enough noise...

no, this is not about iphone critics. i am just referring to the increasingly nutty number of pixels on those wee sensors of digital point-and-shoot cameras. the photographic result of this numbers game is a disaster and an embarrassment to photography: at ISO 400, many of the latest crop of 8 and 10mp cameras produce images that are inferior to what we can [still] get with a plastic throw-away film camera with the same rating film. as always there is a silver lining to this cloud: given the usually mediocre sharpening algorithm in these cameras, at higher sensitivity, one gets lovely watercolor impressionism without needing silly photoshop filters. who needs sharp detail? just look at those blotches of color: a family picture where you can only guess who is who.

sure, i exaggerate, but not by much.

it would be really good to have a pocket-size digital camera for half-serious photography, say something with nearly as good images as a kodak one-use camera...

recently noted quotes

mmmmm, i love the smell of commerce in the evening! -- francis [player vs player]

a mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable disease in the third world, arms sales, opression, injustice. -- a. c. grayling [the form of things]

think collectively, not selfishly. -- karim rashid [design your self]

zen, which i must treat with skeptical care, is a relatively conscious kind of skating on thin ice. -- david vestal [from an essay on intuition]

necessity is the mother of self-delusion. -- thomas lang [hugh laurie, the gun seller]

everybody's got a gris-gris. -- penn & teller [bullshit!]

since we played chess, you got a better child. it is a miracle! -- eren yigit [jan 2007]

we possess no positive term to describe the man who does not worship phantoms of the imagination. -- michael onfray [atheist manifesto]

if hellfire is the stick, mystery is the carrot. -- dan dennett [breaking the spell]

friends don't let friends use raid-0 -- richard elling

practice simplicity with constant repetition and you'll do all right in your life -- john wooden [quoted by hoops coach dale brown]

quote of the week

from michael parsons review of iphone on times online:

I want one. All the geeks I know want one. Once it's been delivered I'll wager long odds we'll discover some tragic flaws: perhaps battery life, perhaps screw-ups with carriers. Maybe one of the sensors will fail, and there will be mass recalls. Who cares? It won't matter. I'm on my third iPod. The first two broke. But I keep going back for more because I, along with several million other love-lorn geeks, have been utterly, utterly had by a sweet-talking billionaire in a black polo neck. We love him. He completes us. And he had us at scrolling.

[i want one too, as soon as possible. neat: we are finally getting near those ST:NG tablets...]