Is this the iPod of photography?

Really what brought me back to my blog is the interesting Lytro "Light Field Camera" that was introduced a couple of days ago. What I wrote in the previous post is true... I've deleted a few drafts of posts because I was worried I'd be foaming at the mouth by the end of them, and to describe some of the thoughts I've had about various political stooges as "uncharitable" is an understatement of cosmic proportions.

Now, though, I've found something really interesting and cool that I want to babble about. This is the first really different camera since decent-quality video cameras got small enough to carry around anywhere. It's made possible by a quantum leap in both coding and processing power, allowing a personal computer and one small, elegantly simple camera do what just a few years ago took an array of cameras and some heavy-iron-level computing power to do.

Instead of taking a single point-of-focus photo like we've been doing for 150 years, the Lytro records all of the light getting to the sensor, grouped into "rays." Lytro says the image quality is "11 megarays" and the system uses post-processing to determine a point of focus from the field of rays. So, while in the system's native format, the images are "live." You can focus in on different parts of the field of view.

The camera itself seems very straightforward and has an elegantly simple design. It has a power button, a zoom slider and a button to record the image as well as some touchscreen functionality on the viewscreen. Aim it at what you want to photograph, perhaps zoom and compose a bit to get the overall contents of the shot right, click the button once and have the chance to decide what is and isn't in focus later. Now THAT is what I call a point-and-shoot! I can't wait to play with one. Perhaps this will be a device that shakes up the world of photography like the iPod changed the way we listen to music.

Idiot Derangement Syndrome

So lately I've been suffering from Idiot Derangement Syndrome... everything that seemed relevant to write about has been in the political sphere, and all of the idiots on both sides of the aisle get me a bit deranged when I try to write about their bullshit, so I've just avoided it. Maybe I'll get mad enough about something not to care that writing what I actually think of one pinhead or the other.

Dim Debate on Light Bulbs

I'm a cynic, and frequently disappointed in politicians. That said, it's even more depressing than usual to see the ignorant Congresschimps throwing their feces on compact fluorescent light bulbs and shrieking about "freedom."

Are our elected officials stupid, or are they liars? Because the legislation they decry (signed into law by W, I might add) doesn't make incandescent bulbs illegal. It simply requires a minimum light output for a given electrical input. In the intervening years, amazingly enough, companies which manufacture light bulbs have introduced more efficient incandescent bulbs in addition to much-improved compact fluorescents and LEDs.

So, what was done was a rarity in legislation... instead of over-specifying and doing something stupid (as the lying bastards are TELLING you they have done) this legislation just said "You have to make light bulbs that are more efficient than the ones your grandfather used." And companies did just that, but your Congresschimps want to roll back the clock to 1950 in more ways than one.

Beck: Blathering Bean-brained Boob

Like my feelings about his BFF Bachmann, I have gone back and forth in my impression of Glenn Beck, trying to decide whether he's an insane paranoid, an intentionally evil liar or just irretrievably stupid.

Sometimes I think he's evil and completely in love with The Big Lie concept, but then I realize he doesn't understand it well enough to keep telling the same lie. Instead, he just comes up with bigger and weirder lies all the time, undermining his own (imaginary) credibility.

Now he calls the very intelligent and insightful Fareed Zakaria an idiot. I think I may have underestimated Beck... perhaps it's possible for him to be both irretrievably stupid AND innately evil.

License to Flash

Every time I attend a concert, I'm reminded of just how little people know about how cameras work. That in itself is really not a problem for anyone except the people taking crappy pictures, but then we must consider the flash.

I propose that we require that people demonstrate at least a minimal understanding about how the bloody flash works before they're allowed to carry a camera. How stupid do you have to be to think that the dinky flash on your cheap point-and-shoot is going to effectively illuminate the band 300 feet away from you? Does it not occur to you that thousands of dollars worth of incredibly bright spot lights might provide enough light for your snapshot without temporarily blinding everyone within 20 feet of your useless piddly micro-strobe? Or did you really want to get a nice exposure of the backs of the heads of people 1 and 2 rows ahead of you instead of taking a picture of the act you paid Ticketmaster $50 to see?

