Wacky Collages
After seeing my Wacky Packages Coverpop, astronomer John Dubinski wrote to share with me his amazing
large-scale photo mosaics of Wacky Packages (and also take my ego down
a few notches, by demonstrating his superior geekitude).
These are the most accomplished photo mosaics I have seen to date, involving random image placement of images with unusual shapes and rotations. They are particularly impresssive because the intial set of images that John is working with contains only 512 tiles, and yet he is getting excellent image fidelity – you can even read the writing on these packages!
John has written a parallelized program that produces these on a 4-node 2 GHz Athlon cluster, and they still take about an hour to produce.
So there you have it. A giant can of “AJERX” as rendered by an astronomer working in the field of parallel N-body simulations and galaxy dynamics. Another geek reaching his true potential!
