Science Comedian

SciFoo 2008: Panoramic Images

September 17th, 2008

I took a decent num­ber of pic­tures at Sci­Foo.  Luck­ily, I had the fore­sight to take a few series of shots – and, even luck­ier, I have a girl­friend who is a Pho­to­shop Wizard.

It’s not always pos­si­ble to merge images per­fectly since the cam­era is chang­ing posi­tion for each shot, but the results are pretty cool.  In fact, the arti­facts of the merg­ing process are fas­ci­nat­ing, too.  Look for the seams.

The first image is from the open­ing ses­sion.  Tim O’Reilly, Timo Han­nay, Sara Winge, and Chris DiBona can be seen up front, address­ing the crowd.  Also promi­nent, to my eye, are Gar­rett Lisi’s bald head on the far right and Simon Quellen Field’s well-appointed head in semi-profile left of center.

Click through for big­ger versions…

The next image is Google’s large indoor open space referred to as Charlie’s, if I’m not mis­taken.  Paul Davies and Chris Patil are promi­nent and the cafe­te­ria area is in the background…

The final image is from the Sci­Foo clos­ing ses­sion.  Once again, Sara, Tim, Chris, and Timo are up front.  Aniruddh Patel is near-center because he was sit­ting next to me before I stood to take these pics.

Jim Hardy – as promised, the wait­ing is over, here is your prize – you have the dis­tinc­tion of appear­ing not once, but twice in this image.  Yes, by virtue of your rest­less­ness, you have been cloned.  In fact, there were orig­i­nally three of you but one was removed.  To speak to you in your own lan­guage:  like pluripo­tent stem cells, you dif­fer­en­ti­ated into three dif­fer­ent germ Pho­to­shop lay­ers.  But only two were harvested…

Thank you, Tara.