Melting Ice Cube Regeneration video may perhaps reminds one of the secene from Terminator 2 where the T1000 played by the actor Robert Patrick regenerates after being frozen and smashed into thousands of little pieces. In this particular case one can see two wine glasses, one containing Sholer Red Grape Juice and the other standard tap water. As the video moves along however, the liquid transforms into Ice Cubes. This footage was recorded over the space of a few hours at a rate of one frame every two seconds.
The following are a few photographs from Stana de Vale showing a small waterfall. This was one of the trips I went on with a body of Academics during a conference in Oreada. At the end of the visit to Stana de Vale, the traditional thing to do is to have a small bonfire.
Another news letter regarding the progress of the new build & masterplan came out on Friday, hence I would imagine that quite a few people would be expecting that I would run off another set of photographs during the weekend showing the latest progress.
As can be seen from the new set of photographs below, quite a substantial amount of work has been done to the main entrance area, with all of the major structural steel set in place. It would appear the cladding of the southern face is more or less complete – so will take some photos from that side in the next photo update. A bit more work has been done to the cladding and installation of windows on the north face. The library tower is coming along, a good sizable arc is now present with concrete flooring panels in place. We should probably see a good lot more in relation to cladding and progress on the library tower in the next photo update.
The following photographs were taken on the road to Balea Lake in central Romania around July 2006. It is known as the Transfagarasan Road and consists of 90km worth of twists and turns winding it way up from north to south through some of the tallest sections of the Carpathian mountains. The following are just a few photographs showing the water falls, interesting outcrops and the road itself snaking its way through the mountains.
Attended a Professorial Lecture by Susan Craw this evening at the Garthdee campus of Robert Gordon University. The talk was titled “Smart Systems from Dumb Data“, it was divided into five distinct sections, moving along from a general introduction to beyond smart systems. A lot of the lecture was focused on the research area of Case Based Reasoning with examples from medical diagnosis and the composition of tablet formulations to audio recommendations being given. About half a dozen academics from the School of Computing were in attendance and a few PhD students, in total there was probably close to 80 people present for the lecture. The lecture commenced at 18:20 and lasted for a period of 45 minutes, after which there was some time for comments and questions before a post-lecture reception at 19:20 in H230.
Cooler Master Cosmos II Ultra Tower Case Unboxing. If you are building an extreme gaming case then this is certainly one to consider, providing you with 13 HD bays, support for more or less every type of motherboard, graphics cards up to 15.5 inches in length. It also allows for the installation of a 360mm rad on top and a 240mm rad at the bottom (with the removal of 6 hard disk bays) to create a nice watercooling loop to cater for all your CPU & GPU needs.
The big question is what components would you put into a case like this, in particular what type of system would you install for cooling – would you go Air or Water? If you go for water cooling would you go for an integrated system like the Corsair H100 or go with a set of rads something like those from hwlabs (you would of course need to take care to ensure you have sufficient clearance if you were install a 360mm rad in the roof – so perhaps a stealth rad would be called for). Would you be looking towards Hexacore CPU’s – or is there some motherboards out their that would support two CPU’s capable of fitting in this case? What type of Graphic’s card would you go with, and what is the optimal amount of RAM given that we are now well into 2012? I would imagine that everybody would say that you should go with an SSD for your OS and Applications (maybe something like a Corsair GT 240GB). Perhaps an additional small SSD 20Gigs or so to act as a cache for your HDD. Any thoughts on the SSD vs HDD configuration? What is the performance gain of dual SLI vs Quad SLI? How much power should you supply – a Hexacore system with NVidia GTX 560 Ti could perhaps run quite happly with a Corsair AX850W PSU.
I attended a conference in Timișoara a number of years ago, located in the central western region of Romania. The following are some photographs of the city, enjoy.
A meeting to discuss some of the plans on the Union Terrace Gardens project was held this evening starting around 18:20 at RGU:Union. This was attended by a fairly small crowd, though made up of several nationalities. A general overview of the plans were presented & an airing of the recently released video fly through (see previous post). Some concerns were raised regarding the need to remove a good number of the trees, perhaps some of these may be preserved, it is however planned to more than double the number of existing trees in the gardens as they stand now. The meeting concluded at 19:05 with some refreshments.
Some time back in 2004 I created a Fractal Terrain Generator. The inspiration to develop this of course came from the first use of Fractal techniques to create the Genesis fly through sequence in Star Trek II The Wrath of Kahn. The application can generate the terrain in a number of forms – points, grid and surface.
The following video was based on a request received for a comparison between Shloer Red Grape Juice vs Water based ice-cubes melting in a wine glass. The water based ice-cubes have a far denser structure than the ones created from the Shloer Red Grape Juice drink. As you can see below the volume taken up by the Shloer Red Grape ice-cubes appears to be far greater than the water in ice-cube form. However once they have completely melted the liquid volume is very much the same. As you can see the Shloer Red Grape does in the end completely turn to liquid before the tap water based ice-cubes. Watch and enjoy for yourself.
