First-Person Shooters Improve Eyesight

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

LiveScience reports on a study which concluded that “action video games that involve firing guns can improve your eyesight”:

A group of 10 male college students who started out as non-gamers and then received 30 hours of training on first-person action video games showed a substantial increase in their ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, compared to 10 non-gamers given the same test, said Daphne Bevelier of the University of Rochester.

[…]

First-person action games helped study subjects improve their spatial resolution, meaning their ability to clearly see small, closely packed together objects, such as letters, she said. Game-playing actually changes the way our brains process visual information. […]

I think this may be just the motivation I need to play Doom 3 more often — it’s for my own good, right? ;).

SXSW 2007 Panels I’m Going To

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Photos From My Trip to South Africa

Ashley Bischoff10 Comments
View From Table Mountain, Cape Town

As you might be aware, I went on vacation to South Africa in February with my family to celebrate my mom’s birthday. There’s not need to focus on numbers — or at least that’s what she would say ;) — but let’s just say that it was her 3Cth (hex) birthday. Anyhow, I’ve finished processing the photos from my trip to South Africa and I’ve posted those at Flickr.

I was also pleased to be able to make use of my new camera, a Nikon D80 that I had bought just a few weeks beforehand. I went with the 18 - 135 mm kit lens at the time and it worked out great. I’ll probably buy a faster lens at some point (this one is F3.5 - 5.6) — or maybe even one of those fancy vibration reduction lenses — but I wasn’t about to start dropping big money on accessories right after the purchase of the body & kit lens.

I was away for about two weeks and I took 110 shots. I selected about 60 of those to process and, in doing so, whittled down the list to 35. It’s not that I don’t like processing photos — once I get going, I find that it can have an almost zen-like quality — but some of them just didn’t work out for one reason or another. Most often, one of those reasons was that I ended up blowing out my highlights for one reason or another. Put another way, once you hit pure white (255, 255, 255), you’ve lost all color information for that pixel and even if the image as a whole is darkened (such as to correct exposure), that pixel can only become grayer.

For example, if you’re taking a shot from within a darkened restaurant that happens to include one of its windows, you’ll probably end up with a big ol’ block-o-white where that window would be since the camera is attempting to set its exposure based on the rest of the (darkened) scene. Or, in my case, you might be taking some shots from within a museum that happens to include a handful of skylights (to name just one example). Dangit. I guess when your colorspace has “only” 256 shades of gray, there’s not much you can do. (Maybe shooting RAW might help?)

PS I offer a tip of my hat to Scott Kelby’s book, “The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers” — though I’ve been making use of image editors for years, I hadn’t extensively used Photoshop up until I started processing these photos. The book is very down-to-earth and has screenshots every step of the way; I recommend it highly.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 10.2 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

Power Searching with Advanced Google Search Operators

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Some friends and I were talking about Google’s advanced search operators over dinner at Mia’s last night (for example, with the operator “site:”, you can limit your search results to a single domain, such as “site:metafilter.com pancakes”). In any case, that’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’ve found them to be fantastically helpful toward my Google-fu.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a Google samurai, but I know my way around a handful of these search operators and I’ve found them to be remarkably helpful toward finding what I’m looking for.

Van Hagar Out, Van Roth In?

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

For those unfamiliar with the band’s history, Van Halen’s history of lead singers roughly follows this sequence: David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, David Lee Roth, Gary Cherone, and Sammy Hagar. Now, some fans mock the Hagar years, referring to the band of that time period as Van Hagar. I, on the other hand, didn’t mind Hagar that much. I mean, sure, I probably preferred Roth, but I don’t mind him in the least on those days when I’m listening to For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or other Hagar-voiced albums.

There’re rumors now, however, that Roth could return to the band:

Rumors continue to swirl that original singer David Lee Roth, who was replaced by Hagar in the mid-1980s, will return to the fold, despite years of enmity. Roth, who has recently worked as a radio DJ and a paramedic, told Billboard.com in May that he saw it “absolutely as an inevitability.”

“I’m telling Dave, ‘Dude, get your ass up here and sing, bitch! Come on!’” Eddie told Guitar World. “As it stands right now, the ball is in Dave's court. Whether he wants to rise to the ocassion is entirely up to him, but we’re ready to go.” […]

I dig the band and just about any avenue which leads to more axe shredding is a-ok with me. Just along as it doesn’t involve Gary Cherone — that man can only be described as Van Halen’s George Lazenby.