Day 18

Today was a short day for me since I had to leave early for a trip over the weekend. I was able to work on my Gough Map chips in the morning. More PCA, SAM, and classification. So really, nothing new.

For the lunch cookout, we had kielbasa and Italian sausages, grilled to perfection by Emily. I was there to give her useful grilling tips and advice. (This is sarcasm, I only distracted her.) But in all seriousness, Emily did a great job on the grill, considering she had little previous experience.

The interns attempted another volleyball game. Before long, we succumbed to the heat and the fact that we struggle as volleyball players and decided to play frisbee in the shade instead. We decided that frisbee would be a more forgiving and less physically taxing activity.

Field Trip Day!

Today, we finally got to go on the field trip we had planned a couple weeks ago. I was surprised by how nice our transportation was. The bus had comfortable seating, wifi that worked briefly, and strong air-conditioning.

The Eastman museum tour was about 2 hours long. We saw a room with old cameras and famous pictures (and had a great tour guide), then we saw the conservation room. The conservation tour guide seemed a tiny bit scared that we would touch everything with our grubby fingers and mess up the state-of-the-art restoration facility. He talked about the different processes involved in preservation, which was very interesting. I really wish we got to see him restoring a document, though.

Those galleries were the only two we got to see. Oh well...I was starving anyways. We got to go to Amiel's afterwards via the nice bus. The best part was realizing that they had chocolate milk there.

It was so hard to focus on working after we got back to RIT. I did make progress, though, and reached chip 28/32 by the end of the day. Not bad. If I'm extra efficient, I'll finish all 32 tomorrow.

Day 16: Blur, Divide and Conquer

This day was quite slow. I think back to this morning and it feels like it happened a year ago. I recall a discussion about Friday cookout meat options (Sausage? Shark?) and some frustration due to movie night planning issues.

I continued to process Gough Map images like a robot. I don't mean this in a negative way. Actually, I enjoyed the feeling of mechanical efficiency as I powered through image after image. 

Anna stopped by before lunch and answered some of my questions regarding Blur and Divide. We tested this method different ways to figure out its constraints. A lot of times, we got funky results. It was all part of the learning, though, and helped us get a better sense of how to use this method for optimal results. Thanks to Anna, I am now ready to blur, divide and conquer all of England. 

I was so occupied with figuring out Blur and Divide that I didn't have time to eat pizza before the lunch talk. I can't believe I put ENVI before food! This program must really be growing on me. 

The lunch talk was cool. I want to try the virtual game where you have to catch a ball with a paddle. Wait, no I don't. Because I would be the person who misses the ball 100% of the time.

Day 15

Contrary to popular belief, I was not at a doctor's appointment this morning.

I arrived around 10:00 and saw that there were donuts, but was disappointed to see that somebody had eaten the Boston Cream (whoever you are, you must confess). I officially finished splitting up the Gough Map into different chips and have a total of 32 now, many of which overlap.

For some reason, I find it necessary to list out what I must accomplished in the near future:

• Work on the water sections of the map (which Allyse has mainly been doing but I want to get a taste of it myself)
• Perform PCA, PCA with masking, SAM, ACE, and MF on all areas of interest (towns where original text is still visible)
• Blur and divide these areas along with the results from the methods above 

The goal: separate the different inks. We're guessing that there are 3 types of red inks and we want to see which method(s) work best in separating them. There are only 3 bullets on my checklist, but I think this will keep me very occupied for a while (especially bullet 2). I think ENVI is growing on me though...and I have also mastered an efficient naming system for my hundreds of files created thus far.

I missed out on some Pokemon action during lunch...but got to chill with Maria instead, so not my loss.

Day 14: ENVI Crash Courses Cont.

Maria says that everyone is dead today. Maybe the thunderstorm contributed to that, or maybe it's the fact that it's a Monday.

Anyways, I have been bombarded with a bunch of new ENVI methods so let's see how well I can explain them.

MF: On a spectral graph, it measures how far a perpendicular line on the target pixel's vector must move to encompass another pixel so that it is considered similar to the target pixel. (Meaning that the pixel is on the same side of the line as the target.)

