A Christmas Flag Vectorization

Mele Kalikimaka kākou! Merry Christmas everyone! By the time this goes up I should be back in California with my family for a surprise visit—thanks Dad!

In the Christmas spirit of giving, have a flag vectorization video too!

This flag is for the small kingdom of Ennarea in eastern Africa, just south-west of Ethiopia. Its formation is shrouded in mystery due to a lack of written records in the area at the time, but it was established by at least the 13th century and survived all the way into the early 18th century before falling to invading Oromo peoples. At the start of Europa Universalis IV in 1444 Ennarea is pretty small, holding only a single province, so it probably doesn't last nearly as long as its historical counterpoint.

Ennarea is just to the south-west of Ehtiopia, circled in green.

This vectorization was an interesting exercise that I've been anticipating and thinking about for a few days. Trying to find a way to represent that intricate filigree work was an exciting challenge, and you can see me trying a few different approaches before settling on something that works for me. I also like the colors in this flag, with the greens and the yellows (brown is just a very dark version of orange or yellow).

Anyway, I probably won't be posting anything for the next week or so, so Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, Happy New Year as well! A hui hou!

Christmas Snow, in Hawaii!

This weekend we had a winter storm, with a strong, steady rain of a kind unusual in Hilo falling from about midnight Saturday till evening Sunday. It made the annual Messiah sing-a-long I attended Sunday an interesting experience in trying to sing over the rain pelting the roof, but it also left behind a nice gift: a beautiful coating of snow on Mauna Kea that I was able to see this morning.

An hour later the clouds had closed in again, so I'm glad I was able to catch this when I did. A hui hou!

Kīlauea Iki Walk

It only took me two and half months, but I finally got around to sorting out my photos and videos from my Labor Day trip to Volcanoes National Park with some friends. I took my old phone along and shot some video footage with it, which I've edited down into a short video showing some of the things we saw along the way. I switched a lot between photos and videos throughout the hike, so I don't really have full coverage with either. It was kind of an experiment.

We decided to hike the Kīlauea Iki trail, which I've hiked twice before, in the opposite direction from the past times I've done it. In the past we'd gone around the rim first, then down the far end, across the crater floor, and back up the steep trail to get back to the trail head at the end. This time we did the opposite, and I enjoyed it a lot more: we went down the steepest part of the trail first, instead of up it at the end of a four-mile walk. It's interesting how much it changes the feel of the trail, and I enjoyed it a lot more (though that may also have had something to do with the weather, which was absolutely amazing).

This picture comes from the crater floor, just after reaching it from the steep trail that switchbacks down the eastern crater wall. It looks across the crater floor, showing the trail we would soon follow in order to ascend the other end of the crater.

This picture shows the main Kīlauea caldera, with the Halemaʻumaʻu crater releasing gasses in it. I should mention that I'm experimenting with a new program called Raw Therapee for processing the raw images from my DSLR, so the color balance on some of these photos may be a little off as I play around with various settings. I'm pretty sure I don't remember those gasses being quite so bright blue, for instance (though I suppose the blue must've been there for Raw Therapee to bring out). This picture was taken after climbing out of Kīlauea Iki crater, and taking a short hike off the trail we were primarily following over to the rim of the main Kīlauea caldera. (“Iki,” by the way, means “small” in Hawaiian.)

After that, we started hiking back along the rim of Kīlauea Iki crater, which has a lot of excellent points for looking out over it. This picture shows Puʻu Puaʻi (“gushing hill”), created by the lava fountains of Kīlauea Iki's 1959 eruption.

We walked up close to the base of Puʻu Puaʻi, near the center of the image, on our way across the crater floor, where I got the following image:

I made a small vertical panorama showing the view from near the base of the hill, and caught my friend Graham in the foreground for scale. It's very imposing standing in the hollow there, with the mass of the hill looming over your head, acutely aware that the lava involved in this eruption emerged from right around where you are.

As mentioned, here's a short video I put together from various bits of footage I had. I took more at the beginning, and it's not very consistent, and the first half or so is only in 420p, and I apologize for the shakiness, but I thought it had some neat moments, such as watching the shadows of clouds race across the crater floor. As I said, it's kind of an experiment. Hope you enjoy it. A hui hou!

