$10 000 dollars to encourage rational video makers! Your help needed.

We recently had David Silverman on The Magic Sandwich show, and I agree completely with him that above all, the conference scene should be FUN!

Fun like this!

I have great memories of our group singing of ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ at the end of that conference!  Telling ya, we have GOT to adopt that as our anthem!

Kinda difficult to have fun like that with the killjoy PC police telling you ‘your tshirt is too offensive‘ or ‘creates a sexualized environmental‘ or that  ’fake jewelry is against the conference code‘.

We are responsible adults thank you, and do not need to be treated like children!

————————————-

…..anyway, I digress.  However much fun conferences might be, they are effectively still a side show compared to the potential reach of the internet.  Lets keep it real: the internet is a place where religions come to die!

-New media is a game changer in a way that conferences never were, and likely never will be!

In this sense, I see it as vital that we maintain a strong internet presence on viral media.  Regrettably the secular/ rationalist community has a problem on youtube at the moment.  Established players have been slowly drifting away, and because the barriers to entry are so high, there are not being replaced!  To be honest, this is to me a far bigger issue than pretty much anything that is happening on the conference scene.

The way I see it we want people making good videos on a semi-regular basis.  But how to encourage this?

Well I actually care about this a lot!, and so I am going to put basically all of the donations I received from last year into a fund to encourage this ($10 000).

So how best to do this?  Well this is where I want your help, for many minds are better than one, and I have essentially no experience at doing this sort of thing.

So far my rough ideas looks like this:

The first thing is of course, while I will supply the prize money, I should detach myself from the judging.  So far Eugenie Scott, Elisabeth Cornwell and ZOMGitscriss have suggested that they would be willing to help out with the judging.  If you have any other names you would like to suggest, please leave them below.

I was thinking about three categories:

1) Merit grants.  This is basically giving money to established people who have contributed much for little reward.  Its just a small way for the community to say thank you for all you’ve done! I also think this would create a lot of good will among our established video makers.

2) Equipment grants.  This is for folks are happy to spend their time making videos, but think that its a bit much to have to spend their own money to make videos for other people to watch for free.  The solution is simple, buy them what they need, HD webcam, microphone, green-screen, etc. and everybody wins!

3) A video competition.  Youtube is becoming an increasingly competitive attention economy, and what is really needed is people who are making competativley good media on a semi-regular basis.  So I suggest that people get to submit their three best videos made over a period of 3 months with the winners taking home cash prizes, and getting their work featured on my channel etc.  We do our best as a community to bring new blood in that are making good videos on a semi-regular videos.

So what do you think?  Good ideas? How best to partition up the prize money?

That is, if you had $10 000 dollars to spend to invigorate the secular presence on youtube, how would you spend it?

The Price of saying ‘Good-bye’

So I was listening to my ipod the other day, and bugger me a track comes on that I’ve not heard for a long time .  It was the track that I was playing on ‘the long drive’ across Wyoming.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was probably on a day or so away from dying.

I’d arrived near Laramie in the summer of 2007 after driving some 2000 miles from upstate NY and I had an ‘upset stomach’.  I figured it was food poisoning or something and drove up into the Snowies, west of Laramie.  The evening and night was all alone in a car park, with a fever, and what I would call ‘low level hallucinations’, in that when I closed my eyes I would see vivid colors that would take the shape of familiar objects and do really surreal things.

The next day I really wasn’t feeling any better, and certainly not well enough to do anything, and so I limped Westwards.  By this time I was getting worried.  If it was food poisoning, it should be getting better by now, and if anything it was getting worse.  I picked up the interstate I80 and headed West.  It was late afternoon by the time I got to Rawlins, and I was weighing in the balance if I should head to a hospital.  In the end I decided I would head onto Rock Springs and if I was not getting better by then I would go looking for medical help.  That drive turned out to be particularly tormentful, with the pain getting progressively worse and in the failing light.  To make things worse, it turned out the GPS was out of date, and inside my head there was a wail of despair that went off as the GPS announced ‘now arriving at destination (hospital) on right’, when it was clear there was no hospital here.  Thankfully Rock Springs was a fairly small place and a little further up the road I found a Hospital sign.  It was only on getting out of the car I realized something was really really wrong.  All the time I had been in the car, all I had to do was essentially set the cruise control and keep the car on the road.  On getting out of the car, I found the movement so painful that I could barely walk.

