teleoscope

It's Time to Forgive Greg Fishel

2012-01-20T08:00:00.005-05:00

Whiteout, a photo by Payton Chung on Flickr.

It was seven years ago today that the city of Raleigh, NC and several of the surrounding suburban communities were totally paralyzed by about one inch of unforecast snow. The photo above shows what a major snow event is was, and still the forecasters managed to miss it. Shocking.

Seven years ago today Raleigh got an inch of snow and the governor wound up declaring a state of emergency. The snow wasn't forecast and all of the trucks that spread salt and sand were out in the suburbs with vacuum attachments picking up leaves people had piled by the curb. The snow started about lunch time and the first thing the city did was to announce early school closings. This put all the cars in the area out on the roads at the same time, trapping the city trucks in traffic jams so no salt could be spread to melt the dab of white stuff off the roads. The guy at the next desk where I worked at the time left at 1:30 PM to pick up his daughter from school and didn't get home until after 3 AM. And his daughter got off easy. Lots of kids never got home and wound up sleeping at the school. We made national news with our inch of snow. Here's a link to the story in USA Today: Inch of snow throws Raleigh, N.C., into a tizzy.

We all figured that Greg Fishel owed us for that one. (He's our local weather guy on WRAL TV.) Of course, it was the Raleigh city government that seized the meteorological oversight and turned it into a first class snafu. But, it has been seven years. I suppose if the bankruptcy laws and the bible (Deuteronomy 15:1-2) both say you should forgive debts after seven years we should let Greg off the hook. Besides, forecasting winter weather in central North Carolina is hard and thankless work.

Most years we get some snow in Raliegh but it is notoriously hard to predict. Our cold air comes from Canada and is quite dry. Our moist air comes up from the Gulf of Mexico and is generally warm. Any straight-forward, predictable weather system -- some major front marching across the map -- will either be cold but dry, or rainy. The only way we get snow is when we get complicated, swirling, mixing of two air masses that average out just below freezing. Since half a degree is enough to make the difference between snow, sleet and rain the forecasters will frequently predict an 80 percent chance of "god knows what" in the next 24 hours. I have often suggested that meteorologists in the Triangle Area (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) should take the winter off on the theory that they do more harm than good. I generally say this when I am disappointed that forecast snow has arrived as rain.

But my point is, it isn't easy. Greg, we forgive you.

Thanks to Flickr user Payton Chung who posted the only photo I could find of the great snow of Janary 20th, 2005.

Cultural Literacy Requirement: The Curate's Egg

2012-01-12T13:07:00.005-05:00

Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones."

Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

This cartoon, by George du Maurier, from Punch November 9, 1895 provides such a useful metaphor for the phenomenon it describes that people still use the term that it inspired 116 years after its publication. The concept is similar to "damning with faint praise" except that the praise is not faint but is instead enthusiastic but excessively specific and often insincere.

Calling something a "curate's egg" (or a "parson's egg") is generally to be critical of it while, at the same time, suggesting that other, more positive descriptions were references to aspects deliberately selected in a polite effort to "say something nice."

One and a Half Metaphors

2012-01-11T14:26:00.010-05:00

You toss the Alpo on the seat
and turn to the pickup with the dog in the bed.
The dog watches you with calm, interested eyes.

The dog is friendly -- like your dog.
As a dog person you know the spot,
along the base of the skull and behind the ears,
where your fingers would go if you let them.

The dog might bite.
That doesn't worry you except
that it might be bad for the dog.
And it's not your dog.

You drive off with your dog food
and the dog can still smell you:
A strange man with just a bit
of another dog's poo stuck to his sole.

You stash the game under your seat
and pull your Honda 250 out into traffic.
A truck pulls up beside you
with a chain-link cage in the back.
The cat watches you with calm, interested eyes.

You've never been so close to an animal
that is beautiful beyond bearing.
The tiger rubs against the wire,
it's fur looks soft.

I Was Wrong...ish

2012-01-10T16:31:00.005-05:00

In my previous post I described a method of using metameric color separation to produce 3D images using passive glasses. Further research reveals that

a) the technology I was describing is less common than I thought

b) it doesn't work quite as I described it.

The system I described is the one used by Dolby 3D cinema projection system, a technology which is not used for 3D televisions, as far as I can discover. Dolby 3D uses the glasses I described that block specific wavelengths of red, green and blue light but the projector doesn't use special phosphors to generate the six colors of light needed but, instead, uses a six-segment spinning color wheel to color the light. Dolby 3D's chief competitor -- RealD Cinema -- uses left-handed and right-handed circularly polarized light for its glasses. Some 3D televisions (the ones that use inexpensive glasses that don't need batteries) use the same technology as the RealD to present stereo images.

Dolby 3D had an initial advantage in the marketplace because its metameric color separation process works with ordinary projection screens while RealD circular polarized projectors require special screens that don't mess with the polarization of the light they reflect. But as more and more multiplexes are built, or refurbished, with all new stuff, including new screens, that advantage is fading and the cheaper, more durable glasses you can use with RealD have given that technology a boost and Dolby 3D seems to be fading.

This image (from the Wikipedia page on Dolby 3D) makes the technology fairly easy to understand.

Metamerism, Congress and Poo, Oh my!

2012-01-01T09:00:00.003-05:00

Update 10 January 2012: Some of my descriptions of 3D television technology were, um, wrong-ish. I speculated a bit to fill in some gaps and in one or two points I was mistaken. (see my correction here.)

I'm afraid this will be another of my rambling posts, so let me apologize in advance if the narrative thread gets a bit lost in the exposition. This is intended to be -- and will eventually be -- a complaint about the intrusiveness of government. But before we can get to that there will be a lengthy Mr Wizard segment to establish some scientific background for my complaint. It is possible that you already know that stuff and can skip to the end. Here's a test question so you can decide: If a prism shows all the wavelengths of visible light -- red at one end, blue at the other -- then why does the color wheel wrap around in a circle? If you know the answer then hit the scroll wheel. If you are in the dark then...

Let There Be Light

When you heat matter it becomes agitated. If it is solid its atoms vibrate. In a liquid they squirm like drunks doing the Conga. In a gas they fly around bumping into things like minor characters trying to drive home after a conga party in a Jetsons cartoon.

Since the atoms contain electrically charged bits -- electrons and protons -- all of this random acceleration, deceleration and jiggling about makes them give off electromagnetic radiation. Not all of the atoms are equally excited. As the party heats up, more and more are out on the dance floor but there are always some chilling out by the punch bowl.

A statistical measure of the average level of excitement is called the "temperature" but among individual atoms there is a random distribution of levels of excitation. Some are more excited than the average, some less. The really excited, seven-Red-Bull atoms give off high-energy radiation which has shorter wavelength and is generally bluer, while the laid-back atoms give off lower-energy, longer-wavelength, redder radiation.

Light from thermal radiation is always a mixture of all the colors -- hotter objects have more shorter-wavelength (bluer) light in the mix but all the colors are there, just in different proportions depending on the temperature.

Here is a diagram from Wikipedia. It has three lines (the red, green and blue ones) that show the emission spectra of a hot body at three temperatures. It also has a black line labeled "Classical theory: (5000 K)" that I don't understand and request that you ignore.

link: a Wikipedia image from "Black Body" entry (bigleehimself on Flickr).

We tend to think of sunlight as 'white', so a pretty good standard for white light would be light with the same mix of intensities at all wavelengths as sunlight. For sunlight at noon that would be approximately 5000K (the blue line above).

At low angles, just after sunrise or just before sunset, sunlight has to pass through more of the atmosphere than at noon. The blue light tends to scatter along the way leaving the light that reaches the ground redder and redder as the sun nears the horizon. When the sun sets on Manhattan the light appears red because the blue light has been scattered to make the sky blue over New Jersey.

Just before sunset the apparent color temperature of the sun is closer to 3000K which is also the approximate color temperature of ordinary incandescent light bulbs. Our brains adjust our color perception for the spectral changes in the light as the sun rises or sets. It can adjust to tungsten light bulbs and their light looks 'white' to us too.

Interestingly, while a mix of all the colors of visible light is a way to get light that looks white to us, it's not the only way. I'll get back to that later. It turns out we can't really see all the colors of light. Basically, we only see three. Humans with normal vision see the world as a mixture of three colors. People with color blindness may see two colors, or even just one. There is a very small percentage of the population that sees four colors but they are oddities and don't really change the argument.

Our retinas have three kinds of 'cone' cells, each of which is sensitive to a range of colors, approximately 'red', 'green' and 'blue'. They are represented in the diagram below in terms of the wavelength of light: (S)hort=blueish, (M)edium=greenish, (L)ong=reddish. It is probably squeamishness about the "-ish" parts that kept the Wikipedia entry on 'Color Vision' from labeling them simply as blue, green and red.

colorvision, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

These cone cells that give us color vision are themselves color blind. An "L" type cell that responds to reddish light reports a single value to the optic nerve: how much total reddish light is present. It doesn't report how red the light is, just how much light there is, in total, in the frequency band to which it responds.

You can map that value to a scale of, say, zero to ten, where zero is no red light detected and ten is the brightest red light you can distinguish. If you write down the numbers for the L (reddish), M (greenish), and S (blue) cone cells at some point on your retina then you have a set of three numbers that tell exactly what color you see there.

Sunlight in the simplified model.

For the rest of this discussion I will use a slightly oversimplified model of color vision. If you look at the diagram above you will notice that the spectral sensitivities of the L and M cone cells overlap over a broad range of wavelengths. Unless you are red-green colorblind your brain sorts out the overlap for you and you see red light as a very distinct color from green light despite the fact that both kinds of cone cells respond to red, orange, yellow and green light perfectly well, only in slightly different degrees. It is only in the very red red light at one end of the spectral band, or in the teal colored light at the other, where the difference in sensitivities between the L and M cone cells is large. Having noted the overlap I will, for the balance of this discussion, ignore it and speak of the three colors of light we see as Red, Green and Blue (in that order longer wavelengths first).

Color TV, 2D and 3D

Sunlight on TV

It is no coincidence that the three colors -- red, green and blue -- are the colors of the little dots on the screen of a color television. If your TV wants to show you something white it turns on all three colors -- red, green and blue -- each of which stimulates one of the three kinds of cone cells in your eye. Since TVs aren't really that bright compared to sunlight let's call the red intensity six, and the green and blue about seven on our one to ten scale. That gives us an R-G-B color number of 6-7-7 which looks the same to us as a piece of white paper viewed in sunlight at noon -- not quite as bright, but the same apparent color.

Green grass on a 3D TV

But is it the same color? Actually, no. Each of those three types of colored spots on your TV gives off light at a single wavelength. The red dots are a very particular red, the green a particular wavelength of green light and the blue a very precise blue. Manufacturers of some 3D TVs use this single-wavelength property in their displays. Instead of a single red color they use two at slightly different wavelengths. Similarly there are two greens and two blues. The dorky-looking glasses you wear to watch the TV have different lenses for the left and right eye. The lens for your right eye blocks one of the red wavelengths of light, one of the green wavelengths and one of the blue. The lens for your left eye blocks the other wavelength in each R-G-B pair.

Left and right eye see the same color despite spectral differences.

The process is a bit more complicated than I am letting on (remember the Red/Green overlap) but the basic idea is that the TV can show your eyes two distinct spectral mixtures of light and, because they cause the same stimulation of the Red-, Green- and Blue-sensitive cone cells in in your eyes, you can't tell them apart. A spectroscope can tell you that they aren't the same color but your eye can't.

The Color Wheel Explained as a Triangle

Now that we know that we only see three colors I am prepared to answer a question that has puzzled me for half a century, one which I have only just figured out while I was working on this post: If the colors of visible light span a linear spectrum from shorter to longer wavelengths, why does a color wheel wrap around in a circle?

Color Triangle

Look at the triangle I have drawn on the right. If you were to inflate it so the lines bulge outward you would have the usual color circle. Looking at lines 1 and 2 you will see all the colors of the rainbow in the usual spectral ordering -- Red, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue. Line 1 represents all possible combinations of Red and Green light with no Blue. Line 2 has combinations of Green and Blue with no Red. Line 3 has combinations of Red and Blue with no Green. With the exception of the endpoints -- pure Red and pure Blue -- line 3 contains all the colors that aren't in the rainbow, most notably Purple. Rainbows don't have purple. Here's why:

A rainbow (or a prism) sorts out light according to wavelength. Each band is a particular single wavelength of light. There are bands for Red, Green and Blue, and between them fall bands of light with intermediate wavelengths. When our eyes receive light of a single wavelength that falls between the spectrally adjacent colors our cone cells can detect -- that is between red and green, or between green and blue -- then our eyes see that light as a mixture of the colors we can see -- orange/yellow/yellow-green for light between red and green and various shades of blue-green for light between green and blue. A 50/50 mixture of pure red light and pure green light looks yellow to us but so does light at a single wavelength half way between red and green. Both kinds of light produce the same stimulation in our cone cells. The same is true about wavelengths between green and blue, although there are some shades of blue-green light that we don't see particularly well.

But that is just for the spectrally-adjacent color ranges -- red/green and green/blue. The third side of our triangle -- red/blue -- mixes colors of light from both ends of the visible spectrum and our eyes don't see intermediate wavelengths of light as a mixture of those colors. A light at a single wavelength half way between red light and blue light is green light. So, when our eyes detect red light mixed with blue light, we see purple. There is no single wavelength of light that looks purple. Purple light is always a mixture of wavelengths. Since a rainbow sorts out light by wavelength and gives each spectral color its own band, there is no band for purple.

Metamerism

Colors that have the property that they are composed of different mixtures of wavelengths of light but cause the same stimulation of your cone cells and can't be distinguished are called metamers. When you look at a picture of an object -- a photograph, a video or even a painting -- and the colors look accurate to you, then those colors are almost certainly metamers of the colors of the objects being rendered. A real-life banana reflects yellow light as well as some red and some green (depending how ripe it is) but a banana on TV consists of a mix of red and green light because (most) TVs have no yellow dots.

Fetching Green Handbag

You don't have to be a couch potato to see metameric color matches. They happen all the time. The dyes and pigments we use to make objects the color we want them to be are chosen because they absorb light in particular wavelengths and reflect or transmit the rest (depending on whether the object is translucent or opaque.) On the right is a reflectance spectrum for a fetching green handbag tinted with pigments that absorb most wavelengths of red and blue light. It reflects a lot of green but there is other light there too. In sunlight its R-G-B number might be 2-5-2.

Matching Green Suede Shoes

Here are the matching green suede shoes. They were dyed with chemicals that absorb light in the middle of the green band but reflect more light in the yellow and blue-green ranges. Despite the differences in spectral composition your eye still sees the same amount of generally red, green and blue light -- 2-5-2 -- and the shoes appear the same color... in sunlight or incandescent light.

The Incandescent Light Bulb Ban

But as of January 1st, 2012 it will become illegal to manufacture and sell one-hundred watt incandescent light bulbs -- the type of incandescent used to light a room with a single bulb. You might have heard that Congress repealed the light-bulb ban but that isn't exactly true. Congress declined to provide any funds to enforce the new law -- in effect giving the 100 watt incandescent bulb a reprieve -- but the law remains on the books. Congress can easily restore funding at any time and the manufacturers know it.

Making incandescent light bulbs for the US market has become a risky economic decision. Companies will stop making them or scale back so they can't be caught with lots of unsellable inventory if funding for enforcement is restored. Prices of incandescent bulbs will go up. People will switch to compact fluorescent bulbs which are more efficient. They will spend less for electricity and can use that extra cash to buy antidepressants because the light in their living room suddenly reminds them of restrooms in bus stations. And that green handbag and those green suede shoes will never match again.

Why Compact Fluorescent Bulbs (still) Suck

Compact fluorescent bulbs don't emit thermal radiation. They aren't hot. They generate light in a cascade of several steps. The first step is that a stream of electrons passes through the gas inside the glass tube -- a mixture of argon and mercury vapor -- which causes the atoms to change energy states. The electrons in the mercury atom have several discrete energy states they can assume but the higher energy states are unstable.

When a mercury atom gets zapped with a passing electron it jumps to one of those unstable, higher-energy states. It will then cascade through successively lower energy states until it reaches a stable state. Each time it jumps from a one state to another it sheds energy in the form of a photon. Depending on the state transition involved (what the before and after energy states are) that photon will have some very-exact amount of energy -- a very specific color. The most frequent state transitions with mercury emit light that is either blue or ultra-violet.

The second light-producing step in a compact fluorescent bulb happens when that ultra-violet light hits the rare-earth phosphors coated on the inside of the glass. The high-energy ultraviolet photon excites those atoms in pretty much the same way as the electron did with the mercury. The atoms in the phosphors have their own particular energy state transitions and each of those transitions emits a photon with a very specific color. The phosphors are selected to add some reds and greens to the mercury blues to give a light that looks white.

In any discussion of compact fluorescent lights it would be ungrateful and wrong to ignore the hard work of the lighting scientists who have been beavering away for decades to improve their light. They have several tricks they do with the phosphors that let them fill in between the colors a bit but I didn't describe those tricks because I don't understand them. But the spectral peaks associated with the energy level transition still predominate in the light. The light from older and/or cheaper CFLs is appallingly horrible but the newer, fancier CFL bulbs produce light that is merely rather bad.

compared_spectra, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

At right is an image that compares the spectra of several kinds of compact fluorescent light bulbs with a 60 watt incandescent bulb and with an unspecified light emitting diode-based bulb. The image is one I found somewhere on line. The page on which I found it neither claims nor references a copyright so I borrowed the image to use here. The comparison makes the Philips brand bulb look pretty good so it might have come from them.

There are a few oddities about the comparison image that strike me as peculiar. It may have gotten a bit dented in its travels on the Internet. In particular the yellow bands seem to have wandered off from where you would expect them. The incandescent spectrum has almost no yellow band and the spectra for the fluorescents show a second yellow band right in the middle of the reds. But it gives you the idea; fluorescent lighting tends to have lots of light at a few very specific colors and not much in between.

Here's a better image to show that phenomenon:

Fluorescent lighting spectrum peaks labelled from Wikipedia

The numbers that label the peaks in the graph refer to a list of elements that fluoresce at that particular wavelength, generally Mercury, Europium and Terbium. If you click on the link in the caption it will take you to a Wikipedia page that has the list. There are several other spectra for various sorts of fluorescent lights on the Wikipedia page where I found the above. Among them is a spectrum for a Philips bulb which may be the one in the comparison image. It does show a somewhat better fill-in between the peaks but it doesn't label its Y axis and I am suspicious that they used a log transform to hammer down the peaks a bit. So I didn't use it here.

You may be wondering, if we only see three colors and (with the right rare-earth phosphors to balance the Mercury blue) the light from a fluorescent bulb stimulates all three types of cone cells in our eyes and looks white to us, then isn't the problem with fluorescent lights basically fixed? Actually, no. Remember the green shoes and handbag.

The shoes and handbag appear the same color in sunlight and under incandescent light because they are a metameric color match in that light. They reflect a different spectrum but we can't see the difference. Fluorescent lights have a big spike right in the middle of the greens. Our handbag reflects true greens strongly and is likely to show bright green under fluorescent light. The shoes, that make the same metameric green by straddling the wavelength, will appear duller, probably a bit brown.

You can simulate the experience of viewing things under compact fluorescent lighting as follows: First go to your neighborhood multiplex and watch the 3D movie of your choice. On your way out steal the glasses and wear them for the rest of the experiment. (You can return them later.) Next, find a room with an overhead fixture that takes three 60 watt light bulbs. Replace one of the bulbs with a black-light bulb that you buy at Spencer's gifts at the mall. Then take all the clothes from your closet, sit under the light wearing the glasses, and sort your clothes into piles that look good together. Finally, carry your piles out into the sunlight, take off your glasses and see what you think of your choices. I'll bet the result won't be pretty.

Light Emitting Diode Lighting

I won't say much about LED lighting except to say that LED bulbs seem to produce better light than CFLs but are very expensive, especially in the higher power ranges. Most LED light bulbs are 60 watt equivalents or lower although 100 watt replacement bulbs are entering the market now. They are very efficient -- better than CFLs and last pretty much forever. They cost 20 to 30 times as much as incandescents but because they are so efficient and last so long they can pay for themselves... sometimes.

If you replace the incandescent bulb on your porch light that burns all the time with a LED bulb it might pay for itself in saved electricity in a year or so. If you replace the light bulb in your guest room closet, where the bulb burns 20 minutes a day, six days a year, that bulb will pay for itself when pigs fly.

Unleashing the Forces of the Market

One theory about the light bulb ban states that with incandescent bulbs being illegal the increased demand for other, more efficient forms of lighting will cause manufacturers to focus on them for research and to compete with them on price. That is, the light bulb ban will make compact fluorescent lighting better and will make LED lighting cheaper. It could happen, I suppose. But at least one unsatisfactory precedent presents itself.

A Crappy Precident

In 1992 President George H. W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act. If mandated toilets that consume no more than 1.6 gallons per flush. It went into effect in Jan 1, 1994 for residential buildings and Jan 1, 1997 for commercial buildings. It offers a nice parallel with the light bulb ban. At the time the law went into effect there were low-flow conventional toilets but they weren't very satisfactory. They are the analog of CFLs in our simile. The role of LED lighting was played by pressurized-tank and other pressure-assisted flush toilets which worked quite well with 1.6 gallons but were much too expensive for most people to buy.

So, in 1994 the Energy Policy Act unleashed the full innovative and competitive powers of the US market to solve the problem of producing a cost-effective, reliable toilet that used no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. The question is, how long did it take for the market to provide a common, economical residential toilet that a grown man can use confidently without knowing where the plunger was located?

Let's see, the "working toilet ban" took effect in 1994. This is 2012. That's something like 18 years so far. But I live in hope.

Christmas Letter 2011, Advance Social Media Distribution

2011-12-20T07:14:00.035-05:00

Our Christmas cards are getting out late again this year -- one of our most honored holiday traditions. Here is an advance electronic distribution of the tedious newsletter that gets folded up inside. If your card doesn't arrive for Christmas, feel free to print this, stuff it inside of an on-sale Christmas card of your choosing, and forge my name.

Walking Amber Down the Aisle in Tampa, Florida on New Year’s Eve Day

Prologue

As I sit down to write this sentence, on Saturday, November 12, 2011, I am, as far as I know, still an expectant grandfather. That is, I don’t think I am a grandfather yet – we were promised a phone call on Amber’s way to the hospital – but it is only a matter of time now, and not much time. When this has been mailed and delivered, Liam and Eva, or Eva and Liam, depending on the order in which they are delivered, will be the newest and second newest members of the family.
Irene is taking to the whole grandparent thing way faster than I am but I don’t suppose that I am unusual in that regard. I think it is a sex-related thing – something carried on the Y-chromosome. If you take your typical middle-aged man and you hand him a baby, saying: “Here is your grandbaby, Lee. Love it forever”, then he will. But until that moment it won’t seem altogether real to him. On the other hand, a woman, on hearing that her daughter, who lives five hundred miles away, is a week late and might have managed to get pregnant, will immediately head for the nearest store where baby paraphernalia can be had at a discount. Once there she will scour the shelves for unisex merchandise, mostly featuring fluffy yellow ducks – the pink kittens or blue puppies will come later once the sex of the baby is determined. In our case, expecting one of each, we bought everything in sight, but the ducks were first.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

from the North Carolina Branch of the Haslup Clan

Since I mentioned the date on which I wrote the prologue, I will tell you that I am starting this paragraph two weeks later. Liam Connor McPherson was born on November 23, 2011, a few minutes before his twin sister Eva Claire McPherson. I am now a grandfather, with all the privileges and responsibilities pursuant thereto. Having gotten that out of the way I will now get on with the Holiday Newsletter. If my narrative wanders, my new grandfatherly status requires you to cut me some slack.

Amber and Lee cutting the cake.

Lee and Amber have had the most eventful year of anyone in the family and the most tightly-scheduled one as well. They were married on New Year’s Eve day in Tampa, Florida during Amber’s brief midwinter break from her studies at the Lake Erie School of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. The ceremony was beautiful, the weather perfect, and as is traditional, the flower girl completely stole the show. It was wonderful to see so many of our favorite people but, as the parents of the bride, we saw them only fleetingly, as we had to stay in constant motion to keep the event on schedule. Now that both of our kids are married off it is someone else’s turn to host the next weddings – it’ll be nice to have a leisurely, more sociable role at a wedding or two.

Shortly after the wedding Amber started her Clinical Rotations – a series of clerkships in various clinical settings – that will comprise most of her third and fourth years of school. Since Amber and Lee were eager to start their family they decided to attempt to have their first child during Amber’s one-month fall break. There was some nervousness about the schedule when Amber found out she was expecting twins, since they often come a bit earlier, but Amber managed to finish enough of her Radiology Rotation to get full credit before her condition made it necessary for her to stay closer to home.

Amber came back to North Carolina briefly so we could throw her a baby shower. This proved a very efficient way for her to catch up with all her friends in a very short visit. Instead of having her drive around like mad while she was here, trying to see everybody, we threw a party and had everybody come to her. Brilliant! … and quite a nice party, actually.

At Amber's baby shower.

Lee and Amber continue to live with her grandfather (my dad) in St Petersburg. Dad recently celebrated his 85th birthday and remains active and in generally good health. Lee’s mother arrived before the twins were born and was there until December 13th. Amber was grateful for some experienced hands while she and Lee were learning how to deal with two babies in the house. Irene and I will be there for Christmas. Lee teaches chemistry at a local college, which is convenient just now, since much of the work associated with the job is done at home and many activities involved in dealing with the nutrition and hygiene of twin infants are more conveniently handled as tag-team events. Things seem to have gone fairly smoothly for the first two weeks although not altogether without some family adventure. They have learned, for instance, that when a key breaks off in the ignition on your way home from the pediatrician’s office, two adults, two infants, two car seats, and a big pile of baby-care hardware and expendables, will not all fit in the cab of a tow truck. Fortunately, dad’s friend Marty Hallas drives a big van was close to her phone.

Reid and one of her professors

Chris and Reid have been married now for over a year and it doesn’t seem possible that it has been so long since the wedding. It has been an eventful year for them. For one thing, Reid finished her PhD this year. It turns out that getting a PhD is a bit like making Chinese lacquer work – the piece is sort-of, mostly, generally “done” for a long time but it always seems to need just one more coat of something or other to achieve its full shiny black perfection. When her committee signed off on her dissertation they extracted a promise of some follow-on cleanup work, basically so they could go on bossing her around after she got her degree. As of this writing that work has been completed, too, and she is now actually done. She is making good progress on adjusting to her various name changes. “Mrs. Haslup” is starting to feel natural and “Doctor Reid Haslup” only sounds a bit odd, but “Doctor Haslup” still makes her think people are talking about Christopher’s grandfather.

Chris continues to enjoy his job as a graphic designer at Capstrat and Reid has found a position in the Chemistry department at UNC in Chapel Hill. They are looking at houses in the area and thinking about buying when their lease is up early next year. I realize that all this puts them rather out-of-step with many of their generation – not only are they both working, but they have jobs that have something to do with their college degrees. Despite being a bit strange that way, we love them both and are very proud of our kids. Our main struggle is to avoid becoming insufferably smug, and I am afraid that battle is half lost.

Calvin is a big Wallace and Grommet fan; thus the cake topper.

Our long-time friend, and next-door neighbor twenty-some years ago, Calvin Powers, was married this past year and Irene and I were in the wedding party. Calvin married Pat French, an editor of medical journals, whom he has been dating for several years and whom Irene and I like very much. Calvin and Pat are our most reliable social friends in the area – the people with whom we are most likely to go out to a movie, or to dinner.

Bling the Merciless: Evil Master of the 1%

Irene and I very much enjoyed their Halloween party this year (as we do every year) and our costumes, drawn from things that were in the news at the time, were well received. Irene went as the “Ghost of Muammar Gaddafi” and my costume – “Bling the Merciless, Evil Master of the One Percent” – won a prize in the costume contest.

Family group photo.

The photo at right is of Pat and Calvin posing with family members just after the ceremony. The two young ladies with the bouquets are Pat’s daughters. Calvin’s dad is in the center in the back and the rest are relatives of various sorts. Irene and I were also in the wedding but weren’t in this family-themed photo.
Our other social friends, Bill and Caran, drove up from Atlanta to meet us in the mountains of North Carolina in October for a Photo Safari vacation. Karen, Irene and I are all avid amateur photographers and Bill enjoys driving around and looking at the scenery. Timing a trip to the mountains for the peak color for the fall leaves is as much a matter of luck as of planning. Peak color depends on the weather and it comes earlier at high elevations than lower ones. We were incredibly lucky this year to hit the peak exactly in the Grandfather Mountain area of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The views and the weather were gorgeous.

We also had an opportunity to spend time with Bill and Caran, and with Calvin and Pat over the Labor Day weekend because we all attended a Science Fiction/Media convention called DragonCon. I think it was Pat’s first time at DragonCon – the rest of us had been many times, although Irene and I have missed the last couple of years due to scheduling constraints.

Costume at DragonCon. Her hat has a pirate ship being attacked by a giant squid.

It is interesting that Pat and Caran are both medical editors. There aren’t a lot of them in the country (or in the world for that matter) and they tend to know one another by reputation. Pat and Caran recognized each other’s names when they first met at Christopher’s wedding last year.

Bill and Caran

Irene continues to frustrate my by often taking better photos than I do, as in this one of Caran.

We are sending out Christmas wishes to my sister Holly (Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Lowe) who is finishing up a deployment in Afghanistan where she has worked in an outpatient clinic. In her latest note she mentioned packing up stuff to be shipped home but seemed a bit vague about when she would be back in the US. So her Christmas wishes are being sent via psychic emissions, and for the more-concrete wishes in the form of a Christmas card she may have to wait until she has a mailing address, even if we get the cards sent out on time for once.

Holly in Afghanistan

This will be our second year running where our empty nest has left us with a bit more passive and flexible role in our Christmas planning. In past years with our children unmarried, it was pretty clear that everyone would come to our house for Christmas and the only real decision we had to make was whether I would cook a four-rib roast for Christmas dinner or whether three ribs would be sufficient. (In general, both are true: three would be enough but I cooked four anyway.) Last year, with Chris and Reid at her mother’s for Christmas and Lee and Amber getting ready for their wedding a week later in Tampa, Irene and I were planning to spend Christmas Day as a couple when a chance encounter with my cousin Bill Dawson landed us a last-minute (and much appreciated) invitation to Christmas dinner with his family. It was much more festive with a bigger group and the food and company were lovely. This year we are spending Christmas in St Petersburg, Florida, to see the new grand-babies. I am sure there are some sorts of plans for Christmas activities but we aren’t making them. We just plan to show up and enjoy whatever happens. And whatever happens will probably be wonderful for us. This card is sent in the hope that the Holidays turn out wonderful for you, too.

A few random photos:

Speed Racer in DragonCon Parade

Photographing Parade from Fourth Floor of Parking Garage

Group Photo from Amber’s Wedding

Irene in Blowing Rock

The Simple Pleasures of Beach Week on Hilton Head Island

Breakfast at Le Farm while Amber was up for her Baby Shower

Liam_and_Eva

At Christmas we remember a birth that changed the world.
They all do.

11:11:11 11/11/11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

That doesn't happen every day.

BestPricePhoto Jack Webb Version: Just The Facts Ma'am

2011-10-26T14:11:00.000-04:00

This is a condensed version of a longer posting containing additional background, interpritation, and fluff.

BestPricePhoto.com World HQ

2378-2380 60th St, photo by Don Wiss taken 5/9/2011, used by permission by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Update: 26 October 2011 (Bumped)

Several commenters have asked if I was able to get a full refund or if I found myself out the 'restocking' fee. As of earlier this week I have recovered the full amount. Please bear in mind that charging a restocking fee is not always a rip-off. When you cut the manufacturer's seal on a product and open the box you have destroyed a noticeable percentage of the product's value in the retail market. If the product arrives in good condition, is as advertised, and was shipped in good faith then the vendor is entitled to some compensation for that lost value if you change your mind about the purchase and send it back. But, if any of those conditions do not apply -- if the product arrives broken, or the advertisement was deceptive or inaccurate -- then, provided that you can document the problem, your credit card company can probably recover the restocking fee. The trick is to expect to write to your credit card company twice, once for the initial partial refund and once to get the restocking fee back. Your credit card company's computers will assume that the initial partial refund is fair and will automatically close the case. The second letter to your credit card company will re-open the case and bring the attention of a human investigator who will evaluate your claim.

From the merchant information on my credit card transaction and from my return authorization email, BestPricePhoto's mailing address is 2389 60th St, Brooklyn, NY. I was fortunate to find Don Wiss' page where he has photos of most of the Brooklyn Camera Store storefronts (http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/). I sent him a note asking if I could use his photo of the building but he said it was too old and he would send me a newer one. His newest photo is still a couple of months old and the "going out of business" signs may be gone. And to be totally fair: the building shown in the photo has two addresses. The "going out of business" shop (at 2378) may not be related. BestPricePhoto.com, technically, does business out of the whited-out door on the right (2380).

I found BestPricePhoto.com through Google's shopping application. Their offering wasn't the least expensive one I found -- another dealer sells refurbished Nikon D7000s for a bit less -- but they were slightly less expensive than Amazon.com and claimed to be selling new products with US warranties. Here's the ad to which I responded:

The Ad, a screenshot by bigleehimself on Flickr.
Note the line items for "Battery" and "1-Year Limited Warranty" in the content list

Elsewhere on the page this text appears:

bpp3, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.
Note the promise of a USA Warranty

Before your online order is processed, BestPricePhoto will give you a call to make sure the order is legitimate and correct, and to help you select additional accessories you might not have thought of when you placed your order. When I spoke to Chris, who helped me with my order, he asked if I wanted the "two hour" or the "four hour" battery. The item list for my order included a battery but BestPricePhoto has several battery upgrade options available. I declined his offer but later I looked up the batteries they have available for the D7000.

bpp4, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.
What is shown here is their advertised price. Five-star reviews from grateful customers have suggested that BestPricePhoto will frequently give discounts on these batteries when ordered to replace the battery that comes in the kit.

But the funny thing is... There is only one battery that can go in the battery compartment of a Nikon D7000 -- the Nikon EN-EL15. It's a new battery and the knock-off battery manufacturers haven't gotten around to it. As far as I know there's no such thing as a higher-capacity version, nor a "demo" battery. All four options -- "battery" "EN-EN15", "Nikon EN-EL15" and "EN-EL15 Extended Long Life Lithium Battery" -- are the same item, with an MSRP (as of this writing) of $72.95.

Two attempts were made to charge my credit card. The first (by MCJ DISCOUNTS INC) was declined by American Express as suspicious. I received email both from BPP's billing department and from American Express, both saying the charge had been declined and asking me to verify it. I didn't think much of it at the time. Credit card companies will often call to verify a charge that seems 'unusual' and I don't place orders of that size with online dealers all the time. I called AmEx, verified that I had expected a charge for that amount on that date and then called BestPricePhoto to tell them they could try again. The second (successful) charge shows the merchant as

8887821617BESTPRICEPHOTOBROOKLYNNY
Doing Business As: 8887821617BESTPRICEPHOTOC
Merchant Address: 2380 60TH ST BROOKLYN NY 11204

My camera arrived nine days after I launched my order, within the time I was told to expect. The contents of the shipment were a Nikon box for a D7000+lens kit with the 18-105mm lens pulled out, presumably to sell separately. The promised "accessory pack" was a no-show; no toy tripod, no memory card wallet, but I hadn't wanted that stuff anyway and I didn't care. The accessories were all present and the charger had US plugs. The contained no "quick start guide" and no warranty paperwork of any sort.

I tried to register the camera online. The Nikon product registration page didn't like my serial number.

The Box, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

serial number, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

graymarketd7000, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I called BestPricePhoto and spoke with “Raymond” who appears to be their entire customer service department. I mentioned the lack of warranty documentation. His response, as I recall: “Oh, did they forget to put that in?” I also mentioned my inability to register the camera with Nikon. His response was that they worked directly with a Nikon service facility and that they would handle the process of registering the camera. He promised me a certificate of warranty “straight from Nikon” and made me hold the phone while he “had the Nikon guys send it to me.” After a few minutes wait he said he had the certification and would send it to me along with another copy of my invoice so everything would be together. In a few minutes another email arrived. Here are the more interesting parts of it...

Cert part A, screenshot by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I've omitted a few more links to Nikon pages. The email ends with a Nikon, Inc signature:

Cert part b, screenshot by bigleehimself on Flickr.

My “certification of warranty” didn’t mention a warranty at all – no warranty period, no description of coverage, nothing – it was merely an assurance that my product had been registered for me. Also, the telephone number provided was the toll-free number for BestPricePhoto and, being, I’m afraid, a suspicious person, I wondered if the note had actually come “from Nikon” as claimed.

I contacted someone who does work for Nikon (but has asked not to be identified), providing him with the text of the note above and asking if the warranty it described was likely to be legitimate. His opinion: "None of the information you provided looks legitimate. If the serial number of the D7000 is 6223221, this is not a USA model."

I called BestPriceCamera and, once again, spoke to Raymond. I told him that the warranty confirmation he had sent, since it contained no information about what was warranted, for how long, what would be fixed or by whom, was not sufficient and that I considered his advertisement deceptive and wanted to return the camera. At this point he offered to give me a warranty in writing and to extend the warranty to three years at no charge. He told me that the warranty would be offered by CSPCentral.com and that I should look into them and I would be satisfied. He sent another invoice, this time including a three year warranty (paperwork to be shipped at a future date).

I researched CSPCentral.com and found that, while they have a well-designed website, their reputation for servicing warranties on high-dollar items was spotty. The mailing address provided on the CSPCentral “Contact Us” page -- 1678 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11230 – was exactly one block from the address for BestPriceCameras. I am once again indebted to Don Wiss for this photo of CPSCentral',s storefront:

CPSCentral (1678 McDonald Ave), photo by Don Wiss used by permission by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Those not familiar with Brooklyn addresses might find this map useful. Point "A" is BestPricePhoto.com and point "B" is CPSCentral.
View Larger Map

A Few Thoughts About Online Reputation

One problem one has when complaining about one's treatment by an online merchant is how many happy, contented customers they have -- how many five-star ratings they have been given. One feels about as welcome as the guy in the third row at a magic show who yells things about mirrors and shaved cards. Most of BestPricePhoto's customers are blissfully happy with their transactions, and many of them have every reason to be. They were looking to buy a working, inexpensive camera at a discount price. And that's what they got. There may be a few line items -- for accessories and upgrades -- where they have paid more for showmanship than for value, but they are happy with the bottom line nonetheless. The ones who have purchased the less expensive cameras may have been ever-so-slightly ripped off in the warranty department but warranties for cheap cameras are of very little value anyway so, hey, if they are happy with the camera, why not?

It's the people like me -- people who fall for their "Hot Deal Today Only" special on the more-expensive 'enthusiast' cameras -- who queer the deal for everybody. If we are sold an expensive camera that we plan to use for many years and it has no warranty, or a warranty of limited value, and if it will be difficult to obtain service for the lifetime of the camera, then we have been harmed. Many of us won't know there will be problems getting service for the camera for years and when we do find out most of us will be mad at Nikon.

I decided that I could not accept BestPriceCamera’s latest offer since: 1) what was shipped was not what was advertised, specifically a camera with a US warranty; 2) When questioned about the warranty BestPriceCamera had made a concerted effort to conceal the warranty status of the camera, including sending me the above email, claiming it came from Nikon; and 3) the warranty they offered when they realized they could not convince me the camera had a Nikon warranty was not a fair substitute.

I called BestPriceCamera back and told Raymond that, having looked into the matter I still needed to return the camera and that, if charged a restocking fee, I would contest it since the product shipped was not as described when I ordered. Before he would issue the return authorization he had me go to his website and view a different listing for the D7000. He was hoping to convince me that I had received a gray market camera because I had mistakenly ordered the “Nikon D7000, 16.2 MP Digital SLR Camera Body” instead of the “Nikon D7000, 16.2 MP Digital SLR Camera Body -USA Retail Kit With Long Life Battery & Quick Charger”. It is impossible for me to know what I would have received if I had ordered the other (slightly more expensive) item but if you open both offers and look at the “This Product Includes” list you will see that both kits have the same exact contents listed including the same exact wording for the “one year limited warranty”.

The camera has gone back and a replacement ordered from Amazon.com. Whether I wind up paying the 10% 'restocking fee' to BestPriceCamera remains to be seen.

Photo from Haunted Camera

2011-09-24T13:24:00.001-04:00

20110924_38-cropped, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

My wife's pocket camera has a tiny sensor and a tiny lens. It struggles to collect enough light to capture images in indoor settings. It is also haunted by a tiny robotic ghost of Science Fiction Artist Kelly Freas who tries to help out.

Kodak, who made her M1093-IS camera, calls the robot, "noise suppression" software, but this image (cropped from an un-manipulated image straight from the camera) shows Kelly's inimitable touch. Kelly loved faces, science fiction subjects and shiny objects. Notice how every single pixel in the face, hat and hair, and in the shiny device she is holding, have been painted over by the robot in this image. Please (please, please) view this image as large as possible so you can admire his brushwork.

If you keep clicking on it you will eventually arrive at the Flickr Light Table which is pretty good.

lil' hulk

2011-09-05T23:52:00.001-04:00

lil' hulk, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Not sure who this young man is. He was ahead of me in line waiting for an escalator in the Marriot. I grabbed a quick shot while he was posing for someone else.

Northanger Abbey

2011-08-31T13:38:00.001-04:00

LibriVox cover art (Flickr)

One of the side-effects of having my GPS stolen out of my car is that I had occasion to dust off the MP3 player that I used to play audiobooks in my car before I acquired my Garmin. One of the audiobooks loaded on that player is a LibriVox.org reading of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (Read by Elizabeth Klett.) I've mentioned this audiobook here several years ago but it seems worth revisiting.

Northanger Abbey was one of the first books Jane Austen wrote and one of the last to see print. Miss Austen sold the rights to Northanger Abbey to a London publisher for £10 very early in her career but it was never published while she lived. After her death her brother (and literary agent) Henry Austin bought it back from the publisher for the same ten pounds they had paid his sister many years before. The publisher was apparently unaware that Miss Austen was, by then, the anonymous authoress of four very popular novels. Northanger Abbey was finally published the year after Miss Austen's death.

It is Austen's most overtly comedic book and is the book where we most clearly hear her voice as author. In her later, more mature, works she stands back and speaks only through her characters, but in this early, somewhat self-indulgent book she is very much a presence, commenting wittily on her ingenuous heroine, on the virtues and uses of novels, and on the literary scene as a whole. The prose is much more playful than in her later work and parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. Here's a bit where our heroine, Catherine, is greeted by her friend, Mrs. Allen, who is something of an air-head:

Catherine found Mrs. Allen just returned from all the busy idleness of the morning, and was immediately greeted with, "Well, my dear, here you are," a truth which she had no greater inclination than power to dispute...

Elizabeth Klett's reading of the book is very nearly perfect. Her intonations are spot on and she does a very good job of giving each character a subtly distinctive voice that helps the listener sort out who is who in long multi-way conversations. She reads at a good pace and never stumbles over any of the peculiar phrases or odd word orderings that sound strange to modern ears and tend to trip up other readers. Her Northanger Abbey gives testament to just how good a volunteer-produced, public-domain audiobook can be.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-30T17:29:00.000-04:00

Update See below:

For those of you who are not local to the Research Triangle area in North Carolina and have been wondering about our experiences with Hurricane Irene, I have a few photos of the aftermath here in the Triangle. For the most part, in Cary Hurricane Irene gave us a fairly breezy rainy day. For those of us who secretly look forward to hurricanes it was a bit of a letdown. But it was not without some effects:

A tree branch fell on my car...

hurricane irene branch on car, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

And a home in our neighborhood was blown off its foundations...

hurricane irene home off foundations, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Fortunately, I have seen the affected homeowners this morning and they are already at work rebuilding after yesterday's storm.

Update: 30 August 2011

It's been a funny week. I posted this joke about a tree limb falling and the next day we had a thunderstorm come through and about an hour after the storm was over the tree I was writing about dropped about a ton of broken wood and wet leaves at the end of our driveway. The teleospouse and I had gone out for a late supper when our next door neighbor called to say a big branch had fallen but missed the car. I didn't get any photos of the branch where it fell because we had to saw it up and move it last night so we could get the cars out this morning. Here's where the branch broke off:

the break, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Now that the branch it gone it is easy to see the bit of yellow insulation that hung up in the tree when a tornado destroyed a Lowe's Home Improvement store this past spring and spread bits of debris over the whole county. It's about 25 feet off the ground and well beyond the reach of my ladder so it will be there for a while.

split tree and insulation, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I wish I had gotten better shots of the pile-o-wood but I only had a minute to snap a shot or two on my way out the door to go to work. Here's the wife bundling up some of the leafy bits for the yard waste pickup. This pile she is standing behind is about 1/3 of the cut up branch.

irene cuts up, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The tree in question, by the way, is a Bradford Pear. A Bradford Pear is a very poorly engineered tree -- after it is about eight years old it will have grown more heavy foliage that its relatively fragile wood can support. They are famous for falling apart in the wind or an ice storm. They are one of the things I offer as proof of the existence of God; a poorly engineered tree requires a spotty engineer. The obvious mistakes in the way the tree was made seem to require a creator having an off day.

BestPricePhoto: A Review

2011-08-21T23:26:00.000-04:00

It has been pointed out to me by readers who have come to my blog looking for something in particular, that I tend to ramble. For any such no-nonsense readers who have come to this page looking for specific information about BestPricePhote.com and my experiences with them, I have color-coded this posting. Notice the background color of this paragraph. To skip the fluffy bits just hit the old scroll wheel and only read the stuff that is this color. Or, you can just read the Jack Web Version (Just the facts, Ma'am).

Still with me? I call that blue-gray color dodofo. Dodofo is my made-up Japanese word for the color with the RGB hexidecimal code #D0D0F0. But I digress; I had intended to start my review with some observations on nuclear weapons and Dave Letterman's jokes. Sorry. I'll try to stay on track.

Letterman and the Bomb:

The fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb is really hard to trigger. It needs a more-traditional atomic-fission bomb just to set it off. Similarly, David Letterman has only one joke and it never fails -- he has made a career of that one joke -- but it needs another joke to set it off. It works like this: Dave stands in front of the camera and tells a cheesy joke. For a second nothing happens, Dave grins. Then the audience starts to think about Dave telling that stupid joke to millions of people on national TV. Half the insomniacs in the US have tuned in to hear Dave tell that dopey joke. It's absurd that he would offload such a dud on a highly-rated show. Absurd and funny. The audience laughs. It works. Every. Time. Brilliant!

Gabora, image borrowed by bigleehimself on Flickr.

"Gabora the Gorilla Girl"

I mention Dave's ever-funny joke to get you in the mood to understand why Gabora, the Gorilla Girl has always been my favorite sideshow on the midway. To see Gabora costs each rube a couple of bucks. The audience stands around in a scruffy tent waiting for the show to start, then the Emcee (who doubles as ticket-taker) puts a rope across the entrance, closes the tent flap, steps to the front and goes into his spiel. He tells about Gabora who is from [some geographically unlikely part of] Africa and who escaped [from something bad -- witch doctor, mad scientist, something like that] and who, because of her experiences there, will turn into a gorilla if hypnotized.

The curtain opens and we see a bored-looking girl, in a rabbit-skin bikini, standing in an alcove behind heavy iron bars. The Emcee goes into his hypnotic cadence "Think 'gorilla,' Gabora! Gorilla! Gorilla! Gorilla!" and sure enough, as the light goes down on one side of the dusty half-silvered mirror and comes up on the other, Gabora is transformed. Actually, since the guy in the gorilla suit behind the mirror is never quite on his mark she is not merely transformed, but translated as well, the gorilla being several inches to the right or left of her reflection.

Once the back-stage rheostat has been turned all the way and the transformation is complete, the gorilla beats his chest, runs forward, grabs the handle on the mirror to slide it out of the way (with a sound like a sliding glass door), runs forward to the bars and pushes them down. This is the exciting part. The bars really are heavy. They make a loud bang as they hit the indentations that years of previous shows have made on the plywood stage.

At this point the gorilla runs out into the tent and rampages through the audience as they exit. On nights and weekends, when the take justifies the expense, they will sometimes have a shill in the audience to scream and run out of the tent for an extra thrill. The whole show takes about three minutes. Everyone in the audience is thinking "For this, I paid two bucks?" But it is fun in a stupid sort of way. What most people in the audience don't realize is that it was fun because of the two bucks. If it didn't cost you it wouldn't work. It's like Letterman's joke.

A Memorable Moment on the Sidewalks of New Orleans:

I remember once, when I was a much younger man, some friends and I were attending a convention in New Orleans. Three of us slipped out to check out some of the strip-joints near Bourbon Street. At one point one of my friends had gone to the bar to get a drink and another had gone to the head when one of the girls approached me and asked if I was interested in a private show "in the back." I mentioned my friends and she said that there would be room for all three of us and she could set it up for twenty bucks. That sounded interesting so I ponied up and she directed me to some chairs set up nearer to the stage. Oh, I thought, that's where "in the back" is -- kinda disappointing.' I guess the show was better from there but we shared our "private" show with several other patrons who seemed to be drunker that we were and to have a better time. I was also distracted by a sign plainly posted on the wall that said that seats in our "VIP" area were $5.00. I had paid $20.00 for three. But, oh well... What the heck. I tried to forget the sign and watch the girls but it was a struggle.

When we left the bar, not long afterwards, I confessed to my friends that I had been taken -- that I had let one of the girls convince me to pay twenty bucks for us to sit on the other side of the room. One of my friend's mouth dropped open. "But," he sputtered "I paid twenty dollars for the show." We glanced at the third member of our party. He stared at his feet for a minute and then nodded. That was a great moment -- standing there on the sidewalk like hayseeds who had come to the big city to be fleeced. We had been taken by experts. The girls had waited for exactly the right moment, when we were separated, and had acted with skill and precision. A good hustle has all the elements of a magic trick -- the pledge, the turn, misdirection, the prestige -- they were all there and they were perfect. We never had a clue. It was an honor to get to see it... and well worth sixty bucks.

Brooklyn Camera Shops:

So, having established the compensatory pleasures of appreciating a skillful ripoff, even when it costs you money, we come to the attractions offered by Brooklyn photographic equipment discounters in general, and BestPricePhoto.com in particular.

A bit of background before we turn on the dodofo and invite our impatient friends to rejoin us: When purchasing discounted photographic equipment from online vendors one makes certain allowances. The product will frequently have passed through the inventory of several vendors who, for whatever reason, found it difficult to sell, so it is not unexpected for the packaging to be shopworn. Packages will frequently have been opened and the contents rearranged; items packaged to be sold as bundled kits may have been separated and sold individually. With a first-tier retail merchant, any of these things would be cause for complaint. But when you are bottom-fishing in the discount market they are par for the course.

What one should insist on is that the shipment contains the equipment listed in the advertisement, and that the equipment is in the condition described. Manufacturer’s warranties are of particular significance in such transactions since one of the possible reasons the equipment wound up in the discount market is that there is a problem with the equipment and, since the vendors who sell such equipment online frequently have limited resources to deal with product complaints, a valid manufacturer’s warranty offers some assurance to the buyer and is factored into his buying decision.

I found BestPricePhoto.com through Google's shopping application. Their offering wasn't the least expensive one I found -- another dealer sells refurbished Nikon D7000s for a bit less -- but they were slightly less expensive than Amazon.com and claimed to be selling new products with US warranties. Here's the ad to which I responded:

The Ad, a screenshot by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The ad to which I responded in making my purchase (see above) listed the following:
• Battery
• Charger
• Eyepiece Shield
• Rubber Eyecup
• USB Cable
• A/V Cable
• Camera Strap
• Hot-Shoe Cover
• Body Cap
• Software Suite CD-ROM (incl. ViewNX)
• 1-Year Limited Warranty [emphasis added, not in original]

Elsewhere on the page this text appears:

bpp3, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The term “USA Warranty” should be mentioned here since it is intended to reassure buyers that they are not buying gray market merchandise. When photographic equipment manufacturers build their products the serial number of each unit is associated with the market into which it is to be sold. For Nikon, as I recall, the regions are: the US, Canada, the Americas (except for US and Canada), Europe, Japan, Asia(except for Japan),and Oceanea (Australia, New Zealand). “Gray Market” equipment is anything sold outside of the market for which it was made. Manufacturers generally will not honor the warranty for gray market products and Nikon USA, in particular, is very restrictive in that most Nikon service facilities will not even offer out-of-warranty, paid service for gray market products. It is neither illegal nor unethical to openly sell gray market cameras provided that the buyer is not misled about their gray market status, but because of their lack of a manufacturer’s warranty and the longer-term difficulty in getting service, they command lower prices.

An example of a reputable company that sells gray market products is B&H Photo. They don't carry gray market digital cameras but do carry gray market Nikon lenses which are clearly identified in their catalog and each entry has a link to an explanation of how the product is supported. Here is their policy on the gray market products they sell.

The First Act: The Order Confirmation Phone Call

Before your online order is processed, BestPricePhoto will give you a call to make sure the order is legitimate and correct, and to help you select additional accessories you might not have thought of when you placed your order. When I spoke to Chris, who helped me with my order, he asked if I wanted the "two hour" or the "four hour" battery. The item list for my order included a battery, of course, but BestPricePhoto has several upgrade batteries available. I declined his offer but later I looked up the batteries they have available for the D7000.

bpp4, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

What is shown here is their advertised price. Five-star reviews from grateful customers have suggested that BestPricePhoto will frequently give discounts on these batteries when ordered to replace the battery that comes in the kit.

