09:10 am - Photos: Recent Uploads
WTF? When attempting to use the telescope I borrowed from my brother as a telescope instead of as a long camera lens, the clearest, brightest view I get is when I remove the telescope eyepiece and hold up a 50mm camera lens to use as an eyepiece. This is ... counterintuitive, at my present level of understnding of telescopes.
Trying to keep both eyes open while one has such a vastly different magnification factor than the other (as when looking through a 700mm lens) is mildly headache-inducing. Trying to do so when one eye sees upside down and magnified while the other sees normally ... Ow. It feels like somebody jabbed a stilletto into my eye socket. (Was my brain trying to tell that eye to move in a way it couldn't do -- rotate in its socket -- or is the pain entirely neurological?)
I can't shoot helicopters today. There were two (both State Police, I think) parked downtown, but when the image in the viewfinder kept rippling from the air currents between here and downtown, I gave up any hope of getting sharp enough focus to read the tail numbers. (So now I'm trying to get cell-phone video of the heat ripples. Just to find out whether I can do so or not.)
Also: is it just me, or is it easier to shoot fireworks on a film camera than on digital?
"[...] a lot of other people will start praising Helms as if none of the hateful stuff matters. The hateful stuff matters." -- Joe Sudbay, 2008-07-04. (He then goes on to provide examples of Jesse Helms' work, and relevant quotes from Helms, showing this stuff that matters.)
"This is part of the reason that Americans are bewildered when non-Americans have opinions about all Americans. On any apartment corridor in the States you can have, per door, a different language, philosophy, level of education, financial condition ... How in the Nine Circles does anyone generalize from that?" -- from the Television Tropes & Idioms wiki entry, 'American Political System'
"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still." -- Edward Estlin Cummings (aka E.E. Cummings or e.e. cummings; b. 1894-10-14, d. 1962-09-03)
[To my countrymen: happy Independence Day! (Happy birthday to
a nation I love enough to want to help make it as great as it thinks
it is, and could be.) And also, happy birthday to
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
justgus37!]
"At some point it occurred to me that the White House's depiction of terrorism has now become so at odds with reality that they might as well be warning us about gelatinous cubes. And, having thought this, I could no longer not hear the phrase "gelatinous cube" whenever this guy spoke, e.g., 'The NSA's Gelatinous Cube Surveillance Program is a vital tool for preventing gelatinous cube attacks here at home and preventing the spread of gelatinous cubism worldwide.' And you know they'll be hyping the threat of owlbears again before the 2008 election." -- Matthew Baldwin (Defective Yeti), 2008-05-07
I was about to remove the windowscreen to shoot birds behind my house, but then decided to leave the screen in place and focus the lens much closer.
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Leaving the screen or the windowpane in the way (depending on how high I was shooting) cost me some sharpness. I'm not going to apologize for that.
"A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all." -- Washington Irving (b. 1783-04-03, d. 1859-11-28)
"Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart." -- Washington Irving (b. 1783-04-03, d. 1859-11-28)
[Happy birthday to Barbara in Texas!]
"Patriotism is not dying for one's country, it is living for one's country. And for humanity. Perhaps that is not as romantic, but it's better." -- Agnes Macphail
[To my friends across the border to the north, happy Canada Day!]
In honour of H. Karamanian (from whom I didn't manage to find any quotations):
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equpped with 18,000 vaccuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons." -- unknown writer in Popular Mechanics, March 1949
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." -- John Von Neumann (ca. 1949)
Somebody's pre-emptive proximity alert[1] has been going off behind my house for the past few hours. Loud, high-pitched, and AFAIK, it can't be turned off except for a timed sleep-mode or the presence of a predator overhead. I don't know enough to identify the make and model[2] from the sound, but I'm pretty sure that's what I'm hearing. I expect to be hearing it every day until autumn.
[1] Rather than sounding when a potential malefactor gets too close, it continuously sounds a warning that the area is defended and others are not to approach, regardless of the presence or absence of anybody to be warned off.
[2] Er, I mean genus and species. But I'm fairly certain it's one of the pocket-sized models, or at most one size up.
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-15:
"In short, [Hannibal] Lecter is and always will be a snob. He is not, whatever his ambitions, a gentleman, partly because he is a homicidal maniac, but also because no gentleman would dream of actually telling you how much he values courtesy." -- Anthony Lane, in a New Yorker review of the novel "Hannibal Rising", by Thomas Harris.
(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)
"Very hard to get bored with a supply of hand grenades..." -- Lgilsig, 2008-02-20 (in comments)
I hit one of those installation wizards that requests that all other applications be shut down before proceeding (*grumble**mumble*poor OS design*mope*), so I took a moment to watch my XP system idling away, filling 103MB RAM just to do that. And remembering back to when 103MB of RAM would have been enough for more than one thousand six hundred of the computers I'd been using, maxed out.
I'm not asking to go back to that -- I can do so much more with these almost-modern machines. Just musing that the Vaio I'm holding takes sixteen-hundred times as much memory just for the OS to wait for me to ask it to do something, than the most memory I could use up at once keeping a computer busy, way back when.
And although I understand the reasons, it's still just a bit creepy when I think about it that way.
(I'm going to deliberately avoid calculating how long it would take to swap 103MB of virtual memory on a huge bank of 160KB 5.25" floppy drives, or think too hard about the fact that half an hour ago I was using 800MB of VM on this (260MB physical RAM) laptop, and have no idea how much real and virtual memory was being used on the three Linux machines that were displaying apps on this screen via X.
Okay, time to load up those programs again and try to remember where I left off ...
"Antisocial behavior isn't spawned by blogs and MySpace, but it sure is a neat place to spend lots of time if you are antisocial by nature." -- Stephen Dill, 2008-04-15
"[...] a person may be 'confused' about what level of
verbal harassment, er, sorry, 'conversation' is appropriate -
though actually, I doubt most heterosexual men are really that
confused, since I am prepared to bet they'd be quite unconfused
if they were approached like that by another man [...]" --
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yonmei,
2008-05-28
"What liberals, who are into doing their own thing instead of committing themselves to being obedient, fail to understand is that the culture of obedience finds self-direction a challenge (an insult) to the preference for following the directions of others.
"Be that as it may, what liberals, who do the right thing by their own volition, resent, and rightfully so, in my view, is that their virtuous acts are denigrated BECAUSE they are self-directed while the obedience crowd commits unspeakable horrors and gets honored for doing what it's told."
-- hannah, 2008-05-21
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the
intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." -- Carl Jung
[thanks to
blueeowyn]
"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited." -- Alan Kay
[I didn't have a Turing quote already in the queue for the 96th anniversary of his birth, so I grabbed something computer related by another Alan...]
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-08:
"One cannot simply equate market economics with Marxist economics. Yet laissez-faire ideology, I contend, is just as much a perversion of supposedly scientific verities as Marxism-Leninism is." -- George Soros, philanthropist, in the article "The Capitalist Threat", Atlantic Monthly, Volume 279, No. 2, February 1997.
(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)
"[...] so many levels removed from reality there's a genuine risk it could be run over by Superman riding a unicorn on his way to meet a reasonable political blogger." -- Luke McKinney, "5 Books That Can Actually Make You Stupider", Cracked
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