Test your Color IQ

Being a photographer, I was intrigued when I saw the mention of a Color IQ test over at The-Digital-Picture. The test is by X-Rite, a company offering color measurement & management SW & HW tools. As per the web site, the color IQ test can be used to determine how accurately your eyes see color.

My Color IQ score

I scored 8 on this interesting test (with 0 being the perfect score & 99 a high score in my age group), so I haven't done so badly. Looks like the test targets only a limited range of the color spectrum, I am not sure what implications this has (if any).

Bookmark: Great Circle Mapper

BLR-FRA-SFO Path with ETOPS 120 min rule time

Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.

Ever wondered why airplanes take weird paths from one city to another? There are multiple reasons, the primary one being that Earth is not flat and is more of an "oblate spheroid" or "ellipsoid" in shape. So the shortest distance between two points on Earth is not a straight line like in planar geometry and is a "Great Circle" (if considered a spherical) or a geodesic path. The other reasons include regulations stating that twin engined aircraft have to be able to fly to an alternative airport on failure of one of the engines within a specified period of time, taking advantage of tail wind etc.

See the ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) page in Wikipedia for more information on regulations governing flight paths for twin engine commercial aircraft.

Bookmark - Tag Galaxy

A 2008 diploma thesis by project by Steven Wood, Tag Galaxy helps you search and view photographs from Flickr by visually representing them as a star with tag planets around it. You start off with an initial tag entered into a text box and then successively narrow down your search by selecting more tags associated with the photograph. Once you're done with tag selection, all photos matching the tags are layered on a 3D sun that can be rotated using your mouse.

For example, an initial tag of "India" resulted in close to 2 million photographs, with 8 other tags shown to narrow it down including Rajasthan, Women, Children & Kerala.

I head about Tag Galaxy from Digital Pro Talk.

Bookmark - A Small World

An interesting collection of macro photographs is displayed at A Small World (Flickr) including some really funny ones. See here for the 50 most popular shots from the same photographer.