– Ultra high quality scans of the mysterious Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains in Antarctica this past week revealed detailed images of the mountain range extending into the depths below 2.5miles of ice surrounded by not only valleys but lakes of unfrozen water. While the geological survey of this region had been done in the 70′s, these scans utilizing new imaging technology available to the National Science Foundation have revealed amazing details never seen before.

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

I was given the opportunity to interview one of the graduate students of Columbia University being considered for the expedition to survey the Gamburtsev region. J.W. Dyer, grandson of the now infamous William Dyer, was excited about the possibility of getting picked to go. He stated, “I hope to get the chance to go study the areas where my grandfather stepped foot over 70 years ago… the modern technology at our disposal will help clear up any misunderstanding or myths that have arisen regarding the fate of the Pabodie expedition.” When asked what he hoped to find in the region Dyer replied, “The best thing I could hope for is to help in the discovery of the geological forces that caused ice to form there in the first place.. .. that would be history in the making.”

Credit: Propnomicon

The Pabodie expedition, mentioned by Dyer in our interview, took place in 1930-31 during which nearly all members were lost. The surviving members were later diagnosed as clinically insane due to their wild stories of monsters and demons. It was later suggested that malnutrition and dehydration may have been a substantial catalyst for the paranoid delusions. William Dyer’s journal was partially recovered, but was fraught with ineligible scribblings, illustrations, and allusions to unintelligible musings throughout and indicating to later physicians the possibility of  pre-existing schizophrenia. Several contemporary novelists at that time capitalized off the sensational nature of the expedition story and over the past 70 years a mythos has developed around the occurrences.

While talking to Dyer I got the sense that he was really ready to “clear his family name” of the past misunderstanding. As such, Dyer is desperately hoping to be officially included in the expeditionary team but will not find out for a couple weeks. In the mean time he went over some of the more interesting parts of the new imagery, explained what some of it is, and discussed what the National Science Foundation is hoping to find in this mysterious mountain range.

Credit: European Ice Sheet Modelling Initiative, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research

Under the miles of ice and far down in the valleys formed at the base of these covered mountains are several open lakes. One lake, now designated “Poor Lake”, within the Gamburtsev region was peculiar in that the scans have revealed naturally formed geometric structures such as cubes and cones of varying densities, currently thought to be of crystalline formation, near the lake but covering a several mile wide area. Though Poor Lake is under more than 2.5miles of solid ice, the area has remained unfrozen. The scan even revealed a light rippling on the water the source of which is unknown. Dyer explained that speculation has arisen as to whether this warmer region could be caused by volcanic activity in a pocket or cavern deep beneath the Antarctic crust.

Another area of interest Dyer described as containing several shapes that could prove to be organic in nature. Though little detail was given, the image referenced seemed to indicate several plant like densities in patterns described as roughly “star shaped” though no images have yet been made public. The area also had a major degradation in the mountain side near these star-shaped areas indicating a collapse having happened relatively recently in comparison to the prehistoric surrounding surfaces. This could indicate an unstable geological region which would explain a multitude of newly arising questions regarding the origin of the continent and its massive ice sheet.

Dyer says he’s so excited about the possibility of getting to go that he’s begun having dreams about the expedition nearly every night. For his sake, I hope his dreams come true as it could be the adventure of a lifetime, definitely an opportunity not to be shrugged off. Perhaps in the near future Dyer will get the opportunity to dispel the myths of his grandfather and, by proxy, outshine his elder’s things.

Credit: Live Science; Varied Source Addendum

– In a shocking turn of events the US military has announced a change of its offensive strategy in the War on Terror. Basing current tactical decisions on long standing military rules of engagement has lead to a never ending power struggle to maintain control over several turbulent middle-eastern regions. As such, the US military has turned its attention to a more literal interpretation and implementation of the term “counter-terrorism”.

Following a press conference on Wednesday, General George Bartholomew Jasper of the US Armed Forces’ newly formed Suilline Tactical Division announced a bold move to incorporate suidae products as a form of biological weapon against specific targets in various militant Muslim regimes. Although this came as a surprise to the press, the Suilline Tactical Division has been in the works for over two years, according to the General. With new tactics using non-lethal biological weapons and sprays, the division is promising a swift quash of the formerly inaccessible mountain regions without the use of ground forces. The new tactics save the government billions according to the projected savings, but results have yet to be accounted.

