My Scientology Anthology

Wikipedia has quite a bit of good, well-sourced information about Scientology.  I've put together a collection of articles that can be printed as a book. The collection is now up on Wikipedia, and you can download it as a PDF from the links on that page, or even buy it as a printed book. I don't get any money from this, but 10% of the price goes to Wikipedia. Maybe you'd like to buy a few to donate to local school libraries?

10 years 20 000 edits

Ten years ago today, I made my first edit as "Slashme" to Wikipedia, adding an image that I had modified from an existing template into an article about the Oshima Peninsula.

Today, 10 years and 21 minutes later, I made my 20000th edit to a Wikimedia Foundation wiki. That's almost 5½ edits per day. For nostalgia's sake, I edited the same article, this time adding the fact that the Oshima Peninsula is home to Japan's northernmost castle.

An interesting fact that I've noticed is that my edits to the various Wikimedia wikis seem to follow some smooth distribution - I'll figure out later exactly which distribution. Here is the log-scale plot:

So I've made on the order of:

• 2×10³ edits to the English Wikipedia,
• 1×10³ edits to Wikimedia commons,
• 0.5×10³ edits to Meta (I was on the Wikimedia South Africa board for a while),
• 0.3×10³ edits to the German Wikipedia
• 0.2×10³ edits to the English Wiktionary

and less than 100 edits to various other projects.

Based on this count, I'm now a Tutnum of the Encyclopedia.

I have collaborated on a featured picture, successfully submitted one Did You Know (for Promin) and created a parliament diagram tool that is in wide use.

I have also created an animatable, printable version of the Wikipedia globe logo, but because it's copyrighted, you can't use it without the permission of the Wikimedia foundation.

Here is an animation of the globe being built up from component pieces, in my humble opinion, a good metaphor for how the encyclopedia is being built:

Very many editors have made much greater contributions than I have, but as another Wikipedian pointed out to me recently, it's not a race. Any contribution is a good thing, and I'm happy and proud to have done what I have.

Focus stacking with Magic Lantern and Hugin

I have tried focus stacking before, but I've never really focused on the topic, because I don't have a macro lens.  I tried out Jon's extension tubes while on holiday in South Africa last month, and of course that got me back onto focus-stacking.

I found a co-operative subject: a South African 10c piece, and took 18 pictures at different focus points, using Magic Lantern to change the focus automatically. Here are some examples from that series of images:

Because I had taken the pictures in raw mode, I used darktable to export them to TIFF files (not JPEG, because I wanted all the data to be present in the processing steps). I then used the following commands from the hugin/PanoTools suite to create the focus stack:

First I aligned the images, creating a second set of tiff files:

align_image_stack -m -a zframe_ *.tif

This was to make sure the images were aligned. Besides camera movement, which can be eliminated with a solid tripod, there might be side-effects of focusing, depending on the lens geometry.

Next, I created the stacked image:

enfuse -o coin.tiff --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask zframe*

This tells enfuse to blend the images without trying to select pixels based on their exposure (--exposure-weight=0) or saturation (--saturation-weight=0); but by looking at the contrast of the area around the pixel (--contrast-weight=1), without smoothing out the area around the pixel (--hard-mask).

I then took the resulting .tif file to The Gimp to tweak the final exposure and contrast a bit, and to create a JPEG file. This was the result:

I think that worked pretty well, so I might just be buying a set of extension tubes soon.

Extra: as pointed out in the comments, one can automate this a bit more if you're not going beyond default settings. For example, with minimal effort you could create a very simple-minded script that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
#Batch-export tiffs from raw images:
for i in *; do darktable-cli $i $i.tif; done
#Align the image stack:
align_image_stack -m -a zframe_ *.tif
#Blend the image stack:
enfuse -o output.tiff --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask zframe*
#Make a JPEG from the stack (note: this is for a medium sized file - tweak the size and quality to taste)
convert output.tiff -quality 75 -resize 4000x4000 output.jpg

Make it executable and put it somewhere that's in your path, and call it something like "focusstacker". Then you can just go to where you've put the raw files and type "focusstacker" and let it run. In my case, it gave the following result:

#NoFilter (except for all the default ones in the camera and the software I used…)

I'd normally want to edit this in The Gimp before publishing anyway, because I like a bit more contrast, and in this case I also applied an unsharp mask, but because I didn't do anything in Darktable this time, I'd have gotten exactly the same result as I posted above if I'd skipped the last step in the script and taken the output tiff into The Gimp.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Yesterday, Muslim extremists shot and killed a maintenance worker, two police officers, a proofreader, three journalists and five cartoonists.  You can read about this murder on Wikipedia.  They were killed because they worked for the paper Charlie Hebdo, who published the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammed.

Anyone who believes that a cartoon can be worse than murder, and who then plans and executes the murder of people who draw and publish certain cartoons does not deserve a place in society. A religious community which tolerates this kind of extremism is a danger to all of us. Muslim organisations worldwide have denounced these murders, and any who have not done so are enemies of peace.

The "Banksy" instagram account (not the real Banksy) summed it up so well:

As Salman Rushdie said: "I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity, [-] religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today."

To remind anyone who thinks that violence will silence anyone, here are those cartoons: