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  2. stuffin says

    That is amazing, she seems to be expanding and covering every centimeter of her territory. Be very difficult for any prey to not get caught.

  5. says

    Oh, also: I’ve ordered a really cheap (<$40) stereoscopic camera I can plug into my raspberry pi. It’ll probably be a while before I can make a 3D time-lapse, but maybe this summer…

  6. Silentbob says

    It looks more three dimensional

    But have you found any more human skulls laying about?

  7. Bekenstein Bound says

    AFAIK it’s not hard to make time-lapses without special equipment, just a store-bought digital point and shoot and a bog-standard workstation.

    Method 1: if the point-and-shoot supports taking photos at timed intervals, use that and set the camera facing the subject where it will be steady. You’ll get a memory card full of still images after a while. Download those to the workstation and use an app (Virtualdub is free, works on Windoze boxen at least) to convert them into video. Any decent video authoring app has an option to import a folder full of sequentially numbered jpegs as the individual frames of the video.

    Method 2: Get a big-ass memory card (32GB would be good, but expensive) in that camera and leave it shooting video. When it’s full download it to the workstation and import it into Virtualdub (or whatever), then decimate the frames. Keep every tenth, or hundredth, whatever.

    I’ve personally used method 2 to get a timelapse of clouds changing: camera was on a tripod facing out a window on a day of changeable weather, shooting in low def; a few hours fit on the 4 gig card I had in it. I decimated the frames to get a minute or so of video showing how the clouds had morphed over those few hours. It’s memory-inefficient as it saves a huge amount of data most of which will not be kept, but it works if you don’t have a “take a shot every x minutes” type of capability on your camera.

  8. Silentbob says

    As an aside; I’ve been surprised to see PZ use the term “cobweb”, because when I were a wee lad, “cobweb” meant an abandoned droopy web like you’d find in the corner of the ceiling and remove with a broom or some such. I’ve never heard the term applied to a functioning web with an actual spider in it.

    So I checked with the font of wisdom that is Wikipedia and it says:

    The term “spider web” is typically used to refer to a web that is apparently still in use (i.e., clean), whereas “cobweb” refers to a seemingly abandoned (i.e., dusty) web. However, the word “cobweb” is also used by biologists to describe the tangled three-dimensional web of some spiders of the family Theridiidae. While this large family is known as the cobweb spiders, they actually have a huge range of web architectures; other names for this spider family include tangle-web spiders and comb-footed spiders.

    Happy to see I wasn’t entirely in error. X-D

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