The tormentful drive across wyoming. Incidentally, a couple of years later I returned along exactly these roads to fly my plane in the snowies. It was really a very traumatic experience as i had so many painful memories of this road. Had a similar experience when I broke my wrist coming off a pedal bike. About a year later I cycled up to the same junction and was again stunned at the power of the involuntary physiological response.

The fever made my stay in the waiting room a really quite surreal experience.  While they were checking my insurance details I sat very still, and very quietly in an almost transidental calm, like I was only watching my life.  The thing that really sticks with me from that waiting room were the parents opposite me, getting progressively more frantic as they went from credit card to credit card trying to get something that would pay for their childrens treatment. It was an unpleasantly disturbing sight seen through the eyes of one whose my mind wasnt quite right and who, by now was dealing with the unconformable realization that there was something very wrong with him.

When a doctor finally took a look at me, it took him minutes to come to the conclusions ‘appendicitis’.  They took blood, and at some did some form of imaging that required a tube to be shoved up my ass and significant amounts of dye to be injected.  I was assured this would be quite painful, although to be honest at this point I was in so much pain, and in such a dazed state that I just didn’t care. Not even a little!

All this confirmed what they had suspected all along, and that they would operate in the morning (less than 12 hrs after arriving).

Now I knew the risk of death in the operation was small, and the chances of death if they did not operate were all but certain, but nonetheless, when they came to put me out for the operation, that this might be the final curtain call.  Complications as unpredictable as they are, it turned out, my appendix was actually fairly far gone and gangrenous and as a consequence my appendix scar is longer than most!

So these were the memories that came flooding back when I heard this track, and then I remembered something else.

-I had chose not to contact my parents, and the uncomfortable things I had weighted in coming to that decision.

I knew that the chances of death were small but real, and in that case, all my parents would ever know of this is that their son had died of complications in Wyoming.

-So how could I not tell them I hear you ask?

Well, I also knew the operation was something I had no control over, and nor would they.  That is that if I told them I knew they would worry terribly, my mother especially as they could do nothing other than powerless wait on the other side of the world to hear if their son was going to live or die.

… and there, as I stood waiting for a bus, listening to my ipod, it suddenly dawned on me that this was the price of saying good-bye to your loved ones.

It also prompted me down the rather uncomfortable line of thought of what sort of risk of death would you need before the balance was tipped from ‘the probability is small, and the matter is out of everyones hands, so I will spare my parents the emotional grief’ to ‘the probability is high, and even though it’s out of everyones hands, I want to talk to my loved ones for maybe the last time.  What would be the tipping point? 10 %? 30 %? 90%?

I’m curious as to your thoughts on this.  What would you have done?

-You are on the other side of the world and with a risk of death, maybe big, maybe small.  Would you spare your loved ones the anguish? Or does the necessity for the closure of talking to your loved ones, maybe for the last time win out?

Thunderf00t 2012: The Aspirations.

The Priorities :

Why Do People Laugh at Creationists.

Of the people I talked to at The Reason Rally, (of the stuff I’d done) this was mentioned more than anything else as the key factor in ‘saving the saved’.   Two more episodes were meant to be put out before the Reason Rally (they are all scripted, just need a couple of weeks to put them together), just all the distractions that WLCs DMCA abuse and Dawahfilms flagging harassment took up all my spare time.  The Reason Rally, above all else convinced me that this is an area to focus on.   I am hoping to get 1/3 to ½ the time devoted to this (probably means somewhat under half the videos will be WDPLAC).

