time travel notes: langford's complete critical assembly

[reblogged from my old blog at sun microsystems]

lately i have been enjoying david langford's witty and sharp white dwarf SF reviews between 1983-91, collected in the complete critical assembly [cosmos books, 2002]. it is a reader's time travel: nearly every review mentions SF books i still have on my shelves or in my overflow boxes. first piece, march 83 review includes asimov's foundation's edge and heinlein's friday both of which i had read that year. [never wanted to re-read them since]

Robert Heinlein's Friday was also enthusiastically greeted, largely because it came as such a relief after his unreadably awful The Number of the Beast.

i could not agree more. NOTB is beyond awful, and it has a special place in my memory because it is the only book that i have ever thrown in the garbage, a place rarely so well deserved. even going back to pulp through recycling is too good for this.
june 83 review includes stanislaw lem's more tales of pirx the pilot which i have re-read a couple of times since. lem is a genius, and i wish some of his other writing would show up in english. [for example, his 2003 dilemmas has yet to be translated. peter swirski had mentioned that there was interest in translating summa but i do not know if there is a translation underway.] july 83 review includes amazing randi's the truth about uri geller, flim-flam, and this line:

Even if inclined towards the loony, i mean the uncritical viewpoint, you should consult these books for the devil's advocate arguments. They are important. In a world where an ounce of sensationalism sells better than a ton of rationality any day, they are very important.

two decades later, we are in a lot worse situation, but at least flim-flam is still in print.
jan 84 review includes lem's masterpiece his master's voice, and douglas adams and john lloyd's the meaning of liff. i have been meaning to go back to HMV, and liff of course have been re-released.

massachusetts: those items or particles which people are searching for when they look into their hankies after blowing their noses.

may 84 review includes the robots of dawn, a good but not great followup to asimov's great caves of steel and the naked sun. [i treasure my original pbk copies of these two now because of the cover art as well]

A considerable improvement on the terminally flatulent foundation's edge, it recaptures the feel of those two robotic puzzles which most critics regard as asimov's best books.

feb 84 review mentions herbert and ransom's the lazarus effect as enjoyable, good average SF, neither unputdownable nor unpickupable. langford says jesus incident [previous book] is fairly awful. i do not know. the first book was destination: void which i liked enough to read twice in one year, and i did pick up the late sequels. for whatever reason [awfulness sense?], i could never get into jesus incident so both books in sequence remain unread to this day, in one of the back rows of my double-packed sf shelves. sigh. this reminds me: some of herbert's non-dune sf, eg. saratoga barrier, dosadi experiment etc. have been re-released by TOR. [never mind links. i would visit my local sf bookstore for these, eg. Incomparable bakka in toronto.]
july 84 review has gardner's wheels, life and other mathematical amusements and dewdney's planiverse. i think i had a copy of the first one and second one was always in the list of books i would pick up if i ever find it remaindered. [i also keep waiting for a definitive gardner encyclopedia of all his sciam columns. i have his wonderful colossal book of mathematics and his lesser known but very thoughtful the whys af a philosophical scrivener - thanks henry]
aug 84 review mentions deadeye dick, my introduction to kurt vonnegut, even though usual starting points seem to be sirens of titan, cat's cradle or bluebeard. after the shooting incident (hence deadeye) i just could not put it down.

kurt vonnegut's deadeye dick makes it as near-sf by including the neutron-bombing of a US city, but is chiefly a straight tragicomedy of power, responsibility and the awful things we do to each other.

[i absolutely detest those "V" cover designs of dell's reissued vonnegut trade pbks. literary giants should not be handed off to unimaginative amateurs. an undergrad can program a robot to design better.] sep 84 reviews pohl's heechee rendezvous which i think is still (after all these years) in one of my to be read someday boxes. of course pohl's gateway and beyond the blue event horizon were favorites, so i am not sure why i never got around to reading the last book in the trilogy. langford also reviews james p. hogan's voyage from yesteryear which i read at least a couple of times.

background is presented in stodgy lectures, most readers will skip the one on physics occupying most of chapter 24. solid and quite worthy stuff, but practically devoid of characterization.

oct 84 reviews get into some of the best sf reading for me in those days: benford's across the sea of suns, [the sequel to in the ocean of night] and his against infinity. benford is one of my scientist/writer heroes; i think by now i have everything he has ever published, including the recent reissues of the galactic center series in preparation for another (last?) book in that series. [i first came across benford through his collaboration with brin in the heart of the comet and picked up all his other books]

gregory benford's across the sea of suns is a fat, impressive demonstration that one can do ultra-'hard' sf with every rivet placed just so, and still write well.

indeed, every benford book is just such a demonstration.
[to be continued]

meme of four [revised edition]

four jobs you've had in your life: cartographic draftsman [northway survey company], cartoonist/graphics designer, systems administrator, programmer

four movies you could watch over and over: galaxy quest, tampopo, incredibles, ladies man [brilliant work by lewis in front and behind the camera. lewis/buddy lester hat sequence leaves me in stitches every time]

four places you've lived: ankara, bursa, istanbul, toronto

four tv shows you love(d) to watch: house, firefly, chef! [lenny henry], big bang theory

four places you've been on vacation: mexico, new brunswick, bodrum, northern cape.

four websites you visit daily: dpreview, cbcnews, bythom, ars technica.

four of your favorite foods: tom yum soup, eggs [in any form], russian salad, circassian chicken [i am amazed that food network has a recipe]

four places you'd rather be: provance, tuscany, barcelona, montreal

wile e. coyote and road runner rules

from chuck jones's eloquent and funny "chuck amuck: the life and times of an animated cartoonist":

rule 1: the road runner cannot harm the coyote except by going "beep-beep!"

rule 2: no outside force can harm the coyote - only his ineptitude or the failure of the acme products.

rule 3: the coyote could stop anytime - if he were not a fanatic. (repeat: "a fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim" -- george santayana)

rule 4: no dialogue ever, except "beep-beep!"

rule 5: the road runner must stay on the road - otherwise, logically, he would not be called road runner.

rule 6: all action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters - the southwest american desert.

rule 7: all materials, tools weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the acme corporation.

rule 8: whenever possible, make gravity the coyote's greatest enemy.

rule 9: the coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

a photographer's notes to self

• make images every day. there is no such thing as *best light* or *best weather* or *best mood* for photography. no excuses.
• take it slowly. it takes a while to start seeing things differently.
• stay in one place, and keep making images, until you are really ready to move. which is often later than you think.
• remember your tripod. amongst other things, it helps you slow down and pay attention.
• stop editing on the spot. allow for lucky accidents to get past that tiny display and impatience.
• don't peek. pretend you have no time for a pause to look at the last image. perhaps you will miss an amazing event if you keep checking the histogram. look at the light, tones, focus and expose carefully instead of taking your eyes off your subject every five seconds.
• revisit places. this afternoon, different light, different wind, different mood, different emotions and head space,  different eyes, different images.
• enjoy constraints. see that 50mm f/1.8 lens sitting on the shelf? use it [and nothing else] for a whole week, and zoom with your feet instead of the lens.

