Avicennasis - Apply directly to the forehead!

If the database is the shape of knowledge in our time, then the definitive act of mediated communication is the data dump. So it is not surprising that the generation that has made the mash-up its prime aesthetic form has produced the data dump. But to put it this way is not to congratulate Wikileaks—at least not without considerable ambivalence. It's to lament the coming of a certain—shall we say generational?—style of exposé. Wikileaks is the Facebook of whistle blowing.

- "Everything Is Data, but Data Isn't Everything" by Todd Gitlin, December 7, 2010.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

- Leonardo da Vinci

The notion of complete self-sufficiency of any item of finite knowledge is the fundamental error of dogmatism. Every such item derives its truth, and its very meaning, from its unanalyzed relevance to the background which is the unbounded Universe. Not even the simplest notion of arithmetic escapes this inescapable condition for existence.

- "Essays in Science and Philosophy" by Alfred North Whitehead, 1947.

The job of science is to deliver reality back to us, not the other way around, and instead of trying to convince people to believe what they say, I would challenge scientists to engage citizens in the process of critical curiosity through thinking scientifically. Scientific facts are being disproven and proven again all the time. The most important thing is not to get the answers right but to be willing to ask the questions, even if the results are not quite what you expected.

- "The importance of thinking scientifically" by Anne Toomey, April 1st, 2011.
 Originally posted to Science for Citizens.

The real scandal might just be this: There are few secrets bigger and more terrible than the ones that are hiding in plain sight. The ones we ignore, sweep under the rug, and won't, don't, or can't discuss. (And in fact, many of the "embarassing" WikiLeaks cables only confirm — in sharper language — what informed readers already knew.)

- "Why WikiLeaks Matters More (And Less) than You Think" by Umair Haque, December 8, 2010.

Innovation has always been a group activity. The myth of the lone genius having a eureka moment that changes the world is indeed a myth. Most innovation is the result of long hours, building on the input of others. Ideas spawn from earlier ideas, bouncing from person to person and being reshaped as they go. If you're comfortable with the language of memes, you could say a healthy meme needs an ecosystem not of a single brain but of a network of brains. That's how ideas bump into other ideas, replicate, mutate, and evolve. Several authors have recently taken on this subject. Henry Chesbrough warns companies to adopt "open innovation," Eric von Hippel speaks of democratizing innovation, showing how, for example, the kite-surfer community outinnovated the manufacturers that were serving it, and Michael Farrell describes "collaborative circles," demonstrating that throughout history the best creativity has happened when groups of artists, reformers, writers, or scientists connected regularly with one another. So Crowd Accelerated Innovation isn't new. In one sense, it's the only kind of innovation there's ever been. What is new is that the Internet—and specifically online video—has cranked it up to a spectacular degree.

- "TED Curator Chris Anderson on Crowd Accelerated Innovation" by Chris Anderson, December 27, 2010.
 Originally posted to Wired.com.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

- William Lawrence Bragg

Geek Quote of the Day

Information is surprise.

The three are fundamentally equivalent: information, randomness, and complexity—three powerful abstractions, bound all along like secret lovers.

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth's organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its centers of perception, its memory—the very body of that great something to come which was to fulfill the aspirations that had been aroused in the reflective being by the freshly acquired consciousness of its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution? A "sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the whole human race."

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, March 1, 2011.

Both science itself, and the human culture of which it is a part, would benefit from a story of science that encourages wider engagement with and participation in the processes of scientific exploration. Such a story, based on a close analysis of scientific method, is presented here. It is the story of science as story telling and story revising. The story of science as story suggests that science can and should serve three distinctive functions for humanity: providing stories that may increase (but never guarantee) human well-being, serving as a supportive nexus for human exploration and story telling in general, and exemplifying a commitment to skepticism and a resulting open-ended and continuing exploration of what might yet be. Some practical considerations that would further the development and acceptance of such a story of science as a widely shared nexus of human activity are described.

