Update on Tim

2009-02-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

This article is mainly defending the stimulus package... But it goes on to point out a ton of things that I have been super passionate about for the last... well five years.

The economy is a huge issue for me, because it makes sense to me, and it's frustrating when people who look out for themselves oppose policies that are so obviously needed... This article articulates many reasons why economic change has been needed since the beginning of most of our lives...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/02/04/obama/index.html

My take:

Fact: Rich people want to get richer.
Truth: When the Rich get Richer, the rate at which they spend money is not directly proportionate to their rate of accumulation. I would say that it is inversely proportional. Meaning, the rate at with the rich spend money does not increase or decrease with the accumulation of wealth because the rich have everything they want. (Also stated in the article) So in turn their rate of spending as a percentage actually goes down, because it's diluted by the increase in cash flow.

Fact: Poor people want to get richer.
Truth: When the Poor get Richer, the rate at which they spend money is also not directly proportionate to their rate of accumulation. However, it is almost always going to increase... IE their rate of spending will likely (and I can't back this up but...) increase proportionately with rate of accumulation. It's easy to see this... Just think to your self "Is there something you would like to buy right now, but don't because you can't afford it?"

Truth: An economy is only as good as it's flow of income (exchange) for goods and services...

So, how do you fix our currently broken exchange?

If you ask the GOP, what would they say? Tax Cuts, which will stimulate the creation of jobs (an important thing to note is that tax cuts indirectly affect job creation). This is fundamentally known as trickle down economics and has been the bane of our economy for at least the last eight years, and in my opinion to blame for the current state of our economy.

If you ask our current administration, what would they say? Put money were it will be spent ASAP (IE stimulus package) Tax cuts, but not for the upper class, and large businesses... but for everyone that deserves them, the people that will actually put money into the economy (IE exchange).

For me, I can't believe that the economy has gotten where it is at, and subsequently, the lack of support for the current stimulus package... I mean how can I feel my best interests (and the interests of the nation as a whole) are being looked out for when greed, corruption, and partisan ideals rein supreme in our Government...? I am sick of feeling like the best solution for this country is being held back or hesitated on because someone and their constituents in Washington might suffer a little.

Fairness shouldn't be only available to those who can afford it.

Image Processing

2008-12-17T22:19:00.000-08:00

One of my interests in Image processing, and one of my hobbies is coming up with cool new ways to process an image. Well my girlfriend Jess just posted a bunch of images that she made using photoshop on her flickr and it inspired me to open up an old program that I wrote in college when I took an image processing class. Anyway below are some of the results.

Original Jess:

Bleach Bypass Jess:

3D Jess:

And my personal fav
Square Jess:

The Inn and Worship

2008-11-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

Going through some of my music I stumbled on an Inn CD that was made while I was in college, and it just so happens that I played drums on it... I was listening to some of the tracks and I caught myself picking out all of the mistakes me and my fellow band mates were committing... Then I stopped and thought about it a little and I was just amazed at how musically it's not the best CD ever, but I remember the energy and focus of worship that was going on... And it made me smile. It just goes to show what can be done with the Holy Spirit in the room.

Here are some of my favorites:

You are so good to me
Better is One Day
The Wonderful Cross
Hallelujah

The hop farm

2008-10-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

So it's been a while since I have posted anything... mainly because I got a girlfriend, which I have failed to mention on the blog at all... Well her name's Jessica and she's great. Here's a picture:

Which leads me into the context of this post... See a couple of weeks ago we went with our friend Anne Marie and 14 other people to a winery that is owned by AM's uncle. Well I was pleasantly surprised that on the way we got to stop at her other uncles place, that just happened to be a hop farm... How cool is that?

Anyway, it's not a terribly interesting process, unless you are there, mainly its just a bunch of specialized machinery that exists to get the hops off of the vine. It was pretty interesting to see and to smell :) Here are the pictures, taken on my iphone, so they are not terrible great.

Priest Lake, The Last Resort

2008-08-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

It was that time of the year again... Lake time! Every year the Weinmeister/Benson/Reeves crew make a trip down to northern Idaho to relax and spend some time with family.

The weather wasn't all the great, it was cloudy with intermittent sunshine, but the worst part was the wind. The wind makes it hard to get in or out of the water, since the chill factor is way worse. Plus, I had a rule of not using a towel the whole week (which I only broke twice), which makes the wind even more unbearable. But now I am whining... it was still awesome.

Me and my cousin Ted and his friend Conner went fishing almost everyday, and I caught the biggest fish we have ever caught there. It was a delicious bass... I wish I would have gotten a picture of it, but alas I didn't bring my camera (Idiot!)

The best day was Friday the last day, it was cloudy with no sun, but no wind. We spent most of the day diving in the water and then going to the hot tub and then back into the water again.

Anyway the week was great, and I love spending time with the family. Below are some pictures.

