As evidenced by the photo such a thing really exists. A friend pointed it out to me in a store the past weekend.
Other families tell of even more humiliating experiences. The father of Mazen Nooraddin was told by a US commander at the airport he would have to take his son's body from the airport to his home in Al-Dora by taxi after Mazen was killed by US soldiers shooting at attackers. He was waiting for a taxi nearby at the time. The family was denied compensation and the military claimed Mazen was working with the attackers, despite a number of sworn affadavits to the contrary.Full story here.
Go here if you think a 1946 classroom movie can't have any relevance to today's society.
First, I can't get as hot under the collar about Nader's decision to run as an independent as the Democrats and their acolytes. Please, spare me the "would Gore have bombed Iraq?" nonsense questions. He almost certainly would have -- Clinton did, after all. Multiple times. Over "no-fly zone" violations. No-fly zones that had no standing in international law (because they were unilaterally proclaimed by the US, UK, and (initially) France. So don't tell me the Dems aren't advocates of rogue superpower unilateralism.
Second. I am particularly unenthusiastic about Kerry (basically a New England version of Slick Willie, a product of one of the most politically corrupt states in the union), whose spineless waffling is already clear to see.
Third. However, Bush is so rotten that at this point I'm still willing to take a leap of faith and give Kerry a chance. In that light, I'm not pleased with the news about Nader.
Fourth, I think the best retaliation would be to convince a conservative who is even nuttier than Bush to run as an independent on the other side to counter Nader's influence. Don't take away my right to vote my conscience -- expand it, and at the same time expand the right of others to do the same.
Almost missed this dramatic view of Mt. Hood today. Turned around from the computer near sundown and there it was. Yes, that's a steam cloud trailing off from near the summit.
No, it doesn't mean an eruption is imminent. The fumarole field on the south flank near the summit has been doing its thing for many years. Sometimes the right combination of activity level and summit weather makes it visible from down here in city.
Still neat to be able to see something like that from my living-room window. Not many people worldwide can boast of such a view.
Many people whom I agree with have been saying that one reason for the Bush deficits is the attempt to create a funding crisis that can "only" be remedied by further destroying the welfare state.
Turns out they've just been proven right.
I'll spare you my rant on why the assertion that Social Security has to be cut in response is both (a) absurd, and (b) a most egregious example of class warfare by the ruling elite against everyone else. You'll see it later.
If you wish to see the kind of future that continued emphasis on technological progress an an intrinsic good in its own right will bring the world to, look at sub-Saharan Africa.
Here we have a collection of nations that gained independence at a time when only a tiny majority of their inhabitants had the understanding of what a modern nation-state was. Circumstances thus dictated that the administration must fall to the select elite that did have the understanding. Tyranny was thus inevitable.
Advanced technology creates and requires so much specialized knowledge that no one person can understand it all. Worse, it's moving to the point where no one person can understand even the basics of it all. Thus a parallel situation is being created in which a tyranny of the priesthood of advanced technology is becoming inevitable.
If you think the human rights situation in Equatorial Guinea is peachy-keen, you'll just love the brave new world the hypesters of Wired magazine are cheering on.
First, a note: the following is about compact consumer digicams, not digital SLR's. Most of what is said below doesn't apply to a DSLR.
The biggest difference is that a digicam is simply a different kind of camera, just like a 35mm SLR is different from a large-format view camera. Not better, not worse, just different. Better at some things, worse at others. Whether or not a digicam is the proper tool depends on what you're trying to shoot and what image you're trying to get as a result.
Consider the image at the start of this entry. It's from a box I saw in an antique mall. I was fascinated by how the conception of plastic has moved over the years from one of modernism and progress to one of cheapness and artificiality. It would have been impossible to shoot with my 35mm SLR: it was inside, in a cluttered space, and behind glass.
The inside part means low light levels. The cluttered space part meant the scene couldn't easily be shot straight on. So I'd have to shoot it at f/11 or f/16. Add that to the low light and a tripod becomes a must. But it's too cluttered and cramped to easily set one up, even if I could have sneaked one past the clerk at the entrance (unlikely; they wanted me to check my backpack lest it knock something over). So that means using flash. But then the glass would have created nightmarish glare problems.
My PowerShot A80 has a small sensor, as all consumer digicams do. As a result the lens has a short focal length -- under 8mm at the wide-angle end of things. Which in turn makes for enormous depth of field, which let me shoot at f/2.8, which gave me a fast enough shutter speed to shoot handheld without flash. And I could easily white-balance the shot to compensate for whatever fluorescent lights they happened to be using.
On the other side of things, it would have been impossible to shoot any of these with my digicam. Exposure times varied from one to four minutes. Shutter speed on my digicam only goes up to 15 seconds. That's because the CCD sensors in digicams have horrible noise problems when you try to do long exposures in low-light situations, unless you cryogenically cool them (like astronomers do with the CCD sensors in telescopes).
It's one reason why all the hype about film being obsolete is just that: hype, either coming from people who make money selling digital cameras, or from the mouths of the mindless techno-boosters. Heck, there's even folks who still make daguerreotypes because they prefer the aesthetic qualities of that medium. And film being a lot more user-friendly than daguerreotypes, plenty of people are going to continue using it for the foreseeable future.
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