The press release contained hundreds of pages of technical information regarding the weapons being used by the new military division. With code names like “Jodie”, “Karnac”, “TLP”, and “Old Major” the suidae weapons range from non-lethal aerosols and liquids, to more dire shrapnel grenades and smart bombs. One development the General spent a lot of time talking up was the new rocket propelled bullet, code named “Wilbur”. Capable of changing course mid-flight this micro rocket can be fired from a hand gun with a modified under-barrel allowing soldiers to switch tactics easily and efficiently on the battlefield. The payload of “Wilbur” explodes a microsecond after impact distributing varied-source, compressed, suidae bio-matter within the subject causing not only mental and physical damage, but a religion based perceived spiritual damage as well. The General concluded his talk by saying, “That is some bullet!”

There is no current data on the reception of this news in the countries where Suilline Tactical Division raids have already occurred. Currently, the press is awaiting further practical examples on implementation, which they expect to have word of within the month.

This is a very controversial topic and I’ll try to keep you up to date on it as much as possible.

…there, J…

While riding on the subway this morning a guy came through asking for money. He had both arms cut off at the elbow joint and was holding a sign stating that he intended on using the money to “get prosthetics.” I did give him my laundry money, being the only cash I had on hand that was liquid, but it got me thinking. He wasn’t badly dressed. He had a zippered backpack in which was having people tuck the cash. Is it wrong that my brain automatically fixated on the sign though? It was a screen printed white cardboard similar to those used by cheap cellphone providers. I just kept thinking, “how did you scan your card for the subway and hold the sign too?” I’m sure he had help getting to the subway to beg, but still… Anyhow, I caught myself accusatorily judging the man with no arms, so I gave him what he wanted.

My cynicism isn’t helping anyone.

Often in New York when walking the streets of our shiny city (cough , cough) I have found it surprisingly comforting to be wearing headphones. When wearing headphones you are not expected to respond to people asking for “spare change”, “donations for world peace”, or “directions to 23rd and 6th” – the corner upon which they stand. Sure, you may still get the cat calls and outstretched hands or the rude comments and even ruder gestures, but you can pretend not to notice and just walk by. I decided today to try it at home too… What do you know, it worked! I didn’t even have an mp3 player in my pocket. My roommate walked into the kitchen complaining about her life, like always, and Bam! It was like a magic trick. She just stopped talking mid sentence and life was oh, so sweet!

P.S.
I don’t ignore everyone. Headphones just give me back my right to freedom of choice.

This is the first in a series of regular installments named “In the Works this Week” that will be posted as consistently as possible with the intention of keeping you readers up to date on the concepts, projects, etc. being worked on throughout the week at Xonikz Independent Industries. This week’s focus is archiving.

Due to a drastic change in media over the last ten years a lot of us have run into problems attempting to access our past media for use in current projects. For example, many of us have stacks of physical photographs sitting in a bin somewhere which is great if you’re sitting in your room pining away over some long lost love, but in the real world those physical photos are next to useless. There are plenty of companies out there that do scanning in mass quantities for those of us without time to do it ourselves, but if you are thinking of converting some old photos into their digital future version here are some tips to keep in mind.

1. Clean your scanner – The last thing you want to do is have to digitally remove the same fingerprint, hair, or tree frog off the whole archive of digital images post scanning because you forgot to check the gate. So before you begin any mass scanning or any important scanning at all, clean your scanner.

