Michael Jones, PhD

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August 22, 2006

[Research] The color of the Earth in different months

Not sure what I might use it for, but this is very cool.

[Earth Observatory Newsroom: Blue Marble Next Generation Monthly Global Images]

Posted by jones at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

[Research] Sandstone fracturing models

Parris Egbert and I are pondering some work on sandstone. This appears to be one of the original geology papers on the subject. Probably not the best one, but perhaps the first one. A reverse bibliography search should be useful.
[SpringerLink - Journal Article]

Posted by jones at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2006

[Research] Sweet laptops for graphics

I was perusing the ATI an Nvidia booths at siggraph looking for the portable laptop with the coolest graphics card. The ATI booth had a couple that I could heft. The guy at the Nvidia booth had the Dell XPS 1210. They are heavy, but they have cool video cards inside. To wit...

• Lenovo ThinkPad T60p (2623D8U) PC Notebook Reviews at Shopping.com. Note that DVI output comes with the docking station. After I switched to pure digital with my current PowerBook, I can't go back now. That's important.
  
• Compaq and HP nw8440. This was rendering a rainy day real time, full screen in the ATI booth. The screen is beautiful. The price and weight and probably the battery life are going to be. Well, suboptimal.
  The Dell XPS 1210 has a good nVidia card in it, it is small and it would be perfect. But, it doesn't have DVI either on-board or in a docking station.
  
• macbookpro. Has a good ATI card, but not the latest and greatest like the IBM and Compaq. And now that I've used Picassa2, I don't need iPhoto anymore.
  

Posted by jones at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

[Research] Natural Phenomena

I was thinking about organizing a workshop on computer graphics for natural phenomena. You can imagine my delight when I discovered that one already exists. I was glad to find that it will be in Vienna this year, which is a beautiful city. But, I don't know if I have the time and money to visit Vienna this year, sadly.

These are some people in Natural Phenomena...

• David Ebert at Purdue
  
• Ron Fedkiw at Stanford (I saw some of, I presume, their fluids work at Siggraph 2006. That was hot).
  
• Not sure if he's on the program committee, but he's done some work in the area in the past. Oliver Deussen
  

There were two posters this year that were/are reasonably related to terrain

• City generation on terrain. You pick a rough road layout and it will do the rest.
  
• John Keyser. These guys had a terrain model for doing water-based erosion of terain. Here's a paper on terrain generation they wrote. The cool thing about their work is that it allows for water pooling and erosion due to the water pool exceeding the height of the basin. I thought their work was probably better than the images on their poster. The erosion looked like flash flood erosion though. They are working on methods for modeling plant motion, due to things like the wind, using a level of detail approach. I think that is an imp;ortant topic as well.
  

Posted by jones at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)