I guess if you're clueless enough that you can't figure out how to turn off your damned flash, you aren't smart enough to google "inverse square law" or understand the content of the search results.

Death and Taxes graphic

This is an interesting poster with a infographical representation of how the US Federal Government spends our money. Click through to view it on their site, because they have an excellent pan/zoom feature that's necessary to view the details.

Ford Fusion

So we're in Pennsylvania for a few days, and I rented a car. Being a cheap bastard, I rented on price as always, but as it happens Alamo had a promo for their "Standard" class for the weekend and I got a good deal on a 4-cylinder Ford Fusion. After 2 days, I really only have 2 substantive complaints about it, which I'll get to at the end.

This car represents a tremendous leap forward in American mid-size cars. I'd say I haven't driven another mid-sized American in years, but in fact a few months ago I had the distinct displeasure of getting stuck with a Sebring by Enterprise. The Sebring was frankly awful... I drove more pleasing cars in the 1990s and belittled them. Even near-oblivion is barely an excuse for producing such a vile piece of shit and trying to sell it as a modern car.

The Fusion is surprisingly solid, quiet, stable and responsive. The steering is weighted well, the brakes are linear and easy to modulate. I do think the brakes start to grab with barely any pedal travel, but that's something I got used to in the first day and it hasn't been a problem... I'll probably think my Legacy's pedal travel is too long the first couple of times I stop when I get home. The seats are firm and comfortable, and there's plenty of room in the back seat and the trunk. If I needed such a car, I would actually consider the Fusion and I the last time I thought about owning a Ford in that size class, it was the original edition of the SHO.

There is some downside, though. A minor prejudice on my part is that I think it really needs AWD. I'm quite spoiled to that, and noted that even with the 4-cylinder you can't use all the available power until the car really gets moving or the tires will spin and howl. It's available with AWD, though I don't know how well Ford's system works.

More of a problem to normal people is the ergonomic disaster of secondary controls. There's a big field of black buttons on a black background with small white labels that are easily readable WHEN PARKED, but if you actually need to adjust something while the car is moving it requires entirely too much attention. Changing HVAC settings requires a reach well below the height of the shifter, and requires diverting ones attention far from the road. Perhaps with SYNC you can voice-command some or all of this, but my rental is not so equipped so I've no real idea.

One final nit I'll pick is the shifter. This is the first automatic-transmission shifter I've ever experienced that requires a button press to move it from Drive to Neutral. It will freely slide from Neutral to Drive without pushing the lockout button, however, which seems ass-backwards to me. If you're going to lock it in one direction, it should restrict an accidental shift INTO drive but facilitate a panic shift into Neutral, especially in this Age of Unintended Acceleration. I have stated many times while people whinge about killer cars that I have never experienced a car that requires anything but a slap to shift from Drive to Neutral, but I know now that such cars exist. I'm still not sure that absolves people of the responsibility of shifting to Neutral if the throttle sticks open, but it's not quite as trivial as I'd believed in some cars, and the Fusion will happily slip into Reverse from Neutral *WITHOUT* pressing the lockout button, so people might be afraid of accidentally engaging Reverse and try to avoid shifting to Neutral even when it's called for in an emergency.

Chuck Norris is batshit crazy

So normally I'd write this off with "well, he's just some actor" and not think any further about Chuck Norris' personal paranoia. After all, in the greater scheme of things, his fantasies are not any crazier than those worried about Xenu's crimes in ages past... perhaps actors as a group are just weird.

Mr Norris, however, is politically active and is among those genuflecting to Glenn Beck and spreading poisonous fantasies about the President being a Manchurian Candidate planted at birth (and of course completely missing the point that in order to be a good Manchurian Candidate, one must first be above suspicion. I never said I thought rabid actors were necessarily smart.)

Chuck Norris apparently believes that Mr. Obama's support of sharing intelligence with Interpol is just a ruse to allow the President to hide important records about the war on terror from Americans. Seriously. Norris finds it surprising that it might be necessary to allow Interpol to maintain the confidentiality of international sources of intelligence, but he probably thought it was perfectly fine to allow suspects to be "disappeared" to black sites by the CIA without a hint of due process.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, even a year after his inauguration. One can only hope that it causes at least as much distress to the afflicted as their foaming at the mouth does to the sane.