- "Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising" by Paul Grobstein, 2005.
 Originally published in the Journal of Research Practice.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine…a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

- Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick, August 17, 1999.

If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

- Richard Dawkins

We must be open to new information at all times even if it threatens our current belief system and hence – identities. Sadly, society today has failed to recognise this and the established institutions continue to paralyse growth by preserving outdated social structures. Simultaneously the population suffers from a fear of change for their conditioning assumes a static identity and challenging ones belief system usually results in insult and apprehension. For being wrong is horrendously associated with failure, when in fact being proven wrong should be celebrated for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding, furthering awareness.

The fact is there is no such thing as a smart human being, for it is merely a matter of time before their ideas are updated, changed or eradicated. And this tendency to blindly hold on to a belief system, sheltering it from new, possibly transforming information, is nothing less than a form of intellectual materialism.

- Zeitgeist: Addendum by Peter Joseph, 2008.

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn't be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. "Why is she doing that?" they whisper. "Why doesn't she just Google it?" …

Hermione, stuck in the nineties, never did get her iPad, and will have to manage in the stacks. But perhaps the instrument of the new connected age was already in place in fantasy. For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"—the "seeing stone" that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn't that users lose their knowledge of the world. It's that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren't.

- "The Information: How the Internet gets inside us" by Adam Gopnik, February 14, 2011.
 Originally published by The New Yorker.

Our Baudrillardian hyper-reality is one in which world-altering inventions must be instantly integrated into our lives or we begin to fall behind, to fall out of reality. If you met someone who didn't use a cellphone or computer and had no idea what the internet was, would you say that person shared your reality? Really? In addition to the risk of being outrun by reality, the strangeness, the alienation of our daily experience of the future comes from the fact that our future is partial. Yes, we have smartphones and internet-everything, but we don't have genetic engineering or neural-implants or human clones or surgical nano-bots or teleportation. Different areas of science enter the future at different rates. We don't notice the current wave of innovation we're riding, only the fields lagging behind. The future is here, but it's incomplete.

- "The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us" by Kyle Munkittrick, December 31st, 2010.
Originally posted to Discover's Science Not Fiction blog.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.

We are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong to the living. Think of all the recent book titles—The End of Science, The End of History, The End of Eternity, The End of Certainty, The End of Nature, and The End of Time. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space do not exist, will it feel like madness.

- "A New Theory of the Universe" by Robert Lanza

Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world—writing, painting, music, money. …Information is crucial to our biological substance—our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires. When we look back through history, we can see that a lot of different stories all turn out to be stories about information. …Information is the thing that we care most about. The more we understand the role that information plays in our world, the more skillful citizens we will be.

- James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood in an interview with Kevin Kelly.
"Why the Basis of the Universe Isn't Matter or Energy—It's Data" by Kevin Kelly, February 28, 2011.
 Originally published in Wired magazine.

[Iain] is getting to the point in his life where he finds himself waxing nostalgic about various different technologies from his youth. One item he has always been fond of is first generation 7 segment consumer LED displays, like those found in old calculators.

He was excited to find one of these displays at the bottom of a box full of electronics odds and ends he received from a friend. After identifying the display and tracking down a data sheet online, he decided that he wanted to build some sort of little gadget out of it.

His first inclination was to build a tiny text scrolling gadget from the display, and thus his "Personal Electronic Retro Telegram" (P.E.R.T) was born. With Arduino in hand, he prototyped the circuit on a breadboard, then sent away to have some PCBs built. Once he received the boards, alll of his prototyping components were swapped out with SMD versions, including a TQFP ATMega168 chip in place of the full-sized Arduino board.

The final result is a nice melding old and new technology which he decided to give to his girlfriend as a gift. Continue reading to see a quick video of the P.E.R.T in action.

The job of science is to deliver reality back to us, not the other way around, and instead of trying to convince people to believe what they say, I would challenge scientists to engage citizens in the process of critical curiosity through thinking scientifically. Scientific facts are being disproven and proven again all the time. The most important thing is not to get the answers right but to be willing to ask the questions, even if the results are not quite what you expected.