But the funny thing is... There is only one battery that can go in the battery compartment of a Nikon D7000 -- the Nikon EN-EL15. It's a new battery and the knock-off battery manufacturers haven't gotten around to it. There's no such thing as a higher-capacity version, nor a "demo" battery. If any other battery existed you could find it on eBay. Try searching for "nikon d7000 battery -charger -grip -mb-d11 -door -multi" and see if anything but EN-EL15 pops up. Oh, and Nikon's suggested list price? As of this writing, $72.95. So, you might be tempted to ask, if the camera comes with a battery, what is in those other options? I dunno. My theory: Profit Margin

Act two: Fun with my Credit Card

The next event in the sequence is BestPricePhoto's efforts to charge my credit card. The first time they sent it through AmEx declined it as suspicious. I received email both from BPP's billing department and from AmEx both saying the charge had been declined and asking me to verify it. I didn't think much of it at the time. Credit card companies will often call to verify a charge that seems 'unusual' and I don't place orders of that size with online dealers all the time. I called AmEx, verified that I had expected a charge for that amount on that date and then called BestPricePhoto to tell them they could try again. Oddly, later, when I was reviewing my credit card transactions,I noticed that the first attempt to put the charge through (the one that was declined) showed the merchant as MCJ DISCOUNTS INC while the second (successful) charge shows the merchant as

8887821617BESTPRICEPHOTOBROOKLYNNY
Doing Business As: 8887821617BESTPRICEPHOTOC
Merchant Address: 2380 60TH ST BROOKLYN NY 11204

The only things the Google search engine could come up with for MCJ DISCOUNTS INC was that it was incorporated in May of this year (three months ago) and its address is 80 Broad St New York, NY 10004 (fifth floor).

It was good to get an address for BestPricePhoto.com, though. Web sites are so impersonal. After calls to confirm my order, and calls to get an invoice, calls about my credit card, calls to get tracking information, etc., etc., I was really starting to feel like I knew those guys. I think there are three of them but I've only talked to two. It was fun to know where they worked so I could visualize them while I had them on the phone.

2378-2380 60th St, photo by Don Wiss used by permission by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I was going to use a screen shot from Google Maps Street View to show the address but the last time the camera car went down that street seems to be quite a while ago and several businesses have come and gone in the interim. I was fortunate to find Don Wiss' page where he has photos of most of the Brooklyn Camera Store storefronts (http://donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/). I sent him a note asking if I could use his photo of the building but he said it was too old and he would send me a newer one. His newest photo is still a couple of months old and the "going out of business" signs may be gone. And to be totally fair: the building shown in the photo has two addresses. The "going out of business" shop (at 2378) may not be related. BestPricePhoto.com, technically, does business out of the whited-out door on the right (2380).

Act three:My Nikon D7000 Arrives

My camera was waiting for me when I came home from work nine days after I launched my order. Even with the delays involved in getting the credit card charge to go through they had gotten it to me within the time I was told to expect. So the shipping was OK; I'll give them that. And the contents of the shipment were, at first glance, more or less what I expected: A Nikon box for a D7000+lens kit with the 18-105mm lens pulled out, presumably to sell separately. The promised "accessory pack" was a no-show; no toy tripod, no memory card wallet, but I hadn't wanted that stuff anyway and I didn't care. The accessories I did care about -- users manual, battery, charger, strap, etc., were all there and seemed in good order. BUT a few things were missing...

The box contained no "quick start guide" and no warranty paperwork of any sort. I checked the users manual to see if there was a section on the warranty in there. No go. I did some online research and found discussions that said that Nikon DSLR bodies don't require a paper warranty card -- you can just register them online. I tried that. The Nikon product registration page didn't like my serial number.

The Box, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

serial number, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

graymarketd7000, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

A note on the value of Warranties: Modern digital cameras are surprisingly reliable. Occasionally, you will find one with a manufacturing defect that keeps it from working right out of the box, but usually they will work fine throughout the warranty period. Less expensive cameras are less durable and tend to wear out after a while -- but still long after the warranty is over -- and the vast majority of purchasers of such cameras will never have occasion to find out if their warranty is worth anything. Additionally, no one expects to get their cheap camera repaired once it is out of warranty -- they just throw it away and buy another one -- so out of warranty repairs on a hundred and thirty-dollar camera are not an issue. But for cameras costing anywhere north of five hundred dollars, with an expected useful lifetime that can run into the decades, matters are different. More on that later.

Act four: Misdirection

Cert part A, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

A few more links to Nikon pages omitted...

Cert part b, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

It's really remarkable the pull that BestPricePhotos's service center's Nikon Guys have with the company. Nikon USA seems to be filled with rage at the gray market -- often willing to alienate their own customers if they think it might depress the value of gray market products -- but when BestPricePhoto's guys at the "Nikon" service center ask Nikon to fix up a gray market camera with a warranty, they apparently say: "Well, as a favor to youse guys I guess it's OK..."

For those of you who aren't into photography, let me tell a story that illustrates what a remarkable document they had sent me.

A satanist walks into a church, saying he wants to confess his sins and seek forgiveness. He says that he has reached an age where satanism just isn't as much fun as it used to be. The thrill of human sacrifice has faded; he has grown too fat for orgies and is sure that he looks ridiculous at them; finding virgins to despoil on alters grows more difficult every month and he is ready to change teams. He asks the priest if anything can be done. The priest ask for a small donation -- for the work of the church -- and walks off. A few minutes later he returns with a piece of paper and gives it to the satanist. As the satanist reads it he becomes more and more amazed. "I had hoped there might be some hope," he said, "but I never expected full absolution in the form of a hand-written note from the Pope!... and in a Lutheran church!"

Act five: Someone in the Audience Sees the Trap Door!

My “certification of warranty” didn’t mention a warranty at all – no warranty period, no description of coverage, nothing – it was merely an assurance that my product had been registered for me. Also, the telephone number provided was the toll-free number for BestPricePhoto and, being, I’m afraid, a suspicious person, I wondered if the note had actually come “from Nikon” as claimed.

I contacted someone who does work for Nikon (but has asked not to be identified), providing him with the text of the note above and asking if the warranty it described was likely to be legitimate. His opinion: "None of the information you provided looks legitimate. If the serial number of the D7000 is 6223221, this is not a USA model."

I called BestPriceCamera and, once again, spoke to Raymond. I told him that the warranty confirmation he had sent, since it contained no information about what was warranted, for how long, what would be fixed or by whom, was not sufficient and that I considered his advertisement deceptive and wanted to return the camera. At this point he offered to give me a warranty in writing and to extend the warranty to three years at no charge. He told me that the warranty would be offered by CSPCentral.com and that I should look into them and I would be satisfied. He sent another invoice, this time including a three year warranty (paperwork to be shipped at a future date). The line item on the invoice contains no indication of who will be providing the warranty, again allowing credulous customers to think it is Nikon.

I researched CSPCentral.com and found that, while they have a well-designed website, their reputation for servicing warranties on high-dollar items was spotty. It didn’t help that the address provided on the CSPCentral “Contact Us” page -- 1678 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11230 – was exactly one block from the address for BestPriceCameras. I saw this as a negative because at this point I had had rather enough of Brooklyn for a while. A am once again indebted to Don Wiss for this photo of CPSCentral',s storefront:

CPSCentral (1678 McDonald Ave), photo by Don Wiss used by permission by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Those not familiar with Brooklyn addresses might find this map useful. Point "A" is BestPricePhoto.com and point "B" is CPSCentral.
View Larger Map

A Few Thoughts About Online Reputation

One problem one has when complaining about one's treatment by an online merchant is how many happy, contented customers they have -- how many five-star ratings they have been given. One feels about as welcome as the guy in the third row at a magic show who yells things about mirrors and shaved cards. Most of BestPricePhoto's customers are blissfully happy with their transactions, and many of them have every reason to be. They were looking to buy a working, inexpensive camera at a discount price. And that's what they got. There may be a few line items -- for accessories and upgrades -- where they have paid more for showmanship than for value, but they are happy with the bottom line nonetheless. The ones who have purchased the less expensive cameras may have been ever-so-slightly ripped off in the warranty department but warranties for cheap cameras are of very little value anyway so, hey, if they are happy with the camera, why not?

It's the people like me -- people who fall for their "Hot Deal Today Only" special on the more-expensive 'enthusiast' cameras -- who queer the deal for everybody. If we are sold an expensive camera that we plan to use for many years and it has no warranty, or a warranty of limited value, and if it will be difficult to obtain service for the lifetime of the camera, then we have been harmed. Many of us won't know there will be problems getting service for the camera for years and when we do find out most of us will be mad at Nikon.

Act six: The Curtain Comes Down

I decided that I could not accept BestPriceCamera’s latest offer since: 1) what was shipped was not what was advertised, specifically a camera with a US warranty; 2) When questioned about the warranty BestPriceCamera had made a concerted effort to conceal the warranty status of the camera, including sending me a an email claiming to come from Nikon; and 3) the substitute they offered when they realized they could not convince me the camera had a Nikon warranty was not a fair substitute.

I called BestPriceCamera back and told Raymond that, having looked into the matter I still needed to return the camera and that, if charged a restocking fee, I would contest it since the product shipped was not as described when I ordered. Before he would issue the return authorization he had me go to his website and view a different listing for the D7000. He was hoping to convince me that I had received a gray market camera because I had mistakenly ordered the “Nikon D7000, 16.2 MP Digital SLR Camera Body” instead of the “Nikon D7000, 16.2 MP Digital SLR Camera Body -USA Retail Kit With Long Life Battery & Quick Charger”. It is impossible for me to know what I would have received if I had ordered the other (slightly more expensive) item but if you open both offers and look at the “This Product Includes” list you will see that both kits have the same exact contents listed including the same exact wording for the “one year limited warranty”.

The camera has gone back and a replacement ordered from Amazon.com. Whether I wind up paying the 10% 'restocking fee' to BestPriceCamera remains to be seen.

Random Notes:

For information on Gabora the Gorilla Girl, see
‘Gorilla Girl’ sideshow act hangs on despite changing times and for how it works, check out Pepper's Ghost'

For comparison purposes, here is a Google Maps street view of Nikon's warranty service department from their address:

View Larger Map

Here's a photo I found on Flickr. Dunno if its the same building.

Nikon Headquarters, a photo by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr.

NikonUSA

Mad Science on the Menu

2011-07-26T22:26:00.000-04:00

Since the Teleospouse is an occasional reader of my blog let me start by pointing out that this is partly her fault. OK, actually, she shares the blame with our friends Calvin and Pat, and -- ever so slightly, I suppose -- with me. But it's not mostly my fault. If the caterer at Calvin and Pat's wedding reception hadn't served the chicken -- or if my lovely wife hadn't pointed out its superior tenderness or how much she liked it -- then the soldering iron would have stayed safely in the toolbox in the garage and Sunday dinner could be cooked without referring to the USDA FSIS Time-temperature Tables for Cooking Ready-to-eat Poultry Products.

What was obvious about the chicken at the reception was that it had not been cooked the way chicken is usually cooked -- baked in a hot, dry oven to an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature recommended by the 1999 USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service rules for the cooking of uncured poultry.) A chicken breast cooked to 160 degrees is safe to eat; at that temperature it will be pasteurized in something under fifteen seconds. But it will also have the dry, tough and rather chewy texture that explains why a half bucket of leftover fried chicken will consist mostly of breasts that were ignored while people dug for the juicy, less-temperature-sensitive legs and thighs.

I am a fairly good cook. When the wife mentions that she has enjoyed a dish we have while we are out and about my first thought is to try to figure out how to make it at home. The caterer's inexplicably-tender chicken breast required a bit of research. After many long hours of flogging Google's search engine I think I know: a) how the caterer cooked the chickens they served, and b) a method available to a home cook to achieve something similar although it would be difficult to create an exact duplicate without expensive, commercial-grade equipment.

What a) and b) above have in common is that they rely on more recent standards released by the USDA that provide guidelines for pasteurizing meat and poultry at lower internal temperatures by holding that temperature for a longer time. The same germ-killing goodness that is achieved by holding the internal temperature of a chicken breast at 160 degrees for 15 seconds can be achieved by holding it at 155 degrees for 45 seconds or at 150 degrees for three minutes or at 140 degrees for half an hour. Please note that this is the internal temperature -- the temperature of that coolest spot right in the middle of the meat -- not the temperature of the oven or the surface of the skin. For a chicken breast to be safe to eat when you cook it to an internal temperature of 140 degrees that coolest spot in the center has to be at least 140 degrees for at least half an hour.

As for item a) -- how the caterer probably cooked the chicken (and the tenderloin) served at the reception -- my guess is that it involved a commercial steam/electric/convection combination oven (something like this one, for instance). As to whether this sort of thing is also available to the home cook, and thus is a candidate for the answer to item b), it would depend on your budget, and on the size of your kitchen and how much highfaluting plumbing and wiring you are willing to install. For most home kitchens I expect the $20,000 price tag would be a problem. But if you have the dough, and if you have a really big, industrial-style kitchen, and if the idea of cooking ten nearly-perfect roasted chickens at the same time appeals to you, then by all means get yourself a steam/electric combo oven and stop reading now.

...

Still here? I thought so.

The other way to cook a chicken breast similar to the one served at the reception is to cook it in a controlled-temperature water (or oil) bath at, say, 138 degrees Fahrenheit until it is thoroughly cooked through, and then pop it is a hot pan (or under a broiler) for a few seconds to brown the skin. To keep it from getting too waterlogged during the extended cooking session you probably want to put the chicken in a vacuum-sealed plastic package to protect it from the water. This cooking process (which you will have seen if you watch the show "Iron Chef" on TV) is called Sous Vide (say it "soo VEEd") from the French term which, I am told, means "under vacuum."

<Mister-Wizard-segment>

To understand the necessity for the water bath, imagine yourself setting your oven to 140 degrees, putting in your raw chicken and climbing in with it yourself. Ok... there are a couple of problems with my thought experiment. First, your oven can't be set that cool, and second, you won't fit. So let's try again. Imagine setting your sauna to a rather-cool 140 degrees and taking in the raw chicken with you. That's easier.

Assuming that you have given the temperature time to equalize before you climb in with your dead avian friend, everything in the sauna will be at 140 degrees -- the rocks on the heater, the air, the cedar bench -- all 140 degrees, assuming that nothing is wet (we'll get to that later). When you plop you flabby thighs on the cedar bench a thermal tug-of-war ensues. The 140 degree cedar will give up heat trying to get your skin up to its temperature, and your skin will pull heat out of the cedar which will cool it down. At the point of contact a compromise temperature will quickly be reached. Since the lightweight cedar has a low specific heat (it can't hold much heat energy,) and since your skin has a much higher specific heat, the resulting temperature at the interface will be much closer to skin temperature than to cedar temperature. And, since cedar is a poor conductor of heat the temperature will tend to stay fairly cool and the hot bench won't burn you butt (or cook your chicken, for that matter.)

Of course, while the cedar is a good thermal insulator it isn't perfect. Heat will continue to flow from the rest of the bench to the part touching your thigh, and on into your skin, and through the layer of flab to your gluteus maximus, and from there it proceeds into your bloodstream and all over your body. You will gradually get hot. That's why you get into a sauna. But you won't really cook because when your skin temperature goes up you will begin to sweat and the evaporation will cool the parts of you exposed to the air. (The part sitting on the cedar bench will stay hot and start to make an ass-shaped puddle.)

Your chicken, being dead, can't sweat, so it will heat up faster. (Do birds sweat, actually, by the way? I'm not sure. Dogs don't -- except for a little bit on their feet -- they keep cool by panting and drooling. I dunno how birds keep cool.) But chicken meat is wet and there will be considerable heat lost to evaporation. Also, neither air nor cedar is a good conductor of heat and, even without the loss to evaporation, it would take a long time for the chicken to get to the internal temperature where bacterial growth stops -- a bit over 130 degrees -- given that the temperature of the sauna is not that much hotter. Clearly we need a way to bring the bird up to temperature faster so it doesn't spend too much time doing the funky chicken before it finally cooks.

There's a couple of things that would help -- we could pour some water on the hot rocks to increase the humidity and minimize evaporative heat loss, or we could point a fan at the chicken to blow hot air against the chicken (the fancy-schmancy oven I mentioned above does both) -- but the easiest thing is to surround the chicken with something that has a higher specific heat, such as 140 degree hot water. To see how that works remember what happened in our thought experiment when the back of your thigh met the 140 degree cedar bench. Now imagine that the carpenter who built the bench left an exposed nail head -- let's make it a big twenty-penny nail, a full half-ounce of 140 degree, buttocks-searing iron -- and that you sat on it. The thermal tug-of-war where your thigh touches the nail head will go differently than before. That nail will have rather more heat energy available to try to bring your skin up towards its temperature. Even though the nail starts out at the same 140 degrees as the surrounding cedar it will feel hotter when you sit on it. You will notice it.

So if you have a sauna and you want to use it to cook chickens at the same time as you beat yourself with birch branches, the trick is to have a fifty-gallon steel drum filled with 140 degree hot water in the corner. Open the lid of the drum and drop in your chicken. Put the lid back on the drum so evaporation doesn't cool the water. While you are doing the traditional Finnish sauna thing -- shower, get in, sit and sweat, get out, shower again, get back in, flog yourself with the vihta... lather, rinse, repeat -- don't forget to open the lid occasionally and give the water a stir (so the water near the chicken stays hot). After about an hour of Scandinavian fun you chicken should be pasteurized and safe to eat. Voila! as the Fins say when speaking French.

</Mister-Wizard-segment>
Since I don't have a sauna, that plan was out. Also out was the eight-hundred dollar gadget at Williams-Sonoma, although I do admire it. It's a little too rich for my blood. Here's their video:

The three-hundred dollar Sous Vide Demi Supreme is also tempting but still more than I want to spend. Then there are several controller units that you plug your rice cooker or crock pot into to control the temperature (here and here). They cost about $150 if you shop around. Candidly, they probably represent the most sensible option but I am still too cheap.

Which brings us to the do-it-yourself kits on eBay. Here's the one I bought:

ebaypurchase, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The price was about fifty bucks but the vendor is in Canada and the shipping set me back another twenty-five.

Of course the kit only includes the key components. There are one or two more items you will need to put together a working device. Here's my kit along with the other items I bought to make it work:

20110723_1, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Many of the above objects are things that someone who frequently tinkers with electronics would have on hand, but I didn't. If you add the price of all the wires, jacks, fuse holders, grommets, twist connectors, etc. to the price of my kit you start to get awfully close to the price of the pre-assembled controller... but, if I had bought that I would have missed all the fun of making it myself. *sigh*

One thing that makes it hard to decide how much to claim I spent on the project is how to account for the stuff I had left over. Lots of items I needed came in large packs. I used one of the thirty-one grommets in the bag below and two of the twenty-five twist connectors.

20110723_9, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I had planned to make the cutouts in my dollar-store plastic box by drilling a pilot hole and then shaping the hole with a nibbler. Unfortunately, the nibbler needs a fairly sizable pilot hole and the plastic box has a tendency to shatter when you try to drill it. I found it easier use a Dremel multi-purpose cutting bit both for drilling and for shaping the holes. It gives you a messy looking cut but I had face plates to cover the messy bits.

20110723_18, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here I am starting to fit in the switch and the plugs.

20110723_26, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The outlet assembly has jumpers that join both socket's line connectors and both socket's common connectors so that both plugs can share a single line and a single common connection if desired. Here I am breaking the jumper off on the line side to separate the two outlets. I want one of them to be controlled by the temperature controller (so I can plug in my crock pot) and the other to be live whenever the switch is turned on (so I can plug in the aquarium air pump that drives the circulator.)

20110723_27, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The line side of the switch/neon-lamp assembly also had a jumper that needed to be broken off.

20110723_30, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here is what the finished product looked like. The power cord comes in on your right through the rubber grommet. A few twists of electrical tape around the cord just inside the grommet provide strain relief. The line connection goes to the switch and is split three ways coming out of the switch. It goes to the circulator outlet, to the solid state relay and through the 1-amp fuse to the PID controller. The dc output of the PID controller goes to the input side of the SSR which causes it to drive both the crock-pot outlet and the neon lamp when it is turned on. The common (ground) return wiring completes the AC wiring which is generally to the right of the PID controller. One the left (yellow wires) is the wiring for the temperature sensor jacks. I tried to keep the AC and the sensor wiring separated to avoid crosstalk that might corrupt the temperature reading.

20110723_43, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Since the photo of my wiring is not particularly helpful and since my description in the preceding paragraph is probably indecipherable, I have drawn a schematic. The PID controller came with a manual (of sorts.) I can't be sure but, from the way it reads the manual was translated to English from its original Klingon by drunken elves.

schematic, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

One of the parts of the manual that can be made out is a schematic somewhat similar to the above. A few parts are mislabeled in the schematic in the manual and, oddly, it shows the SSR between the heating element and ground. This seemed less safe to me since it would mean the crock-pot connection would have line voltage present even when the relay was off. In my device (and in my schematic) the SSR controls the application of line voltage to the heating device and the ground is always connected.

When I finished the wiring, checked my connections, plugged the device in and turned it on there were two problems that slowed me down. First, the wire I used to connect the PID controller to the jacks for the temperature sensor were stranded and when I soldered the connection to the jack plugs a stray strand caused a short circuit. This caused the temperature to read -199.9 degrees Centigrade at all times. I found the short and fixed it which corrected the temperature reading. The other problem was that the neon indicator light -- which was supposed to show that the crock-pot heater was turned on -- was lit up all the time. After hours of research I decided that the SSR had enough leakage current when it was in the "off" state to light the neon bulb. I could add a bleeder resistor in parallel with the lamp to fix the problem -- or I could let the crock-pot heater serve as the bleeder resistor and remember that the neon lamp only indicates correctly when the crock pot is plugged in and turned on.

Here is the device holding the crock pot at 57 degrees Centigrade (about 134 Fahrenheit). The PID controller has a self-configuration process where it measures the parameters of the device it controls and sets itself accordingly. It took about half an hour, during which time the temperature of the water went up and down by several degrees. The automatic configuration process seems to have worked well. The device holds the temperature of the crock pot within 0.1 degree Centigrade and seems quite stable.

20110723_41, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here is the whole setup operating in its place of honor on top of the chest freezer in the garage. It is holding a chuckeye roast at 57 C for 30 hours. I divided the roast into two pieces and sealed the pieces with sprigs of rosemary in ZipLock vacuum freezer bags. The ZipLock bags work quite well; you pump the air out with a cheap, washable plastic hand pump; the bags hold their vacuum well and are designed to go in the microwave so they resist temperatures up to, and slightly above, the boiling point of water.

20110723_37, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

If you look closely at the photo above you will see that the lid on the crock pot doesn't quite fit. It is the lid from our other (smaller) crock pot. There is a funny story about that but first, instructions for how to drill a hole in the lid of your crock pot for the temperature probe.

Please read these instructions to the end before starting. Be sure to wear safety glasses.

The best way to drill holes in glass is to use a diamond-dust-coated drill bit but you can use a less-expensive carbide bit to do one or two holes (after which it will be dulled). To drill a crock pot lid you select the location for the hole and place the lid upside down on a work surface you don't mind drilling into. Arrange the lid so the location to be drilled is the lowest point and pour half an inch of water into the lid. The water is to lubricate the drill and keep drill and glass from overheating. Work slowly. Don't force the bit; just keep a steady light pressure and stop occasionally to let any heat dissipate. You will notice that the water starts to get milky. This is from fine particles of glass suspended in the water. By this method you can drill a hole about half way through the tempered-glass lid of your crock pot. Then it will explode. Tell your wife you dropped it. Later you can confess in your blog.

The problem I had hoped to solve with the hole in the lid is the positioning of the temperature probe. The probe is stainless steel, about four inches long and nicely waterproof. I don't want to get the cord in the water since a leak at the place where the cord joins the probe might throw off the temperature reading. If you lay the probe on the rim of the crock pot and lay the lid on top it sits at too shallow an angle and barely touches the surface of the water. If you stick it in farther then the cord gets wet. Googling for other people who have made similar apparatus I found found crock pots that have screw-on handles that can be removed and the mounting hole used for the temperature probe. I am still working on the temperature probe / lid problem.

Here is a closeup of the crock pot it the lid off to show its contents. Inside are the two pieces of chuckeye roast and a circulator made from (hot-water-rated) CPVC pipes and joints, copper tubing and an aquarium air pump. Around the rim, clockwise starting at 9:00 are: the temperature probe for the PID controller; the temperature probe for my meat thermometer; the copper pipe that feeds the circulator and my frying/candy thermometer.

20110723_42, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The circulator uses an air-lift to pump water; the bubbles rising in the vertical CPVC pipe lift water from the bottom of the crock and the water flows out the horizontal tube. The warm air flows out the top of the vertical tube and exits the crock through the gap between the crock and the lid (where are the pipes and wires and probes hold it up.) The circulator works fairly well (you can see the stream of water flowing out) but is a bit noisy and quite a bit of water is lost through evaporation. In a bit over 30 hours of operation I needed to top off the water five times. As well as cooking your food the rig makes a pretty good humidifier. As such it may be able to come in from the garage during the winter when warm, humidified air is more welcome than it is at the height of the warmest summer in NC since 1952.

20110723_40, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here is the reading on my meat thermometer. 57 degrees Centigrade is 134.6 Fahrenheit so we are a degree and a half off. That's may have something to do with the lid being removed (it had been reading 134 with the lid on) but is good enough anyway. The reason I have three thermometers going is that when you are using sous vide techniques to slow-cook rare meat at low temperatures you are only about ten degrees away from safety problems. Obviously with a newly homemade device I want a bit of confirmation that the temperature is right. It seemed OK. Next time I will omit the frying thermometer but the meat thermometer is probably a permanent fixture because of the added safety factor and because my PID controller only does Centigrade and it is handy to have the meat thermometer to remind me what temperature 57 C is in temperatures I can understand.

Results

ChuckEye:

When it was time to serve the chuck steaks I took the meat out of the bags and sliced each of the pieces in half (giving me four steaks, each about 1 1/2" thick). The (rare but thoroughly cooked) steaks went on a hot grill for a very quick sear and were served. They were quite tasty -- really good, actually, for such an inexpensive cut of beef -- but I think I over-salted them in the bag; they had a bit of a cured beef taste and texture (a bit like corned beef) and had lost quite a bit of liquid in the bag. But they were very tasty and I saved the beef tea from the bag to make onion soup the next day.

BBQ Chicken:

I did boneless thighs and deboned breasts. The thighs went in the sous vide first for two hours at 160 degrees (to soften the connecting tissue so they wouldn't be chewy) and then I dropped the temp to 140 and added the more-temperature-sensitive white meat for another hour and a half. When they came out I covered them with a smoky-sweet BBQ sauce and threw them on a very hot charcoal grill for just a bit of caramelization. It was very tasty but next time I may leave the ribs on the breasts to protect them from the heat on the grill while I am giving them the quick char.

Duplicating the Caterer's Chicken from the Reception:

Haven't attempted a whole chicken yet. I think I know how to proceed but they had a sale on rotisserie chickens last week at the store where we shop and we are a bit tired of roasted chicken right now. I'll keep you posted.