Jeremy Clarkson is helping to destroy the English language

What the hell are "torques?" I realize that there is a valid way to use the word, such as to say "calculate the torques exerted at points A and B" but that's not what I'm bitching about.

Jeremy Clarkson often babbles on about whatever car he has just smoked the tread off of while hooning around the track as having "500 hp and 600 torques." I know he's an entertainer and as such about as into accuracy as Rush Limbaugh, but "torques" is not a unit. Horsepower is a unit of measure, torque is a way to describe twisting forces and common units for quantifying torque are newton meter (SI) and foot pound (Imperial.)

It grates on my nerves whenever I hear Clarkson say it, and now I'm starting to see that butchery of the language parroted in automotive blogs. Even Wikipedia has it more or less right, it's NOT hard to find the right way to express such things on the internet.

Apple is gradually sucking me in...

I'm frugal. People who know me personally might say cheap, but I'm writing this so I'll say frugal. I've never bought a new computer in my life (and in fact could argue that I still haven't) and I definitely tend toward either building my own or buying lightly used, since most people really don't need the cutting edge of technology (or the bills that come with it.)

I built a Hackintosh from a Dell Mini9 refurb early this year, and have really enjoyed OSX in spite of the tiny poorly-laid-out keyboard. I have for some time used a Dell Latitude D610 that I bought used as my "TV computer" for watching Hulu or Netflix on the flat panel in our living room, but the improving image quality of streaming sources and displaying them on a 1080p set was starting to point out the Latitude's shortcomings.

One of the important considerations of a Home-Theater PC is noise. One needs a quiet machine to avoid having fan noise interfere with quiet passages of movies and music. One of the quietest machines on the market is Apple's Mac Mini, and they've recently upgraded it significantly with nVidia video processing and a 1066-MHz front-side bus, so I decided to give it a shot for home-theater duty. True to my frugal nature, I scanned the list of Apple refurbs for a few days until I found a base config (1g RAM, 120g hard drive, 2 GHz Core2 Duo) refurb.

I've had the machine 5 days now, and so far I'm quite pleased with its performance for my needs. I'll point out here that I wasn't going for a full PVR system, I have a DVR from my cable company and I'm happy enough to use that, or I'd have needed a dedicated system like the Tivo HD or a Windows-based system so I could use cablecards. I'm primarily using this for Hulu and Netflix and music (streaming and shared from my primary desktop in the house.)

The configuration was Apple-easy, though it's a bit snotty about recognizing my wireless keyboard on a reboot. (It's a 2.5 GHz keyboard with a USB dongle, not bluetooth... I have to unplug it and plug it back in after a reboot and then everything's fine until the next reboot.) Silent, stable, plenty of open-source choices for my needs. I'm using Plex instead of Frontrow, since Plex gives me nice integration with Netflix and Hulu and other sources. Video performance is good, though I'm still trying to tweak the desktop UI to be clear enough from across the room (the Plex interface is fine.) It's an almost-new machine and I'm quite happy with it... if I keep drinking all this Apple kool-aid I'll end up with a Macbook Pro.

So now for my personal machines, I'm at 2 Windows (XP), 1 Linux (CentOS) and 2 OSX... just in case any readers wonder if I really AM a geek!

Honda spits on wagon fans with the Accord Crosstour

In the interest of honest disclosure, I'll start by admitting that I'm not a huge fan of Honda automobiles. They have for the most part produced very good vehicles that strike me as bland, though there are notable exceptions like the rare and exotic (for its day) Honda NSX (sold in the US as an Acura) and the excellent S2000 sports car.

That said, they rarely seem to make real mistakes. Opinionated schmucks like me bitch and moan about them being soulless and torqueless, but we can rarely claim they are actually bad cars. Their sales would prove us wrong anyway, and their repeat sales definitely show a strong brand loyalty.