basho's crow haiku: 16 translations

Here are the 16 translations of basho's famous crow haiku i found in my library. earlier translations attempt to keep the 17 syllable form in english while others have fewer syllables. [many authors now agree that english haiku needs only about ten to twelve syllables to have nearly the same duration and rhythm as a japanese haiku, which is based on onji sound units]

kareeda | ni | karasu | no | tomarikeri | aki | no | kure
bare-branch | on | crow | 's | is-perched | autumn | 's | evening

On a bare branch
A crow is perched -
Autumn evening.
         Makoto Ueda [1]

On a withered bough
A crow alone is perching;
Autumn evening now.
         Kenneth Yasuda [2]

On a withered branch
a crow has settled...
autumn nightfall.
         Harold G. Henderson [3]

on a dead branch
the crow settles -
autumn evening
         Bruce Ross [4]

On the dead limb
squats a crow -
autumn night.
         Lucien Stryk [5]

On a withered branch
A crow is perched,
In the autumn evening.
         R. H. Blyth [6]

on a bare branch
a crow has alighted...
autumn nightfall.
         Makoto Ueda [7]

on a bare branch
a crow lands
autumn dusk
         Jane Reichhold [8]

A crow
has settled on a bare branch -
autumn evening.
         Robert Hass [9]

on dead branches crows remain
perched at autumn's end
         Hiroaki Sato [10]

on a barren branch
a raven has perched -
autumn dusk
         William J. Higginson [11]

a solitary
crow on a bare branch -
autumn evening
         Sam Hamill [12]

on a leafless branch
a crow comes to nest -
autumn nightfall
         Haruo Shirane [13]

on a withered branch
a crow has settled -
autumn evening.
         David Landis Barnhill [14]

on a leafless branch
a crow -
autumn dusk.
         Takafumi Saito and William R. Nelson [15]

on a withered branch
a crow is perched
an autumn evening.
         Robert Aitken [16]

Books:

[1] Ueda, Makoto
Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary
Stanford University Press, 1995.

[2] Yasuda, Kenneth
Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature and History
Tuttle Publishing, 2002.

[3] Henderson, Harold G.
An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets
From Basho to Shiki
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

[4] Ross, Bruce (ed).
Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku
Charles E. Tuttle Company, Vermont, 1993.

[5] Stryk, Lucien
On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho
University of Hawaii Press, 1986.

[6] Blyth, Reginald Horace,
Haiku
Hokuseido Press, 1997.

[7] Ueda, Makoto
Matsuo Basho
Kodansha America, 1983.

[8] Reichhold, Jane
Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands on Guide
Kodansha International, 2003.

[9] Hass, Robert
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa
Ecco press, 1994.

[10] Sato, Hiroaki
[...]

[11] Higginson, William J. with Penny Harter
The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku
McGraw-Hill, 1985.

[12] Hamill, Sam
The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa and Other Poets
Shambhala Publications, 1995.

[13] Shirane, Haruo
Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory and the Poetry of Basho
Stanford University Press, 1998.

[14] Barnhill, David Landis
Basho's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho
State University of New York Press, 2004.

[15] Saito, Takafumi and Nelson, William R.
1020 haiku in translation: the heart of basho, buson and issa
Booksurge press, 2006.

[16] Aitken, Robert
the river of heaven: the haiku of basho, buson, issa and shiki
Counterpoint, 2010.

data

thom hogan puts it beautifully.

Data is a great and powerful thing. Collect the right data and interpret it well, and you can make very intelligent decisions. Collect the right data and interpret it incorrectly and you can make very dumb decisions. Collect the wrong data, well, you were just dumb to start with.

recently noted quotes

every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half. -- nassim nicholas taleb's corollary to moore's law

the question to be asked at the end of each day is, "how long will you delay to be wise?" -- the good book [a.c. grayling]

Who’s to say that the tone-mapped creations of today will not be the bell-bottom jeans of tomorrow? -- guy tal

i'm sorry, but we can't send a search-and-rescue team into plato's cave. -- xkcd

a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. – Saul Bellow

light is the best disinfectant. -- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice

my personal thing is, I don't want to step in the same river more than twice.-- sting

context determines appropriate tone, reader. no use fighting it. -- bill stott [write to the point]

in the realm of belief we are all hostages to fortune. -- michael philips [undercover philosopher]

remember: think different. that's why your macbook has the same hoary old architecture in ye old generic wintel box ... -- tenfourfox

human intuition is useless both in predicting randomness and in recognizing it. -- james gleick

[in front of a deer head] I'm confused. are we investigating a murder or preparing lunch for the palin family? -- mr nigel-murray [bones]

asked the kid where his protractor is. "how do you draw a circle? by hand?" he says "there is an authenticity to a hand drawn circle"

[kid helping me to meditate] let your thoughts blow away like the summer wind. [he includes the wind sound]

if aliens were ever to visit, NOW would be a good time! -- eren yigit

history, disconnected

in another blog, a long time ago, i had written this.

a pleasant surprise: google maps now have detailed aerial photographs of istanbul that include a part of my family history. the 11-storey building at the center of this image, named after my grandfather, is the third structure occupying that spot starting with my grandparents' family home. [where there are buildings now, there used to be pine trees, a windmill, and enough green space for sheep to graze in...]

the space of these structures aside, only two things have survived: a grape wine my grandfather had planted now covers a little gazebo [cannot be seen at this angle] next to the parking area at the back. the fig tree he planted in front somehow re-grew after it was chopped down during the last construction.

in a few days, this part of our history will be disconnected for me and my brother. there is sadness, but the realist in me reminds me that this is the price to pay when building a new life in another country.

on photography and geometry

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. -- Henri Cartier-Bresson [found on steve mccurry's blog entry]

quote of the day

we cannot afford as a polity to create classes of privileged speakers and press agencies, and underclasses of networked information producers whose products we take into the public sphere when convenient, but whom we treat as susceptible to suppression when their publications become less palatable. -- yochai benkler [forthcoming a free irresponsible Press: wikileaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate]

a random sample of napster, 2001.

a decade ago this month, i was sampling napster library content.

not what you are thinking. only the symbolic content.

this was a project for a research organization studying music trends among peer-to-peer file sharers. original napster had an interesting feature: it allowed users to view the entire library of someone who shared content. the rest is easy: i wrote a napster client to sample shared libraries. this client ramped into random sampling like this:

start with a set of seed search words
randomly pick from many responders [which changed rapidly]
get their entire library, save aside
use random picks from these libraries to seed a new search
repeat.