- "The importance of thinking scientifically" by Anne Toomey, April 1st, 2011.
 Originally posted to the Science for Citizens Blog.

Behold the Vibrotron! Constructed by the Carnegie Melon University robotics club, the vibrotron is a piece of a larger project called the robOrchestra. The mechanics in action here are quite simple. You have two reservoirs of small steel balls. One at the bottom, one at the top. The bottom ones are fed to the top ones using an Archimedes' screw. Once at the top, they are dispensed through some tubing down to plink off of a vibraphone key. All of the timing is done via solenoids mounted at the end of the tubes. The final product reminds us of the Animusic animations that were put out a few years ago.

For this system, since they wanted this to be an automated and reconfigurable bot, they are using an Arduino to control the solenoids. This way they can change songs as they please. We have to admit though, we'd love to see one where the timing for the song was all done through tube length or some other passive system allowing it to be hand cranked and purely mechanical.

[via Make]

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

For some kinds of books, the writing is on the wall. Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the Oxford English Dictionary, has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever. And those hefty objects called "telephone books"? As antiquated as typewriters. The book has had a long life as the world's pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, but that may be ending, where the physical object is concerned.

- "How to Publish Without Perishing" by James Gleick, November 29, 2008.
 Originally published in The New York Times.

History is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, March 1, 2011.

[Jerry] recently got a shiny new DSLR camera and was looking to do something with the old Pentax DSLR it replaced. Having performed a few point and shoot IR conversions in the past, he was pretty confident he could tackle this conversion without too much trouble.

He located the service manual for the camera and got busy taking it apart. He had to desolder the main board to get to the CCD block, where the sensor, IR cut filter, and the shake reduction motors are all located. The IR cut filter was pried off without too much trouble as it is only secured with a clip and an adhesive foam gasket.

Once things were disassembled, the real work began. He had a little trouble cutting the IR filter he purchased, so it took a little bit of elbow grease to get things exactly the way he wanted. Once he got the filter in place, he carefully re-mounted the sensor block to ensure that it was set at the proper height.

Once things were fully reassembled, he tried taking a few test shots, but found that there were some focus issues due to the IR filter being thicker than the original IR cut filter. A few manual tweaks in the camera's debug menu and he was in business.

Be sure to check out his photo stream to take a look at some of the pictures he snapped with his new IR camera.

I've had this pocket geiger counter for a while, and I have not used it much. I took it out recently to check its battery just in case. The unit is made to check for radioactivity in industrial or geological uses, like testing scrap metal from unknown sources, old Uranium glazes on pottery, or possibly contaminated waste sites. The device clicks satisfyingly clearly when it detects three types of radiation. It's bigger than a pocket, but much smaller than the old fashioned vacuum tube variety. It runs off an 9-volt battery.

This device is not sensitive enough to detect natural background radiation, or radiation drift in the atmosphere, or mild exposure on clothing, say. The device has to be very close to the radioactive source. It would have had trouble detecting the radiation during the accident at Chernobyl 500 meters outside of the plant itself. To measure the radiation in uranium ore, for instance, the device has to be just about touching the rock. Stuff has to be significantly "hot" to register, but this is the stuff worth worrying about.

As you might expect, you can't buy one anywhere at the moment (immediately after the Fukushima incidents). But they will be back.

UPDATE: This device is a little bit more sensitive than your classic hand-held geiger counter, and cheaper, and also smaller. It's a good bargain. But geiger counters in general as not extremely sensitive. They can be made more sensitive by wiring them up to count "hits" over hours, days, and weeks instead of per second. See, for example, the Sparkfun geiger kit.

UNDX-1 Pocket Geiger Counter
$275

Available (eventually) from:
http://unitednuclear.com/
Or
http://www.professionalequipment.com/

Sample Excerpts:

Specs:

Operating Range:
0 to 10 mR/hr range on analog meter.
Beeping at 20 mR/hr Continuous Tone at 200 mR/hr.