In General:

The electronics seem to work flawlessly; the temperature control is very good -- quite stable and recovers quickly without too much overshoot -- but the crock pot lid / temperature probe positioning issue is still a work in progress. Nor have I perfected my sous vide recipes quite yet. But I remain hopeful and will let you know.

Links:

My photoset on Flickr for this project contains a few more photos of the process with notes that may expand on the information provided here.

Mad Science, a set on Flickr.

A vastly swell web page written by the guy who did the sous vide cookbook that everyone seems to talk about. http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html#Equipment

A guy who built a sous vide cooker using the same stuff from eBay. http://mythopoeic.org/sous-vide-cooking/

Another DIY page: http://www.instructables.com/id/Sous-Vide-temperature-controller-for-50-100/

Seems to be the manual for the PID controller (or one like it): http://www.sure-electronics.net/measure,tools/TE-MT007_Ver1.0_EN.pdf

... or maybe... http://tinymicros.com/mediawiki/images/a/a4/CB100_Dual_Digital_PID_Temperature_Controller.pdf

A two part series on Sous Vide from the French Culinary Institute: part 1 and part 2

Science's finest hour! http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/03/how-to-sous-vide-steak.html

Info on cooking chicken sous vide http://www.cookingsousvide.com/info/sous-vide-guides/more/sous-vide-chicken-guide

UDSA guideline tables to pasteurize been, chicken and Turkey: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf
Note: These are the required holding times after the internal temp has been reached.

Not actually sous vide related but endlessly interesting: http://khymos.org/hydrocolloid-recipe-collection-v2.2-screen-res.pdf (found link here: http://www.saltyseattle.com/2010/09/potato-artichoke-bisque-sous-vide-with-carrot-caviar-spheres/ )

http://www.edinformatics.com/math_science/science_of_cooking/chicken_sous_vide.htm

The Cheap Critic: Skyline (vs Battle LA)

2011-06-14T22:36:00.000-04:00

If you ignore the time you spend on special effects, how much longer does it take to do a decent job on an alien-invasion film? A script that makes sense -- how much longer for that? How much longer does it take to find better actors, or a least get decent performances from the actors you've got? How about getting the shooting permits so your entire film doesn't need to be shot in one building? If you put that all together how much longer does it take to do a decent job?

As it turns out, that question is easily answered. Brothers Greg and Colin Strause were hired by Sony Pictures to do some of the flying-squid-monster special effects for Battle LA while, at more or less the same time, they were also writing and directing their own, oddly similar, flying-squid-monsters attacking Los Angeles film called Skyline. Sony made noises about a lawsuit but lost interest when Skyline was such a dud at the box office.

It seems a reasonable assumption that the two productions were more or less in sync at some point and that the difference in release dates -- November 12th 2010 for Skyline vs March 11th 2011 for Battle LA (four months less one day) -- is mostly explained by the extra time needed to release an A-list vs a B-list production.

I won't say much about Battle LA except to note that it is a decent film and you should see it. I also won't say much about Skyline except to note that it is not particularly good and you might consider giving it a miss. Both of the films have decent special effects -- more or less the same effects, as it happens -- and if you've seen Battle LA then you don't need to see Skyline.

Since I've suggested that you skip Skyline you might want to know what it is about. So, a brief summary: A fashionable and well-to-do young black film maker has invited some friends from New York to visit. He is hoping to lure one of them -- a graphic artist -- to move to Los Angeles and work for him but the artist's secretly-pregnant girlfriend is not keen on the idea. A party is thrown in their honor in the film maker's penthouse. We meet the building manager who shows up to report noise complaints. He turns out to be one of the less tedious characters. Shortly after the party ends, while everyone is sleeping off the effects, giant flying squid monsters come thundering down from the sky and the special effects commence. In addition to the standard brain-eating toothiness -- and the ability to shoot sticky tentacles out of various body parts -- the main weapon of the squid monsters is their bright blue light which it is not good to look into because it 1) makes the skin around your eyes turn black like a raccoon's mask and 2) it takes over your brain. While they are not too busy having their brains eaten one-by-one, or staring into the blue light, the characters have a spirited debate about whether it makes more sense to hide from the giant flying squid monsters in an all-glass penthouse with the blinds closed or to try to break out and get to the marina because, umm... well, they seemed to think that being on a boat might... help... somehow... because, er, you know, maybe the flying squid monsters don't like water, or something. In any event, the whole escape-on-a-boat thing never happens because every time they try to leave the building they are turned back by drippy, brain-hungry monsters who demand to see their County of Los Angeles Fire Department location filming permits for the marina as required by section 22.56.1925 of the Los Angeles County Code. In the end (spoiler alert) only the graphic artist and his girlfriend are left -- she because giant flying squid aliens don't eat the brains of pregnant women, and he because there is something about his brain that doesn't agree with them.

Cheap Critic: Unknown

2011-05-23T08:56:00.000-04:00

Depending on how you choose to look at it Unknown is either totally derivative or completely original. The Liam Neeson film is a mosaic put together from the plots of other popular films in much the same way a designer patchwork quilt is pieced together from other things.

unknown.

The acting is generally good. Neeson is well-suited to his part and plays it very well. One interesting aspect of this sort of stolen-identity thriller is that you get to have two romantic interests -- the wife that is part of the stolen identity and the girl our hero meets while trying to deal with the theft -- January Jones and Diane Kruger play these two roles, respectively, and are quite good. Bruno Ganz has a nice little role as a retired East German secret policeman and he provides the most interesting performance in the film from an acting perspective. Frank Langella has a good scene with Ganz but is otherwise underused. The rest of the cast hit their marks and say their lines in a perfectly professional manner but it is all in the service of the script and nobody particularly stands out.

Aside from rather a lot of well-done car chase scenes the main interest in Unknown is the plot which, as I said, is pieced together from the plots of various spy thrillers and light science fiction films. In Unknown the protagonist is a scientist on his way to a biotech conference who has an automobile accident and, when he wakes up from his four-day coma, discovers that someone else has assumed his identity. This is a well-used setup and the interesting thing about Unknown is that, rather than trying to find a new angle, it takes a number of previous similar films and braids their plots together. After the accident Neeson is confused about who he is, and so are we; is he Matt Damon from the Bourne Identity? or Gary Sinese from The Forgotten? Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall? Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate? Harrison Ford in Bladerunner? Unknown zigs and zags from one familiar plot to another. We've seen all the endings -- the main suspense is to guess which strand of the braid we will be following when we get to the scunci.

Reid's Graduation

2011-05-16T10:43:00.001-04:00

Reid's Graduation, a set on Flickr.

A few 3D Photos from the NC Zoo.

2011-05-15T12:59:00.001-04:00

baboons4, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

You'd think the Zoo would be a great place to take 3D photos -- but it's harder than you think. The animals are either too far away to get any parallax for a 3D image, or are displayed in a dimly-lit environment where the el-cheapo cameras I used to make my 3D rig have no chance of capturing a usable photo, or the animals are in constant motion so they would be blurred and out of sync, or more often, all three. Still, I managed to get a couple of half-way decent shots. You can view them on my other blog BigLee 3 D.

Fujifilm hs10 -- Initial Impressions

2011-05-08T11:24:00.000-04:00

Some Background

Some years ago I bought the Teleospouse a Kodak P712 camera. Whenever I get her a new camera it will initially frustrate and confuse her and she will be cross with me for giving her a camera with so many confusing features. Usually, but not always, she learns to use enough of the features of her new camera to make her happy and she comes to like it. She was particularly cranky about the P712 when she first got it and she really, really likes it now, which is sad because the mechanics of lens -- the zoom motor and lens position sensors -- are wearing out and the P712 is dying.

Just before the new year I found an extra-cheap closeout price on a Kodak Z981 -- Kodak's then-current super-zoom bridge camera -- which was the nearest equivalent to the P712 that Kodak offered. The Z981 was a mixed bag. The menus have been improved since the P712 and the camera captures fairly-detailed images with bright, true colors provided the light is good. In low light, or towards the long end of the zoom on a cloudy day, the image quality is not so good and the image stabilizer struggles. But the main problem with the Z981 is the build quality. It feels cheap and plastic-y in the hand and the optics on the eye-level electronic view finder (EVF) are awful. When you are trying to use the EVF to evaluate a shot you have taken the chromatic aberration of the plastic lenses in the eyepiece surrounds any high-contrast edge in the image with wide smears of red and blue and you have no idea whether your shot is usable. The LCD display on the back of the camera is better but since the Z981 is a sunny-day camera, and since glare is a problem with the LCD screen, there are problems there too.

It should be pointed out in Kodak's defense that my conclusions about the Z981 have been based on one camera which was bought on the cheap from an online vendor's closeout -- a deal possibly related to the fact that Kodak was about to announce a new model. One of the annoyances of buying "bridge" cameras -- cameras that try to span the gap between the affordable, consumer-oriented point-and-shoot cameras and the more expensive, better-performing DSLR cameras that target the enthusiast market -- is that the only way to try them is to buy them; camera stores don't carry the mass-market commodity camera lines (especially Kodak models) and the big box discount stores may (or more often may not) have a demo model on the floor but hardly ever with working batteries in it. My Z981 is the only one I have ever seen with power so it is, perhaps, unfair to generalize but I did send the unit off to Kodak to see if they could correct the problem with the EVF. They replaced the eyepiece and I saw very little difference.

So, since neither the wife nor I were thrilled with the Z981 I resumed my online browsing for an ultra-zoom bridge camera in our price range. Which brings us to the HS10.

The Fujifilm HS10

One of the subtexts of most of my posts about photography is that I am a cheapskate. While I spend some money on gear I try very hard to get things as cheaply as possible. If I bought the Kodak Z981 because it was last-year's model (about to be replaced by the Z990) then I got the Fujifilm HS10 because its price had gone soft due to Fuji's announcement of this year's HS20. If I had been buying the camera for myself I might have waited for the HS20 to drop a bit -- it has some features that interest me (such as a hot shoe for an integrated TTL flash) -- but since it is for my lovely wife who insists on existing light the HS10 seemed perfect.

Here are some photos I took the first day after the HS10 arrived.

One Last Springtime for a Dead Tree, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The morning was dark, cloudy and ominous when I took this photo of the trump of a tree I cut down last fall. (A few hours later a line of storms came through that spawned tornadoes nearby.) I wanted to capture something of the gloom so I set the exposure compensation to -2/3 of a stop and set the color to 'chrome' to bring out the green ring caused by algae growing on the sap rising from the still-living roots of the dead tree.

I should note that, having set the exposure compensation for this shot, I forgot to reset it to my ususal -1/3 stop that I generally shoot with on most cameras. If some of the other shots in this sequence seem a tad dark that might be why.

strawberryblossom, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here is a macro shot. The Teleospouse likes to take macro shots of small flowers and insects. The HS10's macro mode will do the job for her but it will be a struggle getting her to stand back far enough to focus. The best setting for shooting butterflies is to stand about 7 feet away and use the full zoom. It will be a struggle convincing her not to stand closer but the camera won't focus closer than 6 1/2 feet at full zoom in macro mode. Update: I looked into this further and the truth is more complicated. See Fujifilm HS-10 Macros.

dandlion, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here's a super-macro shot of some dandelions. Super-macro only works at wide angle but it will focus on a subject almost touching the lens and gives good magnification and a surprisingly deep depth of field. Because of the wide angle and the large depth of field one struggles with backgrounds in super-macro mode. When showing off a photo of your prize-winning rose blossom you may also see, in the background, an out-of-focus but recognizable shot of the FedEx guy making a delivery next door.

smallBird, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

One thing I like about the HS10 -- something that most bridge cameras don't have -- is the ability to mount filters. I noticed that the filter size was the same as my Sony VCL-DH1758 1.7x teleconverter that I had bought for a previous camera. Here is a crop from a shot I took with the teleconverter mounted on the HS10. This bird was about 50 yards away and I couldn't really see it with my naked eye. It was just a gray dot in my neighbor's tree. Including the crop this is the approximate equivalent of a 2000 mm telephoto lens (hand held). The teleconverter works surprisingly well on the HS10. In theory the HS10's image stabilizer should undercorrect by a factor of 1.7 but it seems to do better.

At this point my testing was interrupted by a line of thunderstorms passing by. This storm spawned tornadoes which caused extensive property damage and loss of life in the central North Carolina area.

neighborGirl, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

This is another shot with the teleconverter. After the storm had past I was standing on my front porch looking for something to photograph with my 51 X optical zoom camera. (The HS10's 30X times the teleconverters 1.7X gives a 51 X range, at least in theory.) The clouds broke for a few minutes and this small girl came out to see what the storm had done. I believe the yellow object she is holding to be a scrap of fiberglass insulation from a Lowe's Home Improvement store that was destroyed by the a tornado many miles away. After the storm these yellow blobs of soggy fiberglass were spread over several counties.

I am pretty happy with the lack of chromatic aberration (purple fringing) using the teleconverted. Clicking on the image will take you to Flickr and clicking around in Flickr will eventually bring you to a larger image where you can look at the contrasty edge of the white railing in the lower right corner. Not too bad at the price.

robin1, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

robin2, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

These two shots of a robin were taken from my back steps using the teleconverter at full zoom. With the teleconverter mounted the HS10 struggles some times with autofocus. I was using single center-zone autofocus and the camera just couldn't seem to find the bird -- not enough of the right kind of contrast, I guess. I focused by putting the center focus zone on the tree to focus in both shots. For the second shot I repositioned the frame while holding the shutter button half-way down to hold the focus then took the shot with the bird better positioned.

jellybeans, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

This is another super-macro shot. It was taken by poking the lens of the HS10 into our candy jar so the lens was almost touching the jellybeans. I found that I got a sharper result when I used the Aperture Priority setting and stopped the camera down to about f/7. The shots with the smaller aperture seemed sharper (which was expected) but also contrastier (which was welcome but not anticipated.)

livewire3, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

liveWire2, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

liveWire1, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I took these three shots (of a tree that had fallen across a power line and caught fire) to illustrate what a 30X zoom range looks like. I don't believe I was using the teleconverter but I might have been for the first shot. They also serve to illustrate some of the limitations of a long telephoto shot. These have been fairly heavily post processed and they are still photographically lousy. It was very cloudy and quite dark and drizzling a bit. The image stabilizer, which has impressed me in other sequences, did not seem completely equal to the challenge here. Both of the telephoto images were the best shot selected from a several shots taken, and all of them show camera motion blur.

Moon, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The obligatory shot of the moon taken by all photographers obsessing over a teleconverter. This is a unedited, hand-held, approximately 1200mm equivalent shot of the moon taken on a not-particularly clear night with the teleconverter. I was going to try a shot the next night with a tripod but the next several nights were cloudy and then the moon was gone.

Update: Moon using Tripod.

moon_w_telecon, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

Here's that shot of the moon using a tripod. This image has been tweaked slightly but not cropped (although I did use the instant-zoom feature that crops slightly on camera when the image is captured.)

Most of the shots above have been post-processed (cropped, sharpened, lightened or darkened, etc.) to improve their appearance when viewed online. If you are curious about the original images, straight off the camera, they can be found in this set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigleeh/sets/72157626565347460/

Noise

One thing I noticed about the HS10, almost from the first image, was that it exhibits rather a lot of digital noise, even at fairly low ISO values. That said, the noise is very well behaved. Up to ISO 1600 the noise consists of small, well distributed, nicely random luminance noise -- rather like the grain that those of us who remember film would expect from,say, Ektachrome. It is only when you go past 1600 that you start to see much chroma noise which creeps in as yellowish blotches in the shadow areas.

The result is images that will certainly make fine prints up to 8X10 -- and probably be ok at 10X14 -- but which do not reward pixel-peeping or extreme cropping. But with a 30X optical zoom lens with a very competent image stabilizer you shouldn't need much cropping, and pixel-peeping is an awful vice which I am trying to give up.

One thing I did wonder about was whether the settings I used had made the images noisier than they would have been if I just took the camera out of the box and started shooting. For my first-day shots I (mostly) took the advice on settings for the HS10 that I found on the blog of a photographer whose HS10 images I very much admire.

In particular I wondered what effect the Tone and Sharpness settings had on the camera's noise reduction algorithms. In an effort to find out I created a series of nine photos, all taken at ISO 1600, that represented all possible combinations of the Tone and Sharpness Hard / Standard / Soft settings. I shot at ISO 1600 so there would be sure to be some noise for me to examine. As expected the Hard/Hard images had the most visible noise and the Soft/Soft had the least. These two images show those extremes:

tone_hard_sharpness_hard_iso_1600, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

tone_soft_sharpness_soft_iso_1600, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

I'm afraid I didn't control for other variables very well in this sequence. The light was sunlight filtered through trees on a windy, partly cloudy day. The shots were hand held and the auto-focus may well have picked out different parts of different blossoms from shot to shot. My results showed more or less the expected relationships between the settings and the appearance of noise in the images but the effect of changing the settings was not particularly strong.

Here is a montage of corresponding 100% crops from the nine images.

pixelsAt1600, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

The unedited images are available in this Flickr set.

The Bottom Line

I tend to oscillate on the image quality of the HS10. It produces images with bright, true colors that look fine on a 20 inch computer monitor and would probably make acceptable prints up to about the same size--which, coincidentally, is about the size of the biggest print I ever remember making. But every time I click on a HS10 image in FastStone (to pop up a 100% view to check the focus) I think Whoa, what a grainy, gritty mess that is when you look at the pixels! On the other hand, as cameras add resolution, pixel-peeping becomes a sillier and sillier vice. One can easily obsess about half an eyelash in a photo with ten people in it -- a detail that would never show in any print you are likely to make.

DSLR enthusiasts (and I am one of them) will tell you that the smaller sensors on the ultra zoom bridge cameras limit the image quality that it is reasonable to expect -- which is perfectly true. But they will then go on to suggest that these cameras are merely economic expedients for people who are unwilling to pay the higher prices that the better-performing DSLR equipment commands. This is sorta-kinda only half true. The fact of the matter is that there just aren't any 30X optical zoom lenses for the larger-sensor DSLR cameras. The larger size of the sensor -- which gives the DSLR its superior image quality -- would, through simple arguments of focal length and scale, require that such a lens be friggin' huge. If anyone made a 30X zoom lens for a digital camera with a full-frame-sized sensor you'd need a lens wallah just to carry the other end of the thing for you.

So on balance, I think I like the HS10.

My Plot to Sell a Cheap Coffee Grinder

2011-04-21T21:23:00.000-04:00

I'd like to thank my readers in advance for reading whatever part of this they get through. I am venting here. I need to write this ... but I suspect that some of you will not feel the need to read it. That's perfectly ok.

I bought an inexpensive Black and Decker coffee grinder a few months ago to replace another (nearly as cheap) Melitta grinder that, after years of service, had found a small pebble in a bag of beans and died. I installed it in the kitchen next to the coffee maker and the Teleospouse took an immediate dislike to it. Her stated reason was that, while the Melitta stopped after grinding enough coffee for one pot full, the new machine didn't. The more important reason was probably that the Black and Decker machine makes an even-more-annoying noise than the Melitta did. So I picked up a refurbished Cuisinart grinder (at Comp USA of all places) and put the Black and Decker on EBay.

My main vice with ebay is that I work too hard on my listings. If I had a truckload of coffee grinders I could justify the time I spent crafting my description, but for one yard-sale-class item it was absurd that I wrote all this:

B&D Coffee Grinder - Stainless - burr (not blade)
Are you looking for the ultimate coffee grinder to go with your $2400 espresso machine? Well, keep looking; this ain't it. What you have here is a nice-looking, stainless steel coffee grinder that makes a nice companion to a drip coffee maker. It is for people who don't want to spend a month's pay on coffee-making gear but who also know that fresh-ground coffee tastes better. Exposure to air makes coffee go stale. Whole bean coffee stays fresh longer since the air can only get to the outside of the beans. Once you grind the coffee it goes stale quickly. Better brands of pre-ground coffee, which are packed in nitrogen, start to go stale as soon as you open the bag. The cheaper stuff was probably stale when it went in the bag. A week after you open the packages you will find that cheaper beans, ground just before you use them, will make better coffee than the pricier pre-ground product. Amazon describes this grinder thusly: Dial adjusts so you can set the texture exactly how you want – from very fine Turkish blend to coarse percolator grind. Dual safety mechanism ensures that unit will not operate unless top cover is closed and ground coffee receptacle is in place. Electric coffee burr mill grinder with Auto Shut Off function. Dial adjusts so you can set the texture exactly how you want. This grinder is lightly used and is being sold because my wife prefers a model with a large input hopper and an adjustable timer that can be used to grind enough coffee for one pot and then stops. This model has a small hopper and, while it does have an auto-shutoff timer, it runs long enough to grind all the beans you put into it. Personally, I find measuring the beans into the grinder and then grinding them all gives a more-precise dosing than timing the grinding -- since beans don't feed evenly -- but what the boss wants, she gets. Grinder is used in original box and comes with the cleaning brush but no instructions. It's a fairly simple device so you won't need the instructions. Open the top. Put in enough beans for a pot of coffeee. Turn the grind selector knob to the desired fineness. Make sure the lid is closed and the receiving hopper is in place (or it won't run) and push the button to start it up. When all the beans are ground push the button again to stop it. It will stop itself after a minute or so if you don't mind listening to it whine -- me, I push the button. The top burr comes out (turn left to remove, right to lock in place) if you want to clean the grinding chamber, and the little brush that comes with the grinder is helpful.

B&D Coffee Grinder - Stainless - burr (not blade)

Are you looking for the ultimate coffee grinder to go with your $2400 espresso machine? Well, keep looking; this ain't it.

What you have here is a nice-looking, stainless steel coffee grinder that makes a nice companion to a drip coffee maker. It is for people who don't want to spend a month's pay on coffee-making gear but who also know that fresh-ground coffee tastes better. Exposure to air makes coffee go stale. Whole bean coffee stays fresh longer since the air can only get to the outside of the beans. Once you grind the coffee it goes stale quickly. Better brands of pre-ground coffee, which are packed in nitrogen, start to go stale as soon as you open the bag. The cheaper stuff was probably stale when it went in the bag. A week after you open the packages you will find that cheaper beans, ground just before you use them, will make better coffee than the pricier pre-ground product.

Amazon describes this grinder thusly:

Dial adjusts so you can set the texture exactly how you want – from very fine Turkish blend to coarse percolator grind. Dual safety mechanism ensures that unit will not operate unless top cover is closed and ground coffee receptacle is in place. Electric coffee burr mill grinder with Auto Shut Off function. Dial adjusts so you can set the texture exactly how you want.

This grinder is lightly used and is being sold because my wife prefers a model with a large input hopper and an adjustable timer that can be used to grind enough coffee for one pot and then stops. This model has a small hopper and, while it does have an auto-shutoff timer, it runs long enough to grind all the beans you put into it. Personally, I find measuring the beans into the grinder and then grinding them all gives a more-precise dosing than timing the grinding -- since beans don't feed evenly -- but what the boss wants, she gets.

Grinder is used in original box and comes with the cleaning brush but no instructions. It's a fairly simple device so you won't need the instructions. Open the top. Put in enough beans for a pot of coffeee. Turn the grind selector knob to the desired fineness. Make sure the lid is closed and the receiving hopper is in place (or it won't run) and push the button to start it up. When all the beans are ground push the button again to stop it. It will stop itself after a minute or so if you don't mind listening to it whine -- me, I push the button.

The top burr comes out (turn left to remove, right to lock in place) if you want to clean the grinding chamber, and the little brush that comes with the grinder is helpful.

Can you find all the stated and between-the-lines negatives I put in there to try to control expectations so that people who bid on it would be happy with it when they received it? Not expensive or high-end? Check. Small hopper? Check. Not great for espresso? Strongly hinted. Annoying noise? See "listening to it whine."

I was way more than clear about what I was selling.

It sold. The buyer paid slightly too much for it. He paid $20.50 for a used item that Target sells for five dollars more. And he paid more than that for shipping it to Canada. (I would have said Quebec but that would make the rest of this posting pointless since you would all know what was coming.)

Several weeks after the item was shipped. This message appeared in my EBay messages inbox (which I don't look at every day if I don't have any currently active items).

Dear bigleeh,

I buy a grinder without blade ( you write NOT BLADE) and i recive a grinder WITH BLADE. I am in passion. Your description is deception.

- ?????

I was sorry to hear he was in passion about this. To try to help, I replied:

Dear ?????,

Désolé, je n'ai pas vu ce premier message. Je ne sais pas pourquoi je l'ai raté.

S'il vous plaît excuser mon français - Google translate n'est pas parfait.

Peut-être c'est parce que la traduction imparfaite que vous ne comprenez pas le moulin à café que vous avez acheté de moi. Voici la description qui est donnée par le fabricant. "Black et Decker"

Il est dit ...

Obtenez la saveur et l'arôme phénoménale de votre café avec un système de moulin de meulage de précision bavure. Avec moulin de meulage, vous obtenez des résultats plus uniformes, tout en préservant les huiles naturelles délicate des haricots - pour une meilleure tasse de café. Un sélecteur de mouture permet de régler automatiquement la texture de la mouture - à partir d'une mouture très fine pour un espresso à une mouture grossière pour le café turc et de la brasserie percolateur. Mill Burr système de broyage. Sélecteur de mouture. Pieds en caoutchouc antidérapant. Grincement des conteneurs amovibles et d'assemblage. Bouton-poussoir.

Il ya peut-être des sites Web de langue française qui parlent lames en acier inoxydable sur mais ils sont de mauvaises traductions.

English:
Here is the description that is given by the manufacturer. "Black and Decker"

Get phenomenal flavor and aroma from your coffee with a precision burr mill grinding system. With burr mill grinding, you get more uniform results while preserving the delicate natural oils of the beans - for a better cup of coffee. A grind selection dial lets you automatically adjust the texture of the grind - from a very fine grind for espresso to a coarse grind for Turkish coffee and percolator brewing. Burr Mill Grinding System. Grind Selection Dial. Slip-Resistant Rubber Feet. Removable Grinding Container and assembly. Push-Button Control.

There may be French-language websites that talk about stainless steel blades but they are bad translations.

BigLeeH

- bigleeh

His turn

Dear bigleeh,

The problem is not the translate of the text, it's the title: Stainless - burr (not blade). It's a BLADE grinder. Your title is false. With the shipping, it's expensive for an use BLADE grinder.

- ?????

I looked at the feedback he had left for other sellers on EBay -- to see if he was generally hard to satisfy or if he had singled me out for special treatment. The second seemed to be the case: he seemed mostly content with his heavy-metal CDs and first-person-shooter games. I was interested to note that after complaining about his purchase from me, he had bought the same model of Cuisinart grinder to replace the Black and Decker that I had. His new grinder uses exactly the same grinding mechanism as the B&D grinder -- underpowered motor driving set of disk-shaped steel grinding burrs that spin too fast, causing the beans to rattle around in the grinding chamber which produces lots of coffee dust which makes a mess and compromises the flavor of the coffee through over-extraction. More expensive grinders have more powerful low-speed motors and step-down gearing to fix this problem. I will buy myself one... someday.