I have seen this trick done before, but with just with one candle and little consideration given to the backdrop. This is quite an amazing candle trick, it’s all about balance, as the wax melts the balance changes and in so doing generates the see-saw effect seen in the footage. I hope you enjoy the video, there will be a few more like this including the ending where the candles are blown out. Three glasses were used to support the two candles. Quite a nice visual effect is created with the camera looking through the base sections of the glasses. Reminds me of the quote from the Karate Kid “Balance good Karate Good, everything good. Balance Bad, better pack up go home”.
Have just arrived home after attending a lecture from the team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro − working with Keppie Design and OLIN who won the international design competition to transform Aberdeen’s Union Terrace Gardens located right in the heart of the city centre.
The lecture was held in ABS 225, a lecture theatre with a capacity for some 300 people, which was filled to about 90/95% capacity, at the Garthdee campus of Robert Gordon University. The talk was scheduled to begin at 17:30 and commenced shortly thereafter, continuing on until 19:15 including 10/15 minutes for questions & answers.
The majority of the lecture looked at previous projects of the main design team from sites in New York and Switzerland to Boston. Towards the end of the talk the focus turned to the Aberdeen City Garden Project and short walk-through video was presented that will be made available online as and from tomorrow. Much of the content of the video is similar to that available in the downloads section of the City Garden website, with the addition of some extra visuals and a voiceover. The video below is the “older” version that doesn’t include the additional content and voice over that was presented at the lecture, but still gives some sense of the project.
The New York Project titled “high line” came with the remit of revitalising an old elevated railway line that had been disused for several decades. Probably the best way to get a sense of this project is to take a look at the video gallery. One can see that the line had become quite overgrown with natural vegetation over the past decades & this was a theme which the designers wanted to hold on to by creating a planked system of walkways allowing for “cracks” to come through allowing nature to be interspersed with the promenade. The project also “framed” many parts of the city in a new light creating interesting visuals throughout the entirety of the line. It is planted in such a way that there is always something in bloom ten months of the year, and yet even in the height of winter there is still interesting planting and textures to be seen. The style of planting also changes continually along the line, hence with the ever-changing seasons there is always something new to be seen. This new amenity has become an extremely popular and important part of New York that took something old, and generally unwanted and turned it into to an amenity for both residents and visitors alike.
The Blur Building in Switzerland was designed for the Swiss Expo 2002. The building was situated on a lake and surrounded in an artificial fog created by 13,000 fog nozzles. Visitors had to really make use of their senses to experience something that one could really just get glimpses of through the fog. The completed work looked like a cloud just floating above the lake. One can see a walkthrough of the blur concept on youtube below.
The ICA project in Boston was situated right at the water’s edge. The design allows for passers-by to take part and see what is happening inside as the building was seamlessly integrated with the city public HarborWalk. One of its many interesting features in a multimedia room, this is situated in a downwards angle overlooking the water framing it in such a way that neither horizon or sky can be seen. A video of the ICA can be seen below.
Another example of their work is the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) located right on the edge of Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro. This again very much takes its concept from the surrounding area and incorporates it into the design of the building allowing people to publicly visit the building and see what is going on inside without actually entering it, this is achieved by a series of walkways that lead up through several levels to the roof level viewing area and outdoor cinema.
Another fun and interesting feature mentioned during the lecture was a temporary installation in liverpool. One can see a video below. It made use of turntables to create a new and ever-changing feature to a grove of trees.
The few projects above just give an idea of the portfolio from this design team, several other works were also mentioned during the lecture including the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
To go hand in hand with the previous post I bring you 60 seconds of White in full HD 1080P. So when you sit back and relax, what do you see? A polar bear walking across the snow in the artic? Somebody writing on a sheet of paper using a white marker?
The video below is just Black Screen running for one minute, take some time out relax and enjoy, its in full HD too 1080P at 25fps, so you have 1500 frames of 0,0,0 RGB. Take some time out to recharge and enjoy the black and nothing else – there is no audio included in the track to distract you either. If you do some searching you youtube you will find several other similar examples that have received hundreds of thousands of views, these however are of a fairly low resolution thereby detracting from the overall experience. The best I have come across is 720P. So here’s hoping you will enjoy the Black Screen in full HD 1080P.
The video I recorded and blogged about two days ago, regarding the unboxing of the Microsoft Surface we took delivery of on Wednesday 6th Feb 2012 has spread like wildfire across the web, having been picked up my a myriad of websites. Here is the link to the original post http://dcdoolan.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/microsoft-surface-unboxing/
Since its upload it has received 3139 views in little over 48 hours. The following are a selection of sites the have discussed the video / embedded it into their blogs etc.