Happy Thanksgiving, 2016!

Not too much to say today, other than hauʻoli lā hoʻomaikaʻi! Happy thanksgiving everyone! I was hoping to put up some pictures from my Labor Day trip to Volcanoes National Park, but I'm still working on touching up the raw photos, so I hope to have those out pretty sure. Have a shot from the rim of Kīlauea Iki out over the crater as a teaser. Now, off to dinner!

Kīlauea Iki crater from the crater rim trail.

Elemental Humor

Have you ever wondered where all of those funny names on the periodic table come from? I'm a big fan of the periodic table—it adorns my shower curtain, in fact—and one morning the thought came to me to that there are many mysterious names on the periodic table whose origins are obscure to the average layman. Thus, I took it upon myself to create the following list, detailing the origins of many of those inscrutable names:

• 3 Lithium, named after the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
• 18 Argon, named after the Argonauts.
• 24 Chromium, named after the Internet browser (the open-source one that the more famous Google Chrome gets its code from).
• 36 Krypton, named after Superman's home planet.
• 44 Ruthenium, named after the Biblical Ruth.
• 45 Rhodium, named after the island of Rhodes, home to the eponymous Colossus in ancient times and famed as the site of the Siege of Rhodes in 1522.
• 52 Tellurium, named after William Tell, Swiss folk hero.
• 62 Samarium, named after the region of Samaria in the north of Israel.
• 64 Gadolinium, named after the Hebrew word gadól (גָּדֹל), meaning “big, large.”
• 67 Holmium, named after fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
• 71 Lutetium, named for the lute.
• 84 Polonium, named after the sport of polo.
• 97 Berkelium, named after yours truly. 
• …

…alright, alright, I can't keep this up any more.

In case it's not obvious, none of the preceding is true; this is what happens when I get bored while looking at a periodic table and letting my mind wander.

Let's go over the actual, correct origins of the names of the aforementioned elements:

• 3 Lithium is actually named from the Greek word λιθος, lithos, meaning “stone.” This is a reference to it being discovered in a solid mineral, unlike its two fellow alkaline metals known at the time, sodium (known from high levels in animal blood) and potassium (discovered in plant ashes).
• 18 Argon is named from the Greek word αργος, argos, meaning “inactive,” in reference to its chemical inactivity. It's the least reactive element that actually stills forms compounds, though only a few are known and the first compound, argon fluorohyudride (HArF) was only synthesized in 2000.
• 24 Chromium, from the Greek word χρωμα, chrōma, meaning “color,” in reference to the intense colors of many of its salts.
• 36 Krypton, named from the Greek word κρυπτος, kryptos, meaning “hidden” or “secret.” It (like all the other noble gasses except helium) was discovered by successively evaporating components of liquid air, and the name is a reference to it being hidden among all the other gasses that make up air.
• 44 Ruthenium is named for the Latin name for the region that includes Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Ruthenia in Latin.
• 45 Rhodium is named from the Greek word ροδον, rhodon, meaning “rose,” in reference to the rose-red color of one of its chlorine compounds.
• 52 Tellurium is actually named from the Latin tellus, meaning “earth.”
• 62 Samarium is named after the mineral it was discovered in, samarskite, which in turn was named after Vasili Samarsky-Bykhovets, Chief of Staff of the Russian Corps of Mining Engineers, who helped procure access to the samples of the (at the time) rare mineral samarskite from the Urals.
• 64 Gadolinium, similarly, is named for the mineral gadolinite, which in turn is named for the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin, who discovered yttrium (and was knighted three times, apparently).
• 67 Holmium is actually named from the Latin name for Stockholm, Holmia.
• 71 Lutetium is similarly named from the Latin name for Paris, Lutetia.
• 84 Polonium was actually named by one of its discoverers, Marie Curie, after her homeland of Poland.
• 97 Berkelium is, of course, not named after any member of the Berke family, but after the city of Berkeley in California, where it was discovered in 1949 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory.