Determined to get the last word in (hey, you don't have to be a Canuck to be hard-headed), I replied.

Dear ??????,

J'ai démonté l'appareil quand je l'ai nettoyé. J'ai vu les bavures. Deux disques en acier inoxydable. Ils ont grincements de dents. Le café passe entre eux et le broyage. Il moud du café exactement le même que votre Cuisinart que vous avez acheté plus tard. Les bavures sont les mêmes. Je ne suis pas un menteur. Vous vous trompez. J'ai un feedback ebay parfait pour dix ans. Ce n'est pas une meuleuse cher. Ce n'est pas un moulin à très bonne. Mais il comporte des bavures.

J'ai remboursé votre argent, car vous n'êtes pas satisfait. Je n'ai pas le faire parce que vous avez raison.

I disassembled the unit when I cleaned it. I have seen the burrs. Two stainless steel disks. They have grinding teeth. The coffee goes between them and is ground up. It grinds coffee exactly the same as your Cuisinart that you bought later. The burrs are the same. I am not a liar. You are mistaken. I have a perfect ebay feedback for ten years. It is not an expensive grinder. It is not a very good grinder. But it IS a burr grinder.

I refunded your money because you are unhappy. I did not do it because you are right.
Lee

- bigleeh

He lodged a complaint with EBay against me asking me to refund price plus shipping. Trying to be the adult in the story I made a counteroffer of refunding the purchase price (but not the shipping) which he accepted. (I think... the PayPal computer has us wrong-way-round, thinking I am the buyer and he the seller.) He left left negative feedback for me (the only one on my over-ten-year history) and I guess we are done.

In retrospect I regret the counter-offer. If I had let the claim proceed, EBay would have investigated the claim and I could easily have provided documentation of the accuracy of my item description. Assuming that the EBay investigator was an English-speaking grownup the claim would have been dismissed. I would have kept the purchase price unless the buyer was willing to pay to ship the grinder back for a refund, but more important, EBay does not allow buyers who lose a claim against a seller to post negative feedback.

So, I am out the twenty bucks I refunded to him (or a cheap burr coffee grinder, depending how you look at it) since the grinder wasn't worth shipping to Quebec and wasn't worth shipping back. And I am also without my perfect feedback score. And the lady in Ohio that he was bidding against -- the one with something about "Cat Lover" in her EBay id -- is out a coffee grinder that she would have been happy with.

Christmas 2010 Advance Delivery Holiday Newsletter.

2010-12-13T23:35:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas

from the North Carolina Branch of the Haslup Clan

It’s time for another installment of the North Carolina Haslup Clan Obligatory Christmas Letter ™ and, as it happens, here it is. It is written very much in the hopes that it will find you and yours all well and happy, and having a Merry Christmas… or a Happy New Year, or whatever other holiday is timely whenever I finish the letter and get it mailed out.

When I first sat down to write this year’s newsletter I had in mind an approximately chronological presentation and the first thing I realized is that I couldn’t remember much about the first half of the year. There was, mind you, nothing wrong with the first part of the year; we did stuff – the time passed pleasantly enough – but, in retrospect, there wasn’t really much to write home about. I let this problem stump me for an absurd amount of time; I sat there, staring at a blank screen, trying to remember something we did in January or February that would be worth the effort to write down. It was only today, the fourth day in December, with the various postal deadlines for Christmas letters looming, that I realized there was much that was interesting about the year, and I should just do the most interesting thing first, then write about the second most interesting, and so forth until I have filled the space allotted and/or exhausted the patience of my long-suffering readers.

Chris and Reid

Item Number One: A Wedding. The most interesting news for the year by far won’t be news at all for some of you since many of you were there when it happened. Christopher was married October 30th to Reid Clonts – now Jennifer Reid Clonts Haslup – who, for those of you who weren’t at the wedding and don’t know, is a lovely and charming young lady and a very welcome addition to the family. I used all four of her names here in part to tease Reid, who tried to get the Jennifer part dropped when she changed her last name to Haslup, and in part so that, reading this, she can see that it really does make her sound like a princess to have so many names, and is not at all a bad thing. Apparently, changing your last name is easy but changing your first name is hard; it requires hard-to-obtain paperwork which she described to me but I have forgotten – I seem to recall something about a visa signed by General DeGaulle, but perhaps I am remembering something else.

The newlyweds live in an apartment in Raleigh with Reid’s dog Roo (Rue? Roux?) about whom there was some concern leading up to the wedding that, being rather set in his ways he might take a dim view of all the changes of situation that a bride’s dog necessarily faces. But he did much better than expected, even putting up with an extended visit in a household with other dogs while his mistress was away getting married at the Ridgecrest Conference Center in Black Mountain, NC, or was at Disney World, or on a cruise ship off the Mexican coast, or at some other port of call in Chris and Reid’s rather ambitious honeymoon. The apartment (which this paragraph was originally about) is convenient to Christopher’s job at Capstrat where he works as a graphics designer, and to NC State University where Reid is hoping to complete her PhD in Dye Chemistry. In her work for her dissertation she is becoming one of the leading experts on dying things black and on the various color gradations and degrees of blackness of things so dyed. When she receives her degree she hopes to find a teaching position, where she will struggle with the fact that the term “Black Studies” is already in use by a different department.

Janet and Irene – Christopher’s and Reid’s respective mothers in laws

A wedding, of course, is the joining of two families and I am pleased to report that Reid’s people and ours seemed to mix without untoward incident at the wedding. Irene and I like Reid’s mom, Janet, in particular. She will fit in nicely with the family, I think. Since she doesn’t know the family that well she may not know what sort of a compliment that is – and neither do I, sometimes – but it remains true.

Item Number Two: Another Wedding. The main thing I am instructed to say about Amber’s upcoming wedding is that it is a really, really small affair and the mailing list for this newsletter runs much longer than the invitation list for the wedding. Amber’s schedule at the Lake Erie School of Osteopathic Medicine (in Bradenton, Florida) has very few breaks for the next several years and those breaks are brief. If she wants to get married (and she does) then this year’s New Year’s break is pretty much it. The wedding is being held on New Year’s Eve morning in a Tampa restaurant that does events and the size of the venue limits the attendees to immediate family and a few local friends. If your invitation fails to arrive you may have been one of the names forced below the line when we belated realized that the bride and groom must be included in our count.

Amber and Lee. At Christopher’s Wedding (left) at Disney World (right)

Amber is marrying Lee McPherson who will pass for a renaissance man. He has a PhD in chemistry, has worked as a computer programmer, and is handy with things mechanical. He fixed the transmission on Amber’s PT Cruiser and when he was done they drove it away. It was this last part that impressed me because I too have made repairs to Amber’s various cars over the years but my repairs often ended with the car being towed away with a bag of assorted greasy car parts in a plastic bag on the passenger seat. Since the renaissance man biz is a bit slow right now, Lee is teaching chemistry at a community college in St. Petersburg, Florida, and waiting for a the rebirth of the job market for chemists.

Lee proposed to Amber while they were visiting the Magic Fountain of Montjuic in Barcelona this past spring as part of a trip to France for Lee’s mother’s and grandmother’s birthdays. The more observant among you will have noticed that Lee and I have the same name and, in answer to the first question that everyone seems to ask: No, we haven’t worked out what we will be called so people can tell us apart. Actually, it’s not hard to tell us apart. Lee has black curly hair, and I have… rather forgotten what sort of hair I used to have.

Item Number Three: Everything Else. It’s been a busy year. Lee has been working at Glaxo Smith Kline where he has converted one of their accounting systems to handle multiple currencies. Capstrat is one of Glaxo’s vendors and, since Chris and Capstrat are both in the database, Lee uses them to enter test transactions in the system. Sadly, the test system is not hooked up to the real world and all the business steered Chris’ way is only make-believe. Irene continues to sell cheese at Harris Teeter and to volunteer at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The NCMA has reopened in their much-larger space and Irene and the other docents have been kept quite busy giving tours. Their current big exhibition is the Art of Norman Rockwell which is well worth seeing and runs through the end of January.

Various Cousins (Several Times Removed) from the Copley Reunion

In July we attended a Copley family reunion on Gwynn’s Island, Virginia. We stayed in nearby Gloucester and spent a few hours at the Blackbeard Pirate Festival in Hampton. The reunion was for descendants of my mother’s father’s parents and most of the people there were first and second cousins of some sort. There were lots of kids – they would be cousins once or twice removed. I have included several photos of the event here but I won’t try to identify people in the photos. Many of the ladies looked like their mothers had when last I saw them and, while it is a natural mistake to identify someone you see infrequently as her mom, it never makes anyone happy. It was over supper during the reunion weekend that Amber and Lee, just back from France, announced their engagement. The reunion was quite an event and I am quite grateful for the hard work that several of my cousins did in organizing it.

More Cousins. Eddie Demonstrates the “Mosquito Sounds” Hearing Test App on his IPhone and Assorted Young Cousins Enjoy a Pile of Dirt on the Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Dad and I at the Atlantis Resort in Nassau

My next subject is the cruise to the Bahamas that Irene and I took with dad in early September and, as a sort of preamble, I would like to confess that I am totally unable to steer a kayak. Before you all write to tell me that to turn left you either paddle on the right or drag you paddle on the left, or that you can use your paddle as a rudder, let me say that I know all that. It just doesn’t work for me. There is something about the way I hold my paddle, or the shape of my stroke, that allows me to paddle on the right and still turn right, or paddle on the left and still veer left, depending on which side of the boat offers the nearest obstruction for the damnable, unsteerable thing to run into.

Kayaking Through a Mangrove Marsh on Grand Bahama Island

That said, if you are ever looking for an excursion on Grand Bahama Island, you might consider the Lucayan National Park Kayak and Cave Tour. The first leg – kayaking through a mangrove estuary – is one of the highlights of the trip. It includes stops where the guide pauses and all the boats gather around while he tells interesting and amusing things about the mangrove marsh. For details of this part you would have to ask dad, who was in the boat with the guide. Irene and I were busy at the time zigzagging our two man kayak back and forth across the narrow channels behind them, giving the mangrove roots a much closer, hands-on inspection as we ran into them. All I remember the guide saying at the stops in the mangroves was “Ah, they’ve caught up. We can go on.”

The tour also includes a gourmet lunch -- ok, bologna on white bread, cheap packaged cookies, apples and powdered lemonade, but after a morning of wrestling with mangrove roots it was pretty tasty, and they did have some guava jam which gave it some Bahamanian flair -- plus a guided nature walk, an hour at a really nice beach and a tour of two “caves” which, National Geographic will tell you, are some of the most extensive in the world. Of course, nothing on Grand Bahama being that far above sea level the caves are almost entirely underwater, but you do get to see quite a nice hole in the ground with stairs you can descend (about 30 feet) to water-level.

Dad and Irene Climb the Stairs out of the “Cave”

In January… [yes, I have remembered January …] Irene made her annual trip to Disney World with her former co-workers from the time when she worked at the Disney Store. Amber and Lee came over and spent one day with her in the park. Shortly after her return to NC, her car was involved in one of the showiest parking lot car accidents I have ever seen. A woman who had been drinking ran into a car in the parking lot at Harris Teeter -- and then she tried to flee the scene, running into Irene’s car plus six more cars and a shopping cart corral in the process. Her demolition derby show took place in the employee area of the parking lot and the most of the cars she hit belonged to Irene’s coworkers. No one was hurt in the accident but of the nine cars involved Irene’s was the least damaged at slightly more than $2000 in repairs (for which the woman’s insurance paid.)

Irene’s car is the white Subaru wagon on your left.

Miscellaneous Photos:

Breakfast in Gloucester Va.

Family Photo in Atlanta Last Dec. Irene’s Fellow Disney Store Expatriates.

Irene and Her Cousin Lorrie At Ridgecrest

Gateway Support Fun

2010-11-27T12:36:00.000-05:00

There are no agents available to chat with you right now. Please try again later.
There are no agents available to chat with you right now. Please try again later.
You have been removed from the queue. Please contact us by email.
You are currently number 1 in the queue. We apologize for the delay. We will assign you to an agent as soon as one is available. The average amount of time a customer has to wait is 00:48.
Sujith (Listening)
Sujith: Hi, my name is Sujith. How may I help you?
lee haslup: I am trying to get HDMI audio to work on my netbook.
lee haslup: I went to the Intel site looking for dirvers but they say I have a "custom" driver that they can;t update.
Sujith: I will be glad to assist you with your inquiry.
lee haslup: My netbook came with a windows 7 update which I have installed.
Sujith: Could you please confirm the serial number or the SNID of your product is lxw80x01493207ff12500?
lee haslup: That looks right. I copied it off the bottom of my netbook.
Sujith: Did you purchase the product in the US or Canada?
lee haslup: In the US
Sujith: Lee, the serial number does not match our records. Could you please recheck the serial number?
Sujith: You may also provide SNID. It is an 11 digits number which can be found along with the serial number.
lee haslup: the SNID is 93203275325
Sujith: Lee, I see that the computer is out of warranty.
Sujith: As a onetime best effort, I can provide you with some basic information or self help links to fix the issue.
Sujith: May I know the exact issue with your computer?
lee haslup: yes, please
lee haslup: I have no audio on my HDMI connection
Sujith: I will provide you a web link which would be helpful for you.
Sujith: http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2008/Tempest/2905998Rfaq7.shtml
lee haslup: And the control panel lacks the device controls for it.
lee haslup: I have already read that link. It didn;t seem to help.,
Sujith: Was it working fine before?
lee haslup: it has never workd. I didn't try it before I upgraded to Win 7
lee haslup: I am hoping for a video driver update
Sujith: How did you upgrade Windows operating system?
lee haslup: on a dvd from microsoft
lee haslup: there was a coupon included with my netbook when I got it.
Sujith: When did you upgrade Windows operating system?
lee haslup: Dec 2009 (less than 1 year ago)
Sujith: Lee, I am sorry to inform you that technical assistance for this kind of issues are provided by our dedicated support team. They will help you resolve any software related issues.
Sujith: They have the facility to connect to your computer remotely and resolve the issue. You can simply sit back and relax, see the unit work normally.
Sujith: They offer various support packages including yearly subscriptions. A very nominal fee is associated with these packages.
Sujith: If you wish to hear more on this team and their support packages, I shall setup a call back and our representative will call you at your convenience with these details.
Sujith: Would you like me to setup the call back for you?
lee haslup: yes.
Sujith: For Setting up a callback may I have the below details:
Sujith: 1. Telephone Number: 2. Alternate telephone number: 3. E-mail address: 4. Best time to call with time zone:
lee haslup: The computer was purchased 1 year ago today, How long was my warranty
lee haslup: 919.555.3641 (no alternate) bigleehimself@somedomain.com
lee haslup: afternoons are best.
lee haslup: eastern US time zone.
Sujith: May I know then time zone?
Sujith: Thank you.
lee haslup: do you know the length of my warranty?
Sujith: It is one year.
lee haslup: Should have called yesterday then.
lee haslup: Thanks. You've been no help. But not your fault.
Sujith: I am really sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Sujith: Thank you for contacting Acer Technical Support. Have a great day.
Sujith has disconnected.

Episode 72 In which I waste YOUR time for a change.

2010-11-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I sat down at my computer to do something else -- something important and necessary, as I vaguely recall -- and I wound up wasting half an hour catching up on the WOOT.com weekly podcasts. This half-hour represents time I don't have to waste and I am sure that all of you are out beavering away at whatever it is that focused, goal-oriented people do on a cold and drizzly Saturday morning in November. So I hit on the brilliant plan that I would create a post here with several Woot! videos embedded -- in the hope that you will all waste your time watching them and, if enough of you do so, it will slow down the progress of the world at large and give me a few minutes to catch up...

I'll start with the Halloween podcast since I, sort-of, missed Halloween this year. My son got married the day before. The wedding was out of town and I didn't get back until Halloween was over. Hmmm... The wedding... There is something I was supposed to... Oh yes, I promised to post wedding photos. I'll get to that. But first...

Feel free to watch that again. It takes time to embed these things and write these brief comments and, if I am going to waste more of your time than of mine you are going to have to work with me on this. Here's the latest podcast. It sucks in just about every way possible. But, because it sucks in just the right ways it is very funny and oddly endearing.

So, I've included a live-action bit and some lousy animation. All that remains is puppets to complete the set.

Grrr. I just remembered that I had to resize the embed windows to make them fit in my blog's template. That took several minutes. Please watch you favorite video again a couple of times so I can catch up that time too. Or better yet, follow some of these links:

Real Actual Field Tests #7: BuckeyBalls

Woot Podcast Mail Bag

Katy Perry's "California Gurls" -- Ben the Over-Literal Dermestid Beetle

When you have watched all of those several times check back. Maybe I'll have some wedding pictures up...

Mystery Mushrooms in Back Yard

2010-09-05T22:29:00.001-04:00

Some photos of polyspore mushrooms growing in our backyard in a spot where we had a large pine tree removed and the stump ground. I took a stab at identifying the mushroom from photos I found online but while it looks a bit like meripilius giganteus it clearly isn't one.

Whatever it is it's quite large. Several of the fruiting bodies are more than a foot across.

The main thing that convinces me that this is not meripilius giganteus is that several sources have said that giganteus (which of all the photos I found on line it most resembles) makes a white spore print, while my mushrooms sit in a dusty pool of red-brown cinnamon-colored spores.

Here's a closeup of some grass that has been covered with the obviously not-at-all white spores.

I started to clear away the grass to get a better photo but was fascinated to find that the musrooms had grown around the grass instead of pushing it aside. Here is a stem of grass growing through the middle of the mushroom.

When these mushrooms first emerge they look rather like an over-cooked fried egg -- a white, plate-shaped cap with a egg-yolk-yellow center and a brownish rim around the edges. As they mature the center color darkens and spreads and the single plate-shape grows quite large. Once it gets about 10 inches in diameter other plates start to grow on top but they lay quite flat (compared to other photos I have seen of similar mushrooms). The younger growths have a bit of a spiral shape and are rather pretty, I think.

Here's a shot from another angle with Jaxon getting into the photo.

One last photo from yet another angle. As I mentioned above, the area where the mushrooms are growing is the spot where we had a large (24" diameter) pine tree removed (after watching similar trees squashing houses in our neighborhood like bugs during wind storms.) The mushrooms are obviously growing on the decomposing roots of the tree and, I think that the part of the mushroom that shows above ground is a small part of a larger, mostly underground organism.

I am fairly sure that several of my friends developed an interest in mushrooms during their wild college days. If you are one of them and you remember anything about mushrooms -- or, for that matter, much about college -- and you have any notion of what sort of mushroom I have here, do let me know.

Window Willie: Life continues to imitate fiction.

2010-08-24T10:12:00.001-04:00

F&SF November 1956

Here's a snippet from Robert A. Heinlein's 1956 novel The Door into Summer:

Yes, I invented Hired Girl and all her kinfolk-Window Willie and the rest-even though you won't find my name on them. While I was in the service I had thought hard about what one engineer can do. Go to work for Standard, or du Pont, or General Motors? Thirty years later they give you a testimonial dinner and a pension. You haven't missed any meals, you've had a lot of rides in company airplanes. But you are never your own boss. The other big market for engineers is civil service-good starting pay, good pensions, no worries, thirty days annual leave, liberal benefits. But I had just had a long government vacation and wanted to be my own boss...

I got to thinking about dirty windows and that ring around the bathtub that is so hard to scrub, as you have to bend double to get at it. It turned Out that an electrostatic device could make dirt go spung! off any polished silica surface, window glass, bathtubs, toilet bowls-anything of that sort. That was Window Willie and it's a wonder that somebody hadn't thought of him sooner. I held him back until I had him down to a price that people could not refuse. Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?

And here's a bit from Physorg.com's "Self-cleaning technology from Mars can keep terrestrial solar panels dust free" the day before yesterday:

The self-cleaning technology involves deposition of a transparent, electrically sensitive material deposited on glass or a transparent plastic sheet covering the panels. Sensors monitor dust levels on the surface of the panel and energize the material when dust concentration reaches a critical level. The electric charge sends a dust-repelling wave cascading over the surface of the material, lifting away the dust and transporting it off of the screen's edges.

A note on the illustration: The question may be asked, what does the illustration that F&SF selected have to do with Heinlein's novel? Not much, actually. The woman in the painting is a redhead. Heinlein liked redheads, his wife was a redhead and the romantic interest in the novel was a redhead. But Door into Summer is a time-travel romance and the girl in the story spends most of the book as a twelve-year-old. Still, I am sure Heinlein liked the painting, for obvious reasons, and he was easily mercenary enough to appreciate the extra readers that it would attract.

The Cheap Critic: Metropolis

2010-08-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw the film Metropolis at our local boutique cinema -- the Galaxy in Cary -- and enjoyed it thoroughly. Here's a trailer for the version I saw which contains newly found footage that restores the film to within a minute or two of the original version screened in its 1927 German premier:

Fritz Lang's Metropolis was the first science-fiction mega-epic and, even in today's post-Star Wars culture of high expectations it remains visually stunning. It has always been a favorite of mine but, that said, there have always been a few obstacles to full enjoyment that I had to work around. Possibly the biggest problem is that the central theme of the film -- "the heart must be the mediator between the head and the hand" -- is a childish and annoying take on the conflict between capitalists and labor in an industrialized society. The screenplay was written by Lang's then-wife Thea von Harbou, and Lang left the ideological content pretty much entirely up to her, focusing his spectacular talents on on the plot, the visual storytelling and the symbolic content. The result is a gigantic, brilliant film -- filled with some of the most striking visual metaphors for the dehumanizing potential of the industrial workplace ever filmed -- that leads up to a trite, maudlin ending that makes one squirm.

And what's worse, if you put the film in its historical context it's hard not to notice how neatly von Harbou's thesis fits as a seque to her later enthusiasm for National Socialist economic theory. Lang and von Harbou split up over her Nazi enthusiasms which he very much did not share, and Lang fled to the US where he spent most of the rest of his life disliking his film for its idiotic theme. It was only near the end of his life that he was able to get over his distaste for the thematic content and see past it to the achievement that the rest of the film represents. I mention this in my review so that readers who may be seeing the film for the first time can begin the process of getting over the idiotic theme ahead of time and not let it spoil their enjoyment of one of the greatest science fiction films ever made.

The other problem that I have struggled with in viewing Metropolis is that it is a long, silent film and, while it is wonderful, it has always also been a bit wearying, especially since it seemed disjointed and the plot was hard to follow. I must admit to a bit of a worry about the new "restored" version. In the back of my mind was the thought that, while it was exciting that they had found another half hour of footage in a print from Buenos Aires, I hoped I would be able to stay awake to see it since the old version always seemed more than long enough.

I am pleased to report that the restored version of the film, while it still seems longish, is much more engaging and the length is felt as epic sweep rather than as an artistic endurance contest. The restored footage gives the film a plot one can follow and it is easier to get through the new, longer version than the shorter but disjointed versions. One is swept along through the film and deposited at the (stupid) ending in a very enjoyable rush. It is a huge improvement.

Also wonderful is the accompanying music which is a modern orchestral recording of a restored version of the original score. Silent movies were never intended to be watched in silence and the music track is a very important part of the experience. The orchestral version of the original score is wonderful and represents a good, strong second-best way to see the film.

The best way to see Metropolis is to find a performance of the film accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra, described on their website as

"a three man musical ensemble, writing and performing live accompaniment to classic silent films. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources.

Performing at prestigious film festivals and cultural centers in the US and abroad (The Telluride Film Festival, The Louvre, Lincoln Center, The Academy of Motion Pictures, the National Gallery of Art and others), Alloy has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era."

I've seen them preform Metropolis with an older print and it was astounding -- easily the best possible way to see the film -- and they have rewritten their 1991 score to fit the new, longer version, After an April premier performance at the TCM Classic Movies Festival in Los Angeles they are now touring with the new, restored print. Sadly, none of the performances on their schedule for the rest of 2010 are in the southeast -- and with both of my kids getting married in the next four months my travel budget is limited -- but I plan to keep an eye on their schedule and catch a performance at my next opportunity.

Check out the Alloy Orchestra's upcoming performances. If there's one you can get to, do that. If they are out of reach, plan to catch the new, restored version of Metropolis at your local cinema. It's worth the trip either way.

Oh, and thanks to Julie of the Triangle Geeks Meetup group, for organizing the outing and bringing my attention to the showing which might otherwise have slipped by unnoticed.

Review: Soundfly SD WMA/MP3 Player Car Fm Transmitter for SD Card, USB

2010-05-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

My car is eight years old and it has a very adequate sound system -- one that was pretty nice in its day -- but it is not MP3 friendly. The CD player won't play MP3 encoded disks. It has no USB input port, and no auxiliary inputs for an external MP3 player. I do have a cassette player in my car. and a cassette adapter is an option, but then I have to figure out how to keep my MP3 player charged on long trips. This is starting to get into a lot of wires to fumble with in my car.

Enter the Soundfly. In principle the Satechi Soundfly MP3 player and FM Transmitter is everything I should need in order to add all the missing features to my car's sound system. It is a small device that plugs into your cigarette adapter. It has a built-in MP3 player that works through the FM radio in your car. It will play music or audio books from a USB thumb drive or from an SD memory card. It also has a standard jack for an input that it will also transmit to your FM radio so you can use it with an external MP3 player, or a computer, or your phone, or whatever.

One theoretically handy feature is that when you are using its built-in MP3 player it will remember which track you were on and resume at that point when you power it back up after a stop. What should be even better if you listen to audio books is the ability to set a bookmark so it will restart at exactly the place in the chapter you were at when you stopped for gas. If you are thinking about buying the device as Satechi currently sells it you should know that the first feature--going back to the same track you were on--works great, but the second feature--setting a bookmark--is mostly useless due to a firmware bug that prevents its use past the first few minutes of a long chapter. More on the firmware bug later but first a few more impressions:

The FM modulator in the Soundfly is the best I have ever used. Most FM transmitters for your car hiss and buzz and fail to block out competing external signals which, for some reason, always seem to be the sort of obnoxious hip-hop which is most unwelcome in the middle of you Jane Austin audio book. But with the Soundfly I simply own 88.5 on the FM dial as my personal private frequency.

If your radio is compatible with the radio data standards the Soundfly will display the MP3 tag information on your radio's information display. My radio is not compatible so I can't speak to this feature. All I have to navigate with is the three-digit display on the unit itself which briefly shows the directory number and track number on your memory card or thumb drive when you enter a navigation command and usually shows the FM frequency.

The unit itself has a few control buttons but many of the buttons you will need for audiobooks--fast-forward, fast-reverse, next and previous track and folder--are all on the small remote control. In general I think remote controls for use in your car are silly but this one works ok and there is, I guess, something to be said for a hand held device where you can use muscle memory to find the buttons instead of taking your eyes off the road to look at something plugged into your cigarette lighter socket.