I sampled napster for four days, at its peak, and obtained 2647 unique libraries. [i dropped a very small number of duplicates]

here is the entire library data, unmodified, except all usernames were blanked out. you are welcome to do whatever you want with it, so long as you let me know of your research and analysis results, and give due credit.

enjoy.

ps: if you like to get this data with revision control: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/plan9/napdata

re-zoning [haiku]

winter sunset -
a hawk lands
on rezoning sign.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

recently noted quotes

If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. -- bruce sterling

Your thinking is stuck in the maze of twisty little passages that is modern Unix and its version control systems. -- russ cox

A cloud computer is just like a regular computer, except you have to ask permission from the phone company every time you use it. -- cory doctorow

for every unit of concentration, there must follow an equal and opposite unit of relaxation. -- derren brown [tricks of the mind]

I say studies to demonstrate what you already know are the best kind of research! -- stephen colbert [on protectmarriage.com]

the Crime was accidentally picking it up. the Punishment was reading it. -- karthik on crime and punishment

The real problem with open source development is it forces me to suppress my sense of humor. Irony doesn't work through a language barrier. -- rob pike

we find there is a fâçéböök page for @rosannecash but it's a mirage.

derrida, n. A sequence of signs that fails to signify anything beyond itself. -- philosophical lexicon [daniel dennett]

█████ ██ █ ████ everything ███ █████ is█████ ████ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ love. █████ ███████ ███ your █████ ████ government -- bruno decock [on wikileaks]

magical thinking often encounters the law of conservation of energy, and ignores it as a way of self-invalidation. -- ozan yigit

this isn't shopping! this is Thunderdome! -- kid observes costco at xmas time

Between consistency and absurdity, I pick absurdity. -- I_am_Ozma

Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. -- paul graham

guru portraits [repost from plan9 blog]

portraits of some friends from the turn of the millenium
[henry spencer, peter honeyman, norman wilson, david tilbrook]

nikon 801s with fuji reala. nikkor 85mm f/1.8 AF-D.

[note: these images may not be used without my permission.]

forgotten moon [haiku]

caught inside
an autumn puddle
forgotten moon.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

never were [haiku]

autumn nightfall -
he sees things
that never were.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

rand on jobs

came across this interesting bit of remembrance from rand's conversations with students:

For example, Steve Jobs of NeXT is a very tough client. If he does not like something, you hand it to him and he says, "that stinks." There is no discussion. On the other hand, I was lucky enough, I suppose, when I did the logo for him. After he saw the presentation of it, he got up - we were all at his house, sitting on the floor, you know, Hollywood style, with the fireplace going, hot as hell outside. He got up and looked at me and said, "Can I hug you." Now that is overcoming a conflict between the client and the designer"

a zen koan [repost]

the apprentice clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached wen and spake thusly:

master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?

wen considered this for some time and at last said: 'a fish!'

and clodpool went away, satisfied.

[terry pratchett, thief of time]

rooster's turn [haiku]

cicada chorus
suddenly quiet -
rooster's turn.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

pie and poetry

farm house pie (multi-layer leek pie) comes with a poem on the box, written in chinese and english:

preparing me chicken and rice, old friend,
you entertain me at your farm.
we watch the green trees that circle your village
and the pale blue of outlying mountains.
we open your window over garden and field,
to talk mulberry and hemp with our cups in our hands.
... wait till the mountain holiday
I am coming again in chrysanthemum time.

an amazing line from a very old SF novel

I found this amazing line seconds into skimming a very very old book. given how old this novel is, I am moved by the author's sight into the future. can you guess who the author is, and what novel this is from? if you can identify it without googling it, consider yourself extremely well read in science fiction. a hint: the book's future date is year 2000. [if you google, may get one hit: from google's scan of the original. I hid the name of the character to make guessing the source a bit harder]

"It appears to me, Miss xxxxx," I said, "that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements."

[of course he could not have predicted the copyright mess we found ourselves in. this was written before music cartels existed.]

recently noted quotes

let the beauty we love be what we do
there are hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the ground -- rumi

The message that precedes all others -- in art as well as life --
is simple: pay attention -- Harlan Ellison [slippage]

the challenge of iconic places is shooting them with fresh eyes,
and ideally with a fresh opinion. -- david duchemin

creativity needs a constant flow of possibility, and negativity
stops that flow with No instead of Yes. -- david duchemin

organization pays dividends. unless you're organized, you'll
waste time looking for pictures. -- steve mccurry

for me the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and
spontaneity ... henri cartier-bresson

most creativity is a transition from one context into another
where things are more surprising. -- alan kay

smugness and self-satisfaction have no place in an artist's life.
-- walt stanchfield [drawn to life]

21st century problem solving requires anticipation + resilience +
discourse + art. -- david brin

creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. art is knowing
which ones to keep. -- scott adams

a photograph is a secret about a secret. the more it tells you,
the less you know. -- Diane Arbus

move your feet. it's called perspective. -- thom hogan [things
you should do but don't]

shortcuts in art lead to cliche and propaganda. -- david duchemin

creativity is one of those things you replenish by the very act
of using it, giving it away. -- david duchemin

we all try to avoid cliche shot, but the cliche comes in not what
you shoot but how you shoot it - david duchemin

the ability to concentrate flows naturally from the ability to
choose something interesting. -- david mamet

probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an
analogy. -- richard w. hamming

stay dissatisfied with your work. but also appreciate the advances
you make. do it quietly, though. -- chris floyd

if you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. --
paul graham [how to do what you love]

some people take pictures, i find them. -- jane bown [unknown
bown]

in essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between the
pieces, not in the pieces themselves. -- bayles & orland

we are rhythmic creatures who move in patterns and feel most comfortable with those who move in synchrony with ourselves. -- b. hood

pixel peeping: LR 3 b2 and C1 pro 5

I have been playing with and testing four photography workflow tools. each one has something I like and dislike. the thing I dislike about lightroom is all the hype. It is a good tool, but not the best for everything. so now, lightroom 3 (in beta) has a new rendering engine. wonderful. it really needed one. I have been looking at that engine, and i would say adobe has more work to do. these are basic tiff extracts from capture 1 pro (first image) and lightroom 3 (b2)(second image), with no changes to images. basically: import raw, export tiff. look at the detail at both, and tell me if the difference you see is the result of sharpening or differently capable de-mosaic algorithm. I am reasonably certain it is the latter, because no amount of tinkering with lightroom sharpening tools will match the capture 1 pro image.

really. all because of the chain. you see, the faint impression you get from capture 1 pro rendering is that something with a unique structure. lightroom gives you something indistinct: a rope, or wire, or chain, whatever. the correct answer is that it is a chain with long straight pieces and loops[*], as it faintly appears to be with capture 1 pro.

is this important? i think so. beyer interpolation is a way of guessing what you don't know. better guessers produce image data that is more realistic. everything else in your digital darkroom follows from that.

