A Change of Scale and Timescale

There has been a lot of excite­ment about the fact that some of the higher end dig­i­tal SLRs (notably the Nikon D90) can now shoot High Def­i­n­i­tion Video. This means that there are new pos­si­bil­i­ties for peo­ple who don’t have huge stu­dios or wal­lets to do cre­ative things. In one case, it was with lenses and a spe­cial tech­nique called ’tilt-shifting’ that makes for an extremely nar­row depth of field from a dis­tance, and video — in this case, time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy. The result is some­thing that makes one feel like a god, (or per­haps King Kong or Godzilla), look­ing down with placid seren­ity upon the bustling of tiny human­ity below. That’s what a series of videos by Aus­tralian Keith Loutit has pro­duced seem to be. Have a look at what I mean:

The North Wind Blew South

Loutit’s work has been fea­tured in lots of geeky places like Boingboing.com and Giz­modo, but I found out about it from my friend John Biehler, who showed another of his clips on his site.

I think there is some­thing here that tran­scends just the bizarre and unset­tling. It’s per­haps that we already have such a short time on the planet, but still, if we could just slow down and watch, we might see all sorts of things that we’d never seen before. If we could take a drug that would slow us down so that we were, say, oper­at­ing at 1/10 nor­mal speed for just a day, and didn’t suf­fer any ill effects, I bet that’s a trip that many of us would like to take. Yeah. A long, slow, trip.

I write this, remem­ber­ing that this morn­ing I heard that a critic and tele­vi­sion com­men­ta­tor who I used to watch reg­u­larly, John Leonard, died on Wednes­day. Kurt Von­negut once said: “When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while sim­ply look­ing for the men’s room, blun­dered into a lec­ture by the smartest man who ever lived.” Who am I to dis­agree with Von­negut?  Leonard was indeed bril­liant. When­ever I heard him talk on the show Sun­day Morn­ing, I thought that he made being smart some­thing that was sexy, which per­haps the US is once again redis­cov­er­ing. I hope he was con­scious and knew what hap­pened the day before he died. Per­haps he left with a smile on his face.

Pam's Photos, March Flowers and Disturbing Radio News

After many hours culling through the over 1,000 pho­tos that she took on her trip to Antarc­tica, Pam has put together just under 200 of them in a slide show on Flickr. Many are very impres­sive, and she went to some pains to anno­tate them as well. If you want to read the descrip­tions, you can access the indi­vid­ual pho­tos as well. I’m glad that she can share her trip with so many friends and family.

Spring has Sprung For­ward
One of the things I do love about the cli­mate here is the fact that our win­ters, while being plenty wet, dark and dreary, are not very long. Dur­ing our walk last week­end, Pam and I spied many clus­ters of cro­cuses, and I expect that we’ll be see­ing daf­fodils and tulips either this week or next. This is very dif­fer­ent from the win­ters I remem­ber in Boston, which seemed to stretch on and on. Ground­hog Day, as Gar­ri­son Keil­lor used to say about Minnesota’s Win­ter, was for us, ‘some sort of cruel joke’.

This week­end is also the start­ing gun that seems to set off a rush toward Spring, with the switch to Day­light Sav­ings time (which the Province sug­gests might be more aptly called ‘Daylight-Saving Time’, fol­low­ing the pat­tern of ‘man-eating’ tiger or ‘mind-expanding book’). At any rate, I’ll now leave work in full sun, and we’ll be get­ting up before dawn for just a lit­tle while longer.

CBC Radio Two to Change Pro­gram­ming Again?
I’ve learned that in Sep­tem­ber, CBC Radio 2 will once again be chang­ing their pro­gram­ming, and unfor­tu­nately for peo­ple like me, it will no longer include Clas­si­cal music before 9AM, and will no longer have any Clas­si­cal music after 3PM. As they slowly whit­tle away at the pro­gram­ming that I would like to lis­ten to, I’m going to be even­tu­ally forced to turn to the Inter­net (and, if I take the plunge, XM Satel­lite radio) for music that’s not in my col­lec­tion (and my col­lec­tion is huge!). That’s a shame, since I’ve found that Tom Allen’s won­der­ful ‘Music and Com­pany’ to be the only morn­ing radio show that has con­sis­tently made my day bet­ter. I fear I will be writ­ing him a fan let­ter as they can­cel his pro­gram in September.

It was bad enough when the CBC banned news longer than 3 min­utes from Radio 2. Now they are going to be ban­ning Clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming from much of their sched­ule. Not much left for me to lis­ten to, I guess. I keep telling myself that with the growth of the Inter­net to wire­less devices, it won’t be long before the WiMax (or other) cloud will make stan­dard ana­log radio a quaint mem­ory. Still, I fore­see a bumpy road before small con­stituen­cies like the one I’m a mem­ber of are squeezed off the dial, at least until we find our new broad­cast medium. Too bad you blew it, CBC.

