Bike Ride to Los Lunas from Albuquerque

My friends David, Oleg and I biked to Los Lunas from Albuquerque today. Unfortunately, my bike received a massive flat tire. We were luck that the flat occurred very close to Albuquerque (I had patches but the hole was super big - I'll post a picture of the nail soon.) We took the bus back from the river trial to UNM.

I'm pretty happy with this image - especially considering it came from a camera phone


Oleg, David and a small portion of my finger

After my patch job didn't hold, Oleg and I tried to ride two to a bicycle. Unfortunately, people in Kazakhstan have become affluent enough for everyone to own their own bicycles. As a result of the increasing affluence, the population is unable to balance as a passenger. The above destroyed shoe is a direct example of this phenomenon. Luckily, Oleg was completely fine after his foot was violently sucked into the tire.

Here is a link to our current status. It will be updated as we continue to go further south. In total, the ride was 49.9 miles (80.3 km) total according to my bike computer.

Pymol - Molecular Visualization

Today I have been messing with the program PyMol to generate images for molecular visualization. After following a simple tutorial, I generated a few images of water with different settings.

Water - Stick View


Water - Ball View

Now I am working on getting some images of the molecules my research group is more interested in. But first, I wanted to try the ray-tracing option. Not too shabby.

Ray Traced Water - 2048 x 2048 - About 19 seconds (slightly quicker than my ray tracer)

This is a Streptavidin - Biotin Complex generated from data found at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB) here. Luckily, this protein data bank exists, otherwise I seriously doubt it realistic image generation would be feasible.

Streptavidin/Biotin - Ray Traced - Not Quite as cool with the mesh option

Streptavidin/Biotin - Not Ray Traced - I think this looks better

Actual Final Image

2048 x 2048 - 256 samples / pixel
Flipped Image (I trace my image reverse from how I index into my textures)
real 309m15.909s

Next Go

Here is my final image showcasing Perlin noise.

1024 x 1024 - 256 samples / pixel


A little different view point


Even Further to the Side - You can see where my star texture repeats

Next Image

My "movie aspect" images looks a bit distorted, so I rendered this image in 1024 x 1024. There are 128 samples / pixel.

Rendering Time = real 76m41.151s

Quite Possibly my ray tracing final project

The "moon" is actually a Perlin noise texture with the color simply as the [0,1] noise value multiplied by white to get a gray color. I am using cubic interpolation and eight octaves of turbulence. The earth is from a previous assignment, and the stars are actually texture mapped onto a plane behind my sphere.

1440 x 1080 32 samples / pixel
(real 21m42.207s - Somewhat low-res star texture)

1440 x 1080 32 samples / pixel
(real 43m23.741s - Extremely High Resolution Star Texture)

The above picture has a star texture of about 20% the resolution of the bottom. At first, I couldn't see any difference between the two pictures, but now I think the bottom image has a sharper background.

Bagpipes @ Church

Due to the semester finishing up, I thought it would be a good idea to get some "final project insurance" by heading to church. There were some awesome bagpipe players during the service. I managed to get a couple of videos on my phone when they headed outside to play after the service.


I feel ready to do battle on a Scottish Moor

Kate's final project for non verbal communication

My girlfriend has been taking an 8-week, Saturday, course on non-verbal communication. For her final project, she presented material on non verbal communication going on at the UNM duck pond. She was responsible for the presentation, while other members of her group focused on a written report. She created two cool looking poster boards and some snazzy name tags for her presentation.

Kate's Boards


Name Tags

It sounds like her presentation went really well!