 

“OMG, The Bible says WHAT?!”

The bible is batshit crazy.  Most Christian have never read it, and so Im going to make the media.  I may even start this up as a guest spot for people read their favorite crazy bible verses.  This may take the form of a ‘mid-week short’.

 

SCIENCE BITCHES, IT WORKS

I’ve already got permission to get the footage from within a nuclear reactor for an experiment (~June).  Last year I showed you how close the edge of the unknown was and even demonstrated, for the first time as far as I can tell, that gaseous potassium is evolved when the metal is thrown into water, and its GREEN!  This year I’m going to show you the REAL face of the unknown, and how it could affect your life.  Yup going to go inside a nuclear reactor to look at something a billion times smaller that your typical human!

 

Nailing the religious types in the 2012 elections.

I would have liked to have been more active here, but regrettably I got sidetracked into DMCA and flagging complaints.

 

Build the community. 

The secular atheist community on YT emerged strongly, quickly overtaking all the religious communities.  In order to maintain and take full advantage of this position we need to increase the number of people producing good media regularly. I will be moving towards facilitating that goal.  There will be two mechanisms, 1) A (biyearly?) competition for people who have produced at least 3 good videos in three months.  This way promotional effort is focused on those who are both committed to, and capable of producing the goods 2) donation of equipment (green screen, cameras, sound equipment etc) to active folks who are making quality content videos, but that have the amateur-ish look that doesn’t fly so well on youtube these days.  Basically, imagine if someone had supplied ZOMGitscriss with a camera, green screen and other kit early on how much this would have helped.

-Deploy the resources where they will have greatest benefit for the community.

 

Create a DVD.

This is another project I’ve been trying to get done for about a year, to create a dvd of the work, if not for sale, then simply so it can be hosted and torrented.  Indeed I had wanted to get a thousand or so pressed (several kgs) to give away at the Reason Rally.  Sadly again event overtook the aspirations.

This year I’m not going to get enough time to go touring, so sadly no touring or dark sky astro video.   I might yet be able to get a good timelapse of Mars though!  Hope for clear skies

Yup, it’s going to be a busy year!

 

-=Support via Paypal=-

 

Reasonablefaith.org scramble to hide the evidence!

  Well initially I was willing to give William Lane Craig the benefit of the doubt, but I have to admit, the charity of that position is evaporating faster than dew in the desert!

  So a thread was started on the ‘Reasonable Faith’ forum (forum of William Lane Craigs website).

  In this drcraigvideos was making posts suggesting that he was fully legally endorsed by William Lane Craig to file these DMCAs.

  Now up till this point, I was happy to believe that, “well these ‘reasonable faith’ people, they’re not crazy creationists, they must be able to see the writing on the wall here”.  So, after one of the admins  (Philos, who lists his profession as ‘In academia’ (wlc?)) had locked the thread earlier this evening, I wrote him a personal message telling him of the shit that they were in.  How drcraigvideos claim to be legally acting on William Lane Craigs behalf made him legally culpable, and that drcraigvideos actions had a ring of truth about them given that:

1) drcraigvideos blog is directly linked on the reasonablefaith website.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=links

2) drcraigvideos videos are directly linked to the reasonablefaith website.  Damn, you only have to click the links in the scrolling banner to find this out!

  I also gave him some brief background on why what drcraigvideos was doing was illegal, and why it was in their favor to take action on this themselves.  Lets be real, it is at this point unthinkable given the number of emails reasonablefaith must have received that they are not aware of the situation (I also left them a voice message and asked this admin, Philos, to pass on this message to WLC).  If William Lane Craig chooses to do nothing while someone acting in his name, and claiming with his permission is filing bogus DMCA claims against WLC critics, it is VERY challenging to find an academically charitable way to interpret William Lane Craigs behavior.

  So I come back an hour or so later, and what do I find?

