My Canon PowerShot A80 gave me the dreaded E18 error the other week. Charmingly, it did so right on the eve of my leaving for a long weekend in Vancouver, BC. At least I had the forethought to try the camera before packing an expensive paperweight with me. My recourse was to take a film camera along with me.
Tonight I finally got around to doing a Google search about the problem. The following (on this page) caught my eye:
Introduction (Added 7/30/06): Having read the hundreds of posts from camera owners with the E18, I have come to the following conclusion. "E18" seems to be a code related to and barrel extension problems. I have broken down these problems into three categories which explain the variety of causes (or lack thereof) and solutions that people have reported. The solutions are referred to in the numbered paragraphs below, and then described in detail afterward. The three categories are:⋮
- Batteries that run out of juice mid-extension [emphasis added]. Problems such as these appear to be reset-able through either powering off and on or the A/V cable connection method.
Well, I thought: I’ve already powered the damn thing up and down dozens of times, to no avail. And I have no idea what the “A/V cable connection method” is. But it really seems like it all started when the batteries seemingly died in mid-lens-extension. (Or was it lens retraction? I forget.)
Aha! Maybe the computer inside it is just confused as to where the lens is. It’s probably to programmed to turn a motor shaft a number of rotations, and because the physical universe is not at the presumed starting point at power-on time, it’s not in its expected state after operating the motor.
So as its powering off, I remove the batteries just as the lens reaches the retracted point (before the gears grind or it extends again). First try I just missed the correct point by a hair, but the second try was an apparent success. When I put the batteries back in and powered up, it worked!
Keywords (for the benefit of those googling about this problem): Canon, PowerShot A80, E18, home repair, fix.
Again I am left at a complete loss to understand establishment politics. And that loss is international in scope.
First, Canada. A political bigwig says something incredibly stupid and clueless: that the death of Lebanese children at Israeli hands in Qana is basically no big deal. To Canada’s credit, there’s enough of a sense of decency there that this hurt the guy politically. Somewhat. Not enough, but somewhat. But realize he would have been hurt very little had he been an American politican. Then he retracts the statement, calling the Qana attacks a “war crime,” which there’s plenty of evidence to indicate it is. One guess as to which remark proved more damaging to his standing (hint: it’s the one that clashes with the belief that the State of Israel can do no wrong).
Next, France and Turkey. France is exhibiting the typical garden-variety European cluelessness about civil rights by trying to ban a form of free speech they consider reprehensible. I consider genocide denial to be reprehensible, too, but the remedy for reprehensible speech is non-reprehensible speech. But the Turkish state is being outright ghoulish, continuing its long-established pattern of genocide denial over the incident. Yet at the same time they expect people to believe they’re a modern democracy that’s left their authoritarian past behind.
That raises an interesting double standard in the genocide denial business. When the president of Iran — which to the best of my knowledge took no direct role in the Nazi-led genocide of the Jews — denies the Holocaust, it’s taken as self-evident evidence of how Iran is a major threat. The Government of Turkey has an almost ninety-year policy of denying a genocide it was directly responsible for, and no such conclusion is drawn.
It’s revealing that the only arguments mustered against this exhibition is that it is somehow “political” or that its organizers would “burn in hell.” Actually, it’s scientific, presenting hard evidence to laymen.
While the evidence probably will prove inconvenient to certain individuals’ political or religious beliefs, so what? Galileo wrote a lot of stuff that the political and religious elite of his day found offensive. Does that mean he was politically-motivated and thus can be ignored as something less than a “serious” scientist?
From a scientific point of view, the political or religious sensitivity of a set of facts is irrelevant. What matters is the demonstrable evidence that such facts are, in fact, true. The mission of a museum is the education of the public; the widespread acceptance of the myth that homosexuality is somehow “against nature” (despite all the evidence to the contrary) is evidence that this is one area that such institutions have work to do.
It’s the people who say a science museum should not present certain scientific facts to the public that are the ones in favor of politicizing science.
This provides some evidence that maybe it’s best to approach the Dear Leader’s Hermit Kingdom with more of a light touch. It’s not that the prospect of such a regime having nuclear weapons isn’t scary (it is), it’s that maybe super-harsh sanctions would actually impede the ongoing development of a resistance there.
Of course, I’m almost certainly being overly optimistic in assuming such an approach will be taken. The last thing a superpower would want is for the North Koreans to somehow solve the Kim Jong-Il problem for themselves. In the eyes of the ruling elite, the real problem with the Dear Leader is not that he’s an autocratic tyrant, it’s that he’s outside their scope of control. The goal is not the liberation of North Korea (though, given the horrible nature of the government currently there, almost any change would involve a significant increase in freedom), it’s the replacing of a home-grown subjugator with one imposed from abroad.
That may, in fact, be an element of the resistance. It’s entirely possible that it’s being covertly backed and influenced by China.
With two, or maybe three, exceptions, I never “got” mathematics the way it was taught in most formal instructional situations. Or, for that matter, the way it was written about in most textbooks. For a long time I thought it was simply because math wasn’t my strong suit.
Then I took an absolutely delightful junior-level discrete math course, where they actually discussed things that I had sometimes pondered about and wondered why nobody taught. Such as, after exponentiation was taught and explained as repeated multiplication (which is repeated addition, which in turn is repeated incrementing), I knew the next thing to be discussed was the function which was repeated exponentiation, then the function which is that repeated, then an elaboration on the interrelationships between this whole family of fundamental operators. But no there was no such discussion. Worst of all, the usual answer I got when querying about such things was to have the question dismissed as silly or nonsensical. But in that wonderful class, such things were discussed.
I was then further astonished to learn that course (the material which I found simultaneously easy to understand, logical, and interesting), was regarded as a difficult, esoteric mind-bender of a course by most students.
It took a following course in probability theory (which started out easy, then suddenly got incomprehensible, then the “incomprehensible” part was followed-up by a childishly-easy problem with no obvious relation to the gobbledygook that had just been spouted), that a light bulb went off: I simply understand mathematics along different lines than 90+% of the population does. It’s not a problem of being mathematically incompetent, it’s one of mapping conventional (but generally incomprehensible) explanations into unconventional (but comprehensible to me) explanations. I then followed up with the insight that a similar problem had beset my ability to understand physics as it was commonly taught.
Anyhow, that whole set of memories from my college years was triggered upon reading the following quote in today’s featured Wikipedia article:
The equality 0.999… = 1 has long been taught in textbooks, and in the last few decades, researchers of mathematics education have studied the reception of this equation among students, who often vocally reject the equality.
Because, of course, I had come across the concept 0.999… on my own (while pondering the relationship between repeating fractional numbers as expressed in different numeric bases), and had instantly been very troubled by the prospect that the quantity might not equal 1. I remember being quite pleased when, upon querying, one of my better math professors confirmed they were identical.
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