Sensitivity:
Detects Beta at 35 keV with 90% efficiency
or at 1,000 keV with 100% efficiency
Detects Gamma down to 6 keV at 25% efficiency
or to 35 keV at 90% efficiency
 or to 100 keV at 100% efficiency

A close up of severe digital noise

Digital noise usually represents itself as speckled pixels of colour in your images or as a grainy effect, and is generally considered undesirable. Read on to find out how to reduce the chances that your valuable images will be affected by digital noise.

Steps

1. 

   A digital camera sensor
   Understand what a digital camera sensor is, and how it works. Unlike analog cameras, digital cameras work with a sensor instead of film. Sensors receive light and process it into electric charges via tiny photodiodes, whose outputs are reflected as pixels in your final digital image.^[2] These electrical charges tell the sensor what colour each corresponding pixel is meant to be and other information which will create the digital image.
2. 

   This image has lots of noise throughout, clearly visible as speckled pixels in the darker areas of the picture
   Understand what digital "noise" is and what causes it. When light hits the sensor's photodiodes, a signal of electrons are produced in order to convey the light to the camera sensor. Electronic "noise" is the unwanted fluctuations in this signal.^[3] In a digital camera, noise manifests itself as speckles, usually colored and patternless. These are generally caused by unwanted electron flow in and around the sensor adding to the desired electron flow. Noise can be caused by imperfections in the sensor itself such as "hot pixels"^[4], randomness in the distribution of the limited numbers of photons available at low light levels,^[5] and the sensor or camera overheating^[6].
3. 
   Purchase higher-end, newer camera equipment. The most convenient, but expensive, way to combat noise is to buy a newer camera if yours is a few years old, with more expensive cameras being able to deliver better performance. Newer cameras have sensors that are developed to collect more light with less noise than those in older cameras, making them a good choice if you are struggling to control noise in your images and your gear is outdated.
   • Choose a camera with a larger sensor. The problem with smaller sensors is that the light sensors are closer together than in a larger sensor, and that means the electrons overheating corrupt them faster due to their closer proximity. A larger sensor means that electrons will have to travel farther before corrupting their neighbouring light sensors. Full frame sensors are perfect for reducing noise in your images. A DSLR or large-sensor compact camera such as one in "Four Thirds" format is much better than a compact camera, even one a few years newer, although a full-frame DSLR is better still, as fast wide-angle and prime lenses for it are more widely available and cheaper.
   • Pick a camera with fewer megapixels, or a lower resolution, in a given class. The more pixels there are on a camera's sensor, the closer they are together and the more likely overheating electrons will corrupt the light sensors. Although higher-end cameras generally have larger sensors with a high resolution or megapixel count, there are those which have larger sensors but still retain lower megapixel counts, making them perfect for dealing with digital noise.
   • Pick a wide-aperture lens to maximize light intake. Some compact cameras have f/2.0 or f/2.8 lenses; a 50mm f/1.8 lens is inexpensive and excellent for a DSLR.^[7] These will allow the same shutter speed at one-half to one-quarter the ISO setting of a common f/3.5 or f/4.5 maximum aperture zoom lens (At the same f/ratio, the bigger camera is still better: it's collecting equally intense light into bigger photosites, for far more photons to process. The absolute size of the aperture for a given angle of view matters more). Lenses are a much more mature technology than cameras, so an interchangeable wide-aperture lens will improve your photography through many camera upgrades. Image stabilization allows faster shutter speeds but tends not to be built into wide aperture lenses, making those better overall as they stop subject motion too; a fast lens and compatible in-body image stabilization is a great combination.
4. 

