Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Esther Dyson, chair of EDVentures, talks about her decision to publish her personal genome information, as well as the role of the Personal Health Record. I interviewed her at the Markle Foundation Connecting for Health Conference at Torrey Pines, San Diego, Ca. December 3, 2007. I talked about some of these topics in a paper Inverted Perspectives, Triggering Change I coauthored with Dr. Rob Kolodner in Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople

I was fortunate to attend the wedding of Jim and Amanda Hoffmeister in San Francisco. Here is my interpretation of the event. With thanks to Robert Hotz for help with the editing.

This represents my most polished film making effort to date, trying to distill 6 hrs of video down into the essence of a wedding. I first got interested in film making in April, 2006, when I was in a bistro in Paris, listening to a fascinating conversation between Thomas Dichter and Marcia Odell about development issues in the third world. (I was holding a workshop the next day entitled, “How can 6 billion people help each other help themselves?) I put my digital camera on a wine bottle, and put it in movie record mode. When I got back to my hotel to edit the movie, I realized that I could completely shift the meaning of the conversation just by moving the edit cut point a few seconds each way. I decided I’d rather be the editor, rather than just the viewer. Here was my original movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB6RkNVuhCE

This is a portion of the discussion at the 2008 Good Ancestors Principle workshop in Encinitas, Ca. Feb 19, 2008. It includes discussions by David Elleman, Dorion Sagan, Valdis Krebs, Frank Mosca, Frederick Turner, and Tom Munnecke, discussing some of the concepts behind resiliency in systems, including the work of Buzz Hollings.

A group of astronomers has proposed a SETI search strategy:

Richard Conn Henry, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ Zanvyl Krieger
School of Arts and Sciences, is joining forces with Seth Shostak of
the SETI Institute and Steven Kilston of the Henry Foundation Inc., a
Silver Spring, Md., think tank, to search a swath of the sky known as
the ecliptic plane. They propose to use new Allen Telescope Array,
operated as a partnership between the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
Calif., and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of
California, Berkeley.

This is an idea that I have been batting around for some time I posted a quick note on the idea in 2004, at and talked to some folks at the Hat Creek about that time when my wife and I were driving by and just stopped in as tourists.

I called the idea a “Paired Transit Protocol” – because the timing of the transits between the pairs of planets would establish a communications clock for synchronous communications (akin to computers using synchronous rather than asynchronous communications protocols. Synchronous computer communications are more efficient because they share a common clock that obviates the need for “start” and “stop” bits in the protocol.). Because each star/planet system can see the other’s transit, it creates a “leading edge” and “trailing edge” timing signal that precisely links to each other. One system transmitting an anomalous signal precisely when its planet enters or leaves the shadow of its star as cast on the other planet would confirm that that planet had seen the transit of the other planet.

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Thanks to a tip from Charles Smith a while back, I’ve discovered the Gigapan.org site, that helps folks post very large scale mosaics. It’s a fascinating process, and opens up a whole new way of doing photography. It also seems to be contagious. Three friends have seen my panos and have now begun their own exploration.

Above is a mosaic I took of the Copper Canyon in Northern Mexico last month. I shot 21 handheld individual photos, then stitched them together with Photoshop CS3. (using the Photomerge feature with both auto align and autoblend options turned on.)

I then saved the image as a TIFF, and uploaded it to Gigapan. Gigapan allows users to pan and zoom through the image, as well as take “snapshots” of the larger image.

This can take up a tremendous amount of compute time and memory. A 1 gb image can chew up 10gb of disk space while Photoshop is doing its magic.

Here are all of my panoramas