[* you are thinking: you already knew this. answer: i did not. after looking at the capture 1 pro rendering and thinking "how odd" I went back and examined nearly a dozen images of the suleymanie mosque ceiling with good details of the chains that hold the giant light fixture. now I know what they look like.]

luhn validation code in go

this is the fast luhn validation code in go that uses the pre-calculated numeric transformation table, and a toggle-free left-to-right scan i came up with. details are found here. [again, i excluded the isdigit check]

var ltab = [10]int { 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 }

func luhn(s string) bool {
    n := len(s)
    if n < 2 {
        return false /* less than minimum */
    }

    /*
     * if the length is odd, add the value of the
     * first digit and skip
     */
    sum := 0
    i := 0

    if n & 1 == 1 {
        sum = int(s[i]) - int('0')
        i++
    }

    for i < n {
        sum += ltab[int(s[i]) - int('0')]
        sum += int(s[i+1]) - int('0')
        i += 2
    }

    return (sum % 10) == 0
}

autumn cleaning [haiku]

yellow leaves
on discarded chair -
autumn cleaning.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

more notes coming soon.

i have been tweeting a lot lately, and not keeping my online notebooks as up to date as i would like. [my paper notebooks doing just fine] on the other hand, there are a number of ongoing notes, everything from photography to my carefully considered strong atheism, to software engineering (or lack thereof) not to mention bits of poetry that need to be finished and posted. i hope to get back to my blog late august. at least that is the best laid plan...

craigslist: ken-rockwell-obssessed husband

someone found this in craigslist. very funny. [ken rockwell. i do read some of his reviews, but rarely buy only on his recommendation. sometimes he is way over the top, and sloppy.]

    Ken Rockwell-Obsessed Husband (North York)
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [...]

    One gently-used caucasian male. 36 years-old. Slightly defective.
    Remembers the names of Ken Rockwell's kids but not our own. Constantly
    buying high-end photo gear then selling it on craigslist the second
    Canon or Nikon releases something new. Complains endlessly about
    lowballers, tire-kickers and pixel peepers. Sold car to buy a Leica body
    and now wants to mortage house to buy lenses, all at Ken Rockwell's
    insistence. Maybe you can reprogram him. I have no time because I have
    to cart our kids around on the TTC and work two jobs while while he
    fiddles with film and DSLR to achieve super-saturated highlights.

    Reasonable offers accepted: Food, clothing, 1992 Subaru Justy. Offers of
    photo equipment will promptly be deleted! Lowball kickers are welcome! A
    swift one in the nuts will do him some good.

       * Location: North York
       * it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other
         commercial interests

    PostingID: 1239135682

paypal scam via craigslist

Subject: mint lowepro computrekker plus AW - $175 (toronto)
From: annemary
Date: May 21, 2009 12:28:08 PM EDT

Thanks for the post...I am really interested in buying this item but I am not in state for now I'm in Germany for a conference meeting...Am buying this item for my company agent located west africa....I will add $100.00 USD for the shipping cost...Making $275.00 USD... I will make the payment through my PayPal account cos is very secure and easy to receive money.....Kindly send me your PayPal email so that i can send the payment... Hope i will read from u again here soon..

this is a blatant scam of course. i did not ask for $100 for shipping, because i am not planning to ship it. the paypal payment is not very secure; credit card payments can be reversed. see paypal chargeback faq.

reflection [haiku]

wet tulips -
looking in a drop
for reflection.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

frozen [haiku]

spring thaw -
in a rushing stream
frozen heart.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]
sometimes, what froze during the dark, cold days of winter cannot be thawed.

birch and starling [haiku]

dying birch -
one starling on a branch
now two.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

recent notes, tweets and quotes

eren says [and clearly he has been watching too much kids tv and superhero cartoons]

let's face it... in the future, world may be ruled by birdbrains...

overheard in a bday party:

what manners? this is maple pie!

tweet #2858933749: we should be able to tweet straight into wikipedia so that some gems of our tweet-ergo-sum [or maybe sum-ergo-tweet] can be preserved....

"land of the goodebump and the white knuckle" no, not wallstreet... not the average north american bedroom... just mazda's imaginary world.

anonymous on ruby/rails:

it sucks mightily!

toronto star frontpage reads: "politicians chase naked truth" [leaving aside the comic mental image, which two words don't go together?]

I think I overheard someone say "we require spontaneity" ... uhh.

we arm ourselves with ideologies. -- wendy kaminer

thought of the day: familiarity invites carelessness. (familiarity breeds things too but i think this is more important)

flustered dad [me] in need of a paper towel: please bring me a ... a... child: what? an elephant?

adobe "air" ... hmm one thing to learn from car companies: choosing less dumb names.

I wonder what CNN would be like tweeting. repeating the same sniplets of "news" endlessly. or change the word order to keep it "fresh".

situation room: wow it is as dull as I remember it from the bush days. evidently, an increase in the IQ of the administration has had no positive effect on CNN talkies.

need some grounding... phew the C compiler still works! ran out to find a bookstore... where is russell? ooo... house and philosophy!

retweeting redux:. if you like tom u probably will like geoff. here Is a 15-day trial subscription...

thought of the day: if a choice is too easy, it probably isn't real. [some hard choices are not real either.]

correct math considered harmful: you are the 9,672,535,834th visitor to see this lucky banner. congratulations, you won!

plato in tech age: commentators should be required to spend a year hacking and living in the technology they want to comment on...

i wish there was an icon or some onomatopoeia that would accurately reflect a deep sigh, tightened lips, and exasperation. siiighooghummm?

shirky's coverage of linux, from what I have skimmed, is depressingly unoriginal. sigh I will have to read here comes everybody" more fully...

wow the kid can actually explain how fast lucky luke has to be to draw his revolver faster than his shadow!

have picma micron 05mm with archival ink, will travel...

thought of the day

if history repeats, by definition we did not learn from it, and each iteration costs more. [oz/0309]

recent notes, quotes and tweets

AIG... is the sound of brain matter squished underfoot...

when there is nothing to do, it's a waste of electricity to keep the mind running. -- Andre Kukla [mental traps]

I would like originality and repeat scores on my tweets. maybe numbering, indexing and concordance as well. (pat. pend)

grrrr bad enough we had to live with stupid watered-down "sci-fi" for years. now syfy? is that the sound u get when ectoplasmic goo drips?

quoth graydon hoare:

facebook users are insane. it's a web page. full of people's vague mutterings and crude party photos. get a grip.

new journalism: i wish it would be called something else, like journalism-the-next-generation (jtng)...

thought of the day: sun bleaches anything it touches, including thoughts.

so cool to find a quote i had noted from a broderick essay come back to me via my email sig line someone responded to four (!) years later:

bloat is the enemy of promise. sadly, like super-sized servings of greasy junk food, bloat sells. -- damien broderick

deleted ambiance app from my iphone. latest edition requires signup/login for sounds to put you to sleep and you have to pay for the priviledge. just what I need: another login in yet another opportunistic web service. not sure if sleeping is the expected result or the existing condition.

what would world be like without omelettes?

facebook vs twitter: re-structuring vs structuring... closed to open vs open to well... open. perennial battle of world-building. alas, twitter has a foundation made of balsa wood, bale wire and duct tape, so we'll see how easy it is to build a structure on.

thought for the morning... heraclitus was wrong: u can bathe in the same river twice. you just have to swim damned fast to catch it again.

thought of the day: when all else fails, pay attention!

nothing like an old-fashioned shave: meditation under cold steel.

readings on photography for early spring, part one

portraiture... one of the finest books on portraiture is now out of print, alas. i have studied every image in it countless times since 2000... just great portraits with short notes on the process of making the images, composition, positioning the sitter etc.

jane bown, faces

closeup... this one is a photographer scientist's exploration of extraordinary things around her, from microscopic to larger. just amazing and eye-opening work, with short, sometimes lyrical introductions to out-of-this world [yet of this world] images.

felice frankel and george whitesides, on the surface of things: images of the extraordinary in science

light... for a long time i searched for a really good book on photographing lighting that covered everything, from product to portrait. this book happens to be an indispensable reference. a lot of text, a lot of technical detail, but i think well worth the effort if one is interested in best uses of light.

fil hunter, steven biver, paul fuqua, light - science & magic: an introduction to photographic lighting

composition and design ... this one is one of the better books on the topic. covers everything from gestalt perception, dynamic tension, to graphic and photographic design elements to process. i especially like the case studies, various images made and their issues, leading to the one image that has all the right ingredients.

michael freeman, the photographer's eye: composition and design for better digital photos

law of indecision

i recently discovered this:

oz's law of indecision: when enough indecision accumulates, it collapses into a dwarf decision.

