Category: observations

1 minute exposure on the north shore of Green Lake. The timeless look of this is aided by the disappearance of the skyline: the Space Needle has been washed out completely. Cropping might help, but I kinda like the framing effect of the leaves at the top.

Shorter Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan (ret’d) writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

While in Moscow as US Defense attaché from 2001 to 2003, I received several calls from Russians with a remarkable and unexpected request. They wanted to join the United States Army.
I often think of those phone calls now as I consider the efforts our nation makes to find and recruit quality men and women into the service. Is there an opportunity out there beyond our borders that we ought to explore while recruiting the best and brightest to our nation’s defense?
<snip>
America could put recruiting shortages in its past, and the country would gain educated, legal, patriotic, new immigrants who, like immigrants before them, would do the work that many Americans won’t – serve their country in its defense.

[A] country whose national leadership cannot motivate its healthy, heterosexual men (and some women) 42 and under to volunteer to serve their country in its defense, not even its governing party’s strongest supporters, faces some serious problems that a 21st century version of King George III’s hired Hessians cannot solve.

To be fair, these would not be mercenaries in the usual sense. They would not be soldiers of fortune, willing to fight for whoever pays best, but aspiring patriots.

But can you imagine recruiting and fielding military units of men and women who are drawn from the same parts of the world where our alleged enemies lurk?
And picture these veterans in military housing or after being discharged, trying to find a place to live among the people for whom they have risked their lives, the same people who have been told Asians and Middle Easterners are the enemy. Yeah, that’ll work.

I don’t think the Brigadier General (ret’d) has thought this through.
Continue reading “A country that has to outsource its national defense is not worth defending”

I tried Delicious Library tonight, finding yet another use for my new camcorder.

It’s as cool as you may have heard (I realize I may be the very last person to try it, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this) and tempting to put to full use. Given how many things are already claiming my time, as well as realizing how many books I have pre-date barcodes, it’s unlikely I’ll create a full library.

I like the fact that, as a Mac application and the product of an Omnigroup alumnus, things work as you expect, even if it doesn’t seem obvious they will. I found a book with a barcode that wouldn’t turn anything up. So I ended the Amazon SKU and hey presto, the Monster located all the details.

Could be interesting, especially if you loan books or other stuff: I don’t and on the rare exceptions, I regret it. But at least I would be able to know where something went and perhaps have some way of extracting a replacement.

Continue reading “Delicious”

I wanted to see how these WordPress Widgets worked, but to do that I needed a new Widget-compliant theme.

So far so easy.

The Reality-Based Community: Coping with the heat:

There’s no plan for a regular home handyman column here, but I notice many people going about heat wave management the wrong way, so here’s what you need to know. First, what you can do quickly, and without air conditioning, which is a lot if you’re smart.

some good stuff here: I wasn’t aware how reasonably-priced a whole-house fan could be. We bake here in the summer, living on a ridge with a full Western exposure all afternoon and none of the breeze from Lake Washington or Puget Sound to mitigate it. It was over 90 in the house for too much of the time during last week’s heat wave. If the main living area of my house is 1400 square feet, that looks like about 11,800 cubic feet: a 3400 cfm fan can move that volume of air in less that three minutes. As quickly as evenings cool down here, I’m sold.

The stuff about CFL lights I knew and we do that where we can. They never seem to live up to the hype, though. Time for another look, it seems.

Air conditioning isn’t worth doing and I don’t like living in a hermetically-sealed box. Time to see what my local Grainger can do for me.

misadventures in large format photography – f295: The Craft of Alternative and Adapted Photographic Processes:

Well, with the help of one of Ralph Young’s clever 4×5 box cameras, a cigar box of my own, and a $5 film holder, I took a chance on large format this past week. The verdict, if you’re wondering about this yourself: jump on in.

Read on for some giggles and possibly insights in how wrong — or right — this can go.

Tour De France Winner Flunks Drug Test:

Floyd Landis’ stunning Tour de France victory just four days earlier was thrown into question Thursday when his team said he tested positive for high levels of testosterone during the race

Bah. Maybe auto racing is the thing to watch.

I agree with the comment on why the result was delayed until after the race. Surely they can test things much more quickly. The claim that a rider failed a test “during the Tour” suggests it wasn’t the final leg that is in question. And the two week delay to test the backup sample? What’s up with that?

On the uselessness of dating photographic technology:

Camera Age / Technology Age:

[Y]our 50 year old view camera or your 22 year old M6 have gotten many, many technology upgrades. You can put E6 film in them that incorporates the very latest advances in film, and your technology chain will be newer than someone working with a two year old Canon EOS-1ds. In contrast, once you buy a digital camera, you’re locked into the “film” that can be used with it, forever. (the obvious exceptions would be removable digital backs like those for medium format cameras, and things like the Leica DMR).

So don’t tell me how old your camera is. Tell me when the manufacturer last revised the film you use. Because if you’re loading your Leica CL with Fujichrome 64T, your technology chain is newer than my digital Canon EOS-5d by about five months.

Something has been nagging at me about the pace of digital camera technology and I think this nails it.

I’d be happier with a camera body that took upgradeable sensor modules (ie, digital film) than with upgrading the entire camera body each time a significant upgrade came along. My old N8008 does all I need in a 35mm camera and I think I get better images than with my Nikon 5400: the difference is immediacy. If I wasn’t so lazy, my old FM2 would probably suffice and I would only need batteries for the digital components (don’t need a winder for digital now, do you?)

If I could have the image quality (ie, controls) of the olde skool film camera with straight to digital recording technology, that would be useful. But I guess this is the old hybrid approach of the mid-90s with digital backs on studio cameras. My guess is the same idea could be made more compact and reliable/rugged these days.

For some things film is still better (some organizations insist on film for it’s superior resolution: a 4×5 negative at 4000 lines per inch = 320 megapixels). Wonder how long that will last?

You Don’t Say?:

Responding to the heat wave in LA, Prof. Bainbridge writes:

Still, I’m feeling less libertarian about [global warming] every day the temperature stays above 90.

Funny how that works. It’s like I’ve said before — if a neocon is a liberal who got mugged, a progressive is a conservative who got sick.

Libertarians are curiously discomfited when anything threatens their little bubble, aren’t they. When the brandy and cigars get scarce, their faith weakens.

The comments are a weird back and forth about California’s rolling blackouts of 2001 and today: the underlying question that no one had asked last I looked was whether some things were really best left to market forces. Electricity in some places is needed to preserve human life (in hospitals, for example) and to enable industry and the other stuff we claim to all about. Do we really want the likes of Enron’s traders manipulating the flow of power for their own gain, to preserve the illusion of transparently benevolent market forces?

Of course, I can already hear the argument that public control of one essential piece of infrastructure (of those that can be run at a profit, not something like the interstate highway system) is socialism or worse, communism. To which I am inclined to reply, “so?” But to keep the discourse at a somewhat elevated level, does it all have to be one way or the other? I don’t argue for government control of the auto industry or steel: these are, to some degree, goods that people can opt out of using. But opting out of using water or electricity is more difficult and for some impossible.