Speaker For The Diodes - August 18th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"Hey, I like Dead Poets Society as much as the next person. But if you're a teacher and you expect it to be like that, you are in serious need of a reality check. I'm happy when my students' light bulbs go on for a few minutes a day." -- jerel, 2009-03-08

01:02 pm - Checking in, w/ a pano question and a geology question

Catching up, minus stuff I haven't gotten around to uploading to post backdated yet:

And here I am. "Skye Boat Song" stuck in my head again; female vocalist accompanied by harp most of the time, but other arrangements displace that one every so often.

Random observations and two questions:

What cheap/free/OSS app do y'all recommend for (aligning and) stitching together photos to make a panorama, under Mac OS X? Or Linux, since I'll do most such processing at home within LAN reach of a Linux machine (though I think the Mac is currently the fastest computer in the house). At the moment, I'm looking at Hugin.

Finally, when driving through mountains, and going through a section where they blasted a cut through a hill to make the highway, if I see strata in the exposed rock that look like this (image at right), I think, correctly or incorrectly, "anticline" ...

... and when I see strata like this (image at left), I think "eroded by a glacier" (again, correctly or incorrectly).

But when I see this:

... wtf is that? Ancient earthquake, or something else? (FWIW, this would be on I-79 in western Pennsylvania or West Virginia. No photo, alas.) And while I'm at it, am I on the right track with the other two? 8th-grade Earth Science was, uh, quite a while ago.