The State of Their Union and a Strange Sign

I missed the State of the Union Address last week (what a plea­sure to be able to say that!), but I did hear the com­men­tary and cov­er­age that echoed the main sound byte of the speech: “Amer­ica is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unsta­ble parts of the world.” The choice of this par­tic­u­lar phrase fas­ci­nated me for sev­eral rea­sons. First of all, why would a pres­i­dent who’s always done his best to gloss over his past abuses of alco­hol and drugs (which I fully expect will some day reveal a past that would have made his pre­de­ces­sor in the Oval Office look like a tee­to­taler) even men­tion the word addic­tion. Doesn’t it remind us of the ele­phant in the room? No, not the Repub­li­can mas­cot, but the fact that Bush’s unscripted appear­ances are fre­quently inco­her­ent, and along with the pre­pon­der­ance of burst arter­ies on his face, that were, accord­ing to a friend of mine, clearly vis­i­ble on his high-definition TV dur­ing this appear­ance, seem
to sug­gest that he has started drink­ing again.

If we leave aside the ques­tion of Bush’s addic­tions, up until this point, the stan­dard GOP talk­ing point was that ‘we need to address America’s depen­dence on for­eign oil.’ The stan­dard fix to this was ‘more drilling, espe­cially in the Arc­tic Wilder­ness’. If you think that way, it makes sense: More depen­dent on for­eign sources? Come up with your own sources. But if you replace the word ‘depen­dence’ with ‘addic­tion’, it doesn’t work any more. After all, if someone’s addicted to cocaine, you don’t try to help them start an opium poppy gar­den to help them switch to a local source.

What’s more, the other terms that each of these words evokes couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent: ‘Depen­dence’, in Microsoft Word’s built-in The­saurus pro­duces matches like ‘reliance, trust, con­fi­dence, belief, hope and faith.’ Not bad. On the other hand, ‘Addic­tion’ pro­duces ‘habit, com­pul­sion, need, obses­sion and crav­ing’. Not so good. The terms also point to each other, to be sure, but it does point out the neg­a­tive asso­ci­a­tions for the new word. Note that for the Left wing, ‘Addic­tion’ means sick­ness, some­thing that you need ther­apy or coun­sel­ing to help over­come. On the Right, it’s a vice, or a lack of moral fiber or failed upbring­ing. It doesn’t mat­ter which way you look at it, being addicted to some­thing is far worse than being depen­dent on it.

I finally came to the con­clu­sion, that despite the many neg­a­tives asso­ci­ated with the term, Bush’s speech­writ­ers decided to go with it in order to appease some of the administration’s base, the Chris­t­ian Tal­iban, even at the risk of anger­ing the oil com­pa­nies or Detroit (who are pretty much speed­ing toward bank­ruptcy any­way). In this case, I’m sure that it’s all just talk. Bush would never do some­thing con­crete, like actu­ally push automak­ers to adopt bet­ter miles-per-gallon stan­dards, or sug­gest that cit­i­zens use Mass Tran­sit as a way of get­ting the petro­leum mon­key off their back.

No… What?
I saw a very strange sign at the bot­tom of the stairs at work the other day. It seems there are two lan­guage schools on the lower floors (we’re on the third), who serve a pri­mar­ily Asian clien­tele. The kids are from China, Japan, and per­haps Korea, and I usu­ally see them smok­ing in front of the build­ing most of the time. Appar­ently, this sign was meant for them:

Text reads: “Spit­ting is a cul­tur­ally unac­cept­able habit. If you absolutely must spit, please do so in the gut­ters of the road, not on the pedes­trian walk­ways, and in par­tic­u­lar not in front of the main doors to the building.”

When I men­tioned this to my friend Matt, he was amused. “Dude, he said, “Every­body in China spits every­where. In fact, they had to put up signs on The Great Wall to dis­cour­age it.” He gave me a pic­ture he took of this to prove it:

Text reads: “In order to keep fit no spit­ting please no throw­ing waste”

Matt pointed out how the sign tried to get peo­ple to stop spit­ting to “keep fit”, as if doing so made them bet­ter peo­ple. That’s very typ­i­cal, he explained.

Intermezzo

Inter­mezzo
Orig­i­nally uploaded by selva.
Just a lit­tle interlude.

One of the most inter­est­ing pho­tos on Flickr. Also, it’s one of the pho­tos found with an inter­est­ing new algo­rithm that looks for pho­tos with a cer­tain amount of user activ­ity around them (i.e. a lot of users look at, rec­om­mend, blog, or com­ment on a photo). I think it would make a fun postcard.