Hope you enjoyed my attempts at humor. A hui hou!

Vectorizing Fezzan's Flag

Well, the wiki contest I mentioned in my last post finished this weekend, and I came in second place! I got a snazzy new avatar for the Paradox forums and a cool 75% off voucher. I also had (a surprising amount of) fun, so in celebration, have another flag vectorization video!

The 'W' is for 'wiki.'

This one is for the flag of Fezzan, a country in what is now modern-day Libya. The region has a long history, stretching back to when it was ruled by the Garamantian Empire from 500 BC to AD 700. By 1444 it was a small independent kingdom, assimilated into the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century (though in Europa Universalis IV the Mamluk rulers of Egypt tend to get it first!).

Fezzan's location and size in 1444.

A nice and simple little flag, and symmetry made it twice as easy to do. Hope you enjoyed it, a hui hou!

Vectorizing Ryazan's Flag

Well, Paradox Development Studios just released a large patch and expansion for Europa Universalis IV last week, and that means it's time to update the wiki! To make it more fun there's a contest with a raffle involved for people who contribute, and one of the ways to contribute is higher-resolution flag images. (The previous such contest, back in April, is what got me started doing it in the first place.)

As such, this is the perfect time to do a whole bunch and upload them, so I've done quite a few this past week, and recorded the process of some of the more interesting ones (some flags are quite simple, which makes for easy, but not-especially-interesting vectorizing). I'll be releasing some more such videos in the next few weeks as I get around to rendering them, but in the meantime I thought I'd share one now.

This video shows the process of vectorizing the flag of Ryazan, one of a number of small independent principalities in the 15th century located in what would later become Russia. The principality of Muscovy was simply one such principality which steadily grew bigger and bigger by assimilating surrounding principalities until it morphed into the medieval Russian state.

Ryazan's location in 1444. (It's the small brown nation in the center.)

As the subject of the video is Russian, I went with some nice rousing Russian music from Tchaikovsky.

No, I don't know why that horse has no ears.

Vectorizing Illiniwek's Flag

The Illiniwek (or Illinois) Confederacy was a group of some twelve or thirteen tribes living in North America, in roughly the area of the state they would give their name to. The name comes from nearby Ottowa tribes, and means “he-who-speaks-the-common-way,” though the Illinois referred to themselves as the inoka, a term of unknown meaning.

Picture of the Illiniwek from Europa Universalis IV as they start the game in 1444.

In Europa Universalis IV the Illiniwek are represented as a single entity, with a no-doubt fictional flag. It's a fairly simple and clean design, though, so one day I got the urge to go about vectorizing it, and here is the resulting video:

Hope you enjoyed it! A hui hou!

Turns out Geckos are Similar to Cats

I was cleaning out pictures from the past few months from my phone yesterday, and stumbled upon a video I'd taken and forgotten about. I'd found a gecko on my monitor, and decided to see if it would notice my mouse pointer. It did. It was really cute. I couldn't resist making the following video out of the footage:

The gecko in the video is a gold dust day gecko, originally native to Madagascar and some of the surrounding islands, but introduced to Hawaii and other Pacific islands relatively recently. They're by far the most common species of gecko I see around here (there're maybe ten or so species of gecko found in the island chain). They like living in and around houses and are active during the day, which helps, though I'd never actually seen one around my computer before; usually I see them on the lanai or in the kitchen.

I found a few more pictures I'll probably want to post soon-ish, plus I still need to get around to looking at the pictures from my trip to Volcanoes National Park on Labor Day…

The Fictional Element Rant

As an astrophysicist, I enjoy a good science-fiction story as much as anyone. That same fact, though, also makes me pretty good at spotting where the authors are playing fast and loose with physics (for anything but the hardest of science-fiction). Many things I can accept as necessary for a story to work (superluminal travel, for instance), but there's one thing that can break my suspension of disbelief faster than almost anything else if handled poorly: fictional elements.

To see why, let's take a look at the periodic table, which summarizes what we know about the elements. To begin with we need to have a definition of elements themselves. Basically, all atoms have an integer number of protons in their nucleus, known as their atomic number. Atoms with the same number are the same element, and have the same attributes.