1) I’ve been banned.  Cute! Being banned without a SINGLE post!

2) the ENTIRE thread of ‘Thunderf00t DMCAed in William Lane Craigs name’ has been deleted.

Can’t really screen cap something that’s not there, but look for this post yourself!

  I blame myself.  I had assumed that when dealing with ‘Professional Academic Philosophers’ that you might get some integrity.  Instead all I’ve seen is reasonablefaith using EXACTLY and VERBATIM the methods used by PCS those many moons ago.  Dig a hole, then try to delete everything incriminating as soon as possible, then claim it never happened.  Shit, I’ve not seem someone scramble to delete the damning data this quickly since a creationist first donned Joker make-up! Oh yes WLC, I have EVERYTHING recorded

Stagnation on youtube

A brief intro:

This time a decade ago, no one had even heard of youtube, nor did the bandwidth really exist for the project.  The emergence of Youtube was unforeseen by, well lets be real, everyone.  Microsoft was left standing, as was Google.  The access of users to cheap video editing equipment, and further simultaneously given access to the vast array of various uploaded media clips led to an explosion of creativity.

     However as time progressed, expectedly those who did well acquired a disproportionate amount of the traffic.  Now, I don’t have the figures, but a comparative handful of users provide the significant lions share of the traffic.  This has had two detrimental effects on youtube.

1)      The forum has lost a significant portion of its vibrancy, in that it used to be that you could come back to youtube in a week or twos time and everything would be different.  This is not true anymore.  You come back in months time and it’s pretty much the exact same people doing exactly the same thing.  It’s no longer really youtube, but the ‘same old-same old’tube.

2)      The barriers to entry are now essentially prohibitively high.  As a few get a large amount of the traffic, the barriers to entry are huge compared to what they were when youtube was relatively a flat and fair forum.  Indeed almost the only way to now establish yourself on youtube is with the help of someone who is already established, or to have an existing audience for whom you start making videos, or to simply have a truck full of cash to throw at the problem.

    So is there a solution to this?  Is there a way that youtube can regain it’s vibrancy?  Well that’s where many minds are better than one and I ask for your take on this.

    The following is my suggestion:  One way to do this which is arguably dead before it starts is by biasing the YT search algorithms against established players.  Now YT will not want to do that on several levels.  Firstly ‘established players’ are the ‘cash cows’, they are the ‘known commodities’ that people come to youtube for.  Secondly of course, those partner would be pretty unhappy having put all that work into establishing a channel merely for YT to come along and decide ‘bad luck fellas, but YT needs more variety’.   It would also send a lousy message about the relationship between media producers and youtube.  Finally of course, who is likely to fill this gap?  Lamentably imitation is easier than innovation and for every youtube ‘celebrity’ there are probably 10 wannabe clones.  Even if youtube were to tweak its search engine, would it really help?

     Maybe a more viable alternative is to create a second ‘pool’ of users.  A ‘youtube hatchery’ so to speak that allows small channels to grow free of the competition of the bigger players (a different front page).  Limit the hatchery to users with less than 10k subscribers or so, and have a separate front page for them.  The environment would allow people to establish themselves on a smaller forum before competing in the full YT forum where currently they get almost no attention.

     Other than that, it looks to me like youtube has matured and hardened into its adult form, never to see significant changes again, or if it does, it will be more akin to glacial speeds!

The Bonehead Maneuver!

It all started so well!

So I was up on Pine Mountain Oregon, at the observatory, the supernova was ready, and the sky forecast looked good!

The scope was set up early, and initially it was all going so perfectly.

I showed people saturn, and they thought it was cool.

I showed them Titan, the most distant object with a manmade lander, and they loved it!

Sure it was a lousy image as it was just about to set, but for those who had never seen saturn before, it was still really cool!

Then, as I still had the digital SLR at prime focus, I turned the scope to the trifid nebula, and then M22, in both cases giving wonderful images of a nebula and a globular cluster!