[march 2009]

recently noted quotes

must... have... sushi! - eren yigit [age 10]

ufs must die. -- casper dik

will true love conquer all? not in my show! -- joker

when in doubt, eat broccoli -- liz pearson and mairlyn smith [ultimate foods]

the wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes. -- xkcd [what about the brain?]

recently deleted iphone apps

two pieces of "free" ad-supported software deleted from my iphone: movies (flixter), and i.tv. thank you for playing. currently undecided on the movies replacement, not an important app. i.tv was quite easy to replace: napkin studio's what's on is a [says so from the start] ad-free tv guide. it has a somewhat strange initial setup sequence, but once configured, quite nice and smooth. thanks guys.

all i want

first noted quote of the new year... john shaw, from the intro to his photoshop cs3 ebook [review]:

All I want to do is make a good image. I don’t want to make a composite picture by taking a tree from one photo, a wolf from another, those humpback whales from a third, and putting all these parts into a shot of the Grand Canyon.

perl

As I progressed through the project -- as my shell surpassed 1,000 lines and made its way towards 10,000 -- I was learning of a painful truth about Perl that many others had discovered before me: that it is an undesigned dung heap of a language entirely inappropriate for software in-the-large. -- bryan cantrill

[on a related note, see perl as voodoo. thanks ivo.]

storm [haiku]

snow storm -
unblinking, she holds
my gaze.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

idiotic comment of the month

mr harper, on his potential departure from power:

the opposition is attempting to impose this deal without your say, without your consent, and without your vote.

those of us who have lived in countries that produce minority and coalition governments with great regularity should either find a nearby wall to relieve the strain on our heads, or laugh uproariously in disbelief. it is not clear what part of the recent election results mr harper does not understand: his minority part, the opposition having received the majority of the votes, or that coalitions can and should be formed when a governing party is too arrogant and/or too stupid to do its job properly.

toronto sun and canadian democracy

today's toronto sun headline screams: no! no! no! this must not be allowed to happen. [those who studied media are excused for thinking that this is a headline from a newspaper in chilean dictatorship years, and the newspaper is el mercurio] toronto sun should stuff it. this is exactly what is allowed to happen in canadian democracy, where majority of canadians have elected people who can and should use their position to bring change when needed, including a re-structure of governance. goodbye to mister harper, whose arrogance and weak¹ intellect is the cause of unnecessary turmoil. to quote david mamet [bambi vs godzilla]

the unfortunate and inevitable concomitant of "bring it on" is "how do you like it now?"

¹an intellect which has ideology as its primary source of nourishment is weak by definition.

today's dropped iphone app: WeatherEye

nice looking app. in its info page, in all caps, it claims it is FREE. nowhere in its info page does it mention that it is ad-supported. nowhere does it mention that it will want to know your sex and birthdate for better ad placement. yet another bit of cybercrud that wasted my bandwidth, and is now deleted from my iphone.

my eyeballs are very expensive. ask permission before trying to capture them, or go to hell.

gas pump [haiku]

autumn dawn -
old gas pump
serving dewdrops.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

recently noted quotes

we see what we know until we know who we are, then we see what we feel. -- ernst haas.

there is no unconditional love. there is unconditional need. -- gregory house

It's not house-trained. It probably won't work. Don't try and use this release for anything useful. We have made every effort to ensure that all bits in this package are either 0 or 1. However, these bits may not be in the correct order and proportion. -- mdma readme

Anyone found laughing at the code will be shot at dawn. -- mdma readme

there is a technical term for this: it is called being really really stupid. -- fred whiteside [no, he really is not talking about republican politics and strategies.]

if they respond to spam, sarah palin may look reasonable. -- anon

Before citing any statistic, you should have a clear understanding of what that figure is measuring, who calculated it, and how. -- timothy b. lee [piracy statistics and the importance of journalistic skepticism]

Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail. -- seth godin [10 questions for seth godin]

inertia is apparently more powerful than creative intelligence. -- anon

autumn buried [haiku]

autumn buried -
color of leaves
in afternoon snow.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved]

atwood on harper

from a letter by margaret atwood on arts, creativity, and stephen harper:

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. Of course, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth - the only kind of art you might need - but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master's Voice. Maybe that's why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad. He didn't like the competition for media space.

quote of the day

republicans at one time heard to have said:

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all.

[found in david brin's blog]

recently noted quotes

true intelligence is incompatible with the fascist impulse. -- spider robinson

it is never the size, it is always the technology! -- eren yigit [10yrs old]

passwords come from down deep. -- jack reacher

please fasten your seatbelts: we are about to encounter contradictions. the subject is love, and things may get bumpy. -- laura kipnis [against love]

We'd also like to take an opportunity to remind you that one query is sufficient and multiple queries regarding the same issue make the Magic Donkey cry. -- flickr help mail

No humans were involved in the creation of this email. -- flickr help mail [good to see that flicker was able to employ enough many typing monkeys to eventually generate this fascinating email. alas the same email did not contain any important lines from shakespeare.]

almost dying changes nothing. dying changes everything -- house

dad is like a rubik's cube. you have to twist and turn him to figure him out. -- eren yigit

only two things you ignore: things that aren't important and things you wish weren't important and wishing never works. -- private investigator [house]

time for a change

just as i was celebrating the release of nikon d700, and saving money, canon comes up with 5D mark II, and blows me away. twice d700, and costs less.
shopping cart:

• Canon 5d mk II
• Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro
• Canon EF 70-200mm f4.0L IS USM
• Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM
• Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM

update: i specified 16-35 strictly for uses on architecture and interior, thinking it may have less distortion than 17-40 f/4. looking at some of the reviews, i am not so sure anymore. the price difference is huge, i don't care for speed, and 17-40 distortion is not much worse than 16-35.

quote of the day

from A C Grayling's guardian column road to nowhere:

Secularists say, "believe whatever nonsense you want, but keep it to yourself and act responsibly". The Brian-sandalistas say, "believe what we want you to believe and act as we say". The psychopaths among them say, "believe what we want you to believe and act as we say or we will kill you".

brian-sandalista: see life of brian

recently noted quotes

morning is a portal to misery and school! -- eren yigit

my memory is great but seems to be very short these days. -- emily calkin

excuse me, I've just got to go and unclench my teeth. -- prose [tom duff]

gamma is not a relative on your mother's side -- thom hogan

it is always easier to create deviations from normal color than it is to create normal color from deviated colors. -- thom hogan

you know when you run out of questions, you don't just run out of answers, you run out of hope. -- thirteen [house, m.d.]

i could not find any red tape. -- anonymous sensei [jccc taikai, 2008]

the meat is the whole deal. are you getting the picture? -- terry bisson

when faith stands trial, its appeals must go to the court of reason --austin dacey [secular conscience]

it is the special beauty of faith, that, like the fabled phoenix, it draws its life from the flames that destroy it. It flies as it dies. -- thomas m. disch [the word of god]

pulse

three images from a recent photo project.all images copyright ozan s. yigit.
see also: silentrunning photostream

shards [haiku]

evening train -
shards of sunset
cut my sleep.

