the reason my car now looks like this take 2

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/08/15/1302691/tacoma-men-hurt-in-crash-near.html

there's a little news report. not sure how accurate that all is. I don't remember the accident or the couple days after. By Tuesday I think I'd realized from repetition that I wasn't dreaming we'd gotten in a car wreck on the way to Washington.

We'd actually done it.

I was at harborview medical center in Seattle where they moved me because of my condition Saturday night. The news piece says they took me to Yakima but my neck had been hammered down into my shoulders hard enough to dislocate my cervical vertebrae from my thoracic. So I arrived in Seattle a couple hours later where surgeons cleaned up my broken hand and set in a splint for a later surgery. They stretched my spine back into position, and fused my neck vertebrae to my chest vertebrae.

I was on heavy narcotics for the next couple of days till Mom informed them that I didn't use any stimulants at all. so they switched me to Tylenol and oxycodone which brought my mind back around just in time to prove to psychiatric evaluation that I hadn't sustained any brain damage. Which was good. Cuz nobody seemed to like the idea of brain damage.

So I've been sleeping a lot. And I got some new teeth which incidentally taste like bullets. I wanted to make sure if anyone else has teeth repaired that they pay close attention to taste. Course, you won't recognize the flavor if you've never had bullets in your mouth. Don't ask me how I do, its just one of those tastes you know from childhood like quarters and door knobs.

Anyway, the car is done. And I almost was. But I'm improving.

Kidnapped by Pirates

I post this from the floor of the Chicago Airport Southwest Airlines ticketing... what do you call this? Ticketing area?

I've never been to Chicago nor did I plan on visiting it tonight. That may strike you as a bit unusual. How often do you not mean to be sitting on a cold floor on the other side of the country only to find yourself twelve hours later doing just that?

-Unless you've been kidnapped, you might not expect it. But I guess I've been kidnapped today by Southwest. How jovial.

On with the post.

Here's what I wrote joyfully today on the plane to Denver, before all the trouble happened. It is now 3:04AM and I am still in Chicago. Rock on.

HOW I BECAME NOT A SCIENTIST

Why are Children expected to be scientists? Honestly, the ratio of scientists to not scientists in the real world is staggeringly disproportionate to the ratio in public schools. I'm not sure they're aware of this. As important as scientists are in our world, why was I expected to be one? More specifically why did I have to come back to the school on a Thursday night after already being there all day? And of course, What was I supposed to do my project on?

I don't know why Science fairs are such an established tradition. I suppose many a top scientist found his (or her. We do need to be politically correct afterall. This is my public school experience we're talking about.)

Anyway I'm sure many got their first taste of the fame and glory to be had in scientific inquiry from gatherings like these. The road to Nobel prizedom begins in elementary school.

Mine however did not.

I don't remember how this became my project, but I ended up with one of those stupid tri-fold poster boards, a rubber band, a chicken bone, and a penny.

The only marker in our whole house at the time was an old dried out whiteboard marker. It was brown. Scratched in what looked like disappearing ink at the top of my board was the word "acid".

We were supposed to come up with an experiment to test our hypothesis, which happened to be a big word for "what you think will happen." I think we spent three days learning what it meant. There was a test. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire science fair was really just a ploy to make sure we didn't go through life not knowing what a hypothesis was. How glad I am to know its definition now.

I decided a good experiment would be to soak each of the items minus the tri-fold in a cup of vinegar for a week. My hypothesis, scribbled in pencil because the marker didn't work anymore so I put it back in the junk drawer, was something like, the bone will be rubbery because that's what someone said would happen. The penny was supposed to corrode and the stupid rubber band was supposed to get brittle. That's pretty much what happened but a lot less of it than I'd expected.

I had each item sitting out on my table in front of the dumb tri-fold board . By the time things got going, the bone had dried out and wasn't really that bendy anymore.

I stood there feeling like an idiot while trembling grandparents and civic minded citizens came around to pretend interest in my presentation and tell me I should try the same thing with coke.

I was actually quite surprised and somewhat disturbed to discover how many adult members of my community had taken to this unusual activity apparently effected by some mania in decades past. All I could imagine were pre-TV age children running around splashing coke on things and then waiting in stunned silence to see what happened. I thanked them each for the advise, but began to wonder if I looked like the kind of kid that did this sort of thing for fun.