As to the firmware bug I mentioned it happens when the unit is performing operations that require a timestamp in the file it is playing. My guess is that the variable or register they are using will not hold enough bits to save a timestamp past, say, the fifteen minute mark in a track. If you have a single track that plays longer than fifteen minutes the Soundfly will play it fine as long as it is not interrupted but if you try to save a bookmark past the fifteen minute mark it will fail to save it, and if you try to fast forward past the fifteen minute mark it will jump backwards to somewhere near the start of the track. This means that if you have a thirty minute chapter and a twenty-five minute commute you will arrive at work with five minutes of chapter left to play and, unless you sit in your car and listen to the end of the track before you report for work you will spend most of your ride home trying to get back to the point where you left off.

There are several books where I simply never heard the end of a few chapters and others that I only heard because I listened to them on my computer after I had arrived home. It is a maddening process. Your objective is to fast-forward to minute fourteen -- just before the unit will get lost -- and then repeat eleven minutes you have already heard to get to the part where you wanted to set a bookmark but couldn't. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no way to know when you have reached minute fourteen and if you go too far it will skip back to near the start of the chapter and you have to start over.

So, the bottom line is that if you want it for music (where a track seldom runs over fifteen minutes) you are golden. Buy the Soundfly SD, you will love it. If, on the other hand, you are looking for something for audio books and/or podcasts then you shouldn't consider the Soundfly until such time as they fix the firmware. I had mine for three months, during which time the long-suffering Satechi customer support guys were promising me a replacement with corrected firmware "Real Soon Now" but they finally said they were struggling with the firmware upgrade and wanted to refund my money. Since I really like their FM transmitter I requested, instead, that they replace the unit with a similar one they offer that is designed to work with Sandisk Sansa MP3 players. I have a Sansa E250 that it should work with. Hopefully, with my E250 and a Satachi FM tranmitter and car charger I should be good to go. But I still plan to pester Satechi tech support about the Soundfly firmware upgrade. It was supposed to be exactly what I wanted. It was a near miss. I'll buy another one if they ever make one that works.

Mohammed (P B U H, P B & J)

2010-05-20T10:32:00.000-04:00

When I opened my sandwich this morning to add more jelly I found this miraculous image of the Prophet Mohammed (P B U H, P B & J). I thought about selling it on eBay (so I could retire early) but I was hungry, so...

The Cheap Critic: War of Frogs and Dragons -- Disney Animation vs. Dreamworks

2010-04-25T12:12:00.000-04:00

I've been interested in the competition between Disney and SKG Dreamworks ever since Jeffrey Katzenberg was booted from the helm at Disney in the early 1990s, teamed up with a Steven Spielberg and David Geffin to form SKG studios, and started to crank out competitors for everything that had been in Disney's pipeline at the time that he left the company. At first, Dreamworks' animated products were simply tit-for-tat responses to Disney -- Disney was about to release Toy Story II and Dreamworks rushed out Small Soldiers, Disney's A Bugs Life was answered with Dreamworks' Antz -- and in all cases the Dreamworks product just wasn't quite as good. But after a while Dreamworks Animation developed their own pipeline and started to make something besides bizarro Disney films and their product began to improve -- a gradual improvement that has continued until their best work now offers real competition for Katzenberg's one-time employer.

Their latest animated offerings offer a case in point: Disney's Princess and the Frog and Dreamworks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon show both studios in action. Here are my impressions:

The Princess and the Frog

In The Princess and the Frog, Disney returns to hand-drawn animation after a long series of computer generated and/or computer assisted animated features. Computer animation has improved in recent years and has reached the point where there is no compelling reason to prefer hand-drawn animation over the stuff done with computers. But the hand drawn product does have a different look and, in an industry where most animation is done on computers, the hand drawn animation in The Princess and the Frog is, at the same time, nostalgic and oddly fresh; it is beautifully drawn and animated, especially in the sequences at the beginning and the end that evoke the grace and charm of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and in several fantasy sequences that are homages to artist Aaron Douglas. (Douglas was a luminary of that outpouring of African-American art, music and literature in the 1920s and -30s that was known as the Harlem Renaissance).

Jazz is one of the themes that runs through the film and the plot is a jazzy variation on the story of the princess whose kiss frees a prince from the enchantment that turned him into a frog. In this version, our heroine, Tiana, far from being a princess, is the daughter of a working-poor black family -- her mother works as a seamstress for the richest family in town (the La Bouffs) and her father has passed away leaving her his recipe for gumbo and his dream of opening a restaurant. Opposite her is prince Naveen, (who really is a prince.) He is a charming, carefree but largely useless vagabond who would rather be a musician than a prince, and has gotten himself turned into a frog by hanging around the sketchy parts of town where he ran into an ambitious voodoo man. They meet at at a party thrown by Tiana's friend, spoiled but good-hearted Charlotte La Bouff, who is determined to marry the prince, unaware that the handsome figure she is wooing is an impostor, or that the real prince, in frog form, is upstairs hectoring Tiana for a kiss to break his enchantment. Tiana's role as the "princess" in the scene comes from the fact that she has put on one of Charlotte's princess costumes when her own dress had been damaged in one of Disney's obligatory slapstick sequences involving frenetic action and messy food.

From there the story unfolds pretty much as you would expect: Prince Naveen, when his persistence pays off and he is rewarded with a reluctant smooch, is not turned back into himself (possibly because Tiana is not a real princess) but instead, Tiana is turned into a slightly cuter, but equally green frog, and hilarity and adventure ensue.

There is a lot to like about The Princess and the Frog. For one thing, it avoids several obvious cliches. Tiana is Disney's first black "princess" but the film is not at all about her race, and Tiana's best friend, Charlotte, is white, very rich and very spolied but also good-hearted, loyal and generous. There is a wonderful sequence where Tiana rides home on a trolly from the La Bouff's mansion to her family's small house in a poor black neighborhood. The contrast between rich and poor, white and black is quite clear but is drawn with such a light, graceful touch that, rather than showing us an unfair world, we see the gulf that transcendent friendship can span. Disney could easily have dislocated their collective shoulders, patting themselves on the back for completing their set of racially and ethnically diverse princesses but they didn't. Anika Noni Rose and Bruno Campos were very good as the voices of Tiana and Prince Naveen and the other voice actors were all fine. As I mentioned above, the art direction and animation were wonderful and the music is sprightly, if slightly unmemorable.

That said, The Princess and the Frog is not without its problems. It struggles to decide what sort of film it wants to be. It is set in New Orleans early in the last century, during the birth of the jazz culture on which so much of our idea of the cultural life of the city centers, but spends very little time there. Instead, for most of the middle of the film it is bogged down in the Louisiana swamps where our froggy hero and heroine cavort with an all-singing, all-dancing cast of talking animals, splashing their way through rather-too-many musical numbers in an anachronistic folksy musical style that has little to do with turn of the century New Orleans -- or with Louisiana's Cajun culture -- and very much to do with Disney's desire to include a rehash of popular bits from The Jungle Book.

In these sequences a talking, trumpet-playing alligator named Louie plays the dual roles of Baloo and King Louie from the Jungle Book. This digression into the bayou, I think, was a mistake. New Orleans in the 1920s was a sufficiently musical and magical place for their purposes; a lot more could have been done with New Orleans, its culture and the emergence of Jazz; the screenwriters should not have wandered off into the swamp.

The countless procession of talking animals tends to distract from the magical element of Naveen's transformation. When Tiana first meets him her reaction is "Eeek! A talking frog!" Which is fine and fits in the rather naturalistic portrayal of Turn of the Century New Orleans. But then it's "Eeek. A talking alligator" and "eek, a talking firefly" and "...eek, a ... oh, never mind." We find ourselves in a world where all animals talk and Tiana, apparently, was simply unobservant enough to grow up without noticing.

The Princess and the Frog is very much worth seeing. It is, in fact, a very good film but it misses being a great film through the pacing problems and the stylistic discontinuities introduced when ill-fitting bits of obligatory Disney formula was jammed into a movie that could have stood on its own. Pity, that, but still a good effort overall.

Odd aside: The Teleospouse volunteers at the North Carolina Museum of Art where she gives tours. She immediately recognized the Aaron Douglas inspired sequences although it took her until after the film was over to remember his name. (In the film look for our heroine's daydreams of the restaurant she wants to open someday.) The NCMA has a number of works by Douglas and the one I remember best is a striking gouache and pencil illustration he did for Paul Morand's book "Black Magic" in 1929. The illustration is entitled "Charleston" and it features a black saxophonist being admired by a languid white woman. It also shows a pair of clutching hands in the foreground and a hangman's noose between the man and the woman. Taken all together these elements suggest that the sexual tension between the black musician and the white woman was a dangerous thing. It makes an interesting and ironic contrast to the rather less edgy relationship Disney shows between black Tiana and apparently white Prince Naveen (a musician) in a story with a very similar time and setting.

There is a small image of Douglas' "Charleston" on one of the middle pages of this brochure from a show at the Spencer Museum of Art at The University of Kansas, Lawrence.

How to Train Your Dragon

I will have less to say about Dreamworks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon, mostly because it is the better film of the two and I will find scarcely anything to criticize. It is, perhaps, a bit less ambitious than The Princess and the Frog but it does what it sets out to do effortlessly. I complained that some of the obligatory elements seemed to have been wedged into Princess and the Frog as an ill-fitting afterthought but when I saw How to Train Your Dragon it was only after the film was over, as I took stock mentally of what I had seen, that I noticed that all of the obligatory elements of a kid's adventure film had been present: Geeky kid who is ignored by adults and made fun of by other kids turns out to have the stuff of heros? Check. The cute, popular, tomboy, on whom our hero has a bit of a crush, is the first to notice his change in status? Yep. 3D eye candy? You betcha. Waterslides, roller coasters or swoopy flying scenes? Only the latter, but plenty of it. Animals that are cute and scary at the same time? Yes. Giant monsters? Ohhh yes. Unusual pets? Yep. Lots of stuff cribbed from Harry Potter? Of course. Action sequences with risk of death and dismemberment? Roger that. Death and diememberment? Yes, both actually; I don't remember any main characters that die but the film pays off big time in the dismemberment department.

The film opens with views of a picturesque viking village perched atop rugged cliffs by the sea. In voiceover our hero, Hiccup son of Stoic, sets the scene for us:

This is Berk. It's twelve days north of Hopeless and a few degrees south of Freezing to Death. It's located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. My village. In a word? Sturdy, and it's been here for seven generations, but every single building is new. We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunset. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitoes. We have... dragons.

I won't go to the trouble of summarizing the plot here. From Hiccup's introduction and my list of obligatory kid's adventure film elements you can work out all you need to know about the story, although it is tempting to offer the further suggestion that you can consider How to Train your Dragon to be a sequel, of sorts, to Beowulf, done as a kid's coming of age tale. Gerald Butler, who plays Hiccup's dad played Beowulf in the 2005 film Beowulf and Grendel and he seems to have brought much of the situation to this film with him.

So please do see How to Train your Dragon, if you get a chance. It is quite the best kid's film in years, and saying that is to undersell it because you don't have to be a kid to enjoy it. It is wonderfully written with engaging characters and real excitement. The 3D animation is top notch and adds to the enjoyment without becoming the only reason to see the film -- catch it in 3D if you can (it is well worth the couple of extra bucks) but don't hesitate to watch a flat print if that is all that's available. It's a lovely film. I recommend it.

On balance, I have to hand the win to Dreamworks Animation this time. Disney's film was a worthy effort but they seem a bit off their game. Score one for Katzenberg.

I am, once again, semi-cheating on the "Cheap Critic" theme for these two films since I paid full price to see How to Train your Dragon in 3D, but I did see The Princess and the Frog at our local second-run theater. This makes the average ticket price about six bucks: more than I like to pay but not enough to endanger my cheapskate creds.

Curling Mnemonica

2010-02-28T10:35:00.000-05:00

Here is the USA -- and particularly here in the southeastern part of the USA -- curling is a sport that one sees briefly during the coverage of the Winter Olympics, idly wondering "what's with the brooms?" and forgetting altogether for another four years. In these parts, most people are almost as vague about curling as they are about the game of cricket, but unlike cricket, it is safe to ask about curling if you run into a fan. A cricket match can run several days, and the average explanation of how the game is played can seem much longer and leave the idle questioner with only one new fact: he shouldn't have asked. Curling, on the other hand, seems to be about having fun and drinking beer although the Olympic media coverage of the latter aspect seems spotty.

John J Miller, of the Corner at National Review Online suggests visiting a page with ten great curling songs to listen to while we wait for the next Winter Olympics. They are more entertaining than one might suppose. I've promoted a couple of favorites to this posting but by all means click through to check out the rest.

I'll close with some lyrics from The Curling Song by the Arrogant Worms:

Curlers, underneath your two feet
the whole yin/yang of life comes to pass.
For there's a slippy side to make you go real quickly
and a grippy side so you don't fall on your ass.

Indicators of a Modern American Conservative

2010-01-23T13:28:00.000-05:00

Two friends of mine (Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver) have hashed out a list of what they feel are fourteen key indicators of a current-day American conservative. Here they are:

1. Optimism about the future and the courage to face its challenges

2. The complete rejection of utopianism or human-achievable perfection -- this one was suggested by Brad; I hadn't thought of it, but Brad is right!

3. Adventurousness, dreaming big, achieving the "impossible"

4. Individualism, in contrast to collectivism

5. Capitalism, in particular, small-business entrepeneurship

6. Strong tendency towards preserving American traditions, whether good or bad

7. Patriotism

8. Religiosity

9. A strong belief that personhood begins at conception, thus that abortion is nearly always morally bad

10. A strong tendency to reject evolution by natural selection as denying God and the spiritual nature of Man

11. Belief in the legislating of virtue

12. Deep respect for and appreciation of the American military

13. Respect for the democratic decisions of the people -- extreme distaste for oligarchy (especially kritarchy)

14. Distrust of foreigners, especially immigrants

Read the whole thing in Dafydd'd blog, Big Lizards, here.

I wrote a tedious and overlong comment in response which I have decided to post here as well. (Why should only Dafydd's reader suffer?) Here it is:

My rule-of-thumb notion of a "conservative" is a person exactly like me when I am surrounded by libertarians. Contrariwise, a "libertarian" is me when I am surrounded by conservatives. As a Frank Meyer-style fusionist I think that the silly schism between libertarians and American conservatives can and should be patched over, and whenever I am surrounded by members of one group I feel the need to serve as an ambassador for the other. Since you and (especially) Brad tend to identify more with libertarians than conservatives I will be using myself as a model of conservative perfection for purposes of this discussion and as I visit each point I will either admit, humbly, that it describes me perfectly or complain that you have larded your list with not-necessarily-conservative vices to justify your rejection of the label "conservative". Feel free to bear that in mind.

Trait 1 -- Optimism: This one is odd but mostly true. More on it later.

Trait 2 -- Antiutopianism: Perhaps the reason that Brad needed to point this out to you is because you didn't derive your list, as you state, from first principles. This is the first principle of modern American conservatism.

Trait 3 -- Adventurousness: This is related to traits 1 and 4. Individualist optimism tends to manifest itself as adventurousness.

Trait 4 -- Individualism: Given its roots in classical liberalism this is a key attribute of most variants of American conservatism.

Trait 5 -- Entrepreneurial Capitalism: Quite right. It is merely adventurousness expressed in its economic variant.

Trait 6 -- American Traditionalism: I'm something of a traditionalist and I must quibble here a bit. I don't think any traditionalist would agree that we seek to preserve "bad" traditions. We merely give the traditional modes of thought and behavior the benefit of a the doubt until the evidence become persuasive.

Trait 7 -- Patriotism: Certainly a virtue associated with American conservatives (and occasionally a vice as well.)

Trait 8 -- Religiosity: Religiosity is closely related to populism and populists are ideological nomads. It is true that they are currently camped in conservative territory -- so for the moment you are right -- but they are fickle and may move on at any moment.

Trait 9 -- Personhood of the Unborn: There are pro-choice conservatives but this seems fair since there is a strong correlation with other markers for conservatism. This is a difficult issue for fusionist compromise. I suppose I might support a woman's right to kill her baby provided that she understood that that is precisely what she is doing, and that all arguments to the contrary are rubbish.

Trait 10 -- Creationism: Um, really? You mean to tell me that something like the majority of the conservatives that you guys know are creationists? Weird.

Trait 11 -- Legislating Virtue: This libertarian talking point is a truism that is not particularly true. If you look at the seven deadly sins (Catholic version) -- sloth, lust, anger, greed, pride, envy and gluttony -- you will find liberals and conservatives have split the list fairly evenly for their proscriptive legislative agendas.

Trait 12 -- Respect for the Military: Currently true but, as I am sure you know, historically problematical as a marker for conservatism.

Trait 13: Respect for Democracy: I must admit I had to hit Wikipedia for "kritarchy." I was initially inclined to mostly agree here but on further reflection I have decided you are mistaken. With a few obscure exceptions such as those very few people who know what the word republican means (most of whom, coincidentally, tend to vote "Republican") all political organizations will extol "the will of the people" when they are winning and tend to be OK with judicial activism when it is on their side. "Conservatives" do it, which is disappointing since they should know better, but no more often than the other side.

Trait 14 -- Nationalist Xenophobia: Yes, there is rather more of it in conservative circles than I would like. It is an understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate reaction to militant internationalism, multiculturalism and affirmative action on the other side. It irks me because the anger is misdirected and wasted -- charging the cape and ignoring the matador.

Getting back to the concept of conservative optimism, it is quite real and, in a round-about way, a consequence of conservative antiutopianism. Modern liberalism is officially more optimistic than conservatism -- after all they believe in the perfectibility of human institutions and the conservatives don't -- but that belief sets liberals up for a lifetime of disappointment. Conservatives, on the other hand, expect to have to muddle through in a not-altogether-satisfactory environment. Experience makes liberals cynical as they fall short of their hopes, while conservatives are mostly pleased to find how much can be done in an imperfect and non-perfectible world. This cheerful but conflicted optimism is a key indicator of a conservative mindset and is almost-always present, even in officially-dour paleo-cons such as John Derbyshire of NR.

Avatar

2010-01-12T15:38:00.001-05:00

This review is, technically, not part of my "Cheap Critic" series since I actually coughed up the big bucks to see Avatar in 3D during its first run and it has not yet quite hit the local second-run cinema as I type. That all being said, it would fit rather nicely in the series since Avatar is at heart a remake of a 1970s-era movie that was never made for obvious technical reasons. More on that later, but first a public service request...

P L E A S E

If, like me, you are a conservative or right-leaning libertarian, to enhance your enjoyment of the film and for the sake of other members of the audience, please remember to turn off your liberal bullshit detectors before you enter the theater. For SF films I usually set mine to the "Star Wars" setting -- its lowest level where it only goes off for the most egregious drivel -- but even at that level it went off three times during Avatar. After the second time I set it to vibrate but it still activated so violently near the end of the film that several California natives fled the theater believing an earthquake was in progress.

For a lifelong science fiction fan of a certain age, watching Avatar is like a party where your best friends from college show up, all looking happy and well off, and you spend a couple of hours reminiscing about what used to be cool back in the day. Every now and then the doorbell rings and instead of another old friend you find a door-to-door evangelist handing out pamphlets about Gaea but you quickly shoo them off with "Not now, I'm having a party," and you get back into the groove.

You see, with the admitted, very notable exception of the film technology used to make it, there is nothing whatsoever new about Avatar. All the elements that make it up -- its plot, its themes, its visual style, its virtues and its vices -- can be traced to the popular science fiction and fantasy milieu of the mid-1970s. It is the product of sensibilities formed in the '70s finally given an outlet to express itself in film. Since I too am a product of those times, Avatar reminds me strongly of a lot of my favorite stuff -- things I have wanted to see on the screen for almost half a century; how could I not think it is swell?

Here are a few example of the kind of stuff I mean: To start with there is the visual imagery in the film. If you read what Cameron and his conceptual artists say about how it was developed you will hear about flying creatures modeled after sea life and floating mountains inspired by the Chinese Huang Shan mountains but that is just after-the-fact smoke-blowing; the truth of the matter is that they cribbed it all from progressive-rock album artist Roger Dean. Here's a link to an io9.com article about Dean's influence on Avatar -- "Did Prog Rock's Greatest Artist Inspire Avatar? All Signs Point To Yes" -- click on all the images and see what you think.

One of many Dean images that io9 finds similar to Avatar.

As for the plot, themes, etc. you can easily construct the screenplay for Avatar by cutting bits out of several novels from the '60s and '70s and scotch taping them together. You start with Harry Harrison's short novel, Deathworld, published in 1960, for the broad outlines of the plot. I'd outline the commonalities for you but that would constitute major spoilers, both for the book and the movie -- they are that close. Then, for the themes and some details of Na'vi civilization you throw in Ursula K LeGuin's short novel, "The Word for World is Forest", 1976 (based on her Hugo-winning Novella published in "Again, Dangerous Visions" in 1972), then to get the right tension between things technological and maqical add a dash of Andre Norton -- say, "Judgement on Janus" which she wrote in 1964 -- and borrow a dollop of Ann McCaffrey's Dragonflight -- 1968, from her Hugo-winning 1966 novelette, Weyr Search -- for the dragon-riding bits, and finally, for some of the military technology -- but none of the philosophy -- throw in just a pinch of Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, Starship Troopers.

With the possible exception of Roger Dean I don't blame Cameron for not crediting his influences. It suffices to say that all of these sources had a huge effect on speculative fiction during that period and that Cameron is a product of the times. One hears Avatar criticized as derivative, and not without some justification, but it is derived from material from other media from forty years ago. If finally getting around to making the sort of film that has waited a generation for technology to catch up is to be derivative then I can't see what is wrong with it.

There are a few minor nits to pick aside from Cameron's very successful capturing of the pre-new-age, mildly cretinous liberal vibe of the '70s. Avatar obviously wants to be "hard" Science Fiction but, with Cameron's penchant for action rather than exposition, it lacks the Mr Wizard moments necessary to wrap a gloss of technobabble around its more magical elements. Cameron had the material (see the explanation of "unobtanium" in the Avatar wiki, for instance) but he just refused to use it. You could vastly improve the film's hard SF creds by having one of the "scientists" who our hero pals around with spend sixty seconds on the properties and importance of Unobtanium.

And, of couse, it would be nice if the script didn't suck in all the ordinary ways; none of the characters has any motivation for his or her actions -- the bad guys do bad things because they are bad and, conversely, our hero is heroic because he is our hero -- and they all appear to be as dumb as a pile of rocks -- their synapses apparently being dedicated to staying in character with none left over for anything like problem solving.

But, as I said, these are all nits. Films like Avatar require the willing suspension of disbelief for their enjoyment and Avatar only occasionally makes that difficult. It is great fun, especially if you are old enough to remember the 1970s. I recommend it highly but don't forget to turn off that bullshit detector so your ears don't whistle like a tea kettle and disturb other members of the audience.

A bit of random reading for making your own cut-and-paste script for Avatar:

Harrison’s Deathworld and Cameron’s Avatar from the Crotchety Old Fan

Full text of Deathworld by Harry Harrison - Project Gutenberg

Cover from Paperback Judgement on Janus by Andre Norton

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin -- Wikipedia

The Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey -- Wikipedia

2009 Christmas Holiday Newsletter

2009-12-27T11:04:00.001-05:00

I am writing this first paragraph in a hotel room in Williamsburg, Va.. Irene and dad are watching White Christmas on TV and I am dividing my attention between Bing, Danny and my writing. Christopher and his fiancee, Reid, are with us for a short vacation to see Colonial Williamsburg and the Mariner's Museum in Newport News. (More on the fiancee bit later.) Today we did the Mariner's Museum. They have a wonderful exhibit on Civil War ironclads with the actual turret and the propeller from the Monitor on display. The exhibit is fascinating and endlessly historical but it can be a lot to see in one day and we are beat. If my prose lacks its usual verve I blame it on the the Monitor, the Merrimack and Irving Berlin.

Since this is a Christmas newsletter I should mention that Colonial Williamsburg has a complicated, pluperfect subjunctive relationship with Christmas. Tourists expect to see how the colonists decorated for Christmas but the historical fact is that they didn't decorate at all. Christmas was a very minor holiday in the colony of Virginia. As the reenactors explain it: “The colonists didn't decorate for Christmas, but if they had these are the sort of decorations they might have used.” They don't mention that the colonists would have found the idea of decorating for Christmas rather scandalous; A proper, protestant Virginian would not make that much fuss over a suspiciously Catholic holiday.

One thing I took away from this struggle for a historically-feasible colonial Christmas is that you can mix and match the tunes and lyrics of many Christmas songs. In Jefferson's time the the song “Joy to the World” existed but with a different tune; the familiar music would not be written for a century – so the reenactors led us in singing “Joy to the World” to the tune of “Oh God our Hope in Ages Past” – another “common meter” hymn that did exist in colonial times. Many of the religious Christmas songs are C.M. and you can mix and match words and tunes. Try it yourself: Sing “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” to the tune of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” I'll wait.

...

Back? Good. It''s bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time but it works.

OK then, enough of that – on with the news. Parts of this may be review for some of you. Last year's Christmas cards didn't get out until the Fourth of July and had a limited release – so I am repeating much of the news from the that issue here as well. If the information that follows seems a bit familiar, feel free to skim.

Since my last Christmas newsletter Christopher graduated from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in corporate communications (fliers, brochures, ads, etc.). During this time also, Chris met and wooed a young lady named Reid who has agreed to become his wife next fall.) Reid is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles. Those of you who attended Chris' cousin Jessica's wedding had a chance to meet Reid ... and she got to meet quite a bit of Chris's family as well, but, inexplicably, having met the family she still said yes.

Amber has moved to St Petersburg, Florida, and is attending the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee – Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – has also moved to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Amber is working very hard at her studies and seems to be doing well. Her mother and I are elated with Amber's progress but do miss having her in North Carolina where we enjoyed the opportunities to see her more often.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which has temporarily closed most of their galleries while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene isn’t giving many tours but the classes on the collection continue so she, and the other docents, can hit the ground running when the museum reopens next April.

As for Lee (that would be me) I am finishing up an assignment working for the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources Ecosystem Enhancement Program and will be starting a new assignment for the NC DOT at the end of January. I was briefly laid off this summer while the state of North Carolina attempted to find funds to pay my employer, Keane, for my services. I was rehired by the same employer to work on the same job after three months and, between severance and a few weeks of unemployment pay I saw very little financial impact. The experience did afford me an opportunity to experience the recession first hand and not feel left out. As I write this I have returned from Williamsburg, having had a swell time, and am now typing on my laptop in the doctor's office. Oops... Nurse just called my name; back in a minute...

Ok, I'm back now. Where was I?

Oh yes, family news. Almost over, I promise. On our trip to the Williamsburg area we got a chance to try out dad's new bionics. I think his cataract repair was done since my last Christmas letter and his pacemaker is brand new. It was only about two weeks old when we took him out hiking all over the eastern half of Virginia. I am pleased to report that his color and energy are much improved and he no longer walks into walls in dimly lit rooms. In fact, with his new bionics, while we were waiting for the Grand Illuminations fireworks to start he was able to slog across an uneven, and slightly muddy Williamsburg parade field in near-total darkness, never tripping over freezing tourists huddled in folding chairs, and still have enough energy to participate in the discussion of which restrooms would have the smallest queues.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary (in 2008), Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along. We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)

Washington DC: Dad came up in fall 2008 for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings.

Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950). George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion. (This should have been in last years letter but there wasn't one and I love the photos...).

George and Dad Dad, George and their Classmate, Dean Martin

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee, Irene, Christopher and Amber

The Wizards of Thaws

2009-12-01T18:27:00.000-05:00

The clip above is the climactic scene from the Wizard of Oz. If you have never seen Oz you should be warned that the clip contains spoilers... oh, and welcome to Earth, stranger; we Earthmen have seen the film an average of seventeen times each.

I was reminded of the self-styled Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz while reading this article from Reason Online about the scandal that has arisen around some questionable practices among climate researchers at several prestigious scientific institutions, most notably the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, a scandal that some pundits refer to as Climategate.

The Reason Online article is well written, fair, and worth reading, especially if you haven't been following the Climategate story. Basically, the scandal involves a number of computer files, including emails between climate researchers discussing ways to manipulate the data to eliminate the bits that don't fit the theories, obviously fudged data sets, and snippets of sketchy software that was used to produce reports showing alarming levels of global warming -- things which, taken all together, give a disturbing picture of tendentiousness in the selection and processing of the data, processing methodologies of highly dubious scientific merit designed to eliminate ambiguities, and a desire to suppress debate and pervert the peer-review process. The role played by Dorothy's dog, Toto, in Oz was played in Climategate by an anonymous whistleblower who stole the files from the researchers' computers and released them on the Internet.

The global warming skeptics community is obviously delighted with these developments and they have chosen the name Climategate to suggest that the climate scientists have exhibited Nixonian levels of corruption, deceit and abuse of power. I suppose they are right but in saying that I should probably admit that I have always thought that Nixon got a bit of a raw deal. Watergate was wicked, I suppose, but the standards for naughtiness in politics are pretty high and I just can't get that excited about a bit of clumsy political espionage. Ten worse things are done every day without causing any furor at all. And I think that some of the calumny aimed at the climate researchers is equally hyperbolic.

I am sure, for instance, that Dr Phil Jones, who has temporarily stepped down from his post as the head of the CRU while an investigation is carried out, feels a bit ill used -- and not without some reason. He and the other climate researchers were not fudging their data to lie to the public -- quite the opposite, at least to their way of thinking. They were simplifying the data to make a more compelling story for the public and the politicians -- trying to convince them of things that they, themselves, urgently believe.

Activist scientists are often initially drawn to their chosen fields because they see the need for some sort of action. Their belief in the problems they are seeking to solve precedes their studies and guides them. They become experts on their problems and the possible solutions but remain a poor choice to evaluate the urgency of those problems. They wouldn't have devoted years of their lives to studying an unimportant problem and much of their professional prestige is tied up in the perceived urgency of their pet issue. It poses a constant moral hazard to them and it takes a very scrupulous scientist indeed not to yield occasionally to the temptation to exaggerate.

Adding to this temptation is the undeniable fact that a number of the more vocal climate change skeptics are pseudo-scientific cretins who see every cool day as a thoroughgoing refutation of the whole global warming theory. The climate researchers spent weary years answering these critics and gradually developed an us-vs-them mentality and an almost religious devotion to their theories. When the first few years of the past decade were cooler than expected based on their theories the climate researchers knew that the cool spell would prove to be a temporary aberration and that the inevitable upward trend would resume. But they knew also that they would be attacked and the oh-so-important changes they sought in fossil fuel usage would be impeded. So, for the good of the planet they fudged the data to make the cooling spell go away, confident that when the upward trend resumed their minor adjustments would make little difference. But there was a problem with that plan: the expected resumption of the temperature rise did not occur. Year after year for the rest of the decade the temperature rise failed to materialize and the amount of adjustment needed to "hide the decline" kept growing, but the climate researchers had left themselves with no face-saving exit strategy. The pressure built until the recent leak led to a rupture and the whole thing blew up.

Our best hope to get the climate change debate back on a more science-based footing is to avoid ad hominem attacks on the errant researchers. They have been deceptive and self-aggrandizing, but not to an unusually excessive degree. The problem with ad hominem attacks is that they lead to ad hominem defences -- the researchers are not unusually wicked. By attacking them -- and not their findings and methodology -- the opportunity is lost to correct the damage they have done.

When Toto pulled back the curtain and revealed the Wizard to be less than he pretended to be Dorothy accused him of being a very bad man, to which he replied: "Oh no, my dear, I am a very good man; I am merely a very bad wizard." The Climategate scientists are not necessarily bad people, but they are clearly very bad scientists.

Booster's Billions

2009-10-31T09:45:00.000-04:00

Brewster's Millions, Wikipedia tells us, is a novel written by George Barr McCutcheon in 1902, originally under the pseudonym of Richard Greaves. It was adapted into a play in 1906, which opened at the Globe Theatre, and the novel or play has been made into a movie nine times. (The YouTube embed above is a snippet from a 1945 version that I like better than the Richard Prior version that may be more familiar to most of you.)

Links: Project Gutenberg Text, Librivox Audio Book

The novel's story revolves around Montgomery Brewster, a young man who inherits a million dollars from his rich grandfather. Shortly after, a rich and eccentric uncle who hated his grandfather also passes away. The uncle's will leaves Brewster with seven million dollars, but only under the condition that he keeps none of the grandfather's money. To inherit the seven million dollars, Brewster is required to spend every penny of his grandfather's million within one year, and end up with no assets or goods gained by his grandfather's wealth at that time. Should he make the deadline, he will earn the full seven million; should he fail, he remains penniless.

Brewster's uncle puts restrictions on how the million must be spent requiring that Brewster demonstrate business sense by obtaining good value for the money he spends, limiting his donations to charity, his losses to gambling, and the value of his tips to waiters and cab drivers. Brewster finds that spending that sort of money sensibly in so short a time frame is not an easy thing -- a full time job, actually -- and much of the interest in reading the book is to see how he manages to do it.

What brings Brewster's Millions to mind right now is that our collective uncle -- Uncle Sam that is -- has decided to give a million of us pretty much the same job: to spend 787 billion dollars as quickly as possible to stimulate the economy while, at the same time, only spending the money on necessary, useful things that we would need to do anyway, only perhaps just not all at once.

There is an active debate going on while I write this about how many jobs have actually been created and/or saved by the stimulus bill. I'll get back to my take on that debate later but for now to avoid getting mired down in needless controversy I will simply take the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" at its stated goals as presented by its sponsors and proponents: to spend 787 billion dollars to create and/or save a million American jobs.

787 billion bucks is a big number -- but then again a million jobs is a big number too, so maybe it's a wash -- one big number divided by another big number can give a small number after all if you do the math. So let's do it then.

Faced with really big numbers -- things like the mass of the sun in grams or the number of carbon atoms in a gnat's ass -- a scientist will generally use scientific notation to avoid big-number fatigue from writing all those zeros before the decimal point. For those of you with a more scientific bent I will restate the stimulus package in scientific notation: that's 7.87x10^11 dollars for 1.00x10^6 jobs or 7.87x10^5 dollars per job, or in conventional notation, $787,000.00 per job created using the stated goals of the stimulus package.

You know, I do OK for myself but there are years where even I don't make that kind of money and, having worked through the math I am forced to consider any attempt to justify the stimulus package as a jobs-creation program to be absurd on its face. But of course, jobs creation is only part of the deal; there is also stimulating the economy (whatever that means,) and investing in "infrastructure," where the term is generally understood to involve spending on pet projects in districts that vote heavily Democratic.

The inevitable answer to my complaint, of course, is that we collectively voted for these guys and so we collectively deserve what we get. Leaving aside my objection that it is not my fault that the collective "we" is often an idiot, I can still wonder: where do they think all that money is going to come from?

I have a theory. I think the majority of the members of congress view wealth in pretty much the same way you would see it in a Scrooge McDuck cartoon if you watch it with the sound off. When they think of private wealth they see a cavernous vault with gold, jewels and currency stacked in untidy heaps which wealthy bankers and insurance company CEOs like to wallow in like a small child in a pile of stuffed animals.

If they confiscate half of Uncle Scrooge's gold then he will still have enough to swim in but it won't be quite as deep -- he might even touch bottom at the shallow end of the vault. But, hey, times are tough and that idle wealth can create a lot of jobs so Scrooge will just have to suck it up.

What they miss, of course, is that Uncle Scrooge might have most of his money committed to industries that employ people -- all, admittedly, working to make him richer yet -- and some of those people might lose their jobs. And remember that Scrooge is a miserly old duck and it is likely that he doesn't pay $787,000 per employee. Three or four people working at real jobs in Duckburg might lose those jobs to create one Brewser's Millions-style job in Washington where the chief responsibility is to look busy whenever an auditor or a Republican comes near. Which is to say, I am skeptical, actually, about the job-creation claims of the supporters of the stimulus package. I think that if you subtract the jobs lost in the private sector from the jobs created in public works projects you will get a lower number than the targeted million job figure.

In closing, lest I be unfair to Scrooge McDuck, the reason I talked about watching the cartoon with the sound off is that the cartoon I linked to goes out of its way to make exactly the points I have accused our congressmen and senators of missing. It's not a bad capule presentation of the economic case for capitalism -- on a third grade level, admittedly, but possibly too difficult for most politicians to grasp.

Here's the second part:

Changing the Atmosphere in International Relations

2009-10-09T10:29:00.000-04:00

by Brak Hosing Yomama

The Cheap Critic: New in Town

2009-09-04T10:24:00.001-04:00

As a general rule, when you find a film you have never heard of that features actors and/or a director or screenwriter of whom you have heard, you have found yourself a stinkeroo. The film New in Town -- with Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. as the leads, and with J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson in Spiderman) in a supporting role -- is a case in point. It was released early this year; I don't remember a theatrical run for it and I think the studio may have decided to cut their losses and go straight to video.

As with most films that don't quite work there are parts that are perfectly OK. The acting is fine, for instance -- Zellweger does a good to very good job, Connick is a bit better than OK, and the rest of the cast labor through the script with admirable stoicism that more-or-less works for the mid-winter Minnesota setting. The basic storyline is brutally formulaic but no more so that any number of other romantic comedies; the typical chick-flick doesn't need M. Night Shyamalan-style twists and turns. And the film simply drips with heartwarming niceness and, God knows, we can use more of that in the cinema these days.

If I had to put my finger on the problem I would say that the film's Danish director (Jonas Elmer) hasn't quite got the American sense of humor down pat. He finds a few genuinely funny bits -- rural Minnesotans talk funny and a Miami city girl might be surprised by how cold it gets in the winter -- and he proceeds to pummel us with them endlessly. After about forty minutes one arrives at Yes, yes. That's funny. I get it. Ha. Ha. Do you have another joke?

He is equally ham-handed with the thematic material. Zellweger, you see, is an executive sent to re-tool and downsize the plant that provides the main source of revenue for the town. Her romantic interest, Connick, is the local labor union representative. The get off to a bad start but, as the formula demands, they come around in the end. The management-labor relations theme was laid on thickly. There were times I was reminded of Fritz Lang's Metorpolis -- The HEART must be the MEDIATOR between the HEAD and the HAND. When the semi-evil management team comes up from Miami to confront their now-wayward colleague I half-expected the a robotrix to emerge from the black limos to replace her.

In fairness, I should say that it is a likable movie -- if you really, really try to like it. But you have to put on your Pollyanna dress, sit very still and will yourself to enjoy it. It can be done.

The Cheap Critic: The Fallen Ones

2009-08-26T10:53:00.000-04:00

The Fallen Ones is a made-for-TV film (SyFy Channel) that offers an extremely enjoyable, immersive viewing experience... to me and a few of my fiends -- but possibly not to anybody else. My DVR caught it almost a year ago. I watched the first bit of it then told the machine to save it so I could finish it later. I was not particularly excited by the first few minutes and it took me a while to get back to it.

There are two ways a film can offer an immersive experience -- can take you out of yourself for a while. The first way is for the film to provide a transparent window on the story. That way, one moment you are sitting in the theater watching the opening credits, and the next you are in the tomb with Indiana Jones, batting at spider webs while you wade through piles of snakes and dodge blowgun darts that seem to come out of everywhere and nowhere. Making that kind of movie requires a high degree of craft for the writer, director and actors.

The Fallen Ones doesn't offer that kind of immersive experience. It offers another kind. One moment you are sitting on the couch watching the tube and the next you are there on the set with the actors, wondering if this will all look as cheesy in the rushes as it does during the shooting; you finish your bit and wait for the director to yell "CUT", hoping that the caterer's trailer still has any more of yesterday's ham sandwiches which were really good, especially the pickles.

The Fallen Ones is totally opaque. While you are watching it you can think about the script, the wooden dialog, how much fun it must be for young actors to work with well known, semi-retired celebrities, and whether the arid location where the film was made is that lot just outside of L.A. (the one where half the westerns of the forties were shot -- and most of the B-movie science fiction films of the fifties). You are free to daydream about all these things without being particularly distracted by the story line.

By any objective standard the film is dreadful... but many god-awful films tend to be uneven and The Fallen Ones has its odd glimpses of failed potential. For one thing, it has a decent concept (from which an appallingly bad script was written) and a few brief sequences that are really, really good. One sequence in particular sticks in my mind. I won't trouble you with too much of the plot but it deals with a 40-foot tall mummy that is found in the desert southwest. We spend most of the movie waiting for it to come to life and then comes a sequence where we think we have finally seen it. We see something in the distance, lumbering through the darkness, but when we get closer it is... something else. That sequence is wonderfully macabre and, although it lasts less than a minute, quite wonderful. It was worth watching the whole mess just to have seen it.

GOP Has No Clue on Healthcare

2009-08-22T17:44:00.000-04:00

If you listen to the congressional debates on health care you will hear the members of the GOP criticizing the plans put forth by the Democrats while offering very few ideas of their own. The Republicans have no idea at all how the country's health care industry should be run, and they know it. That's why they are my guys. All they know, really, is that they haven't a clue. But that's one more thing than the Democrats know, and, actually, may be all they need to know.

Let me explain:

The problem of determining the best, the most efficient, the least expensive and the most humane way to deliver health care to the public is hard -- really, really hard -- and there is nobody in Congress who can do it. That's because the members of Congress are all human and the problem is simply too hard for mere human reason to make much of a dint in it. I suppose, as a theological notion, that God ought to be able to figure it out, but the problem is so difficult that those of weak faith may find it difficult to believe in a being who can solve so knotty a problem -- I mean, divine omniscience is fine as a theory, but surely there are limits...

But until that voice from the sky pipes up and straightens us out we are more or less on our own to figure out what to do. God help us. You should have figured out by now, since I a merely a man, and since I make no claim to have a pipeline to divine wisdom, that I have not the slightest notion what to do about health care -- or more accurately, I do have my opinions (don't we all) but I have no convincing arguments that my opinions are right. I have no plan for health care. But I do have a meta-plan -- a plan about coming up with a plan -- and based on the insight provided by my meta plan I am quite confident that the current administration has it exactly, 180 degrees bass-ackward, wrong.

So here is my meta-plan for health care:

Step one is to give up on the idea that we can figure it out. There isn't going to be any clear, universal, over-arching theory that solves all of our problems. It's not going to happen. We need to get over it. A corollary to this is the realization that all the five-year plans currently being touted for health care are wrong in some important particulars, and many of them are wrong in all particulars. This isn't because the people who formulated the plan are lazy, or stupid, or ignorant, or evil. They have merely taken on a task too difficult for them to accomplish, and their only real fault is a certain lack of intellectual modesty.

Step two is to get more people working on the problem. I'm not talking about a hand full of Czars and blue-ribbon panels here, or even a few thousand politicians or tens of thousands of bureaucrats, what I had in mind was more like, well, everybody. I think we should all run off, willy-nilly in all directions, and look for the best way to manage health care in our own personal lives based on our own individual silly-assed notions of how to go about it.

I admit that result won't be pretty. Since we all have opinions about how the problem should be handled, and since all of our opinions are different, we will find ourselves looking out over a chaotic sea of people doing things that strike us as wrong. And most of them will be wrong (remember that the problem is hard) but some will be less wrong than others and people will notice. After a while clusters will start to form. It is perfectly fair to crib off your next-door neighbor's health care plan. If his plan seems to be working out better than the mess you've made of things then maybe you make your plan look more like his. Maybe you and he and some of your other neighbors team up and pool your resources. Eventually, small pockets of spontaneous order will emerge, but mostly, things will still look pretty much a mess.

While this part of the meta-plan will be characterized as "every man for himself" that's not altogether fair. It's more like every man for himself... and for his family and friends... and for his neighbors, his business associates, and for the people in his care... and when need be for strangers in need who appeal to him directly. But the locus of control would remain with the individual and I would expect him or her to be kind and fair to others.

Finally, step three is the step my more progressive readers have been waiting for -- the step where we harvest the empirical evidence gained by our higgly-piggly experimentation and finally condense it down to a coherent plan. Well, I have some bad news. There is no step three. Step two is all there is. The unfortunate truth is that the messy hodgepodge envisioned in step two is probably the best of all possible worlds -- not perfection, because that is seldom possible -- but the best we are going to ever see.

All the plans for "Universal" health care lose me on the word "Universal." The mess we find ourselves in now stems, in large part, from a near-universal plan for health care that our grandfathers thought up fifty years ago. They devised a targeted plan for big-company wage slaves who worked the same job for forty years, and then retired and were promptly buried with their new gold watch. Using a combination of mandates and tax-incentives they managed to herd a majority of the public into employer-provided health care plans, most of which worked reasonably well until the world changed. Then, with people living longer past retirement, and with people changing jobs more often, what used to be a "one size fits all" plan started to bulge at the seams. But the incentives and mandates associated with the old plan prevented the growth of alternative setups that might have been better suited for the new realities. And here we are.

It perturbs me that people look at our current problem that stems from having too many of our eggs in the same basket and they decide to blame the basket. Most of the plans being pushed call for the creation of a spiffy, modern new basket, and this time making sure we put all of our eggs in it. As if the only problem with the current setup is that, last time, we missed a few eggs.

Cheap Critic: Angels and Demons

2009-08-18T00:22:00.000-04:00

My wife occasionally watches how-to crafts shows on television. One of the episodes I remember sitting through (keeping her company, mostly) was a lady who took photographs (either personal snapshots or items cut out of magazines) and cut them into strips which she wove together and glued down to make a new composite image that was hoped to be more interesting than the photos she cut up.

Ron Howard's sequel to The DaVinci Code is a cinematic version of the same basic technique. In this film, director Opie took several tired, formulaic plots, cut them up into pieces and wove them together to form a rather-more-interesting composite. I can't think of a scene in the film that isn't a hoary old cliche, but the film, taken as a whole, is much more interesting than the sum of its parts.

It's well worth seeing, especially if you can find it in a reduced-price, second-run theater. (I paid $1.50 at our local second-run multiplex.) And if you don't have a local second-run theater it will be more-or-less OK on a decent television if you rent the DVD; it's not particularly and eye-candy extravaganza.

Spawn of Das Ubermaus!

2009-08-09T13:26:00.000-04:00

In a previous installment we demonstrated the superiority of my homemade mouse trap because it captures clearly superior mice. Well, I caught another one last night.

As I was getting ready to head off to my secret location for releasing mice -- in a city park as far from other houses as feasible -- an idea hit me. What good is it to catch such high-quality mice in my garage if I can't find a way to use them to my advantage. That's when it occurred to me.

I had found this device in the Teleodaughter's room after she moved out. When you press the button on top a red ray shoots out the nose. I had immediately recognized it as a mind-control ray projector for mice. Perhaps I could use it on my ubermaus.

I applied the ray to the subject while thinking my instructions slowly and clearly. The mouse was to creep into homes people in the area and impersonate a Microsoft mouse. It should use the mouse-driver software installed on all modern computers to take control of the machine. It should then open the browser to this posting and wait for further instruction in the comments section.

So, my mind-controlled agent was ready for insertion which was performed at oh nine thirty this morning. All that remains now is to wait for him to report in from the field.

Are you there, Perry Rhodent?

9 0 9 0 6

2009-08-07T09:56:00.000-04:00

One of my old, bald tires was also flat yesterday when I was leaving for work so I switched cars with the wife who made her shorter commute with the temporary, undersized comedy-tire spare while I drove her car to work. When I got home I swapped back, headed for the tire shop, got very slightly lost, and arrived just after they had closed at 6:00 pm.

Sitting in my car with the key-drop envelope I copied the odometer reading onto the blank -- 90906 miles -- and glanced at the sticker telling when I was due for my next oil change -- 90906 miles. What are the odds?* When Earl (the manager of Bull Tires) called this morning to say the car was ready I told him to change the oil, too. It seems I am supposed to change my oil. I can take a hint.

*about one in four thousand, more or less.

Forth of July Online Card and Newsletter.

2009-07-04T08:32:00.001-04:00

Independence Day, 2009.

The 2008 Christmas cards never got out this year so I am doing a Forth of July 2009 newsletter to cover 2008 and the first half of 2009. I am pleased to be able to report that all family members are healthy and otherwise doing well. Here is a rundown of our current status:

Christopher graduated a year ago from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in advertising and corporate communications (fliers, brochures, etc.). Chris rents a room from his Army friend, Paul, and his wife, Jen, who have just had their first baby. Paul and Jen seem to appreciate Chris’s steadiness, his quiet lifestyle, and the rent that helps with the mortgage. Chris has a girlfriend named Reid who is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles.

Amber will be working for a few more weeks as a Medical Services Coordinator in the emergency room at the UNC Hospital. She will then move to St Petersburg, Florida, to attend the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. She has been living with her parents for the last few months to save up money to finance the move. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee -- Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – is also moving to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Her mother and I are elated that Amber has been accepted into medical school but will be sorry to see her go.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will be closing many of their galleries for almost a year starting this summer while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene won’t be giving many tours but the classes on the collection will continue so she and the other docents can hit the ground running when the museum reopens in April 2010.

Lee is currently sitting at his computer, writing a mid-year family newsletter, and waiting for the phone to ring with job offers. He is switching to the first person -- now. He … that is, I had expected to ride out the tail of the recession working on a contract for the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but a black hole developed in the North Carolina State budget and the DENR contract was last seen near its event horizon. It may yet emerge (my champions at DENR assure me it didn’t actually fall into the black hole) but for now I am available. My previous employer, Keane, could not afford to keep me on their payroll while they found my next assignment but they are hopeful they can recall me, either for the DENR gig should it ever win its way free of the governor’s office, or for any of several other proposals they have bid. In addition, I have several other prospects I am working and, even if Keane comes up empty, I don’t expect to be unemployed for long so I am trying to enjoy it while it lasts.

One item on the plus side of unemployment is that it gives me an opportunity to do things with Irene as long as they don’t cost much money. We have both been getting more into photography. After a somewhat rocky start with her Kodak P712 (during which she struggled with the controls and the balky auto-focus) she has discovered that she really likes the long stabilized telephoto lens and birds without scaring them away. We’ve made multiple trips to the botanical gardens (which is free) in Chapel Hill and several to the NC Zoo (for which we have a membership). I’m glad she is enjoying her camera but I wish she would stop taking better photos that I do.

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee (Irene, Christopher and Amber).

The cover photo on this card is a composite of a photo Irene recently took of a distant thunder storm, and of some fireworks photos that I took from the deck of the Disney Wonder cruise ship.

Random Photos of Stuff We’ve Done.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary, Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along.
We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)

On the cruise we went…

... shopping in Ketchikan, and ...

... kayaking in Prince Rupert, and ...

... whale watching in Juneau.

Beach Week: Was on Hilton Head Island again last year. Somehow we never quite got around to that big group family photo – people kept leaving and arriving and we reached the end of the week to realize that there had never been a time when we were all there at the same time. Maybe this year we’ll get that photo for the Christmas card.

Graduation: Chris graduated from Ringling just before we all left for the Alaska trip. Irene and I went down for the occasion and the morning of Graduation Day we went walking on the beach at the Ft. DeSoto State Park. Irene, who has lost the tan that used to protect her growing up in central Florida, got sunburned and spent the Alaska cruise smeared with cocoa butter. Now the kids and I will forever associate the scent of cocoa butter with glaciers, floating ice and the frozen north.

Washington DC: Dad came up in the fall for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings. Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950).

George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion.

Miscellany: A few photos that speak for themselves.

Pirate Night on Disney Wonder Cruise Ship w/ Irene's Disney Friends.

Lifeboat Drill on Disney Wonder

Irene in Nassau

Wildlife Photography in our Back Yard

Polar Bear at North Carolina Zoo

Das Uber Maus

2009-07-01T16:09:00.000-04:00

Consider this mouse.

It is active, ...

... athletic ...

... and elusive.

Clearly it is a superior mouse... a better mouse.

And I have trapped it.

So, by definition, ...

... I have built a better mouse trap.

Those of you who doubted my ability to catch the mice in my garage using a dodgy homemade trap cobbled together from hardware cloth, wire and half a Walmart minnow trap -- you know who you are -- are singing another song now*.

*Probably Michael Jackson's Billy Jean which is playing constantly on all media outlets just now and sticks in your head like superglue.

The most Beautiful Things on Earth...

2009-06-27T13:22:00.000-04:00

... may be summer thunderstorms to your west southwest viewed just at sunset, from fifteen miles away.

Photo by the Teleospouse. My contribution was to slow down so she could get the shot and crowd the center line to give her as much clearance as possible of that tree on the right side.

Kung Fu and Cheech Wizard.

2009-06-12T17:29:00.000-04:00

The other night at dinner I was talking with the Teleodaughter about Kung Fu actor, David Carradine, and the rumors surrounding his recent death. I mentioned another celebrity who was reputed to have met the same fate and the Teleodaughter admitted that she had no idea who cartoonist Vaughn Bodé was, nor did she know his character, Cheech Wizard (examples). This fascinates me since Bodé, at the time of his death in 1975, was immensely popular and he remains one of the three or four most influential comic artists of the last fifty years. Ask any artist to draw something in the style of the 1970s -- or ask a graffiti artist simply to draw anything -- and they will immediately channel Bodé although many of them might not know who he was. In death, Bodé achieved an odd sort of identity-free immortality. He dissolved into his decade and has become its graphic arts avatar. It's not altogether unlike the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Bodé, who was interested in alternate spirituality, might have liked the idea, although it would not have entirely made up for finding himself so suddenly and embarrassingly dead.

David Carradine's signature TV show, Kung Fu, was ending its very successful four-year run at the time of Bodé's death. Carradine also made a contribution to the zeitgeist of the decade but, unlike Bodé, he stayed around to give an identity to the phenomenon. He had a presentable career since then -- he wasn't one of those actors who makes a career of signing photos taken forty years ago at media conventions -- but his early 1970s TV work defined him. His hardcore fans may prefer to remember his character, Frankenstein, from Death Race 2000 (also 1975) but for most people he was always "that guy who starred in Kung Fu in the '70s, only now he is doing ads for Yellowbook".