   Manual mode is usually represented by an M
   Switch your camera's exposure to manual mode and adjust the settings which may introduce noise. When the camera is on automatic, or in program mode, as is the case with most lower-end cameras of the "point-and-click variety", your images are more likely to have noise as the camera changes the exposure by itself, and quite often it will introduce factors that introduce noise to your images. Taking control of your camera and exposure settings will help you eliminate factors which could contribute to digital noise in your photographs. Your camera's instruction manual will contain all instructions on how to adjust the various settings on your camera.
   • It's OK to use a semi-automated exposure mode, but be sure to manually set a low ISO if possible. For instance, you could use aperture-priority mode with a wide aperture, which will allow a relatively short shutter speed with any given ISO. You could use your camera's exposure-compensation or bracketing function to try different exposures near the one the camera thinks is right.
   • 

     ISO dial coupled with shutter speed control
     Reduce your ISO. ISO is the setting which controls how light sensitive your camera's sensor is. A lower ISO (for example ISO 200) means your sensor is less sensitive to light, but is also less likely to create digital noise, while a higher ISO (for example ISO 400, or ISO 800) makes your camera sensor more sensitive to available light, but also increases the chance your images will have noise. Check your camera's manual on how to adjust the ISO setting.
     • If you need a higher ISO for a correct exposure with a fast-enough shutter speed to avoid blur from a lack of camera support or moving subject, use it. Adding a few speckles of high-ISO noise is better than smearing the picture with blur or wiping out its shadow detail with underexposure.
   • Use a faster shutter speed, or rather, avoid long exposures. Long shutter speeds (for example, exposures of 5 seconds, or 30 seconds or longer) create more noise as they make the camera's sensor overheat faster. Faster shutter speeds give less chance for the sensor to overheat. So consider adding more light to your image to reduce the exposure time, and reduce the chance of noise: turn on some lamps, or use a flash. If you can't add more light, or it would spoil the picture (like one of lights outdoors at night), a slightly slower shutter speed and a lower ISO will provide the best results, as described below.
   • Increase your signal-to-noise ratio with a low ISO and generous exposure.^[8] If you let a lot of light into your camera, preferably quickly, it will overpower the noise and give you an acceptable image. Use a low ISO setting, which amplifies the sensor's signals relatively little, and exposure to go with it (Some kinds of noise can accumulate over time, and even accrue more rapidly as the sensor warms through use, but a longer exposure is still generally better than a higher ISO). The lowest setting is usually best, but you'll usually have to look for noise to notice it up to ISO 400 with a compact camera or old DSLR, and up to ISO 1600 with a modern (2011) DSLR.
5. 

   The image on the left is taken with noise reduction on, while the right image is taken without the hardware active
   Turn the camera's noise reduction setting on, if it has one. This feature is usually found in higher-end cameras. In-camera noise reduction is usually helpful in combating noise in your images, especially those of a longer exposure or in low light conditions. However be aware, it does smooth the fine detail in your images, making them softer to the eye, which can be problematic, so only use this setting if you feel that noise will a serious problem while shooting. PC software can often smooth noise in post production, while preserving detail better than that supplied in the camera's internal computer, and you can revert to your original image if you decide you didn't want so much smoothing, or even any at all.
   • You can use "dark frame subtraction" – making a preliminary or subsequent "exposure" of the same length as the actual exposure but with the lens capped to detect noise to delete from the final image to compensate for "hot pixel" and other camera imperfection noise.^[9] Some cameras can do it automatically, not bothering to open the shutter for the dark exposure, but you can perform it yourself, even with a compact camera.^[10] This technique does not smooth your image, so is a suitable option for those who are worried about other noise reduction methods.
6. Make your image as bright as possible. It may seem obvious, but the less shadow there is in your image, the less chance noise will have together there. Noise generally appears in darker areas of your images (where there's less light to overpower it), so whether you introduce a new light source, such as a lamp or flash, move to a better-lit area, change your exposure settings to allow more light or photograph lighter subjects, reducing the amount of shadow in your image will reduce the amount of noise.
   • Night pictures can be tricky because the highlights are actually the light sources. Like the sun during the day, they're much brighter than the surrounding areas which receive and reflect back to the camera only a little of their light. A camera's light meter averaging their brightness with their surroundings as if they were ordinary highlights will underexpose them for one big, noisy over-dark shadow. Try increasing the exposure significantly over what it suggests.
   • Very bright lights can cause streaking or "bloom" with the CCD sensors usually found in cheaper cameras. Try to avoid having them close-by in the image.
7. Avoid using digital zoom, such as those frequently found on lower-end cameras or "point-and-click" varieties. Digital zoom is technically not zooming at all; it is in fact cropping and enlarging from a small area of the sensor. It should especially be avoided when that small area is clouded by noise.
8. 

