Category: del.icio.us

Ladybug in mid-air

Originally uploaded by Luca5.

This is great. A little luck and a lot of preparation pays off.

I am spending a couple of days with this:

“Nikon D80 10.2MP Digital SLR Camera (Body only)” (Nikon)

thanks to the generosity of Kate McElwee.

For all my grousing about digital photography, a lot of my issues would go away if I had access to one of these. Why? It feels like a good SLR camera, not a digital or film camera — just a camera. The controls are easily worked out (I declined the tour of the controls as she was pretty busy when I picked up the little gem), the quality of the images and the experience of getting them is first-rate.

It offers the control you need for some images but can do all the heavy lifting as required. The main thing I noticed (and loved) was that it’s responsive: it writes pictures to disk as fast as you can take them, something my over-rated 5400 has never done well. And that’s taking RAW images, 14 Mb in size, not jpgs or tiffs.

Some other details:

• the rear screen is amazingly bright if you need to check something in the field
• the image counter counts down, not up: in other words, it knows how many images you have room for on the card and keeps track, rather than letting you run the card full so you have to delete images while the action is happening
• there are a lot of options and choices you can make, but you don’t have to — the program modes are pretty reliable
• it just feels solid and substantial without being bulky. It’s not heavy (an F4 weighs 3 pounds, more than twice what the D80 weighs. I took one of those on my honeymoon — 3 weeks — and I wasn’t sad to turn it back in to the rental shop.)

The reason I wanted it is that I will be helping wrangle some kindergarteners for the Dalai Lama’s visit and there’s a chance that some photography might break out, even if I don’t get into the session.

Not having used any other D-series cameras, I have no idea how much this offers vs the D50 or even the D70. But I have to wonder what more you get with a D300.

• Calculated Risk: Maricopa: Do It For the Children
  sounds a lot like places I lived when I was a kid: Florida in the 1970/80s was all about this big house in the sterile suburb and no unstructured fun for kids (except drugs and drinking).
  (tags: kids culture values markets urbandesign civilization)

This is the best April 1 stunt I have seen.

Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

[From Gmail: Google’s approach to email]

• ● Solar furnaces
  I want one of these. I suspect a lot of houses in the desert southwest and a lot of the southeast could go off the grid with something like this.
  (tags: energy environment power)

I was reminded of the essay from which this is excerpted:

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.

We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

[From The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto]

I read it years ago, perhaps when it came out, perhaps later, but all that came through then was what seemed to a bitter cynicism about institutional education. But now I see something different, after the Six Rules are laid out.

I see a different present, one in which my sitting in a Swedish bentwood chair typing these words into an electronic device to be published on a global information network would be an unlikely outcome. When I first re-encountered this, I thought of a world without the increased conformity and social control he mentions, and I thought of a less advanced, less developed world, not industrialized. But then I realized that without the industrialization that brought us the manned moon landing and the internet, we might also have missed out on two world wars, the cold war, mutually assured destruction, global warming . . . .

Hmm. Tough call. Does the diverse bounty of the internets outweigh industrialized warfare and it’s by-products? I realize some industrialization would have happened. I know the old agrarian dreams are just that, but would the restless fingers of the machine age have made their way into our lives as far as they have?

A friend writes:

i’m doing the book display for april, poetry (it used to be known as national poetry month, but i think that’s no longer politically correct) and decided to use this for my backdrop because it’s kind of dirty but not exactly.

How To Eat a Poem
by Eve Merriam

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

Poems and life should be enjoyed with the same enthusiasm . . .
I’m reminded of D H Lawrence and his notion of figs. It’s a tad more frank.

I wonder how much this duplicates the Interstate Highway System. The red lines are proposed, the black ones are existing.

See for yourself.

[source]

Lou figures out that the mp3 standard is not wonderful. My reply at ZDnet, if I had felt like registering one more %^&*( time just so I could leave a comment:

every recording is a degradation of the live, in-person performance. the question is, what trade-offs are you comfortable with? if you don’t have an audiophile playback system, what good are high-end recordings?

most people listen to music in environments that are full of compromises: the solution, according to the snobs (call it what it is), is to stop listening. better to listen to music you like and follow the trend of better equipment/better encoding that not listen at all, don’t you think?

[From Rocker Lou Reed takes aim at new technology | Tech News on ZDNet]

Questions:

• how is mp3 “new” technology?
• how perceptible is the difference between a WAV file and a 320k mp3 or mp4/aac file?
• does he have any idea what he’s on about or is he just one more “traditionalist” in a changing world?