01/27/17 12:12 - ID#60756

Grovesnor Room at the Central library

Two Fridays ago, I went with (e:paul) down to the central library. Our original intent was to check out the 3d printer, but taking a class is required and we hadn't signed up. So (e:paul) got a library card and we're going to do that another time.

I hadn't been to the library outside of the auditorium since I was starting to pick up PHP 3 years ago.

They have a high-end maker bot 3d printer, and a second smaller one. You only have to pay for materials.
They also have a 3d scanner in between the two. I'm interested to try that out.

After that we checked out the science book exhibit on the second floor. There were exhibits about Galelio, Bernouli etc - light on information, and though the books were obviously old there was no indication about where or when they're from (if they were originals they should have said it).

What's with this crazy creature on a this map? Breasty mer-bird?

Also an artifact of time - payphones. The second last one I can think of in Buffalo besides the one on Elmwood and Summer.

The most interesting part was the Grovesnor room. It has almost any Buffalo related book that was ever written - including books like "Parolees and pensioners in the first ward, report 1912". The room probably contains the most arcane info about Buffalo anywhere, that almost noone left living knows. I wonder how many of these have been scanned, if any.

There were books on being carless in Buffalo, written in the 1960s!

And all the original bike culture in Buffalo.

And an encyclopaedic book written about the NFTA and all it's predecessors, with every line and model of the rolling stock cataloged in depth.

A whole bookshelf dedicated to Timothy McVeigh. Creepy.

And a workbook about immigrants in Buffalo, where one of the activities is "Draw and color pictures of Buffalo immigrants in native costumes"

In one of the sections there were annual reports from Roswell Park. At one point there was a semi-famous BMT doctor there named Geoffry Herzig. Not related to my grandpa as far as I know (this one is from Cincinatti) bu he resembles him a lot.

instagrams of (e:paul)

Permalink: Grovesnor_Room_at_the_Central_library.html
Words: 386
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/27/17 01:02

Category: buffalo

01/25/17 01:22 - ID#60755

Roswell Park's smoking machine for mice

As seen in the Grovesnor room in the Buffalo and Erie County central library. While (e:paul) was geeking out over Roswell Park and 50 years of annual reports, I found this picture.

I mean I get that they needed to conduct the research but what a crazy photo to use for PR.

The mice are trapped with corks in glass tubes, with burning cigarettes attached. They were setting out to research the correlation between smoking and cancer. There even was a tobacco farm in Orchard Park and West Seneca where they grew different types to compare against commercial tobacco.

I wish I could actually could find this study to find out how many cigarettes they made these mice smoke.

Permalink: Roswell_Park_s_smoking_machine_for_mice.html
Words: 121
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/27/17 12:10

Category: art

01/18/17 01:53 - ID#60752

More 3d fiddling

I made two more things in 3D with blender. The first one I was experimenting with particle effects and wood textures, plus some simple animation. I had to downsize to a tiny gif and it's still 632k. I think (e:paul) or I should add HTML5 video - I hate uploading to youtube for short clips.

The next render I followed this blender expert's tutorial on youtube.

I'm pretty happy with the doughnuts even those the doughnut mesh is weird.

I freaking love 3D modeling so far, especially compared to most art forms I've tried. It seems way more intuitive to deal with something that that has depth and perspective built in vs for me trying to learn and translate a 2D projection of what I want.

Plus Blender is pretty awesome software and entirely open source. It went open after a crowd funding campaign bought the source from a failed Dutch ompany, all the the way back in 2002.

(software)

On my machine rendering is pretty slow and limited to the CPU. But Terry's computer is blazing fast and I haven't even gotten CUDA GPU rendering set up yet. Once I do, each of the GPUs 2580 cores can be set to rendering instead of the i7s 4 cores.

Permalink: More_3d_fiddling.html
Words: 228
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/18/17 02:17

Category: winter

01/09/17 01:33 - ID#60751

Cross country skiing

We went with (e:yesthatcasey) and David down to Byrnecliff in Warsaw. I loved being able to go down ridiculously fast on the Corkscrew trail. At one point I had to slide over and fall because I was out of control.

Afterwards we went to go eat mexican food at this restaurant called Arriba Tortilla in East Aurora. I thought there was no way they could make regular tex-mex expensive but they found a way by making portions huge but ridiculously overpriced.

Permalink: Cross_country_skiing.html
Words: 95
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/14/17 03:06

Category: family

01/09/17 01:32 - ID#60750

Props to my brother

Serious props to my brother, who organized a drive to furnish an apartment for a Syrian refugee family. He managed to furnish the entire apartment with donated furniture, a full kitchen, bedrooms, pantry, living room and electronics.

The furniture and rest of the donated stuff was nice quality and even matched. I know it seems silly but I have to think moving into a complete apartment like that has to make it slightly easier to adjust to a new county thousands of miles away from home.

Permalink: Props_to_my_brother.html
Words: 87
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/14/17 03:10

Category: art

01/09/17 01:15 - ID#60749

hallo welt

I was stuck on thinking of new things to program or try out today. So instead I fired up the open source blender on my laptop and ran a tutorial to make a 3d render of a mug.

(e:paul) helped me run through the basics of compositing and using blender. So I ended up making these purple velvety metaballs to go alongside the mug, cushioned on a field of stiff AstroTurf (and with the obligatory "hello world" text).

I watched him play with a trial of Cinema 4D and he made a model of a vase in about a minute.

The output here is dumb but it was ridiculously fun to do something new on the computer. Scripting something here with Python could be interesting. The interface in Blender is confusing but I also don't know the language of 3d compositing.

I'd like to try animating it, on Terry's mega Warcraft machine.

Permalink: hallo_welt.html
Words: 156
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/09/17 09:51

Category: plants

01/04/17 12:46 - ID#60746

Botan Buffalo

We took (e:terry)'s mom down to the tropical temperatures of the botanical gardens last Monday. I have more pictures of the plants there than I'll ever need. Here are a few that I probably haven't posted before, besides the orchids.

Permalink: Botan_Buffalo.html
Words: 54
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/09/17 01:17

Category: new years

01/04/17 12:44 - ID#60745

Happy new year

Full of turkish coffee and the obligatory drunk dancing (e:mike) show.

Permalink: Happy_new_year.html
Words: 17
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/06/17 12:45

Category: bikes

01/04/17 12:38 - ID#60742

Bicycle heaven

It's an amazing museum in Pittsburgh, dedicated to classic bikes, mostly cruisers from the 1950's/60's. It's a little west of the Mexican War streets on the north shore, in an old industrial area. Ironically probably the least bike friendly section of Pittsburgh I've seen.

You can tell it's kind of like the basement at Rick's but somehow they found some money to arrange them very nicely.

The random rare bikes they had were insane. They had a 5 seated tandem from the Monkees, a mountain bike with a single sided fork, a bike someone rode literally around the world, and this street-legal fiberglass tricycle car that allegedly got 100mpg in the 1980's.

The weirdest part of the whole museum were the non sequitur jokes scattered around the building. For example. there was a baby doll in a cage with this sign attached.

Or this dummy in a trunk.

Or this neon hippie-bike-part-dance-party room. Which starts blasting this eurodance song "God is a woman" as soon as you walk in.

Permalink: Bicycle_heaven.html
Words: 187
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 01/06/17 12:54

Category: cookies

01/04/17 12:36 - ID#60741

Christmas cookies

We went over to the hotel my family was staying at for a festivus celebration and some Christmas cookie decorating.

The designs stayed pretty abstract.