Bleach Bypass Simulation

2008-07-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

I will go over an easy way to emulate a bleach bypass look using simple blending functions. First, Bleach Bypass is an optical effect which entails either the partial or complete skipping of the bleaching function during the processing of a color film. By doing this, the silver is retained in the emulsion along with the color dyes. The result is a black and white image over a color image. This produces an image that where the dark areas become darker and the light areas become lighter.

There are many films that use this technique, examples are Saving Private Ryan, Children of Men. Below is an example from Children of Men:

It may not be obvious at first but when you see a side by side image it's pretty obvious. Here's an example:

As you can see the top image is normal and the bottom image is a little different in that the blacks are blacker and the whites whiter, which creates a cool effect.

So we have already said that to create this effect we need to blend the original image with a black and white version. So lets first create the black and white version, which is essentially desaturating the image. Below are three methods to desaturate an image.

lightness = 0.5 * (max(r,b,g) + min(r,b,g))
luminosity = 0.299 * r + 0.587 * g + 0.114 * b
average = (r + g + b) / 3

Personally I like the luminosity function because it accurately weights color as the human eye sees it. I.E. the human eye is most sensitive to green. Anyway, now that we have our function to make our image black and white, we need to figure out how to blend it.

There are several ways to blend two images, but we need to identify a method that turns the light areas of our image lighter and the dark areas darker. Unfortunately, there isn't one method that will do that, so we will have to use two different functions based on the value of the color.

First we will use a multiply function for the darker areas which will make them darker, and a screen blend for all the light areas to make them lighter.

Multiply = p0 * p1
Screen = 1 - (1 - p0)*(1 - p1)
where pixel p = [0,1]

It's easy to see the output of each function. If p = 0.5 our multiply function outputs 0.25 and our screen function outputs 0.75. One thing to notice at this point is that if we use the screen function on anything above 0.5 and the multiply on anything below, we get an output of 0 <= p <= 0.25 and 0.75 <= p 1.0 which is not desirable since we are missing the inner 50% of the color spectrum.

To solve this we need to make the lower limit of each function 0.5 when p = [0,1]. An easy way to do this is solve each function for 0.5 when p = 0.5, it's easy to see that this yeilds a constant of 2 for each so our functions, which result in:

Multiply = 2 * p0 * p1
Screen = 1 - 2 * (1 - p0)*(1 - p1)

Now that we have our functions we are ready to run it. The algorithm so far looks as follows:

foreach pixel p0
....luminence = 0.299 * p0.r + 0.587 * p0.g + 0.114 * p0.b
....p1.r = (p0.r<0.5)?(2*p0.r*luminence):(1-2*(1-p0.r)*(1-luminence))
....p1.g = (p0.g<0.5)?(2*p0.g*luminence):(1-2*(1-p0.g)*(1-luminence))
....p1.b = (p0.b<0.5)?(2*p0.b*luminence):(1-2*(1-p0.b)*(1-luminence))
end

Now the last issue is blending the created image back into the original, which we can do using alpha blending:

p = a * p1 + (1 - a) * p0
or a more simplified version
p = p0 + a * (p1 - p0)

You may recognize the simplified alpha blending function as a linear interpolation function. This will allow use to control the opacity of the overlay we are blending. An opacity of 1.0 (I.E. 100%) looks the best but it's always nice to have an option.

In conclusion, the above algorithm can be used to simulate a pretty cool look that is now getting pretty popular in films. The only last effect that you can add to make an image look more like these films, is to add a small amount of additive white Gaussian noise. This will give a grainy look to the image which will be more reminiscent of said films. But that may have to come in a later blog post.

MARINERS WIN!!!!

2008-07-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

Went to the Mariners game tonight... At first it was just another bad game for the Mariners (ie they were getting smoked). Then a light came when both Beltre and Sexson hit home runs to tie it up in the seventh 6-6. Now we were in it to win it... It came down to the bottom of the nineth when Bloomquist hit a ball right over the center fielders head. Mariners win 7-6 over the Blue Jays... Take that CANADA!

PS did I mention it was Canada day... America proves once again that Canada will always be in the shadow of greatness.

Operation Pay for Bike

2008-06-23T19:46:00.001-07:00

Most of you know that I got a bike a while back, and if you don't, now you do. If you have never seen it before here is a pic:

Well given the nature of the world today, and everyone's quest to suck the life out of this planet, I have decided to start tracking the miles that I ride on my bike that I would have otherwise driven with my car. This tally equates to money saved and my carbon footprint being smaller and hopefully my conscious feeling a little better about the resource hog in me. Below is the link to the spreadsheet:

OperationPayForBike.spreadsheet

US Space & Rocket Center

2008-06-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

Last week I was in Huntsville, AL visiting Redstone Arsenal on business. During some down time we visited the US Space & Rocket Center. It was pretty amazing seeing the shear size of the rockets and the intricacies of the engines. I left feeling very humbled at the expanse of knowledge that exists.

Below are some of my favorite pics:

You can see the entire album here.