The dilution of effort

Bruce Wilson wrote an article called The Dilution of Effort concerning the temptation to snap, snap, snap away with film and digital cameras and not pay attention to really composing an image. I think he goes a little overboard, but this paragraph is spot-on:

WE HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN by taking our time. Instead of shooting three rolls an hour, spend three hours on one photograph. Think about the scene. Is it really worth shooting? Will your cousin want to see it? [I don't mean will he comment appreciatively when you show it to him, I mean will he pay you to put it on his wall?] Is the light the best it could be? Would a different angle of the sun (either in the day or at a different time of year) make a better shot? Could you get a better shot if the clouds were different? Do you have the right film in the camera to create the look that best fits the subject? Does your framing of the shot and the composition convey the feeling of the subject that first made you stop and linger on it? Do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? If you don't know, how can you expect your photograph to successfully convey it?

The concept that has most changed my understanding of photography in the past year is that it is a graphical art, and like all graphical arts, it communicates a message via a limited or limiting medium. The message makes the photograph.

Conservative Match

I saw this ad today on a conservative blog:

Um, yeah. Those liberal guys. Because >50% of American males can all be completely written off, with one click of the mouse and one wave of the hand. Because that's how we grow our intellect: not by engagement, but by changing the channel.

By the way, honey: if you are a conservative and your boyfriend is bashing conservatives, then your relationship's biggest problem is communication, not politics.

Sukiyaki

I've loved the song Sukiyaki since I first heard the Cornell Hangovers' rendition of it back in 1995. Today a simple Google searched finally answer my questions about the origins of this song. http://www.maddmansrealm.com/sukiyaki/ says:

Internationally acclaimed singer. Sakamoto made his show business debut in 1960. His biggest hit, Ue o Muite Aruko (I Look Up When I Walk; "Sukiyaki" in the West), was released in Japan in 1961. After its release in the U.S. in 1963, the song's earnestness and melodic beauty proved irresistible despite its incomprehensible lyrics. Against all odds, on June 15, 1963, the song ousted Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" to become the No. 1 popular song in the U.S. "Sukiyaki" remains the biggest international hit by a Japanese popular singer.

The version I bought off the iTunes Music Store is by the Starsound Orchestra, and features a simple male vocal lead single a nicely-paced version of the song.

Fun with optical mice

I just discovered that you can use an optical mouse in mid-air. Since its on-board sensors generate images in the infrared band of the spectrum, if the mouse's sensor is exposed to a moving, high-contrast infrared light source, it will cause a corresponding reverse motion of the cursor on the screen. For instance, you can make the mouse detect motion by holding it upside-down and moving a candle across the field of view of its optical sensor.

Furthermore, if you have an incandescent light source some distance away, you can point the bottom of the mouse at it and move the cursor by rotating the mouse from side to side.

Bill Frist is a very rich man

...and the SEC investigation into his insider trading received hardly any news coverage. His connections to the HCA and the sort of Enron-style antics those guys were up to is just appalling:

Meantime, an investigation of HCA was going on. It turned into the largest medical fraud case in history. HCA had defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare, the military’s health care program. They kept two sets of books. They paid kick backs. They engaged in “upcoding,” billing for more expensive procedures than what they actually performed. They charged their advertising to the government as “community education.”

I wonder how much of the existing wealth in this country is due to our markets being free of anything remotely resembling perfect law enforcement, and how much has been created by the market's legitimate "freedom to innovate".

Cygwin startup problem and Ext2Fsd

After installing Ext2Fsd, and open-source driver for mounting ext2 partitions under win32, my Cygwin installation magically stopped working. Well, it took me some time to establish this chain of causality but I finally figured out the problem: ext2fsd installs a win32 version of mount.exe into c:\windows\system32. This preceeds c:\cygwin\bin in my path, and every time the Cygwin environment is started up, it basically executes the following mount commands:
mount -fst c:/cygwin /
mount -fst c:/cygwin/bin /usr/bin
mount -fst c:/cygwin/lib /usr/lib

These commands end up running Ext2Fsd's version of mount.exe, which doesn't know anything about -f, -s, or -t. I've emailed the author of ext2fsd alerting him to this problem, but until he fixes it for good, I've just renamed his mount.exe to mount_ext2.exe.

Tidal Locking

Have you ever wondered why one side of the moon always faces us? The reason for the moon's orbital period matching its rotational period is a phenomenon called "tidal locking" or "tidal despinning": http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v30n3/dps98/320.htm

Google Answers has some good write-ups:

The mass of the Earth tugs on the Moon in the same way the moon pulls on the Earth. Since the Earth is so much greater in size it is able to distort the sphere of the moon. The Earth draws mass from the Moon towards it. This elongation of the Moon reduces its rotational velocity and converts it to heat. Eventually the spin is nearly nullified. The elongation is drawn along an axis pointing to the Earth. It results in permanent tidal bulges which makes it dynamically most stable if one end of the bulge is always pointed towards the Earth.

Eulogy

Today's must-read: a eulogy for an Iraqi journalist, killed by US soldiers at a checkpoint.

When you string together all the rhetorical marketing one-liners that Bush has used to justify the war in Iraq, it really sinks beyond pathetic. The only one they haven't used yet (but which I'm expecting any day now) is "because they're brown."