Trifid nebula (left) and M22 (right)

After that the troubles started

I was having terrible trouble getting the deep sky video camera to play ball.  Mind you it was a terrible strain on the poor old laptop, which by this time had manycam, an external webcam, an internal webcam and the video capture software from the DSVC going.

To make matters worse it wouldn’t work at all with the netbook. GAH!

The clock ticked on as I tried to sort out the problems while intermittently trying to explain what was going on to the blogtv room which has some 1000 people in it. – no pressure!

Eventually I figured it was a conflict with the microsoft webcamera.  Aha… in business at last!  Then another disaster, the scope had powered off with all the cable pulling.  GAHHHH.  No problem I can just realign.  However while repositioning the laptop I realized the DSVC was no longer working.  NOOOOOO!  NOOOOTTT NOW!.  On further inspection, the cable had ripped the connector out of the video converter that came with the camera.  I mournfully looked at the ripped connectors, knowing that it was now impossible to deliver what I had promised .

Ripped connector on AV / USB converter that came with camera. VERY FLIMSY design compared to 40 buck converter shown below.

Sensible video converter design (right), and DSVC (left). Whenever people see all the junk I travel with, they call me CRAAaZEEE! Who else would carry an AV/ usb converter? However a few drivers later, and I'm operational again!

Could I mend it?  Maybe at my best, but these four sub millimeter connectors that needed resoldering.  Not a chance of doing it in the dark, on top of a mountain, with gloves on in the near freezing windy weather in less than half an hour.  I starred in beleaguered disbelieve as how but for a slight tug on a cable a 500 buck video camera was now rendered helpless.  Having decided the video camera was a hopeless situation I formed the best contingency plan I could.  ’Well, everything else might have gone tits up, but I can still do a live shot of the supernova through the digital camera.’  So I roll the now aligned scope around and shoot M101.  The frame come out a peculiar red. ‘No, NO, that can’t be! it’s up there, I can see it, the seeings not that bad, why do I only get this washed out red crap with only the slightest hint of a core of a galaxy’.  Needs must when the devil drives, and it was clear that the supernova was all but the brightest thing in the field, and I managed to compare it to previous images.  It was a very disheartened Thunderf00t who ended the blogtv show that night.  The wind had gotten up, and moisture had started to coat thing, increasing the windchill.  Cold, tied up in cables in the dark and all alone atop the mountain and burdened by not having delivered what had been promised.  I ended the show and turned my mind to packing up.  The sky was now very poor, with it only being possible to make out the brighter stars.

Then as I was packing up, I came to put the lens cap on the telescope, and all of my troubles with the later imaging became clear.

Oh yes, I had pulled the bonehead maneuver in spectacular fashion.  The corrector plate was covered with dew/ice.

My only redeeming thought was, with all that moisture, there was nothing I had that could have prevented that level of dew/ ice up.  The even sadder irony is on inspecting the deepsky forecast again.  ITS ALL THERE! Just look at the humidity prediction on the deep sky forecast at the top.  Gah! The Bonehead Maneuver!

Supernova LIVE tonight! (Wednesday 31st Aug)

Thunderf00t Hoping to do ‘Supernova LIVE’ tonight from the top of Pine Mountain, at the observatory!
Not sure if it will work, but going to do it through blogtv
http://www.blogtv.com/people/Thunderf00t
So hopefully about 10pm pacific standard time (Ill keep you posted)

 

If not I will be recording some video, which I can post such that you can see it in ‘real time’

Wedneday 27th July (It’s like sex!)