"You do realize I'm at school right now." I wanted to say. "You don't seem to understand. It's 7:30! I was here all day. And in exactly twelve hours I'll have to be here again. I have to because someone decided to make it against the law for me not to..."

At the end of the night they handed out ribbons.

I didn't get one.

My teacher did come around and snap a Polaroid of me. She handed me the photo and walked away. As I watched it develop I realized how stupid I looked standing in front of a presentation on how to break rubber bands over the course of a week.

Isn't science a glorious thing.

Jump Around

STILLS PRojECT from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.

Here's a little project I did to experiment with still frame images from my Canon 7D. 


The thing can shoot at 8fps which means I can composite great shots like the two pictured here to the right. I wanted to see if I could put them into a timeline and export as video. Found out it was pretty easy. I added some photos I took at the local Draper Days fireworks show where I got tired of the "here's my summer" photos and started opening the shutter for a few seconds at a time and waving the camera around to get a more abstract image.  Anyway when I made them  a video file, they danced around really nicely and I got the idea to lay them over the rest of the video like burnt scratches in film stock. So I did and then I thought, hey why not use some of the shots I've got at 60fps? So I played around with speed ramping those with "optical flow" in Motion. Then I thought I'd add some titles so I did that too and liked it. If you don't like it, leave a comment for everybody to read. Thanks and have a happy day... or night as the case may be.

bouncing off things on the freeway

Now as you might expect, the action described in the title isn't one most of us prefer to experience on our summer journeys. However, judging by the number of TV shows out there that think they're bringing us something we can't see already on YouTube, its something most of us will watch for fun. 


 I don't know how often you've noticed, but those concrete dividers they put on the freeway to separate the two sides are covered with scuffs. I've always wanted to see a car slide along the thing, but naturally, I've also not wanted to see it  since it could end with a pile-up in which I'd be a main participant. 

Yesterday I was privileged to finally see what I'd been wanting to see ever since I was old enough to breathe. 


And it happened safely.
 BEHIND me!


 I was driving along mindlessly when I happened to glance in my rear view mirror. At that precise moment the mini van behind me drifted up against the concrete to relax for a while. A minivan's construction and seating arrangement is such that the occupants are clearly visible from the front whilst being completely ignorant of outside forces from within. It was like watching a short play on a little mobile stage.


 As the people inside rocked violently around, the driver appeared calm, in fact unaware of anything unusual going on. The loud scraping noise that no doubt accompanied this adventure  also seemed to go unnoticed. His wife apparently felt differently judging by the way she frantically started looking around and opening her mouth a lot. This was more than likely accompanied by some screaming.


 The van swerved away from the wall and into the other lane where to everyone's relief, no one was driving. The wife continued to flail and gesture whilst looking around, opening and closing her mouth. The van swerved back, but a little too hard and that darn scraping noise was back. 


 The minivan eventually settled back to a natural normal course the way a golf ball bounces to a gentle roll. The husband remained calm, almost comatose through the entire ordeal. They might have  pulled off the freeway to inspect the damage, but I'm not sure they even noticed since they continued on driving behind us for several more miles as if nothing had happened. What a surprise to arrive at your destination later that night and realize someone's violently keyed your car... While you were driving. incredible.

7th of July Celebrations Continue Weeks Afterward!

Everybody knows the joy of wearing a Kool-aide smile and blowing stuff up. Here's my brother Aaron blowing up stuff with his home made canon. It doesn't get any better than this, and yes, those are rabbits in the background.

I think we can all learn a valuable lesson here.

1. that you should always have reliable combustables around.

If matches won't do, try piles of gasoline soaked rags.

A hair dryer can usually be employed to get a flame out of something like that... Or simply fill the tub with water, slosh some gasoline over the top, plug in the hair dryer, toaster, or clock radio and toss it into the tub.

Make sure the home electonic has been turned on before doing this as experience has shown that doing so after can result in hand and arm damage including loss of life.

Then you can simlply roll up a newspaper or towel and transport the flame via homemade torch to the backyard where your fire cracker awaits.

and 2. Never eat flamingos. They taste like pink chickens.

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Caution: do not ingest. May cause blindness if inserted in eye socket.

Nathan leads an Australian tour through the wreckage of the end of the world!