Most of you know that I spent several years in college helping out The Digital Michelangelo Project, a research project headed up by my undergrad advisor, Marc Levoy. For those of you who’ve never heard of DMich, it is a project to create 3D computer models of several of Michelangelo’s sculptures, the most famous of which is the David. The data was gathered by using a laser to capture 3D scans of the statues, which are all currently housed in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.
I wasn’t involve in the initial scanning, but I did join the project my sophomore year after essentially pestering Marc until he would let me help. I was responsible for aligning the 3D scan pieces (the statues were made up of several different scanned pieces) to create a single mesh for the entire statue. I helped out on the project on and off until I finished my graduate degree.
One of the applications of this project is that we now have the ability to create physical replicas of these statues with unrivaled accuracy. I helped create the David mesh which was used to make the first replicas. It was during my last quarter at school, and since I was only taking one class, I did the work for free. As payment, Marc said I could have one of the replicas.
This was about a year ago, and I had nearly forgotten about this promise, but 2 days ago, I received an e-mail from Marc saying that my “Davidino” (little David) was ready. I picked it up from him yesterday, and it is incredible. It is an amazing feeling to know that I was holding in my hands the most accurate replica of the David in the world. Anyway, long story short, here are two pictures: [Michelangelo's David] [David Head]. Don’t worry; the full-body photo has been sanitized for your protection.
Edit: By popular demand, the David image has been restored to its full glory.
Comment Spam, Redux
Tuesday, April 27th, 2004I recently had a little discussion with Nick about comment spam. This was after I hadimplemented the little hack which required you to re-type a six-digit number in order to post comments. Nick said that he thought it was a reasonable solution, but had the good point that he didn’t like the idea of making his readers do anything differently. He had the idea to embed a hidden generatable number which would verify that comments posted to his site were actually posted through the form on his site.
I, being unoriginal, decided to steal his idea. However, as I am not only unoriginal but lazy, I figured that it’s enough to just embed a fixed hidden value in the form, rather than a generated number. This is similar to Eric’s idea to combat comment spam by asking users to type in his last name in the comment form.
So… there ya go. We’ll see how it works.
Edit: I just realized that ever since I implemented the above-mentioned number hack, people have been unable to post comments on my photos page. Oops. This has now been fixed.
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