One of my beefs with Honda of late is that they make cars I'd actually want, but only sell them elsewhere. They have for several years sold a wagon in Europe called the Accord Tourer that is by all reports an excellent car and is certainly nice to look at. It's well-proportioned and seems an excellent choice for someone needing some cargo capacity in a nice car. Now, the European Accord is not the US Accord, it's more like the previous Acura TSX. It's a bit smaller than the now full-sized US Accord. This means they can't just "bring it here" and sell it as an Accord Wagon (or, god forbid, leave the name alone and call it an Accord Tourer.) They could fairly easily produce an Acura TSX Sportwagon (or Tourer, or call it a WSX or TSX Type-W if you want to pick an Acura-ish name.)

The motoring press started teasing with sightings of mules based on the nice Euro Accord Tourer around a year ago, and things were looking good for a Honda or Acura I might actually put on The Short List. The silver car at right in a Brenda Priddy spy shot looked like an Accord Tourer with a Honda Pilot-style grille. It looked slightly tall, but it's common for US-market cars to have more ground clearance than Euro cars to deal with our more variable road surfaces, so that wasn't a reason for concern.

Then the spy shots showed something just WRONG. Maybe they were trying to throw us off... but no, American Honda is bringing a fat, swollen, repulsive pig of a crossover hatchback lump that's more like the off-scale, overweight, clumsy-looking BMW X6 than the sleek Accord Tourer. The fat white beast to the left is the all-but-undisguised production car, as confirmed by official pictures released by Honda. So far I've only seen postings from a few people who don't hate it, and for all I know they're sockpuppets anyway. For some reason Honda created a Facebook page for the thing, where it's been almost universally panned by people signing up as "fans" just to pour derision on it. In my (completely unscientific) ad hoc analysis of the comments, it looks like about 20-1 in favor of haters. Go haters!

Maybe now they'll bring the Accord Tourer.

Oklahoma students' civics knowledge is not OK

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a study on the basis civics knowledge of Oklahoma public high school students in which 1000 students were asked 10 questions taken from the citizenship test required for candidates to become naturalized citizens of the United States. The actual test also contains 10 questions and requires that the candidate answer 6 of them correction. According to KWTV News 9 in Oklahoma City, about 92% of candidates for citizenship pass on their first try.

The Oklahoma high school students' performance in the study contributes to my already-cynical view of our public education system. Only 3% of them would be allowed to become citizens if they hadn't been born here! Only 23% of them knew that George Washington was our first president, and only 28% knew that the President is the person in charge of the executive branch. Hell, only 61% of them correctly named the ocean bordering the US to the east!

Instead of basic useful knowledge like this, our citizens debate whether or not we should teach intelligent design and creationism. They're entitled to their opinions, but they probably wouldn't know that such entitlement is written into the Constitution if they hadn't heard it at a Teabagging Party.

UPDATE: Statistician and blogger Nate Silver is a bit suspicious about the pollster who put out the Oklahoma results, and has an article about it here.

The (Forgotten) Concept of Moderation

I see examples frequently that pragmatism and moderation are largely forgotten concepts on modern society. I'll skip the political bullshit that offers myriad examples and cut straight to the event that prompted me to write this post.

Author and New Yorker Colin Beavan came up with a gimmick for a book... he'd become "No Impact Man" and subject his family to a year without modern conveniences and products in order to reduce their impact on the world... to shrink their "carbon footprint." They were to do this while living in a 9th-floor co-op apartment on 5th Avenue.

The premise itself is reasonable enough, but the execution is almost farcical. Why should we care that some schmuck decided he'd walk up 9 flights as a personal hair shirt in a building that has a functional elevator? His fairly ridiculous antics such as turning off the electricity and replacing their refrigerator with a "pot in pot" evaporative cooler are simply not inspiring to normal people leading normal lives... I doubt that it's going to encourage many people to consider working conservation into their everyday choices and paring down waste in their lives... and frankly I think people who buy their kids $975 boots aren't people to emulate anyway.

The rational thing to do is to reduce our impact in sustainable ways... meaning things we can continue to do indefinitely as improvements in the way we live, not as ridiculous overdone experiments that grate on us during the whole time we've deprived ourselves of a normal life (and often lead to overcompensation when the experiment is over.)