It was a disheveled piece of human flotsam that crawled out of the mountains that morning.  I had spent a night fighting a losing battle again sleep, and had, in terms of results, very little to show for it.  I know I thought to myself, look the night might have been one long concatenated mess, but at least I can haul my carcuss down to town and get a thousand calorie breakfast from mcdonalds, and Im sure you will start to get a grip once you have  a full stomach.  Regrettably, by the time I got down to town Mcdonalds had JUST finished breakfast.  The moment was a cross between ‘Falling Down’ and that moment in ‘Evil Dead, Army of Darkness’ in the alternative ending where he oversleeps.  Oh yeah it was one of those ‘the world conspires against me’ type moments.  After a long deep sigh, the eyes snap open with regained focus: time to go on the offense!  Online I soon discovered that the reason the Orion Deepspace Video camera wasn’t working up to expectation is it has an integration function in the menus!  I laughed, when all else fails: READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.  Spent a few hours rendering and uploading what I had.  Now the next problem, that damn screw!  I need a replacement for that damn screw.  Turns out Ridgecrest has a Home Depot, and I figured that was the logical place to try for a bizarre screw.  I was wrong- they had nothing!  Arse, thousands of bux worth of telescope crippled by a tiny screw.  Then it dawned on me, I could just drill and tap a hole myself for any screw I wanted.  Deep in my mind there was a spark, I had a drill and tap and a load of screws that would fit in the car, they were part of the stuff for the airplanes.

Picked up some supplies and headed back up into the mountains, same place at last night.  This time I was more seasoned on that grinding hill though and got up all the way without even a hint of overheating.

Up at the top of mountains, I sorted out firstly the backend of the telescope,

Then the webcam.

Come the test of first light, both performed admirably.  The sky wasn’t still enough for planets, but it was wonderfully clear.

The Deepsky video camera worked as expected! (~500 bux)

The stripped MS webcam worked admirably (~50 bux)

The video of the planets shot on by eyepiece projection onto the sensor of the D60 (~900 bux) was okay, but not as good as channeling it straight into a video camera.

The 60d I have to admit is a heinous machine for astro!  I got it primarily as I needed 2 DSLRS to do some of the projects I want to get done on this trip, to work with the 40D.  The 60D just idles circles around the 40D.  I think a lot of it is simply a better sensor.  More pixels, if they are not being used for resolution, mean faster light gathering, and lower noise.  The bottom line is the 60D goes up to iso ~6000, at least 2x what the 40D will do.  The 60D will also do video, which I thought might be useful, although thus far it hasn’t panned out, although this might just be teething troubles with the camera.  Just for an example, crank the ISO up to about 5000 and do a 1min exposure (unguided, bar the telescope tracking) on M51, and this is what you get:

M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy, 1min exposure, iso 5000, canon 60d

After that, all you need is an intervalometer and deepskystacker.  In many ways it’s such a cheat.  When I was young, I improvised all sorts of devices for the tracking, and there was none of this ‘cap a test frame to see if it’s centered’.  You took the pictures, and after minutes of painstaking guiding, you had to wait till at least the next day to see how well you did when you got the film processed.  Many a time I chuckle at night as to how what used to be hours of work, and a day or two to see the results from can now be effortlessly superseeded by a minute of scope time.

Later in the night, after visiting many a deep sky object, I turned the scope to Jupiter, then Mars, then the very late moon, all using the same magnification, just so I could give folks the scale of these things, all on the same magnfication.  The seeing was abysmal!  Mars was a swimming ball!  However all on the same magnification I got Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the moon!

 

So yeah, I guess its like sex, in the dark, the first time is always a fumbled and inept experience.  However, having seen things in the broad light of day, and having had time to ponder on what went wrong and why, the second time can be more of the ‘tour de force!’

Cool, I Haz it.

This Picture says it all!

The Thrill!

It’s hard to describe the thrill and excitement of seeing something for the first time. Something that no other living eyes have ever seen.

I’ve for some time had an interest in why the alkali metals (sodium, potassium etc) explode in water.

First step of course is to get a feel for the orders of magnitude you are dealing with such that you don’t blow your fingers off or something, but even this tinkering has proved to be fascinating beyond my wildest expectations! (albeit thanks to at least 3 slow motion camera)

~200mg (1/5th gram) potassium, reacting with water!