As usual for the holidays, I visited my parents in Mendocino and my in-laws in Palo Alto. It's odd how sometimes the things I think about are caught up in location: I was working on one problem in Palo Alto, completely forgot about it while I was in Mendocino, and returned to it anew once I returned to Palo Alto.

Photos now online from my wife's cousin's son's birthday (colors a little wonky, probably only of interest to relatives, but they came out better than I thought they had) and New Years Eve at MacKerricher State Park. It was cold and windy; we didn't stay long, and later caught the very pretty tail end of the sunset (and some very good seafood pasta) at Sharon's in Noyo Harbor. I tried cropping some of these 2:1, even wider than the 16:9 aspect ratio that I usually crop panoramic shots; I think it works well for this subject.

I'm sure I've written about this before, but not here and now I can't find it, so...

Here's the question. You have a bunch of photographs, in different aspect ratios, which you would like to make thumbnails of for a web gallery. How big should you make the thumbnails? Equivalently, what is a good measure of the size of an image, that allows one to compare sizes of images that have different aspect ratios?

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On a related subject, I was amused to learn recently that there are two conflicting definitions for the aspect ratio of a "silver rectangle" should be, analogous to the golden rectangle: 1+sqrt(2):1 or sqrt(2):1. One can convert either rectangle into the other by removing a square. The 1+sqrt(2):1 can be formed by the two opposite edges of a regular octagon, and has the advantage that its aspect ratio is the so-called silver ratio. But the 1:sqrt(2) also has the nice property that cutting it in half produces two similar rectangles, and is more important both in modern commerce (the size of European paper) and in ancient architecture.