   Don't let your camera overheat!
   Keep your camera stored in a cool place before you use it. The cause of most noise is a thermal reaction. The warmer your camera is, the more likely the sensor will overheat in a shorter period of time. Making sure your camera is cool, especially when in hot conditions, can greatly improve your camera's performance and reduce the likelihood of digital noise. Excessive heat such as that in uninsulated areas of a car in the sun, will be harmful for cameras regardless.
9. 

   Noise reduction has been implemented on the right, reducing it drastically from the left image. Note however, the softer appearance of the second image
   Take further steps to combat noise in post production, such as the aforementioned "dark frame subtraction" or noise reduction software. Sometimes, no matter what actions you take to reduce noise, it may still occur in your photos. In these cases you should take the time to learn and implement noise reduction in post processing.

Video

Tips

• Over time your camera's sensor quality will degrade naturally. A general estimate for high-end cameras is that it will take 100,000 photographs before it begins to show signs of wear. When this happens, noise may appear more frequently, so consider upgrading your camera body, or at the very least its sensor, every few years.
• Camera store assistants and owners can help you pick cameras that perform well in reducing digital noise levels, so talk to them if you are looking to upgrade your gear.
• Noise can be light or dark in appearance (luminosity noise) or can be coloured, either red, green or blue like the pixel colours themselves.
• Understanding and controlling noise can help you greatly in your photographic hobby. Photographic topics that tend to suffer from noise include: astrophotography, band photography, nightscapes, landscapes, fast-action scenes, low-light situations, timelapse photography, and many more. For astrophotography, you'll generally want some kind of tracking mount.^[11]

Warnings

• Never look at or attempt to touch your camera's sensor unless you are trained in doing so, as you may destroy it if you are not careful.
• Remember, sometimes some measures you can take to reduce noise can reduce detail in your images, so deciding when it's pertinent to use it is important. Sometimes, accepting the noise is better than not, especially if you know how to remove it in post-processing.

Related wikiHows

• How to Know Which ISO to Use in Photography
• How to Understand Camera Exposure
• How to Take Sharp Photographs
• How to Understand Your Digital SLR
• How to Use Every Nikon Digital SLR
• How to Make the Most of Your Digital Camera

Sources and Citations

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Sometimes I read the same books over and over and over. What's great about books is that the stuff inside doesn't change. People say you can't judge a book by its cover but that's not true because it says right on the cover what's inside. And no matter how many times you read that book the words and pictures don't change. You can open and close books a million times and they stay the same. They look the same. They say the same words. The charts and pictures are the same colors.

Books are not like people. Books are safe.

- Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, 2011.

[Rajendra Bhatt] writes in to let us know about a nice simple IR bounce tachometer. The project uses a startUSB for PIC board and a 16×2 character LCD with a very basic Infrared bounce circuit.  Measuring either a reflective or non reflective spot in the rotating object, in this case a bit of white paper, the micro is supposedly capable of measuring up to 99,960 RPM (we think the paper might fly off at this point) with a resolution of 60 RPM. This is the same concept as a beam-break style tachometer but keeps all your electronics on one end of the spinning hazard.

The article also goes into detail about setting the PIC18F2550′s Timer0 register to enable 16-bit resolution.  The PIC is configured to turn on the infrared LED for one second, measure the number of pulses (through timer registers), and multiply that value by 60.  We would be more careful with the TMR0H and TMR0L counters as they have to be read and written in a certain order to preserve their values, but you'd need to be measuring upwards of 15,360 rpm to run into that error.

It is a quality writeup for anyone interested in learning about the start USB for PIC board, tachometers, or a new project. Thanks [Raj]!