“Soon after I purchased a 200mm f/2.8 lens last year, it got a really large white spec on one of the optical elements inside. This spec was quite a bit larger than any other piece of fluff in any other lens I own. It was quite disturbing but did not affect the beautiful pictures that this lens took. Last week, I observed to my horror a dust mite crawling on this very same optical surface. It walked directly towards the spec, ate it, then walked out of site. I watched it happen in amazement. … I hope I can train these suckers so that I can sell my new internal lens cleaning technology.” — About lens cleaning biotechnology….
Arctic foxes are incredible:
As far back as the late 1940s, Laurence Irving and Per Scholander, two pioneers in comparative physiology working at the US navy’s Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow, Alaska, attempted to measure the cold tolerance of different species, using the point at which shivering begins to indicate environmental stress. Arctic ground squirrels succumbed at 8 °C and polar bear cubs at 0 °C, but when the scientists came to test Arctic foxes, their equipment could not generate temperatures cold enough to register a result. They eventually had two of the hardy animals flown to a more sophisticated facility in Washington DC, where shivering was finally observed after they had been exposed to -70 °C for an hour.
They’ve also been known to spend up to 5 months in one stretch on the ice where nobody knows what they eat, they’ve been seen less than 40 miles from the pole and after these extended trips manage to find their way back to where they came from! On constantly shifting ice!
All the above stolen from New Scientist.
This made me chuckle.
Doug Allan filming Arctic Fox, Svalbard, Norway.Picture: DOUG ALLAN/NPL/REX (via Freeze Frame: Doug Allan’s images of wildlife in some of the world’s coldest places - Telegraph)
Maybe my next project…
Finally upgraded my headphone amp project to stereo!
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For years I’ve run all audio through an M-Audio firewire solo that ran the speakers and headphones. Recently I’ve been having trouble with plugging everything into it so I decided to run everything through a Behringer rack mixer I’ve got instead. So after switching it all over I put on some music on my PC and discovered that it’s incredibly loud!
The Behringer mixer has these stepped volume controls and I found I had three usable steps of volume: off, quiet and loud. The next step being deafening! So I’ve turned down the gain on the monitors and it’s a bit better, I’ve got 5 or 6 usable steps now (the knobs have 24 steps), but the output level meter on the mixer’s showing that my output’s peaking at -24dB… (It goes up to +12.)
This is all just crazy. I’m in a world of confusion. I don’t know what any of it means!
Also the headphone output is incredibly loud!
On the plus side I can now run music through my effects unit and pretend I’m listening to it in a warehouse or something.
[video]
I feel I may have overdone the desaturation…