Archive for June, 2009

It’s bad enough that we use so much oil…

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Now Nature has created a strain of bacteria that eats it.

Chinese Scientists Discover Bacteria Eating Up Their Oil

Scientists have had critters like this in the lab for some time now. In fact, years back I remember talk about using these oil-eating bugs to clean up oil spills at sea. It seems Nature has gotten the same idea.

It’s interesting to ponder why a complex ecosystem like the Earth would spawn a bacteria that eats oil. It’s even more interesting to theorize why these bacteria are only now being discovered, when oil, at least easy to reach oil, is going down in quantity.

Free Tilt-Shift software

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Tilt-shift photography has become quite popular lately. Unfortunately, an actual tilt-shift lens can cost thousands of dollars. The Lensbaby
is another option for this type of photography, but it isn’t a true tilt-shift. However, there are a number of software options for tilt-shift imaging. You can, of course, make judicious use of masks and blurring in Photoshop, but often you just want to do something quick-and-dirty to spice up a blog post.
There’s a new Adobe AIR app that creates tilt-shift images for you and it’s free. Check out Tilt Shift Generator from Art & Mobile.