[oz/2008]

tv shows and reality: a quote

abby: i am good mcgee, but i cannot work miracles. this is impossible. i told you once, i told you a thousand times -
mcgee: there is no substitute for quality source imagery, i know.

[finally a show that does not try to screw with the information theory, insult the audience, and try to extract 10mp worth of information from a crude 1mp cell-phone image... CSI fantasy shows should get a clue, and go back to something resembling science. oh wait, narrative brain damage is irreversible...]

leica M8 in iraq

a working photographer has to read michael kamber's detailed field review of leica m8. if that does not deliver the swift, smarting kick leica needs, i do not know what will.

I have found the Leica M8 to be unreliable, poorly designed, and to deliver substandard results in most of the situations in which I have used it. I can’t think of any camera--or for that matter any electronic device I have recently used--that so thoroughly fails to live up to its potential and its heritage.

[some of us have spotted a few of the design issues without having to make a living out of it, or paying the outrageous sums of money required, thank goodness...]

a zen poem

the moon's the same old moon,
the flowers exactly as they were,
yet i've become the thingness
of all the things i see!

bunan (1602-72)

[found in zen poetry: let the spring breeze enter edited and translated by lucien stryk and takashi ikemoto]

recently noted quotes

yeah, don't give me any ideas. i am getting too farfetched! -- eren yigit [age 10]

there is no pause button on reality. -- eren yigit [a remarkable observation that gives difficulty to many religious fanatics and republicans]

i love the word "smear"... -- laura calder [french food at home]

The life of a contrarian is inherently frustrating. Whenever you point out the flaws in a particular dogmatic position, there is a tediously-predictable, reflex reaction that you must be a dogmatist, for the opposite extreme. -- david brin [Airline deterioration, the new elite, levees and clkimate deniers]

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere. -- victor stanger [has science found god?]

I bought it because I'm a sucker for finishing a series. DON'T DO IT. Put the mouse down and walk away. Do NOT check that box. -- from a review of stross's "clan corporate" at amazon [we get reviews]

[...] but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. -- donald knuth [interview with knuth]

hating bit fields in c structs. dat shit nevah werkz -- peter honeyman [tweet]

finding a needle in a haystack isn't hard when every straw is computerized. -- dexter

We need to kick the bishops out of the House of Lords, ban the Police and judiciary from taking donations from religious organizations, and get religion out of politics by any means necessary. -- charlie stross [when is a cult not a cult?]

i do not even know what a square looks like. i operate from a circle. -- dolores pitcher

fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch. -- arianna huffington [right is wrong]

twee ... splat

this morning's fun task: feeding twitterrific to appzapper.

i have all but given up on twitter; a relatively interesting idea badly let down by inexperience and hyped-up, quick-and-neat frameworks that let you do well in boring situations, sell a rack-full of poorly written books, but cannot scale to the real world. talking about books: here is another possibly useful book idea that should be titled (you guessed it) twitterrible...

[related reading: release it!: design and deploy production-ready software]

encounter [haiku]

spring flies -
a delicate encounter
all blacked out.

[oz/2008]

[black flies are out in full force in new brunswick. they are in my ears, nose, eyes, viewfinder, hands. they bite. thoughtful, well composed photography is not to be had...]

quote of the day [on content, or lack thereof]

If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam? -- charlie stross [why your internet experience is slow]

a haiku

first plum blossom
lands on grass --
sudden sword.

[copyright ozan s. yigit, 2008]

cover design of the day

one of the best cover designs i have come across this month.
margaret mcmillan, uses and abuses of history [this is just about the cover. i do not know anything about the author or this particular book.]

recently noted quotes

i would rather eat tomatoes than listen to this. -- eren yigit [in response to kelly pickler's singing about red shoes. eren really dislikes tomatoes]

design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. -- michael t. nygard [release it! design and deploy production-ready software. - yes, this book is really very good.]

some people take pictures, i find them. -- jane bown [unknown bown]

who wants to go through life not ever singing? -- roger ebert [review of woody allen's everyone says i love you]

here are people we don't care about, doing things they do not understand, in a movie without any rules. triple play. -- roger ebert [review of "an american warewolf in paris"]

based on the evidence, the bible isn't scripture. it's a Rorschach test. -- solomon short

dtrace is the MRI of software. -- gil hauer

As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral. -- fraxas [on advertising]

People who brandish naturalistic principles at us are usually up to mischief. -- peter medawar [the future of man]

Philosophically, I believe the designer's goal involves making decisions for the user. If the decisions are good, it's a good design and the user is content. I do not believe it's the designer's goal to defer everything to the user. As a bonus, making decisions early tends to simplify the design. -- rob pike [9fans mailing list]

faith is the invisible means of support for a belief when reasons fall out from under it. -- austin dacey

unfortunately, consulting entrails has never been a reliable guide to truth, even when those entrails are your own. -- austin dacey [the secular conscience]

I DISLIKE YOU! -- anonymous canadian baseball fan [against detroit tigers pitcher]

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. -- Microsoft .NET Framework [another amusing and informative manifestation of enterprise-level public debugging infrastructure]

dealing with fatuous rhetoric

mike harding [hi x-boss!] at sun alumni blogs pointed to ethan at urbanspoon and made my day. do latte drinkers really vote for obama?

We could just assume all trust fund babies are sipping latte at Starbucks and refer to figure 1, but that wouldn't serve the interests of science. Instead, let's assume that trust fund babies have one thing in common, money, and look at how wealth stacks against voting habits.

looking for a notebook app

i have been looking for a good mac notebook applicaton for a long time. i have a set of requirements that may seem quite idiosyncratic; here are a few of them:

• basic wiki/blog/etc. functionality [esp. markdown et al support] for simple structured writing [mac user, blogger]
• emacs-grade editing capability for heavy lifting [oldtimer, unix hack]
• good image support [photographer]
• sketching, scribbling [designer, illustrator]
• good indexing [eg. see circus ponies notebook], regex search [author]
• good layout support [author]
• organizational tools for content

clearly i do not need just a notebook; i need a strange hybrid. so far, i like circus ponies notebook as a comfortable compromise, though its lack of direct blogging support is forcing me to look for other tools. [my blog is just one of my notebooks, structured slightly better for public display.] i initially wrote this entry as a test from macjournal. [the result did not display correctly, alas; it was fixed using appzapper...]

