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I’m not sure what Manege Frei means. I assume it means something like sad bear in the circus or something like that. It’s a nice flash movie though.

I heard about a sand sculpture contest they were having down in Long Beach, so I drove down there to check it out. I was only out there for like an hour, but I got amazingly burnt. It turns out there is no atmosphere over Long Beach. The unfiltered solar radiation just drills down at 100% and cooks you to a crisp.

Anyway, I took some photos while I was there.

You know, I usually pay very close attention to the lyrics in songs (at least when I can make them out). For some reason though, I never really noticed the lyrics to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. At least I didn’t until I saw This Maxwell’s Silver Hammer Cartoon

It’s kind of dark in a happy kind of way.

Richard Koch thinks we should apply the 80/20 principle to our personal lives. It makes sense, but to be honest, I only read about 20% of the article.

It seems a report has found that women prefer round and soft designs. Given recent experiences at work, this doesn’t surprise me at all. However, I think the case seems terribly over-stated.

Holy crap, new episodes of Greg the Bunny are airing on IFC! I absolutely loved Greg the Bunny when fox was running it. Unfortunately, this preview clip Greg the Bunny Video does Las Vegas is amazingly unfunny. I hope the rest of the shows are better than this.

Check out this cool video of Octopus Attaching a Shark. There’s an unreasonable amount of start/stop buffering in the video which makes me feel like it’s 1998 again, but the video itself is really interesting.

Snowy is a fun game. It took me a few lives to figure out what I was supposed to do, but once I did, I had a good time with it.

I’d never heard of the graffiti artist, Banksy. I guess he’s English. The Guardian is caring some images from a recent trip to West Bank barrier in Israel/Palestine. It’s interesting stuff. I wish the images were bigger though.

The F Number - Demystified :

In any camera that allows you to have control over aperture, the aperture setting is done using what is referred to as F stops.

[…]

Every newbie, faces some confusions with these F numbers.

• They don’t seem to follow a linear series like 1, 2, 3, 4
• Notation keeps varying like f/2.0 or F2.0.
• The number is supposed to indicate a value of Aperture but there is no “A” in the notation!
• Any time there is a discussion about increasing or decreasing aperture, people don’t use these numbers. They talk about “stops”, like move up 1 stop or move down half a stop etc.

So what’s up with this numbers ? The concept behind these number is not that complicated, but the notations and varying terminology to describe the same thing leaves some room to explain.

You know, I probably learned all this stuff back in my photo journalism class, but it never really sank in, and I never knew where those numbers were coming from. Turns out, it’s a lot of math, but pretty simple at its core.