Dinosaur Skeletons

After a while, I'm finally able to add a new blog entry. Finals are over (yay) and I'm on break, so I have to find something fun to do.
Here's a book that I had when I was younger, but never got to do. This book shows how to take 3 chicken skeletons and make a fairly accurate apatosaurus. I loved reading this book when I was younger, because it has a great deal of information on bone structure to go along with the instructions.
Expect to see more entries with progress photos of the project.

Make Your Own Dinosaur
Out of Chicken Bones
by Chris McGowan
(c) 1997

A Late Night, Caffine Induced Post on Facial Recognition

Here is just a quick example of how a computer could judge the emotion of someone using facial recognition.

First the program would start with a photo of the head (fig 1.). The way that this would be acquired would vary on the project, but I'd like to see something like a web cam used to update the photo and emotion over time.

Then the face is cropped out of the rest of the image (fig 2.) Again, this dependson the situation that the program was made for.

Several points are found on the face based on physical features (fig 3.) The ones I used on this example are the two ends of the lips, cheek bones, each end of each eyebrow, the nostrils, and the eyes.

The location of the points relative to each other is calculated and this data is used to determine the emotion. In this example, the angle formed by Nostril 1, Nostril2, and Lip 2 are used. As shown in figures 4-6, the more 'sad' the face is, the smaller this angle will be.

For more emotions, the rules would have to be more complex than in this simple example.

Introduction to the shoe project.

Okay, so I'm working on a project to add wheels to shoes, so I can go downhill faster when I go to college or meet up with friends down there. I'm trying to make them be able to survive the fairly shitty roads around here, something that things like "heelies" cannot do well.

I've gotten most of the things shipped to me by now, and next week I'll be heading down to the shop to get some measurements and drill a few holes. Here's just a quick pic of how it'll look.

USS Voyager

I thought I'd use this post to introduce two of my loves, Star Trek and Modeling, specifically papercraft.

I've been working on this model of the USS Voyager the last few days. It's a pretty hard to do model, mainly because its soo small. I'll be sure to post some pics of the final product if I ever finish it. This paper model was made by Ninja Toes. He's made alot of other things, so check out his site.

Introduction

Hello, this is my first real stab at blogging, but everything seems self explanitory.

I made this blog to document projects I'm working on, discussing various books and stuff, and just standard blog fair.


Things I want to do:

1. Post atleast one blog every week (hopefully more than that)
   
2. Include a ton of pictures
3. Try not to only half finish projects
4. Get some people to actually enjoy reading this blog