Star Trek Reboot -- Escape from the Swamps of Canon

2009-05-10T01:32:00.000-04:00

It is probably a "spoiler" to tell you that the new Star Trek movie takes place in a different universe that runs parallel to the familiar Trek universe of the TV show and most of the other movies. But I don't care. The film does an adequate job of documenting the critical events that caused the time-lines to diverge but some people seem to miss it -- which irks me. So, if I can save one moviegoer from having to sit next to a trekker with a booklight clipped to his dogeared copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia flipping pages and muttering to himself during the movie, this small spoiler seems worthwhile. The Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, etc. in the film aren't supposed to be the same Kirk, Spock etc. as the ones you have seen before. It's not a mistake if there are differences.

I've heard the alternate-universe plot described as a writers crutch. I guess it is... or, actually, more of a writer's prosthesis -- a marvelous device that lets a lame series with its legs crushed under tons of accumulated detail get up and dance a jig. The Star Trek franchise has been hoisted out of the Swamps of Canon and made fresh and new.

Not of course that the film is perfect. There is, for instance, a scene on an ice planet where our hero is pursued by a series of increasingly large critters and every time the monster at his heels is replaced by one bigger and scarier he screams like a girl and runs faster, his only plan apparently being to keep running until he is saved by the inevitable Deus ex Machina. I didn't like that part very much but it was short. And I wasn't satisfied with the makeup on the obligatory green Orion woman with whom Kirk makes out -- her lip color didn't suit me. But, except for those small flaws I liked the film a lot. I remember thinking during the end credits that I would have liked rent out my house for the summer and move into the theater where I would live on stale popcorn and Star Trek until it was time to move across the hall for Harry Potter.

Last Unicorn Architectural Salvage in 3D

2009-05-09T14:03:00.000-04:00

I recently took my Stereo Photo Rig to a local architectural salvage yard. Here are a few of the photos. These "crosseye" 3D photos were taken on the grounds of an architectural salvage company near Chapel Hill, NC. For directions, hours, etc., see their website -- www.thelastunicorn.com/ .

To view these photo you need to cross your eyes slightly so you see three vague images and then concentrate on the image in the middle which will be in 3D. It takes some practice but most people with good vision in both eyes can learn.

More photos are in my Flickr.com photo set.

Tea Party Stereo Photographs

2009-04-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

Here are some stereo photographs from yesterday's Tea Party rally on the grounds of the State Capitol in Raleigh, NC. To view these 3D images you cross your eyes slightly so you see three images side by side and then concentrate on the image in the middle. Most people who have good vision in both eyes can learn to do it.

Click on any of the images below to see it bigger or view the entire set in Flickr here.

Building a Stereo Camera Rig (on the Cheap)

2009-04-14T23:45:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be writing about the stereo (3D) camera I made with a total expenditure of about 70 bucks but, before I start I want to teach you a trick for cheating on the "Find the Ten Differences in these Pictures" feature in the Sunday Comics page of your newspaper. I want to do this first because the way the newspaper business is going the Sunday Comics may be gone before you can read this posting to the end.

The trick is this: you hold the paper so the two versions of the picture are side by side and cross your eyes so you are looking at one version of the picture with your left eye and the other version with your right eye. Just relax your eyes and let them cross so you see three copies of the picture and concentrate on the one in the middle. If the pictures are over/under you will need to turn the newspaper sideways. Assuming you have adequate vision in both eyes you can almost always do this with a bit of practice. Your brain will fuse the two pictures into one image that appears to float a few inches in front of your nose. The parts of the pictures that are the same will look normal but the parts the are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. That missing button on the clown or the dog's tongue out vs. in will be dead easy to spot.

I don't have any of those find-the-differences pictures laying around for you to try out (they are copyrighted and I am too lazy to draw one) but here is something I whipped up in PowerPoint. Look at it and relax your eyes. Let them cross slightly so you see three boxes, not two, and then concentrate on the box in the middle. The parts that are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Let your mouse cursor hover over the image for the answers.

Here's a slightly harder one, again a PowerPoint image. This time the only difference is the spacing between the letters. Some of the text is slightly to the left or right depending on the image you are looking at. What you should see is some of the letters appearing closer to you than the rest. Your eyes have to cross just a bit more to see those letters and your brain will interpret that as their being closer.

By a happy coincidence the technique for looking at crosseye-format stereo images is the same as we've been doing here. Here are two images I took at the NC Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill last weekend. The photos were taken at the same time by cameras about four inches apart. Again your brain will interpret parts of the picture that are farther apart (so you cross your eyes more to look at them) as being closer. In these photos the bottle trees are farther apart (and thus appear closer) than the bench.

Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

In my description of the photo above I mentioned that the photos were taken at the same time. That's the hard part. If you are going to take 3D photos of anything that moves (ie. people) you need both images to be taken at the same time. One way to do this is to use a single camera with a beam splitter -- a collection of prisms and mirrors you put in front of your lens to split the image -- which gives you perfect synchronization but so-so images (because of all those mirrors and prisms and such.) See my posting on my Russian made SKF-1 beam splitter for more info. The other way is the use two cameras and try to figure out a way to make them do the same thing at the same time. That's what I have been trying to do lately.

I should probably mention at this point that I have not been altogether successful in that regard. I am still struggling with a few technical bits and if you are looking for complete instructions for making a reliably-synchronized stereo rig you can stop reading now, and if you are an optimist you can check back in a few weeks to see if I have the problem solved.

Here is a photo that shows the problems you run into if your stereo images are not properly synchronized. In this photo the two cameras went off a fraction of a second apart-- just enough time for a few things to have moved. The image on our right was taken first then the one on the left. When you view this as a 3D crosseye image the things that have moved will shimmer and flicker like the differences when we were cheating on the find-the-differences puzzle.

Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

So what has moved? The most obvious thing is the legs of the girl in the blue dress. She is walking across the frame right to left and, for the most part the displacement simply makes her look a bit closer than she actually is, but her moving leg and her swinging arm are too different and our brains can't fuse them into a consistent image -- so they shimmer. The young lady in the green dress was turning and the hem of her dress looks a bit odd. The lady in the background (white shirt) was putting her foot down and her left leg shimmers. And finally, the lady in the foreground -- the one who looks a bit like the Queen dressed up as Paddington Bear, and who says she was not dressed for a photo shoot and has expressly forbidden me to post any pictures of her in that outfit -- has moved her toes.

<tedious reading="optional">

Here is a photo of the stereo rig I built.

Lots of people have built stereo rigs, most of them better built than mine, but I don't remember seeing one before that converts from horizontal to vertical format.

It is constructed from two Kodak C530 digital cameras that I have modified to accept an external shutter button.

I chose the C530 for a number of reasons: First, it can be had cheaply -- a used one in good shape can be had for twenty bucks on eBay; Second, it is fixed-focus which should make the shutter delay more predictable; Third, it is small enough to sit side-by-side without making the lenses too far apart; Forth, it is large enough for a clumsy tinkerer to solder bits of wire into its innards and still put the case back together; and Fifth, it can be had cheaply.

Because the C530 is fixed focus there is no fancy three-way button that you push half-way to lock the focus. My plan was to make the additional connections to two C530s to allow them to be hooked up to external shutter connections. I had hoped to hook both cameras in parallel to a single switch. I haven't got that part to work yet but more on that later.

To open the C530 you take out six small screws -- two on each end and two on the bottom, make sure the selector wheel is set to the "OFF" position, open the battery compartment and pry the case apart at the midline.

This photo shows the shutter button circuit board, the control wheel and illustrates why the case won't open if the wheel is not in the OFF position.

Here is a detail of the shutter button circuit board.

The circuit board sits on top of the battery compartment and appears to provide power to the camera through jumpers J7 (battery common) and J5 ( +3 vdc ). It also provides +3v to JS (shutter?) when the button is pushed. Here's my guess for a schematic.

Since the shutter switch is between J5 and JS that is where my external switch connections ought to go too, so I soldered on a couple of bits of wire, routing them beneath the other connections and towards the end of the camera.

No, I'm not proud of those solder joints but there are good connections with no shorts.

It's a bit hard to see here but I have enlarged the screw hole enough for the wires to pass through it and used a pair of diagonal cutters to clip off the tab that the screw previously connected to. This allows me to close the case and route the wires out the old screw hole.

Once I had the wires connected to the shutter switches on both camera I closed the cases, put in some batteries and made sure I could fire the shutters by shorting the wires. So far, so good.

In theory I thought I could just hook both cameras together in parallel J5 to J5 and JS to JS and fire both cameras together with a switch between the J5 and JS connectors. The schematic would look something like this.

But that doesn't work. For some reason the cameras don't like to be hooked together. Once they are connected J5 to J5 and JS to JS and turned on they take turns going off a random until they are turned off, disconnected or run out of memory.

My new plan was to use a double-pole single throw momentary contact pushbutton switch -- one that is really two switches (for two separate circuits) that are both activated by the same button. The schematic for that would look like this:

But the problem is... DPST pushbutton switches are hard to find. Radio Shack failed me so I turned to the Internet. Not much help there either, as it turns out. I'll find one eventually. But for now, I have installed two buttons side-by-side -- close enough to press both of them with one finger.

My first session with the new rig was both encouraging and a failure at the same time. It was encouraging in that I got some very nice stereo images and the synchronization was occasionally fine -- indicating that the two cameras do have a very similar shutter-lag -- but discouraging in that I had trouble pushing both buttons at the same time and got quite a few photos like the one above with the little girl in the blue dress.

So, I have redoubled my efforts to find that DPST pushbutton and have ordered this button...

... which claims to have the electricla properties I am after and offers the additional advantage of being very, very big, red and silly-looking. I'll post the results of the installation of the Big Red Emergency button when it comes.

</tedious>

Since I wrote the above I have taken the rig on another outing -- the Tea Party demonstration at the NC State Capitol and I continue to struggle with synchronization. In fact, it is difficult to get one of the cameras to fire at all sometimes. I think one of the buttons may be defective or have a loose connection. You have to push it just right to fire the camera. Maddeningly, it seems to fail most often when you are holding the rig overhead for a crowd shot like this one:

But it does work -- more or less -- and when it does work you can capture quite a nice image with it.

Who Will Watch the Watchmen?

2009-03-06T12:32:00.000-05:00

Watchmen Trailer - Warner Bros

Who will watch (the) Watchmen? Well, I did, for one -- last night at the midnight show. I don't have time for a full review but a few random observations:

My daughter has been looking to borrow a copy of Alan Moore's graphic novel so she can read it before she sees the movie. Sadly, I can't find my copy, and her brother has been too buried under his backlog at work to look for his copy... and she is running out of time. I have some good news for her: the new film is incredibly faithful to the graphic novel -- it is exactly the same, almost frame-for-frame, and there is no burning need to read the graphic novel first. It's the same thing. Zack Snyder, the director, did an amazing job of sticking to the graphic novel. (He did leave out the comic-book-within-a-comic-book subplot about the Black Freighter but it came out cleanly.) If you see the movie first then skim the comic book, reading only the parts about pirates, you will have gotten the whole experience.

Snyder did allow himself one small indulgence, almost a signature. In the first sequence, an aging superhero called The Commedian is attacked in his apartment by an assassin. As his attacker bursts through the door The Comedian throws ... something (a whisky bottle would be in character) ... at the assassin but misses. He hits the door instead, knocking off one of the digits in the apartment number, changing it from "3001" to "300" -- a reference to the Snyder's previous comics-related movie: "300."

The Watchmen is arguably the best comic book mini-series ever made. And the movie version is, as I have said, incredibly faithful to the comics version. The interesting question is this: does that make The Watchmen a great movie? Not necessarily. That's not to say that it isn't a great movie -- haven't made up my mind -- just that it is an interesting question.

I've heard reviewers criticize Snyder for sticking too close to the original -- not giving the movie room to breathe -- and they suggest that it might have been better if he had updated the original a bit. I can see the point. The Teleospouse and I were the only members of the audience last night who are old enough to really remember President Nixon -- who features prominently in the graphic novel and the film -- and Moore and Snyder use images of Nixon as shorthand for big chunks of the zeitgeist of the 1970s and early 80s in a way that must have puzzled many of the twenty-something members of the midnight audience. But Snyder was right to leave the story in its original, alternate-history of another generation setting. Watchmen is a creature of its times and would not survive an update.

I takes nothing away from Snyder or his movie to suspect that the prominence of the Nixon character is one of the reasons that the movie was funded just now. The aging leftists who run much of the Hollywood film industry are looking at retirement (those who are in still good health) and Nixon is the demon figure of their youth. They can't resist an opportunity to revisit their salad days by taking one more whack at the Tricky Dick Piñata. Like Frost/Nixon, Watchmen cashes in on the favorite animus of the generation in the 'arts' that is just entering its decline. For those of you too young to remember the Tricky Dick meme, Tricky Dick is to Chimpy McBu$hitler as Heroin is to light beer. Bush derangement syndrome has been the Methadone which with the Hollywood left has tried to get by -- but now that Bush is gone they have gone back to the real deal.

Obama's Brilliant Plan to Finance the Stimulus

2009-02-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

The conservative critique of President Obama's "stimulus" package, when talking to other conservatives, tends to be that the provisions of the plan are bad things in themselves -- spending on pet liberal projects which cost a lot, do little to actually stimulate the economy, and which tend to reinforce the expectation in the populace that any problems they might have are best solved by sitting on their thumbs and waiting for the government to bail them out. These are the arguments against the proposed stimulus plan that resonate with the right.

But this line of argument is less compelling for Joe Sixpack. To explain their opposition to the plan to the working guy conservatives boil down their argument to one simple rhetorical question: "Where in the world is all that money going to come from?" The question is pithy, easy to understand and, they thought, unanswerable. This is where they underestimated President Obama. He seems to have a plan.

In road-runner physics a character who has walked off a cliff will not fall until his unsupported state is brought to his attention. Apparently tax accounting rules for liberal politicians are similar; they don't need to pay their taxes until the unpaid taxes come to the attention of the press. Mr. Obama apparently knows this and is using his cabinet appointments to produce extra tax revenue.

President Obama's pick for Treasury -- Timothy Geithner -- had to pony up about $30k in back taxes to buy into the Obama honeymoon tax amnesty plan offered by the liberal press. And he's a piker compared to Tom Daschle (Health and Human Services nominee) who coughed up more than $100k. Mr. Obama plans to grow the size of the staff of the Administrative branch considerably, and he will be replacing most of those currently working there. Add to that the judges, ambassadors, and all the bureaucrats who are appointed by the president and you get a lot of political appointments. If they all pay off as well as the Geithner and Daschle picks he will have gone a long way toward paying for the stimulus package.

Update: I had barely finished this when I turned on the TV to find that Daschle had stepped aside to let someone else take their turn at the wringer. We may find that trillion bucks for the "stimulus" plan yet!

How to Take a Really Memorable Photo.

2008-11-15T13:07:00.000-05:00

Bill Owens (Dolly Parton's Uncle) at the American Chestnut Foundation's 25th Anniversary Celebration in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Bill Owens is Dolly Parton's uncle. He is a songwriter who performs in the shows at Dollywood*. He is a supporter of the American Chestnut Foundation and provided the entertainment at the ACF's 25th anniversary celebration.

I bought my Sigma f/1.4 30mm lens for my Nikon D40 with events like this in mind. The ballroom in the Reed House Hotel in downtown Chattanooga seemed well enough lighted to my eyes but the light was quite dim for most cameras. Hotels are a horror show for existing light photographers. Lights are dim and oddly-colored and reflective surfaces are everywhere.

The Sigma was doing more or less what I had bought it for. I was shooting full auto and the D40 was doing 1/25 of a second at about f/2.8 -- an acceptable compromise for depth of field, hand-holdability and subject motion blur.

Mr. Owens was moving around a bit and the camera really liked that couple on the right side as the subject. I had a bit of a struggle getting it to ignore them and focus on Bill.

Add to that the facts that he had set up on the far side of the stage, I wasn't sitting that close to the stage and a 30mm lens is pretty wide at that distance and I was starting to get a bit frustrated. It didn't help that Mr. Owens was interacting with his slide show which kept his back mostly to me.

This shot above is probably the best I was going to do with the normal lens. I had convinced the camera to focus on the subject and I got a nice profile shot. But I wasn't completely satisfied. So, as he finished his last song I put on my longer but slower zoom lens and changed the setting that was keeping the camera from using the flash. I don't usually like photos taken with an on camera flash but they do generally have the advantage of being sharp and well exposed.

When Mr. Owens stood up after his set I also stood up and snapped the photo below.

It costs me a bit to admit that this is the most memorable photo of the group. The teleospouse still remembers the cost of the Sigma lens and my argument that it was my patriotic duty to go out and spend that economic stimulus check tends to fall on deaf ears. But she does react well to existing light photos. Unfortunately, this time it was the flash photo that grabbed her attention.

Looking at the shot on the LCD screen on the camera she told me that I really ought to show it to Mr Owens who was packing up his equipment.

I should have shown it to him. I'm sure he would have enjoyed it.

The problem is that I am a bit shy.

And I was already feeling a bit embarrassed by the Teleospose's howl when I showed her the photo. People were looking at us wondering what was going on.

Here's what she was looking at.

detail

Entire Image

*I know what you're thinking. Dollywood, huh... But you're wrong. Dollywood is a class act. It's one of the nicest non-Disney theme parks with a wonderful mix of terrifying rides for teenagers, decent shows and traditional mountain craft exhibits. I recommend it.

The Elephant

2008-11-06T16:39:00.000-05:00

In the aftermath of the election, and Barack Obama's solid victory, there is a great deal of speculation about the future of the G.O.P. There is a widespread consensus that the Republicans lost the presidency, and lost seats in congress, because they deserved to lose. This comes not just from the places you'd expect -- the Democrats, the Libertarians, the Greens, the, um, whatever Naderites call themselves these days -- but also from a large number of Republicans -- perhaps a majority. So many people are saying it, indeed, that it has become quite the cliche and it is with some reluctance that I admit that I am one of them.

Conservative pundits have looked at the demographics of the recent vote and are feeling quite glum. This is not so much because they lost -- the Republicans were sailing into a sizable headwind this election and nobody was offering even money that they could win it -- but because they lost votes in all the demographic segments where they usually do well. It wasn't just the Democrats get-out-the-vote program that whelmed them, they were leaking votes in the demographic compartments that were supposed to keep them afloat.

The popular meme in the mainstream media is that there may have been a sea-change in the country, precipitated by war-weariness and the bad economy, and that the US is now a center-left country instead of a center-right one. This meme is on all the networks, presented rather gloomily on Fox News, cheerfully on CNN and CBS, and gleefully on the Beeb. There is, to be sure, some debate about it -- the talking heads on one side of the screen will point out the shift in voting patterns and assure us that the world has changed, while the heads on the other side of the screen will point to several ballot initiatives that suggest otherwise and say not so much, but the notion is never dismissed and the change in the vote is never explained away.

This leftward lurch meme is bunk, of course, and the reason is is never explained away is that the obvious explanation is something that the talking heads can't say -- a taboo subject. It is the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.

For me, as a libertarian-leaning conservative, there is a bitter-sweet aspect to Obama winning the presidency. It is an historic event, an overdue milestone in our history, and a real accomplishment for our society. The slight bitterness arises from the fact that I had hoped -- and expected -- that the first black president would be a Republican. As an individualist, I try to resist identity politics -- to vote for the man and his policies, not for his ethnic identity -- but in resisting I can't deny that there is something to resist. History was there to be made on Tuesday and I could feel its pull. I didn't vote for Obama. I am enough of the Buckleyite to have stood athwart history on Tuesday, not so much yelling "STOP", as saying sadly "Not this time." But, since I am channeling William F. Buckley, I can't really criticize those, such as Buckley's son, Christopher, who were carried away by the flow.

My point is that having elected the first black president we all feel a sense of accomplishment -- even those of us who voted against him and fear that his policies will be a disaster -- it is a pleasing sense of something overdue which can be checked off of our lists. Vice-President elect, Joe Biden -- whose mouth is only loosely coupled to his brain -- inadvertently captured this sense during the Democratic primaries when he said "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... I mean, that's a storybook, man."

I contend that the factor that cost McCain those missing votes in the safe parts of his base is that some people saw the election not so much as a contest between Democrats and Republicans -- or a contest between Barack Obama and John McCain -- as a referendum on the question "Is America ready for its first black president?"

The elephant in the room, which everyone is studiously ignoring, is that people voted for Barack Obama because he was black. Or more precisely, people felt ready to vote for a black president and there was Obama -- "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" the first presentable major-party black candidate for president. Biden was exactly right, it was a storybook moment.

The good news for the G.O.P. is that it is a one-off deal. In four years this historic moment will be merely history. The short attention-span media will have lost some of its infatuation, and Obama and the Democrats will need to run on their accomplishments. During their well-deserved time in the time-out corner, the strategists for the Republicans should ignore the illusory leftward movement of the voting public and focus instead on the basics -- having a message that makes sense, having candidates who can present the message, and generally generally acting like they have part of a clue about running a political campaign.

Photo Credit: The photo of an elephant in the rear view mirror is a creative-commons licensed photo by a flickr user named exfordy. The original photo is here: flickr.com/photos/exfordy/123900378/

Belated Halloween

2008-11-02T14:12:00.000-05:00

Didn't have any time to decorate for Halloween this year. I've been busy at work and the wife has a cold. The cold may be the same one that caused the host of our pumpkin-carving party to have to cancel his party last week. The pumpkins never got carved and, when I got home from work on Halloween night there was no time.

So... Since I wanted to do something, I grabbed a desk lamp and hid it behind a potted plant to illuminate the pumpkins and then decorated them with bits of black duct tape cut out with scissors.

The nice thing about using black tape is that it leaves the pumpkins intact so you can remove the tape and use them for your non-spooky autumnal decorations and, possibly, make a pie out of them later.

pat-a-cake

2008-10-23T17:14:00.000-04:00

Update:Like many nursery rhymes this one turns out to be a fantasy although details of what actually did happen remain sketchy...

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, mugger man

Give my your dough as fast as you can

I'll bat you, and roll you, and mark you with "B"

And put you in the hospital for Barack and me.

While it is unfair to blame to Obama campaign for this I would like a brief hiatus in the reporting of the hateful things that McCain supporters may (or may not) have shouted at a McCain rally.

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.
Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.
Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Panchronic Chameleon

2008-10-03T11:21:00.000-04:00

Creative Commons licensed photo by Martha de Jong-Lantink

Pictured above is a Madagascar Chameleon, from the Greek for "ground lion". Cameleons are best known for their ability the change their color at any time in response to changes in their environment. The Madagascar Chameleon is Nonpanchronic Chameleon in that, while it can change color, the fact remains that it was previously a different color and may be yet another color at some time in the future. This is distinct from the Panchronic Chameleon which, when it changes color, changes its color over its whole history, past, present and future, so that, if it has changed color, not only is it the new color now, but it always was that color and it always will be that color.

Panchronic Chameleon.

How the recent vice-presidential debate is scored tends to depend on whose team the person doing the scoring supports. Those who are committed to the Obama/Biden ticket -- which includes almost all of the major media outlets -- tend to give the edge to Biden for his "greater command of the facts" although they do acknowledge a slight disappointment that Palin failed to be as bad as they had hoped. I, on the other hand, find the Obama/Biden ticket alarmingly liberal based on their voting record and tend to support McCain/Palin as the lesser of two evils -- I liked Palin's performance. But I do agree that Biden had the greater command of the facts. His command was so firm that he could command the facts to be whatever he found convenient.

I learned a lot from Biden while watching the debate. I learned, for instance, that Barack Obama never said he would sit down to talk with president Armadinajad of Iran without preconditions. Funny, I woulda swore I remembered him saying just that again and again and again. Something wrong with my ears, maybe, or my television, or my memory. And all those times Palin accused Obama of voting for this bill, or against that one -- why, it turns out that John McCain voted the same way! Has anyone told the Congressional Record? ...because they have apparently got it wrong.

And that bit about the vice presidency and the Constitution, I didn't know that the relation between the vice presidency and the Senate was so controversial. Presiding over the Senate and voting there in the event of a tie are the only day-to-day duties of the Vice President that are mentioned in the Constitution. When President Kennedy wanted Vice President Johnson to head some executive agencies Johnson, worried that the Constitution granted him no Executive authority, sought a Constitutional opinion before he accepted the responsibility. But the Constitution is a living document, deeply mysterious and filled with emanations and penumbras; and we are lucky to have experts like Senator Biden to interpret it for us. And how convenient for him that his Constutional fugue allowed him to work-in a mention of Dick Cheney, who the Democrats have worked very hard to vilify, and it allowed him to use the term "Unitary Executive" which appears to be a topic of grave concern whenever a Republican is in the White House.

Here is Biden on the Vice Presidency and the Constitution. The relevant part starts at about 3:50.

When you are playing Scrabble a word that had been played must be challenged immediately or it doesn't matter that it is illegal. Similarly, in a debate, making things up on the spot can be a winning strategy against a less knowledgeable opponent. Palin probably suspected that Biden was pulling some of these facts out of his ... er, let's say his hat ... but she couldn't be sure enough to challenge him on it and risk losing her turn. So she wisely decided to let it go and move on. A wonkier opponent -- say, Newt Gingrich -- might well have called Biden on some of his improvisations, and even then it might have been a mistake, but for Palin to take the bait would have been disastrous.

Of course, since the purpose of these debates isn't to establish who is the more-skilled debater but to give the public a sense of the philosophies of the candidates I am not sure that the public was well served that Biden was given a pass on his inventions.

But, then again, I could be wrong. It could be that Joe Biden really is the likable, centrist everyman that he suddenly appears to be, and that his 35 year voting record in the Senate is an anomaly. And Obama, who has worked to make this election a referendum on color, really may be the red-blooded, red-state, red white and blue-draped regular guy -- with, to be sure, an environmentally-responsible tinge of green -- that he now appears to be. If that is true then the rightist wingnuts ( such as you humble author) who worry about the few hints that leak out through the heavy media blockade around Obama's career -- hints suggesting that until quite recently he was a pinkish, blue-blooded leftist surrounded by radical reds and black-power extremists -- are worrying about nothing. It could be that Panchronic Chameleons really can change their colors in the past as well as the present and the future if you just believe.

I'd like to believe. It would be comforting. Joe Biden sure was likable during the debate. You could tell that Palin genuinely liked him. I did too. If only I could get over my old-fashioned ideas about the one-way flow of causality in time.

Some of Biden's reasoning can be a bit abstract and hard to follow, so here is an alternate explanation of the same principles from the World's Foremost Authority.

Come to think about it, Corey and Biden have a lot in common.

Postscript.

Professor Irwin Corey, The World's Foremost Authority, is a brilliant comic. I went looking for clips of him on YouTube for this piece and was delighted to find that at 94 he is still performing, and more impressively, as you can see from the above, he is still funny as hell.

Here's another clip of the professor from thirty-some odd years ago on the Smothers Brothers Show. I remember him doing this bit.

I couldn't find any clips of him on the Tonight Show. That is a pity because from these clips you don't get to see that he could make this stuff up on the fly. Johnny Carson would ask him a question and he would make up a five minute answer that would just kill you. He's a funny, funny man.