Keep a car as long as it's economically viable (few of us live where it's truly possible to live without one altogether unless you're a writer who doesn't have to go to a job.) When it's really time to replace a car, buy one that MEETS your needs, not one that's ready for taking 7 passengers on the Paris-Dakar rally.

Buy a house that's big enough, not one you think will impress your friends because yours is bigger than theirs. Maintain your house and stay there, nearly everything about moving is both wasteful and expensive, especially if you're "moving up" to a McMansion. Part of maintaining your house is making its systems efficient, and USING them efficiently. Flush the toilet when you need to, but don't cool your house to 65 when it's 90 degrees out (and don't heat it to 80 when it's snowing out, either.)

There are thousands of things that nearly everyone can do to drastically reduce our impact on the planet without getting all stone-age about it. Ridiculous stunts like this just make many people think "that's crazy!" rather than "that's easy, I should do that!"

Wack Job Extraordinaire: Michelle Bachmann thinks she could be president

I thought that I had become immune to surprise at Michelle Bachmann's idiocy, but I'll be damned if she didn't manage to attain new heights of craziness.

According to MediaMatters, on Mike Gallagher's radio show Bachmann claimed that Democrats want to sabotage any Republican woman who might become president (citing Sarah Palin specifically) and suggesting that's the reason Dems have negative things to say about her.

I guess that's possible, but it seems much more likely that Democrats aren't fond of Bachmann because she's a vapid, rabid, paranoid, delusional hack who shouldn't be president of the local John Birch fanclub, much less a member of Congress.

Sometimes a service policy is worth it.

In general, I advise against buying service policies. Companies sell service policies because they are profitable on the whole... the house always wins. Especially for new toys you buy under warranty, the service policy is really just extra money you're giving the vendor because you feel like you didn't pay enough for your new toy.

While there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, sometimes you can get a good discount on the blue-plate special. Our refrigerator recently decided it was tired of keeping our food cold and needed a break. A 7-year-old Kenmore Elite, I felt it was a bit early for it to retire so I did a little research. Based on the symptoms, troubleshooting guides indicated that the problem was either quite inexpensive or the most expensive problem a refrigerator can have, so bet on it being the $25 start capacitor/overload relay assembly (and lost.)

Per the collective wisdom of the troubleshooting guide, if it wasn't the start cap it was the compressor itself. My first surprise was that many companies marketing themselves as appliance repair services don't work on the refrigeration system of refrigerators. I guess they just fix icemakers and replace thermostats... they can't be bothered to maintain a license to handle refrigerant apparently. When I finally got an appointment, it was 4 days out. (This is when it's really nice to have a "beer fridge" so we didn't lose our entire inventory of perishable food.)

I had plenty of time to research the state of the refrigerator market. It turns out that nice bottom-freezer refrigerators are not bargain goods, and viable substitutes for mine were $1600-$2000. I was not enthused. I remembered that Sears offers 12-month service policies on appliances less than 10 years old, though, and thought it was worth a call. Sure enough, I could buy one. Here's how it works:

For my refrigerator, they offer a 12-month service policy for $250 that covers repairs (trip-charge, parts AND labor) up to $500 per incident. If the repair costs more than $500, you can opt to pay the rest out of pocket or apply $500 to the purchase of a replacement at Sears. Since the guesstimates I had heard for replacing the compressor ranged from $400-$600, this seemed like the right move.

The total for the repair ended up being $622, so for $397 ($250 for the service policy plus $122 for the excess on the repair plus $25 for the part I bought to troubleshoot the problem initially) I got a $622 repair AND 12 months of coverage should the repair work turn out to be less than perfect. I think that's a reasonably good outcome.

Smitten with a giant Ford?

I notice that I haven't written anything automotive in a while. I think that's a function of being cranky... I've written mostly grumpy negative stuff in recent posts, including the last automotive thing I wrote. There's a bit of confusion in this topic, but not really the negative kind.