2. Set the quality – This may seem like an extra hassel, but will save you oodles of regret later in life if you do it right. Most of us won’t use our old family portraits for anything more than memories, but for those of us who have high quality shots from which we intend on doing high quality prints should scan at high quality. Back in the day (ten years ago) 1 gigabyte of storage space was a lot for the average user to consider, but now you can get cheap promotional thumb drives with over 30gigs of storage space on them. As such, there is no longer an excuse for not backing up your data at its best quality. Granted, most of us will never print a billboard for Times Square, but that is no excuse to default to a 72dpi scanning setting. You may run across a few scanning tutorials recommending this generic setting for standard home photo archiving. Ignore them. I worked in the pre-press department of a printing company for 3 years and here are some things I would recommend for archive photos. Scan at no lower than 300dpi. If you’re scanning negatives, or slides, or anything smaller than the average photo push it even farther. Pixels mean nothing in scanning analogue media so consider how clear you want the final image to be not how big. I would suggest scanning slide film at no lower than 900dpi you’ll want the ability to “zoom in” later and you won’t have the option at 72, 100, or really even 300dpi without significant degradation and digital artifacts. Keep in mind this is for scanning purposes only and has nothing to do with your current digital archive. The analogue dpi will be represented differently depending on which photo software you use to view it, but bigger is better in the long run. I’ve included a comparison link at the beginning of this segment but don’t get too bogged down with the reasons, just don’t ever scan anything at less than 200dpi. If you run into the issue of your scanned images appearing as “huge” keep in mind a 10.1 Megapixel camera has a pixel size output of 3872 x 2592. This “hugeness” is relative to your computer screen and most modern photo viewers will size the photo to the screen automatically.

3. Turn off image enhancing – Most scanners have some sort of built in software that sets all sorts of things up automatically to output a really bright picture with really saturated colors. You don’t want this. Make sure to create a new default setting which has all the built in image enhancements turned off. It will help you in the future if you haven’t scanned light gray as white instead of light gray. If you never run into a reason to change your picture’s color, then awesome; but for the rest of us who like the workability of a neutral toned picture this is key to avoiding future stress. All this to say it’s better to scan the picture as-is then to cross your fingers and hope the built in software doesn’t accidentally erase your child’s squinting eyes because of lack of contrast (lack of contrast is fewer contrasting levels and is recognizable by extreme blacks and whites with loss of grays in-between).

4. Naming conventions – Your digital camera names your files automatically with various titles and numbers to help you keep track of what the image you’re storing is. Do the same when you scan things. If you are scanning a batch of images, I suggest you decide your naming convention first to help save a little time finding things later. If you’ve chosen to number your files remember to use enough zeros to account for the amount of files to come. For instance if you know you’ll have 1000 pictures of your trip to Casablanca then name the files “Casablanca_0001″ and so forth until “Casablanca_1000″ is the last file. This will let all devices read them in the order that you scanned them. You can change the names later, but this will likely work best for viewing whole folders in order. Use meta-tags (mentioned later) for keeping track of file contents. I’ve personally started naming my files by year, month, day, hour, minute, second which sounds confusing and looks like this 20100607_193637 (yes, it’s in 24 hr time to avoid duplicates). I just take too many pictures to bother naming them all right away… I’ll name the selected shots later when I can come up with names for them.

5. Tag your files – Most current scanning software will ask you to tag your files and while this seems like a lot of trouble at first glance it can be a life saver later. Start generic. Use the location, event, and photographer’s name as the primary meta tags when you begin to scan the files. At each collection change interval go back and tag your photos with their primary contents (dog, plane, man-bear-pig) then tag the primary color in the photo (red, blue, green – no crayola color names necessary if you don’t want). The color tag is becoming rather prevalent these days and it will help you to get a jump start on what I’m certain will be a standard tag expectation in the next few years. The more tagged details you can put in your image’s meta data, the better. This will help when searching for the file in the future, particularly when you can’t remember where you were or what was in it. Searching for “the guy in the green hat” will give you much more accurate results if you record the “Casablanca, 2010, May, hat, green, man, guy, etc.” in the meta-tag (keywords).

6. Organize your folders by hand – While there are photo programs out there that sort your files into various structures based on whatever their preferences are, there is still nothing better than setting up your own filing system and keeping track of where your program saves files. This will help immensely to save space on your hard-drive. It will also help you not lose files during software updates or computer changes. I suggest running all your images off of a backup hard-drive and backing up that hard-drive redundantly on a weekly or monthly basis (or pay for an online data backup service if this all seems like too much work/control).

7. Store your paper photos for good – Now that you have all your old pictures available at the tip of your cursor, what do you do with the paper copies? Burn them…. cough, cough… no don’t do that. Ship them to mom… maybe not all of them.

8. Update your social network so we can all see how goofy you looked in the eighties.

9. If you went through all this trouble so you could use these photos for something other than social networking then you likely already have the software knowledge necessary for enhancing and editing the pictures to be usable for you purposes; if not… good luck catching up with the new generation of history makers.

Well, I hope you like the first “In the Works this Week” installment. Next week will be something equally long and boring… Cheers!