The following photos give you an idea of what the Big Breakfast is like at RGU:Union, enjoy. As you can see it comes with several slices of toast, fried eggs, sausages, hash browns, beans & rashers.
The last photo update of the new build at Garthdee was on Sunday 22nd January 2012. At that point a good deal of work and been carried out in cladding a section on the north face of the build. In the past two weeks or so there has been some very big changes yet again. Quite a number of window units have been installed in the section that has been cladded, and preparations are underway to continue the cladding process right down towards the eastern end of the building. Work on the steel for the library has commenced with a good sizable section in place, perhaps 30 degrees of an arc up to about the 5th level. The steel for the main entrance into the building has also be set in place and makes a huge difference to the overall appearance of the site. One can really now see the overall size and shape of the building coming to the fore. The next month or should be interesting as the steel for the library tower is set into place. As per usual the photographs below should help to give you an idea of how the build is going.
Today the School of Computing / IDEAS Research Institute, Robert Gordon University took delivery of an MS Surface. The video below depicts the unboxing process, the first boot-up and playing around with some of the features including some surfing on bing maps and browsing of the associated imagery. We spent about half an hour unboxing it and just seeing what it can do. You can certainly expect to see it if you visit the School during Applicants day 7th/10th March as well as series of talks and practical workshops. I hope you enjoy the video, I edited the footage together quickly once we powered down the surface for the evening, so this comes to you right off the editing suite, rendered just minutes ago. I am sure that we will spend a good amount of time playing with it tomorrow and over the course of the coming days, weeks & months. You can read some more material about the Surface from here. For more videos from the School of Computing you may visit the Schools Vimeo channel http://vimeo.com/rgucomputing/videos.
Just like the recent melting ice video, footage of Newton’s Cradles in action seems to be another fairly popular YouTube topic. It is of course an interesting topic that helps to explain some basic principles of physics. Another interesting question is what would happen if this was suspended in a vacuum. Given that to hear a sound you need three elements – the Sound, a Medium through which the sound can travel and finally the receiver (SMR Model). If there is no medium ( a vacuum ) is there still a sound? The sound may be generated but it has no matter through which if may be conducted. There are two videos below enjoy.
The video below shows Newton’s Cradle with two spheres generating the initial interaction, it is shot from a fairly wide angle, followed by a 90 degree rotation, finishing up with a closeup.
For some strange and curious reason time-lapse videos of Ice melting in wine glasses seems to be quite a popular topic on YouTube – go figure. So I decided to create a similar video myself over the weekend. The Ice-cubes I used had a red tint to them as they were made from ShloerRed Grape juice. You can see the video below. Certainly the lighting could be improved. Recorded just over two hours of footage this was compressed down into a little under two minutes representing a speedup of 5187%. As an experiment I rendered out the video on a number of machines to see the resulting processing times, from dual-core laptop / desktop to a dual quad-core Xeon workstation.
Output Settings
Video NTSC 1920 x 1080p, 29.97fps
Audio AAC 128kbps, 48Khz Stereo
Bitrate VBR, 2 Pass, Target 7.00 Max 8.00Mbps
Frames 4196, Footage Duration 02m:20s:00f
Render Time 08h:05m:56s on a Dual Core Laptop, 2 Gig’s RAM, Windows Vista
Render Time 01h:13m:02s on a Dual Core Desktop, 4 Gig’s RAM, Windows 7
Render Time 00h:28m:15s on a Dual Quad Core BoXX, 8 Gig’s RAM, Windows 7
Below one can see the CPU and memory usage of the Dual Core Desktop and the Boxx Workstation, its interesting to see the memory usage levels. One can clearly see in the image below that the dual core machine is using up 3.6GB of its memory, on several occasions it even exceeded this.
In the case of the BoXX workstation a similar pattern is quite evident, with almost the entire memory of the machine being committed to the job. One can see below that the memory commit was 7.75GB of the total 8GB available. It again peaked a little higher than this on several occasions. CPU usage generally hovered around the 94/95% mark. Edited and rendered using Adobe Premier Pro CS5.
Great news, I have just approved the 200th member to the School of Computing Linkedin Alumni Group. The group was started by Dr. Niccolo Capanni on the 12th February 2009, hence it’s almost three years to the day the group was originally created. I took over managing the group nine months ago at which point there was 110 members. Hopefully with another cohort of Honours & MSc students graduating in July we will have a good number of additional members joining the group. It will be interesting to see how long it will take before we hit the 300 member milestone. If you are a graduate of the School of Computing at Robert Gordon University they you can join the group by following this link. Before joining it is well worth while to take a look at a few other profiles to get a sense for what they are like. You should clearly outline your link to the School – what degree you did, subjects of interest, extracurricular activities etc. You may also want to do some searching around and establish at least a few connections, before your request to join will be approved. The following post by http://cbeagrie.wordpress.com can be a useful starting place for some ideas regarding the content you may wish to include in your profile.