[if any readers of this blog have some suggestions, other than write the app yourself, i would appreciate them]

[update: i have circus ponies notebook, and voodoopad pro now. they are both reasonable tools, with some nice ideas. on the other hand, neither tool impresses me all that much.]

daily rotfl: iso and ooxml

jason matusow of microsoft wrote:

I could make a very compelling argument that Open XML has done more to revive the reputation of international standards than any other standard before it.

i doubt such an argument can be made anywhere except in warm fantasies of those oblivious to decades of international standards work. a reasonable reading of the events, arguments and objections around this particular "standard" suggests iso's reputation, such as it was since the heady days of iso/osi, is worse off than before; there has been significant complaints that microsoft, consistent with its history of monopolistic aggressiveness, has abused the standards fasttrack process to push out a specification that it can manipulate to compete against a well-specified, open iso standard it does not like. [canada, i am proud to say, voted against this faux-standard precisely because of this]

being a microsoft toady is not the kind of reputation iso needs.

good books in the pile

an incomplete list of books from 07-08 i found entertaining, essential, edifying, exciting and sometimes exceptional.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction Of The Human Mind

Predictably Irrational [i expect everyone knows dr. ariely by now...]

logolounge 4 [a logo designer has to keep up with these logo lounge collections. alas, the content is less innovative than one may expect.]

collective intelligence [very interesting book with some cool algorithms, and in python. sort of book numb3rs might publish...]

Refactoring to Patterns

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter [masayuki miyata's paper cuts [kiri-e] make this book possibly the best edition out there. i wish it was in bigger format]

Venus on the Half-Shell and Others

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability [second edition.]

Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life

Here Comes Everybody [hmm, i know some people called this a masterpiece, but i reserve that word for very, very special books. my initial impression is that this is a good solid piece of work, but not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination.]

Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

The Age of American Unreason [robert fulford of national post called her a "demi intellectual" and wrote a lazy, lip-smacking critique of sorts, as befitting his paper: "To satisfy Jacoby, it's not enough to exhibit intelligence. It's necessary also to use that intelligence properly, to develop views closely resembling hers." first part of the sentence is priceless, never mind its degeneration into a slur afterwards.]

Dark Integers and Other Stories

Calendrical Calculations (3rd ed)

Brasyl

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting [one of the most informative books on photographic lighting i have ever found.]

Influences: A Lexicon of Contemporary Graphic Design Practice

Silver Palate Cookbook 25th Anniversary Edition [you just have to have it. many years ago i discarded an early edition, now have it back with better photography...]

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

Cosmic Motors: Spaceships, Cars & Pilots of Another Galaxy

Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters [one of the best in this topic]

Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

Statistics as Principled Argument [MAGIC: magnitude, articulation, generality, interestingness, and credibility. required reading.]

Scientists Confront Creationism [insert picture of fish in a barrel]

[list extracted from my amazon [ca] and chapters orders, but all pointers on this blog are directed to barnes and noble [us]]

ventus available online with CC license

one of my favorite authors, karl schroeder just released ventus under a creative common license. [eg. pdf] see karl's site [recently redesigned] for different download formats.

Ventus is a novel of information apocalypse set in the far future. For a thousand years the sovereign Winds have maintained the delicate ecological balance of the terraformed planet Ventus. Now an alien force threatens to wrest control of the terraforming system away from the Winds...

Jordan Mason, a young tradesman, is thrust into the midst of an ancient galactic conflict when he becomes the only human on Ventus who can locate the source of the alien threat. But will he side with the Winds, who have brutally suppressed technological development among the human colonists of Ventus? Or will he throw in his lot with an entity that may be planning to remake Ventus in its own, deathly image? Ventus incorporates ideas about nanotechnology, terraforming, and information theory in an epic tale of war, tragic love, betrayal and transcendence.

a photographer's notes: images on facebook

if you care about copyrights, especially your rights on your images, you may want to keep them away from facebook.
first their stuff:

No Site Content may be modified, copied, distributed, framed, reproduced, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, or sold in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without the Company's prior written permission, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally post on the Site.

now your stuff:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

plain and clear. if you are a serious photographer, your images do not belong in facebook.

[group link: My photos are MINE! NOT Facebook's! Change the Terms and conditions!. so far as i can tell, this group was formed in 2007, and has amassed 87164 members. facebook has not changed its terms and conditions, and i doubt it will.]

recently noted quotes

lock-ins are never good for customers: a business that isn't confident that it can keep your business by providing the best product at the best price is a business that isn't planning on providing the best product at the best price. -- cory doctorow [in defense of complaining]

look, she is nuts, but we cannot give her 10ccs of atheism and send her home. -- tal [house, m.d.]

Don't you have paint to watch dry? -- cosma shalizi

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. —- marshall mcluhan

This page was last updated in 1984 by a gifted psychic who foresaw all that is described here. -- mr bunny's hutch

ah, complexity: the mother of all consulting fees! -- marco tabini

you may have an invisible opponent, but you still have to see him. -- sandra jorgenson [iaido 5th dan sensei, mu mon kai]

i paid a life to get these parents. [because i pay a lot more, i get better parents] -- eren yigit [age 9]

properly implementing a singleton requires a number of the tricks shown earlier. -- the ruby programming language

people don't change. for example, i will keep repeating: people don't change! -- house [house, m.d.]

cyborg: do you even have opposable thumbs?
beastboy: most of the time! -- teen titans [fourth season]

why is the notion of a fundamentalist comedian funny, or at least quite odd? -- john allen paulos [irreligion]

the incongruity necessary for appreciating humor is only recognizable with an open mind and fresh perspective. -- john allen paulos [irreligion]

people want interesting clutter. people want clutter that is on sale. -- matthew powell

left to its own devices, the mind runs off in random directions as synapses connect to others that happen to be in the neighborhood. -- jack hart [a writer's coach]

Dear site operators: Here's a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. -- cory doctorow [17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you]

autosave failed ... autosave failed ...

google's blogger, a year or two later: utterly boring layouts and templates. unbearably mediocre editing front-end. endless "autosave" failures. same sorry software, different day.

[addendum: yes i know i can take my blog elsewhere, but quietely walking away is not good enough. i want google to be informed. i want it to know that blogger is mediocre, and should be improved. google did not get to where it is by being the second or third best.]

[april update: at least one blog entry become entirely un-savable in draft form. several other drafts have had intermittent autosave failures. this is gone from bad to disgusting.]

daily rotfl

yet again pz myers is making fun of fishes in a barrel, er, creationists. [a creationist own goal?]

Creationist: There are no transitional whale fossils!

Scientist: Oh, dear, really? That's terrible! We should teach the students about that, don't you think?

Creationist: Yes, we should. That information must go into the science standards for our state.

Scientist: I quite agree. When we mandate that our teachers must offer instruction in the details of whale transitional fossils, the gaps will be so obvious.

Creationist: Good. Let's insert, "Teachers will discuss the nature of evolutionary transitions, emphasizing the kinds of evidence needed to support claims that land animals evolved into whales, and that cats give birth to dogs."

