Rano Raraku Synth

I just finished this synth of the statue quarry at Rano Raraku and it has to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen. This uses our blimp photos from 2006. Amazing.



http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=5C835782-4494-4FD4-A0A5-396064007534

Photosynth

Microsoft's new Photosynth is probably one of the coolest bit of technology released by the company in years. It is the product of Microsoft Research and a number of computer scientists from my old alma mater, the University of Washington. Photosynth is a web service that runs through a browser (Windows only for now) that takes stacks of digital photos and merges them into a single, mind-blowlingly cool 3-D arrangement. This is like a 3-dimensional panorama and ideal for photographing subjects where you want an overall view but also the ability to "drill down" to see detail. And Photosynth does this without any preset reference points -- it just takes the pile of photos taken from every crazy angle and matches up points across them all and then produces a 3-dimensional view.

One of the great thing that photosynth does for me is allow me to take blimp photos that have all sorts of yaw, roll, rotation issues and merge them into a single viewable entity. I've been working on this problem for a while - though a wide range of panorama building software (e.g., hugin, Panotools, Autopano, PTAssembler, Tatuk AIC, ArcMAP, ERDAS, DoubleTake, PTGui Pro, and many others). The problem I have is that the photos are so uncontrolled in the blimp in terms of their orientation and distance from subject (much less the issue of the ground topography) that the solutions are not very good and it take a lot of manual work to fix them (if that is even possible). The best solution Ive come up with right now is either Adobe Photoshop CS3 "PhotoMerge" option or PTGui Pro (though DoubleTake is great for a small # of photos). Both seem to work best when the camera has a constant height, the images are sequential, and the topography isnt too lumpy. That's great but it's not easy to achieve.

Photosynth really changes all of this since it is built to examine 3-dimensional things. It does a remarkable job of merging photos together that vary in height, roll, yaw, resolution - easily the best I've ever seen. Now, first thing others ask me about these products is whether or not you can "flatten them" to put into GIS -- that doesn't currently seem possible (it would require more processing to do integrated projection of the aggregate set of images). Ideally, that will be forthcoming but who knows (its free as it is). But as it stands right now, it is a powerful (and easy!) way of visualizing an archaeological landscape with all the detail you can possibly want (depending on your camera and the load on the photosynth servers - it has been pretty popular since being listed on Slashdot).

Here are a couple of the "synths" I've created in the last few days:

Easter Island: Rano Raraku: Rano Raraku - 2

Easter Island: : Akahanga-Easter Island

Guatemala: Cotuzmalguapa

Greece: Mycenae Acropolis

Greece: Mycenae - Lower Town

I'll post more as I create them.

Also, you might want to check how this works and what they have in mind for the future (imagine having a cumulative set of images from everyone in the world for any place) http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/findingpaths/

Temple of Poseidon

A panorama from our last day in Greece...

Type Variety, Systematics, and Scholarship

I recommend that those interested in archaeological systematics read Michael E. Smith's blog on Culbert and Rands' recent "type-variety" article in LAA. http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/08/news-flash-type-variety-classification.html Smith points out a serious failure in the editor/review/writing process in this article that resulted in the failure to cite previous literature that already did what they claimed to do (show that type-variety is flawed and cannot be a "single" classificatory system). The result is an article that is pretty much a "duh" for anyone who has read anything on classification or formal theory in archaeology. Sadly, the way their conclusions are framed - that ceramic complexity is too great -- will lead some to believe that the solution is some numerical technique, a bigger computer, or some new-boffo-annealing-self-organizing-strange-loops - or whatever. This of course misses the point that "ceramic complexity" isn't the problem, its the lack of a problem that is a problem. Without any question, there can't be a way of knowing whether any system of chopping up the world is better than any other. Without questions, what would the "right" (or "correct" or "real") classification look like? How would we know when we found it?

More immediately upsetting is the discipline's acceptance of poor scholarship - for example, literature reviews and relevant citation. When authors who are writing in Latin American Antiquity can't be bothered to read articles from the 70s in American Antiquity (all of which are available on JSTOR) and the reviewers and editors let them get away with that, then there really is a problem.

Science Writing - Compendium assembled by Dawkins

Just bought an edited volume by Richard Dawkins - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing - a great compendium of classic science essays from Dobzhansky to Eddington to Feynman to Sagan. A lot of these I have but the collection is a really wonderful and inspiring set of essays. These writings certain demonstrate how good science writing can be.

Summer reading

This trip to Crete has really kicked off summer reading. The list includes a number of books I brought with me (The Mirrored Heavens, The H-Bomb Girl, Axis, The Prefect) and a bunch I picked up while traveling from the airport, hotel "exchange shelves," and a small bookstand in Rethymo Crete that we found (a good deal: bring in two used books, get one free). The books I picked up along the way included a couple of crappy "physical anthropologist solving crime" type stories - told poorly. But its all good in the summer...

A Painted House- John Grisham - Picked this up at the bookstand in Crete. It is a "slice of time and place" kind of story about a seven year old boy growing up in northeastern Arkansas - Craighead county in the 1950s. The story takes place in the county a bit north of where I did my dissertation research and along the St. Francis. So the landscape he describes I know well (though, its a different world there now). The kid wants to be a Cardinal baseball player when he grows up but he's living in a time where cotton is picked by hand and there is a lot of cotton to pick. An relaxing summer read.

