Aussies find rocks

Well, hey! A million cubic kilometers of rock is not something one trips over & forgets, and besides, this appears to be spread over (under, anyway) the chunk of Oz which includes Uluru (“Ayer’s Rock”) and also Kata Tjuta (“The Olgas”), which are both geologically interesting features all by themselves.

Kalkarindji is said to represent a Cambrian “igneous province” (which in English is roughly “a large area of similar rock”)

basaltic volcanism coincided with the Early-Middle Cambrian boundary and suggest[s] a temporal link between eruption of the Kalkarindji basalts and the end-Early Cambrian (early Toyonian) faunal mass extinction event.

This, in turn, makes Kalkarindji interesting to people wondering how the seriously drastic changes between early and late Cambrian faunas occurred, since that’s about where it rests, and most shapes of lifeform appeared more or less as a swag in the rocks about there.

Just the related extinctions provoke much paleontological discussion — any big hints which sprang forth about exactly how so many different forms arose in a relatively hurry would be world-wide news. And of course, by now Australia looks almost natural when rock news appears from us. (-:

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

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