Cosmos Computed

Nothing beats a nice spring day on the slopes. The warm sun beams down, with its barely-filtered UV rays piercing through the thin air and frying all unprotected skin. The snow starts out icy, but before long it becomes soft and smooth, with slushy snow flying out at every turn. The weather can be really crazy - a couple years ago, Vail reopened for an extra weekend after closing when it was hit with a snowstorm that dumped 3 feet of snow. One of the best Spring skiing days I've ever experienced was nearly two months ago at Vail, a week before the closing date. Due to some lucky weather events, I experienced all three main types of snow conditions in a single day: ice, slush, and powder. The day started out like any other: hard snow covered the trails, frozen solid from the cold night before. Turns were difficult to make on this surface, as the skis could not carve on the ice. Clouds covered the sky. It was cold, but not frigid. View of the back bowls and Blue Sky Basin, taken from...

First off, apologies for this long-overdue post. I've had a busy month, and although I would have liked to post this within a few days of the beginning of 2016, I wasn't able to get it done until now. 2015 was a great year, and I think the images in this post will reflect that. In the previous year's image collection ( click here to view ), the images were only photographs. The image editing was restricted to cropping; I didn't need anything more. In this collection, though, I have drawings, CGI, and microphotography. These new types of images required more processing to prepare them for viewing. Of course, I used GIMP. I can't afford to pay for software. Instead of listing tons of images, I picked out the most important ones. I also tried not to add the images from previous blog posts; the majority of what follows is new stuff. I also attempt to analyze the images from both a scientific and artistic standpoint. Most likely, by the time most of you read this, you...

Keystone on opening day Keystone Ski Resort just opened for the ski season on Friday. I went up to the resort that same day. There was only one run open (not including the beginner area at the top of the mountain), but it was awesome nevertheless! One of the main downsides to skiing on opening day is the number of people. There must have been about 2500 people on the mountain at the same time as me (not including the people snacking in the lodge). To keep the lines moving, the lift attendants made sure that the lift was completely full, with 4 people per chair. Even so, the wait to get on the lift took a long time. At one point when I was standing in line, a thought came to mind: the line was constantly being filled with more and more people, but it never got longer because the chair lift was carrying the people away at the same rate. So what would happen if the lift attendants only put 3 people on each chair, instead of 4? This would disrupt the balance: the inflow of skiers would be ...

Over my fall break (which lasted 1 day), I wrote a JavaScript program that would render a sphere. I thought it would be a fun way to practice math and programming skills simultaneously. As usual, I used my FireTools.js library to help with graphics as well as some other functions. To render the sphere, I wanted to take every pixel on the screen, and calculate the color of the pixel. The color would vary depending on which part of the sphere the pixel was displaying. If the part of the sphere was facing the light source, it would need to be brighter than a part of the sphere facing away from the light source. To find the brightness of each point on the surface, I first calculated the XYZ coordinates of that part of the sphere. This is also equal to the normal vector at that point. I took the dot product between the light source's direction and the normal vector. This is a mathematical operation that tells me whether the surface is aligned with the light source, as well as the percen...

I have some crazy news! I was radiated by some radiation, and became radioactive. Over time, my radioactiveness decreased, and as it decreased, my mass decreased as well. I am now a foot shorter than I used to be, and weigh 50 pounds less! At the top of this post, you can see a picture which proves it. In the photo, I'm sitting on a weird box that materialized in the middle of the road... Okay, so you probably know what's going on here. I didn't really shrink; I'm obviously sitting on a chalk drawing. I designed the chalk drawing to look 3-dimensional when viewed from a certain angle. From other angles, it looks totally different; some of the lines that appear parallel in the photo aren't actually parallel at all. It only looks that way because it's an illusion. Here's another example: This was a little more complicated to draw. Not only were there parallel lines, but there were also circular shapes and hidden areas. And here's my best chalk drawing so f...

You may have noticed that my blog background changed a couple days ago. I've been meaning to change it for quite a while, but I didn't get around to it. Then, a few days ago, I had some free time on my hands. Why not create a 3D model of Earth, I wondered? So I pulled up Blender (a free computer graphics program I use) and got to work. I actually wasn't entirely sure where to begin, but I had an idea of the basics. I needed to: Map some terrain onto a sphere Make an atmosphere Create clouds Prevent the clouds from looking like a weird shell around the planet I'm not fully fluent in all the different techniques and features for Blender, so I looked for a planet Earth tutorial online. I soon found a BlenderGuru tutorial describing how to create and render a model of the planet Earth. The problem with the tutorial is that it was for a different version of Blender, and as a result didn't do everything I wanted to do. I watched most of the tutorial, did some more Google ...

I recently created a couple of nature-themed animated GIFs. (Click the images to view larger.) The first image is a blossoming tree. I thought the tree looked pretty, but I realized that part of the beauty came from the gentle swaying in the wind. So I decided to animate the image. To do this, I snapped a quick series of photos. Then, I used GIMP to reduce unwanted noise and scale them down. Finally, I saved the images as a looping animated GIF. The result takes a while to load, and seems kind of jerky, so I'm not sure whether I like it. My next image is a late snowstorm. In many snowstorm photos it is difficult to tell the difference between the falling snow and the already-fallen snow. Again, an animated image seemed necessary. In this case, however, a series of photos wasn't quick enough, so I took a video instead. I then grabbed a sequence of 10 still frames from the video. Again using GIMP, I scaled them down and saved as a GIF. The problem with animated images like this ...

In this post, I'm including some of the photos of snowflakes I've taken over the past few days. As usual, these close-ups were taken using my macro setup . I did not edit the photos in any way. New posts every month - subscribe for free !