The Mirrored Heavens - David J. Williams - This is one of those hyper-cyber-techno-future type books that is largely derivative of Gibson's work. It is a bit underrealized in terms of technology and characters. Much of the story line hinged on people in fantastical suits doing crazy things with weapons and armor. Nonetheless, it is a good read. I think this was a first novel - perhaps future work will be less ambitious in terms of scope and more detailed.

The Ring - Stephen Baxter - This volume finishes (as far as I can tell) one of the branches of Xeelee series (Raft · Timelike Infinity · Flux · Ring · Vacuum Diagrams · Reality Dust · Riding the Rock) and the Michael Poole series (Coalescent · Exultant · Transcendent · Resplendent). In the story, we finally find out about end of the Xeelee as they engage in megayear battles with non-baryonic matter birdlike entities who are altering the structure of stars to be more stable for their version of the universe. Its a far out story of course, but full of details about the inner workings and evolution of stars as well as implications of anti-particles and the dark matter universe. Geeky sci-fi.

Relentless - Simon Kerrick - I picked this book up in a little used book stand in Rethymo Crete simply as a beach read. That's really all its worth - a hack tale about a guy who is being pursued by some evil dudes who want him for a reason that doesn't become clear until the "surprising" end (which turns out to be his wife who was having an affair with his best friend who was a lawyer for a judge that was involved in a pedophile ring that also involved an evil developer but it also turns out that his wife was having an affair with a woman who worked at the university and was ... well, its a big mess). Hack writing, easy reading.

Written in Bone- Simon Beckett - One of the now-popular tales of a forensic anthropologist who solves crimes. Here, the main characters travels to an island off the Scotland coast to explore a mysterious death that turns out to be a murder - the wrap of this one is hilariously convoluted in terms of the "who dunnit" and involves a twisted maze of characters. Fairly generic murder mystery stuff combined with basic forensic anthropology (mostly focused on the effects of bodies that catch on fire - so lots of gruesome descriptions of heads exploding, limbs curling and meat sizzling). Another easy beach read.

Axis - Robert Charles Wilson - A sequel to Wilson's book Spin about a world that is made accessible through a giant arch that is placed by the "Hypotheticals" - a set of mysterious aliens that no one ever sees. The idea is that these aliens are some vast set of replicators that do odd things like trap the Earth behind a big stasis shell and then let the universe age 5 million years. In this volume, we learn more about the Hypotheticals as their remains rain down on this alterna-Earth and genetically engineered children become communication conduits. Sadly, it's pretty forgettable really - I had to think hard about what the book was about to write this summary.

Odd Thomas- Dean Koontz - I picked this up at the airport on the way to Greece as something really throw away (really throw away.. I never intended to bring it back). It's the story of a dude named "Odd Thomas" who can see the dead (sound familiar?). Anyways, he sees dead people and gets involved in resolving bad things that had happened to them. The main arc of the story is about a big disaster that is coming to a little town that Odd tries to stop (he knows its coming because of some mysterious dark creatures that only he can see that gather before a bunch of deaths). Like most of Koontz's book - its quick read, good for about one cross country flight - but nothing particularly redeeming about it.

Narrow Dog to the Carcassone- Terry Darlington - I swapped one of the other books at our hotel in the hills above Chania, Crete. It's a nonfiction account of Darlington's trip in a crazily long motor boat - 62 feet long, 3 feet wide - that was built to travel the absurdly narrow canals of England. Darlington with his wife and a whippet named Jim motor this tube of a boat across the English Channel - and then across the canals of Belgium and France. It is a funny story, though decidedly British in its humor. I liked it particularly because it reminded me of the Free Spirit and the numerous adventures we had on that old wooden Chris Craft in the Puget Sound.

Raw Shark Texts- Steven Hall - A completely unexpected tale of someone who finds themselves waking up and not knowing who they are but with letters coming to themselves from themselves (ala Memento). But in this story, the protagonist finds himself chased by conceptual sharks that swim the seas of shared ideas. It's a cool exploration in the notion that our ideas of the world form the world and that there can be beasts/replicators that evolve in the information landscape (and prey on generators of ideas). A weird but excellent book that I know Tim Hunt, Mark Madsen, and Mike Pfeffer will love.

The H-Bomb Girl - Steven Baxter - A fun alternative history/possibilities story about a girl who meets versions of herself from potential bleak futures. It takes place in the early 60s Liverpool. Light sci fi.

Currently reading and still on the stack..

The Prefect - Alastair Reynolds

The Line War- Neal Ascher- Neal Ascher - I started this one and right off the bat is a great extension of the Cormac series.

House of Suns - Alastair R - Alastair Reynolds

Saturn's Children - Charles Stross - Charles Stross

The Execution Channel - Ken Macleod

Blimpin'

Today was a good day to blimp. The first flight of the morning was over the acropolis - cool stuff. The second flight was likely good but ended in nothing since the battery on the camera died almost right away. Crap.

But the shots from the first part of the day are great...