I’ve been a fan of Jeff Buckley’s version of “Lilac Wine” for years so was interested to see this link on Stuck in Customs today. The animation is so beautiful, I had to steal it and post it here too. I’m sure Trey will forgive me!

Lilac Wine from Matthew Landa on Vimeo.

While I’m writing, I should apologise for the complete lack of Flickr and photoblog updates this week. I’m working on a commercial job that’s eating a lot of time and, on top of this, the kids went back to school so I no longer have my summer 30 minutes of uploading time in the morning. I’ll get back in the swing in a week or so once the paying gig is out the way.

I’ve been fascinated by Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio since attending a special mathematics course while in high school. The regional mathematics adviser came and gave a fabulous presentation on how Fibonacci numbers keep popping up in nature (as a side note, he could do this amazing thing where he would draw an almost perfect circle on a roller blackboard by moving the chalk left to right with one hand and rolling the board up and down with the other – very cool party trick). Aside from the lecture delivery being extremely entertaining, it was, I think, the first time I had seen mathematics tied so intimitely with nature and it probably went a long way towards convincing me to study physics at university.

Reading Trey Ratcliff’s blog today, therefore, I was delighted to see the following video. It’s beautifully done. Take a look and see if you agree. I recommend viewing full screen.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you will know that I highly approve of Dean Kamen’s FIRST organisation. This weekend sees the kick-off for the 2010 FRC competition and the start of the 6 week design and build period leading up to regional competitions in March and April. If you can make it to any of the events, I would encourage you to go along and see just how cool they are. Talking of cool, they even managed to get Neo to do a PSA spot for them this year…

Edit: A more knowledgeable colleague just pointed out that the Keanu PSA was actually prepared for last year’s competition. That answers my question about why it doesn’t contain any footage from the 2009 competition. Oh well…

I spent 4 days in San Diego a week ago at another FIRST Robotics Competition. This event was smaller than the previous one I attended in Cleveland and I was even less busy with official Luminary Micro support work so I had a lot more time to watch the matches.

During this time, I played with my Powershot G9. I had found out the previous week that it was capable of shooting time lapse video (yes, I had read the manual but I guess I forgot this since I reckoned it was another totally useless feature) so I shot some of the matches and the crowd reaction in 24x and cut it together into a little video on Vimeo. I also uploaded this to Flickr as an experiment now that they support video in addition to stills.

I really think this makes a rather effective intro to the competition and gives some impression of the excitement of the event. If you want a less frenetic version, I’ve created a set of my favourite FRC images on Flickr too.

Carol Watson has just posted a video of the opening of the “Menage a Trois II” exhibition at her gallery in Johnson City.