ACE: Like MF but slightly more accurate because it uses a cone in addition to the perpendicular line.

Did any of that make sense? Hopefully.

During lunch, Bob helped me open a cabinet (that didn't have a handle...) so that we could play a board game. We chose Trivial Pursuit. I was disappointed in myself for forgetting that the Hubble Space Telescope was a thing.

Later in the day, Allyse, Di, Dr. Messinger and I took a field trip to Anna's lab. It was a cool little hideout cluttered with old imaging instruments and hard-drives storing, like, a billion GB of ancient document data. Anna showed us how she was working on spacial data (while we are working on spectral.) She taught us an ENVI method that sharpens writing/structures on images. It has the coolest name yet: "Blur and Divide." It makes me think of "Divide and Conquer" even though they really have nothing to do with one another.

Day 13 (counting skills on point)

My previous assertion to finish analyzing the 15 Gough Map chips today was not fulfilled. Regardless, it was not a completely unproductive day, considering that I had spent the majority of the morning as a test subject for an RU's music experiment. John (the RU), Cici, Emily, Allyse, and I had trekked out into the oppressively warm outdoors to seek out a rare, piano-containing room far, far away. Once we reached our destination, we spent a few minutes (or maybe an hour) tuning the violins and picking out the best violin/player combo for the experiment. John recorded us playing different notes on the violin and piano simultaneously. Later, he will attempt to separate the instruments in the recording and determine the notes played by each using some complicated method of his. This experiment also doubled as a start to our internship orchestra. Next stop: Carnegie Hall.

The lunch cookout was quite a messy experience. First, we found ourselves lacking a proper watermelon-cutting knife and had to resort to plastic knives and Cici's Swiss knife. Barely hindered by our lack of resources, I skillfully cut the watermelon with the Swiss knife and have decided to pursue a career in the food industry (McDonald's?) Meanwhile, the watermelon soaked through about 80 thin paper plates. The lunch mess continued with a frenzied scenario in which a giant bug dropped into the ketchup on my plate and only moments later, a gust of wind blew the plate of ketchup right into Cici and me, covering our arms in ketchup. The mess was unbearable, and maybe kind of funny, but we figured it was a good enough excuse to skip volleyball practice for the day.

And now I will talk about actual important things, like the Gough Map. I got to chip 14 out of 15, and I am making an achievable goal for myself to truly finish all 15 chips on Monday. I also look forward to separating the different inks (original/revised) on the entire map, which is our next project, along with the Mexican codex.

At the end of the day, we began to speculate on each of the intern's future. I will be interested to see which of our predictions come true.

Day 12

This interesting day began when Bob launched us into a discussion of "the worst thing that happened during the school year" at each of our respective schools. We all went into depth about senior pranks and other horrors of high school, then departed from the morning meeting to go do serious stuff.

This serious stuff, for me at least, included getting a NEW DOCUMENT TO WORK WITH! It was a Mexican codex that had been showered in chalk-like paint at some point in its approximately 5 century life. What remained visible was...pretty much nothing. Dr. Messinger and Di warned Allyse and me of the difficulty of extracting the underlying structures in this document. Although it was a daunting task to undertake, I was up for it. I mentally prepared as I waited 30 minutes for the image to download on my computer.

This may be a disappointment, but I did not end up working on the Mexican codex today. Allyse's sensible voice guided me into going back to the Gough Map documents and performing more thorough analysis on them before moving on. (No offense, Gough Map, you're really cool but I just wanted to try something new.) I owe Allyse for this insightful advice, though, because I made much more progress on the map in areas I had overlooked previously.

With an unnecessary amount of difficulty, the navigationally challenged interns made it to the Student Union for lunch. Nothing too funny happened there.

For the rest of the day, I sat at my usual computer in the Reading Room with a fierce determination to perform PCA and SAM on all 15 chips I had created of the Southeast section of the Gough Map. Sadly, I only made it to chip 11 (second disappointment of the day), but I believe I produced the most results today out of all the days so far (so that cancels out one of the disappointments!) I plan on finishing this task tomorrow.