I haven’t written formally for awhile, but I thought of an interesting seed this weekend that reflects on the many times I’ve walked through Cambridge in the morning and late at night after lab. The result is this short philosophical compilation framed, unsurprisingly, from the perspective of a Cantabrigian walking home after parting ways with friends.
Archive for October, 2010
You know the saying – “He’s worth his weight in salt.” But salt’s not all that valuable these days, except to pizzerias and Chinese take-outs. So what would you like to be worth your weight in? Personally, I’d like to be worth my weight in chicken-derived monoclonal antibodies.
There’s a reason why we have different units of measure around, but I thought it’d be fun to even out the playing field, so to speak. So, how much does stuff cost per pound, anyway? And don’t complain about lbs. vs. kg – the orders of magnitude here makes the 2.2 conversion factor a piddling quantity.
| Item | Unit price per pound |
| Water, Tap | $0.00018 |
| Acetaminophen, Tylenol Extra Strength, from Costco | $0.04 |
| Rice, commodity | $0.12 |
| Salt, Morton table salt, 25 lb. bag | $0.31 |
| Gasoline, average New England (@ 6.2 lbs./gal) | $0.44 |
| Juice, Orange (@ 8.3 lbs./gal) | $0.95 |
| Water, Aquafina 20 oz., vending machine | $1.20 |
| Silicon, metallurgical grade | $1.45 |
| Rice, Kokuho Rose 5 lb. bag | $2.00 |
| Copper | $3.68 |
| Ford F-150 | $5.50 |
| Book, American Heritage Dictionary | $6.05 |
| Jeans, Levi’s 501 | $19.44 |
| Maple Syrup, Butternut Mountain Farm | $26.76 |
| Playstation 3 | $27.18 |
| Kitten, adoption | $50.00 |
| Cigarettes, Marlboro, MA minimum price | $143.77 |
| Fetal Bovine Serum, Hyclone, 500 mL bottle | $191.78 |
| PVC figurine, Senjougahara Hitagi 1/8 scale | $378.87 |
| Printer ink, Canon CLI-8 black | $488.57 |
| iPhone 4, 32 GB | $990.85 |
| Violin, decent quality | $10,000.00 |
| Gold | $19,697.42 |
| Immunoglobulin, from human plasma | $27,240.00 |
| Cocaine, street retail | $29,510.00 |
| Cocaine, research grade free base | $230,178.00 |
| Diamond, natural, 1 carat, decent quality | $22,700,000.00 |
| Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells, 500k ampoule | $43,991,408.11 |
| Lucentis (ranibizumab, anti-VEGF), wholesale | $590,200,000.00 |
| Anti-VEGF antibody from chicken, research grade | $2,151,960,000.00 |
| Antimatter | $28,375,000,000,000.00 |
I recently downloaded 3D studio max as part of the Autodesk Student community. I decided that the human figure made most sense for a first major project, since it covers most basic organic contours that I would need to be able to create, while allowing me to focus on the models rather than the texture mapping, rendering, and lighting aspects (at the basic level). Three days in, this is what I have so far:
I am just using a simple four-point lighting scheme for now. I ultimately plan to finish up the body and then work on posing and expression. The dress design is a modified version of a handkerchief dress that I drew in vector format as part of the “Only One Camillia” dress-up doll Flash that I’ve never released to the public, which in turn was based on a brown paisley handkerchief dress on Kaboodle that I saw a few years back. The pattern here is the calming “sea-scope” from DinPattern. Pale blue and brown is one of my latest color-pairing obsessions, although I’m still trying to tweak the brown to the right shade.
Here is a wireframe (with opaque faces to reduce clutter; rest assured that she does have a back of the head). You can see a few oddities, especially near the lip (which is why the lips look weird). Ideally, the lip orifice should have been modeled radially just like the eye sockets and breasts. I’ll probably go back and refine the polygons near the lips later on.
