Month: January 2006

is four times a pattern?

If, as the saying goes, “once is accident, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action“, what does four times make? A pathological condition?

Our Long National Nightmare Continues:

Roughly speaking, there have been four great showdowns over abuse of executive power in modern U.S. history. The earliest has to do with domestic surveillance by the CIA, and other ill-conceived schemes, as revealed by the 1975 Church Committee hearings. The second, closely overlapping the first, involved all the excesses of the Nixon administration, including Watergate itself, the “Plumbers,” the secret bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger”s wiretapping of staffers, etc. The third, the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan Administration, seems quaint compared to the fourth, the Bush administration”s NSA domestic surveillance program, and the broader assertion of executive authority to torture and otherwise ignore international law.

These episodes have certain themes in common. Yes, one of them is that they were all hatched in the first term of Republican presidencies and revealed only after reelection, but that’s not the answer I’m looking for.

All four attempted power-grabs can be laid at the feet of one party and all were part of the incumbent’s agenda going into office (how else to explain how all began in the first term?).

Who votes for these people? Saps who want a king? Wasn’t there a war about that?

giving enuresis a bad name

Rolling Out the Rubber Sheets:

In fact, my policy is to refer to the warbloggers in 2006 as “bedwetters.” There need be no shame in being a bedwetter. It’s a condition that can be treated. But for the neocon-converted, treatment first requires taking honest self-inventory. Having the courage to look in the mirror admit, “I’m a pompous warmongering bedwetting crybaby who loves to hear myself maunder.”

Favorite quotes (both referenced in the full-length post from which the above is excerpted):

Now I may not be as “emotionally or morally sophisticated” as Roger L Simon, but then I didn’t spend the afternoon of 9/11 flushing away my beliefs and convictions in a piddle-stained panic. So please spare me the “cojones” and “cowardice” locker room speech from the man who is one car backfire away from turning into a fedora floating in a puddle of pee.

All those fine words about the rule of law safeguarding our liberties, the arbitrary exercise of power and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Normandy went right out the window on 9/11. That was when Henry [Hyde] and the rest of his stalwart defenders of the rule of law promptly wet their pants and then let their president use the constitution to clean up the puddle.

Great minds think alike, indeed. As for Henry Hyde, I have found his posturing as some paragon of moral rectitude repulsive: I’m in agreement that a mature mind can hold two opposing ideas at the same time,
16Hyde2
but for a congressman to steal another man’s wife, keep her as his mistress, and then comport himself as he did during the Clinton witch-hunt is another matter. Youthful indiscretion? At 41? I don’t think so.

Now playing: Expresso Love by Dire Straits from the album “Making Movies”

Libertarianism has left the road and is now driving down the pavement.

A great rant on the rising tide of anti-social behavior in England. The whole thing is worth a read, for a few gems beyond the nut graf below.

George Monbiot » The Anti-Social Bastards in Our Midst:

But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the anti-social bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless of the consequences. I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people’s actions. We drive on the left in Britain, but we are being driven to the right.

I found the ideas, quoted from some crackpot columnist in the Times, that cyclists have no rights and should expect to deliberately run into, that walkers on private but legally accessible property should be deterred with land mines, or that anyone riding public transport at the age of 26 or older is a failure, to be mind-blowing. So much Olde Englande’s reputation of civility and tolerance, of forbearance and gentility.

Isn’t it interesting how that cocoon of metal brings out so much in people, how it empowers their inner bully while nurturing their inner coward? I’m reminded of Bill Cosby’s routine on the appeal of cocaine. He asked someone why they used it, and was told, “it intensifies your personality.” His rejoinder? “What if you’re an asshole?” So it is with the SUV.

I don’t have a lot of patience with so-called libertarianism: it always comes wrapped up nicely as a logical well-thought philosophy. But when it comes to things I care about — and that I think anyone who leaves their house regularly should care about — like schools, roads, public services, it always sounds like the old “socialize the risk, privatize the gain” strategy. Sell the schools off to private concerns, either outright or through some charter school fiddle, and see any accountability we ever had go up in smoke (who will these school bosses listen to? citizens or the investors?). Do we really want to set up private police forces?
Now playing: Definitely Maybe by Jeff Beck from the album “Beckology (Disc 2)” | Get it

phishing gets more sophisticated?

This was a recent piece of phishing spam that looked a lot like a real eBay communication. It’s even addressed to me, rather than to “member@ebay.com” or something similar.

Phishery

But that link? Nah, I don’t think so.
Now playing: Balalaika Gap by Camper Van Beethoven from the album “Cigarettes And Carrot Juice- The Santa Cruz Years (Disc 1-Telephone Free Landslide Victory)”

pinhole mechanics

I ended up rejiggering the pinhole on this. Rather than risk the pinhole I drilled through the plastic cap being less than optimal, I drilled it out with a larger hole and covered it with a square of aluminum from a pop can. Gorilla Glue to the rescue, yet again. Once that dried, I put a hole through the aluminum with a straight pin.

But what is the diameter of a straight pin? 0.0255 of an inch as best I can tell, call it 0.025 or 0.635 millimeters.

Now what? To properly expose the film, I need to calculate what f-stop results from that size hole and the focal length of this monstrosity. The focal length looks to be 1.75 inches.

Pinhole
Working from the helpful forms and calculations here, it looks like this camera has an effective f-stop of 70.

So, not too bad. The exposures won’t be too long. This chart displays times as long as 22 hours. That’s not too practical.

The camera is done. Time to see what it can do. I am tempted to use some color film just for testing purposes, but I don’t have any to hand. Perhaps one of these old rolls of Ilford Delta 100 will serve.

pinhole camera update

Well, the glue seems to have worked (Gorilla Glue is strange stuff — takes some getting used to).

Interesting feature this camera body has that I didn’t realize: there is a little dark-slide on the viewfinder window that allows you to black out that window, so you can make sure your camera is light-tight.

So now it’s time to run some film through it. It has a threaded tripod mount and will take a cable release, so all in all, this might be a good test.

Continue reading “pinhole camera update”

pinhole camera manufacture

Well, I decided to look into this and as luck would have it, some of what I needed came readily to hand.

  • I needed a 35 mm SLR body. Found an old Fuji ST901 AutoElectro I hadn’t seen in years, complete with an old 50 mm lens. 01 I 05 Db 1D 88 1
  • My plan was to somehow fit a lens body cover on the camera body, with a pinhole drilled through that
  • But I didn’t have a body cover for this camera. Gluing one on would mean I couldn’t use the SLR viewfinder for composition.
  • When I found the lens, I toyed with the idea of taking it apart. But that requires tools I didn’t have at hand.
  • But as I was pondering how destructive I could be and still end up with something useable, I spotted another old piece of detritus: an old telephoto for a Pentax K-1000 I no longer have. 02 I 05 Cd 39 D3 1
  • With the lens I found a lens cap, 49mm in size, and a clear glass/UV filter. The lens was no good to me, but it occurred to me I could affix the filter to the body and use the lens cap for the pinhole. The lens cap won’t fit the body opening but it would fit the filter. Pretty close to what I set out to do.
  • A little Gorilla Glue, some weight on the assembly (books), and time will tell.

Where this idea appeals to me is the ability to bridge the SLR experience I have with the stuff I want to learn, in a film format I can use. I found some old Ilford B&W film (Delta 100 and HP5, circa 1995) and if memory serves it was frozen until 2000 when we moved to Seattle and has been in the relatively constant 60 degree climes of my basement since then. If I burn a roll and it’s past the sell-by date, I’m not out much.

Now playing: Staralfur by Sigur Rós from the album “Agaetis byrjun”