What am I confused about? Well, normally I like smaller cars. My current car, a 2005 Subaru Legacy GT Wagon, is the largest car I've ever had as my daily driver. Even so, the Legacy is on the smaller end of its group of competitive midsize cars, and even though mine is enlarged a bit because it's a wagon, it's not a large car, and never FEELS like a large car. Why then do I like the Ford Flex?


This thing is big. I think it's something about its overall proportions and especially the ride height that make it look reasonably sized. Visually, it seems to be smaller than the Edge, which is actually the smaller of the two by quite a bit. In actual dimensions and interior space, it's close to the size of GM's Acadia/Traverse/Enclave trio on their Lambda platform, but it never looks as huge as those.

I thought at first that it was just some photographic magic, but I've seen many of them in person and they seem to be the "right size" somehow. Happily, I'm not in the market... My Legacy is a great car and I'm still very happy about it, and working from home has really cut the number of miles I'm putting on it anyway. At this rate I'm likely to keep it until I can pay cash for my next vehicle, which would probably make me even more insufferable than usual. Maybe I'll go drive one and feel like it's huge and hate it, but what if I don't hate it? 355 hp/350 lb-ft of torque from Ford's new EcoBoost V6 wouldn't suck, though all that weight would certainly take its toll on performance.

Ah, well, it's safe to be fascinated with expensive toys when I'm too practical and cheap to buy one!

Contradictions in terms: "Glenn Beck" and "Common Sense"

I was shopping at Costco yesterday, as is pretty normal for me on a Saturday. I browsed through the books, which is less typical of late because I've been utilizing Fort Worth's excellent library system for my own books since we're spending big bucks on David F's textbooks these days.

I noticed a paperback the just set off the "WRONG!" warning in my head... a book by Glenn Beck entitled "Common Sense." Now, the synopses I've read sound like at least part of the book focuses on a decent topic (that our government is spending us into a very deep, dark financial hole) but it just strikes the wrong note with me that a "news" entertainer who frequently comes across like a bipolar guy who's off his meds should fancy himself a modern-day Thomas Paine and brand his musings as common sense. Maybe it's just the title that concerns me, but I'm loathe to give him $6.59 to find out. (Oh, and I noted in reading up about the book that it costs the same for the real, physical paperback at Costco as it does to rent the ephemeral right to read it on your Kindle until Amazon changes their mind. Buy the real one if you're buying.)

Rick Perry loves tolls, hates affordable health care

Ah, Rick Perry... everyone's favorite States' Rights whiner...er... proponent. I guess he's been logically consistent about States' Rights. He certainly supports the State's right to sell off its highway system to the bidder offering the sweetest backroom deal and the best junkets.

Now Mr. Perry has come out against the proposed federal health care plan. No surprise there, since Perry hasn't spent a penny he didn't have to on health care, trusting that the Magical Market will somehow improve preventative health care for the poor and the working uninsured. Like Roy Blunt (R-Mo), chair of the "GOP Health Care Solutions Group" Perry has no alternative to offer. No market-based magic bullet to lower health care costs or improve access to insurance, just that worthless "Not gonna do it!" attitude.

Liz Cheney supports "Birthers," thinks Obama is unpatriotic

Liz Cheney thinks that "birthers" aren't crazy, she and they are just concerned that President Obama doesn't "defend our nation overseas."

So, here we see the arch-con(servative) attitude coming out. Being respectful of other nations and cultures rather than being bellicose and swaggering is "not defending our nation." Admitting that we as a nation have perhaps not always done what is best for the world is not sedition, it's intellectual honesty. Of course, there's no reason to expect Ms. Cheney to have learned intellectual honesty at home...

Fox News' Brian Kilmeade channels Hitler for morning show

Ah, such entertainment that's offered by Fox... as long as you aren't actually looking for what they say they are selling (that fair, balanced thing) you can be amused endlessly by their slant, lies, and racism.

This morning, Brian Kilmeade educated us all on why America is going to the dogs... MISCEGENATION! Why, those Italians and Irish aren't even the same species as us dUhmuhricuns! And Victoria dingbat Jackson thinks Obama is the one like Hitler?

There's a link to video of the segment here at Salon.com.