Scientist: Well, as a compromise, let's leave out the bit about cats and dogs, and we'll have to clean up and standardize the language in committee, but let's do it. The committee might even make this broader, pushing for discussion of all kinds of transitional fossils, which, of course, are absent. Boy, you sure got me over a barrel, forcing me to include discussion of an evolutionary flaw in our public schools. I hope you aren't going to continue to outwit me with your Mastery of Science.

Creationist: <preening smugly> Ha ha, our cunning plan is working!

dns and censorship

a judge orders dynadot to

prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.

hm. until we get a domain name system that can withstand arbitrary attempts of censorship and manipulation, click this link: wikileaks

blue note needs java and linux

i try to track all rudy van gelder remastered blue note jazz. this used to be somewhat easier; rvg had its own section in bluenote. it is now redesigned, and more difficult to navigate even when not throwing up after a simple click. how embarrassing for such a legendary label...

Exception Details:
System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Source Error:
Line 40: for (int i = 0; i < b1.Items.Rows.Count; i++)
Line 41: {
Line 42     if (Convert.ToInt32(b1.Items.Rows[i]["Width"]) < 433)
                   b1.Items.Rows[i].Delete();
Line 43: }
Line 44: b1.Items.AcceptChanges();

Source File: e:\inetpub\wwwroot\LabelSites\BlueNote\
bluenote.com\www\CatalogArtistReleases.aspx.cs    Line: 42

prophet and wikipedia

nytimes reports on an attempt to censor a medieval image of prophet muhammad in wikipedia. evidently, no amount of inhumanity or insanity [such as beheadings, suicide bombings] can arouse enough islamic sensitivity to put together a petition [not that petitions would ever work against insanity] but a medieval image in wikipedia can. too bad the painter is already dead...

quote of the day

So in light of the issue’s new prominence and with a desire to improve the mental hygiene of others, I would just like to say that Intelligent Design is a really, really bad idea -- scientifically, politically, and theologically. I say this as a dedicated conservative, who has on many occasions defended and espoused religion and religious conservatism. I also say it as a professional molecular biologist, who has worked daily (or at least week-daily) for years with biological problems to which the theory of evolution has contributed significant understanding -- and to which Intelligent Design is incapable of contributing any understanding at all. -- mac johnson [intelligent design and other dumb ideas]

late resolutions for 2008

• touched: i will never buy any new electronic gadget without a reasonable touch interface. thanks to apple, the year of the teeny buttons, plastic styli, undergrad-grade interfaces and poor navigation are gone. [sad observation: palm is still producing things for year 2000. see centro.]
• right of ownership: i will rip every single cd in my cd library in three different ways: lame mp3, aac, and ogg, and i will encourage and provide assistance to anyone with a cd collection to do the same to their own library.
• food fight: every package of food that i find in my storeroom that has any form of tropical oil [such as palm oil] regardless of how many "healthy grains" claims it may have, will go in the garbage. companies that produce this crap [such as orville redenbacher] and pretend you are getting something healthy will be boycotted.
• environmental protection: i will do everything within my power as a canadian citizen to keep majority [preferably even a minority] government from the reach of harper and his drooling toadies.
• squeezed: i will write ten thousand lines of python. a portion of that will be rewriting others' java, perl and ruby code.
• overbooked: i will finally clean up my library, and get rid of anything i have not looked at in the last five years. [this is going to be very difficult. what am i to do with my copy of weissmann's lisp 1.5?]
• wikiful: i will contribute to at least ten wikipedia entries. [i had also once promised that i would contribute 100 images to wikimedia; i am still working on that one...]
• fox hunt: i will remove every copy of firefox, iceweasel and any other related animal from all my systems. i am sick and tired of of this bloated, resource gobbling piece of cyberblob eating up my systems.
• martial way: i will finally learn aikido. [i am minutes away from aikido yoshinkai canada where kimeda sensei teaches.]
• imagenation: i will make 2000 good [keeper] images, and display ten of them at a nearby starbucks. [see photographic goals]

recently noted quotes

to clarify, add detail. -- edward tufte [iphone resolution]

archer: you're sure there is nothing down there?
t'pol: yes captain.
archer: not even a microbe! i don't want to blow up something that can evolve into a sentient species in a couple billion years. -- [star trek enterprise]

as usual with arguments about the invisible hand of the market, it is a load of rubbish. -- mark c. chu-carroll [insurance: why it sucks]

I have an unreasoning prejudice against phones that I can't run a Python interpreter and a word processor on. -- charlie stross [marketing musings]

don't you know? a dead martyr's worth ten posturing leaders. -- kyril finn [star trek next generation]

streamlined madness is what i've come to expect from sun. -- anonymous coward [slashdot story on Sun buying MySql]

Ideational Clearance Sale! Going out of our minds, all concepts must go! -- http://gnosis.cx

we live the life of mollusks! -- anonymous mom

if my mom was a role model, she would be famous. -- connor yigit [my five-year-old nephew]

apple and dtrace: move along, nothing to see here

adam leventhal discovered that apple broke dtrace while trying to prevent some applications from being traced.

The notion of true systemic tracing was a bit too egalitarian for their classist sensibilities so they added this glob of lard into dtrace_probe() -- the heart of DTrace:

#if defined(__APPLE__)
        /*
         * If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
         * then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
         */
        if (ISSET(current_proc()->p_lflag, P_LNOATTACH)) {
            continue;
        }
#endif /* __APPLE__ */

[i was tempted to say but at least they have dtrace, while linux developers are still scratching their heads and armpits but i won't. i just realized that they are now even at being differently clued.]

[update: landon fuller's fix]

daily yawn

perl6 and parrot
released, i hear
oh, like
wow.
welcome to 2001
without
the onion.

daily rotfl

here is john dvorak, pissing on sun, again. [i find it disappointing to be in an industry that encourages its practitioners to wear the "engineer" label also continues to encourage employment for drooling "analysts" whose fame and typing skill far exceed their ability to assemble a coherent and thoughtful analysis.]

I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job.

nicely put, but...

stephen metcalf tries to rescue slate, but too late, me thinks...

The crux of Saletan's pieces was his Liberal Creationist analogy. The analogy is hopeless along several competing dimensions, but it reminded me of the Dilettante's First Law of Empirical Narcissism. In a moment of controversy, the temptation to proclaim yourself an avatar of truth, and your opponent a faith-based inquisitor, is natural enough. But Darwin is Darwin thanks to generations of independent corroboration. By definition, generations of independent corroboration do not stand behind a thesis that is still being hotly contested. In claiming Darwin (or Copernicus or Galileo) for his cause, a person is often by implication saying: There would be consensus here, but for you damned critics! This is an odd definition of consensus. Conversely, when one's angry reaction to an idea is being adduced as evidence in its favor, one should ask: What does my anger have to do with the truth-content of your idea? If you told me there was a genetic basis to Jewish avarice, I would be angry. So what? What does my anger have to do with your crappy research?

broken social

i just deleted my opensocial account. [why? i do not have the time] first attempt spinned for an hour, though i was warned that "this will take a few minutes." second attempt did what it was supposed to do after a shorter spin. so we know that the deletion sort-of works on opensocial.