An element's atomic number uniquely identifies it.

An element's atomic number is so central to its identity, that it's the first thing I want to know about a new fictional element. And thence the problem: its atomic number can't be one, because that's hydrogen. It can't be two, because that's helium. It can't be three, because that's lithium, and so on all the way up to one-hundred and eighteen, the highest the period table goes at the moment (while elements with numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 are not named yet, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry is expected to approve names for them before the year is out).

And thus we see the problem that a fictional element (in a moderately hard science fiction setting) must overcome: all the elements up to a hundred and eighteen have been discovered already. Having a new element without further explanation feels to me like someone trying to tell me that they've discovered a new integer between 1 and 118; my immediate response is always going to be, “But we already know all of those integers.”

Now, while this is a problem, there are two approaches that I can see to justifying it:

1. The easy way: give it an atomic number higher than 118. The problem with this is that everything we know about nuclear physics says that anything with such a number should decay so fast it'd be nearly impossible to detect. But this is science fiction we're talking about here. It's pretty trivial to throw in a section discussing why what we thought we knew about physics was in fact wrong, allowing stable high-atomic-number elements to exists. At the very least, lampshade it by having someone remark how they have no idea how such an element is stable, but it'll give the physicists and chemists something to work on! I've seen this done in a free game set in the Half-Life universe released recently called Transmissions: Element 120. They went with the route of explicitly disclaiming knowledge of how element 120 (the putative source of the game's gimmick) was so stable, but it showed to me that they had at least acknowledged that a problem existed and had thought about it, and it didn't break my immersion the way simply announcing some new element would have. (They even used what would be the correct chemical symbol for element 120, Ununbium: Uub).
2. The slightly odd way: have the fictional element replace a real one. So this universe is like ours, except that, say, ruthenium is replaced by fictitium. I've never seen this used, and it would really only sort of paper over the problem, but it could be interesting if the replacement element is judiciously chosen. Elements that are uniformly highly radioactive and decay quickly might be good choices to replace; no one's really going to notice if astatine didn't exist, whereas history would be very different if iron didn't exist.

Of course, it's painfully obvious that most of the fictional elements that most badly break my immersion were only added to their respective settings to drive the plot (usually through opposing factions warring over it) and had no thought whatsoever given to them. To those needing such a plot driver, might I suggest a third path? Use an existing element, and give it a new property that explains why it's in such high demand. It's much easier to accept that an obscure element has suddenly become much more sought after due to a recent discovery than a totally new, never-really-explained element. Plenty of elements that were simply intellectual curiosities to their 19th-century discoverers are now critical components of modern items and infrastructure due to discoveries in the intervening time that could scarcely be imagined at the time they were discovered. (Various rare-earth metals being important in making high-end electronics, for one example.)

Note that this whole rant really only applies to science fictional settings of at least a moderately hard nature where it can be assumed that the periodic table exists. Mithril in The Lord of the Rings doesn't bother me because it's a fantasy setting. (You could also rationalize it as maybe being some real element that was unknown to any but the dwarves at the time. A light, strong, silvery metal could apply to aluminum, which is normally found in compounds but can very rarely occur in pure form as nuggets, explaining why it's only found in the mines of Moria. Just a fun thought exercise.)

Similarly, I don't mind if all the elements in a series are fictional. Star Wars goes this route, with the Expanded Universe (before Disney disavowed it) having probably dozens of fictional elements and minerals. That's interesting, and it gives you a lot of latitude in coming up with interesting elements. It's mixing real and fictitious elements (without justifying the latter) that really starts the smoke coming out of my ears as my brain tries to reconcile the fictional element with reality (for settings where it's assumed things are like reality unless specifically noted).

To put it simply, in science fiction stories, don't mix your real and fictitious elements without comment or justification, please. One or the other, not both.

Well, I don't know how interesting any of that was, but it's been buzzing about in my head for a while and I wanted to get it out. Sorry if I've now retroactively spoiled anyone's favorite story. A hui hou!