Vulnerablilities

The media is abuzz today with discussions about the tanker truck which caught fire and destroyed a bridge in the San Fransisco area. I've seen all sorts of comments ranging the whole gamut, from those that express shock that concrete and steel can collapse under intense heat, to how absolutely vulnerable the entire transporation system is. It's this latter comment which bothers me.

First, a missing overpass isn't a catastrophic failure of the transportation system. It's inconvenient that the commute might take a bit longer (this morning's did not), but hardly a problem. If you take any highway in any major city and close it due to a wreck, and you'll have a nasty traffic problem. That's not a catastrophic failure -- trains (both freight and passenger) can keep running just fine; detours are found for those who drive.

Second, having a network of highways isn't a vulnerability. You either need an overpass, a tunnel (underpass), or an intersection. All of these can be destroyed just as easily I imagine -- the burning truck would have caused a tunnel collapse and likely melted the pavement of an intersection. Though an intersection could be more readily repaired than the other two options, the point is all of them are vulnerable.

Third, heaven forbid people telecommute, carpool, or pay for the bus. Of course, Arnold made today a ride-free day on all public transport, which I personally don't understand. If you encourage everyone to take public transit today, what will they do tomorrow? I see the following options:
1. They take public transport again, paying for it. The question is, why wouldn't they have paid for it today?
2. They don't take public transport because it's not free on Tuesday. They drive to work, causing traffic jams. The question is, what's the use of delaying the traffic jam from Monday to Tuesday?

Violence

32 die in multiple attacks.

170 die in multiple attacks.

One of these happens almost every single day. The other happens once every few years, if that often. Yet it is the infrequent which shocks. Why? There is no difference. In both innocent people are killed. Both are despicable. We should do something to prevent both in the future, yet I fear we're only going to take steps to try and prevent the event in which 32 died.

Art

Have you ever found yourself in an art museum looking at some very famous artist's work, thinking to yourself, "Hey, that looks just like the crayon-on-construction-paper my 3-year-old made that's taped to the refrigerator!"? Turns out that art isn't art unless you're told it is. At least that's the moral of an experiment done by the Washington Post wherein Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, played his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin in a Washington subway station. Out of the thousand commuters who passed by, it was thought 75-100 would actually stop and listen. Only 7 did, and only two of them thought anything particularly special about the performance. But if you took these same thousand people, placed them in a concert hall with $100 admission tickets, they'd surely think the music was absolutely phenomenal.

Similarly, if you take a million-dollar painting out of its frame, walk it two blocks down the street from the museum it resides in, and place it in a cafe's collection of $100 paintings for sale, it's unlikely anyone would buy it. Clearly, we are trained to admire art, but only if we know, from someone else, that we should be admiring the art.

So the question is who gets to decide what's worth admiring?

Avalanche Beacons

Having recently aquired an avalanche beacon at a princely sum, I figured I was well on my way towards backcountry skiing and exploration. I had always assumed that all the people I'd seen leaving the Alpental backcountry gates had all the necessary equipment -- after all, the requirements seem to be the pretty standard "forecast, beacon, probe, shovel, and partner" deal that you see at every backcountry gate at every ski area.

Snowshoeing a few weeks ago I had run into a few groups of skiers. While they had passed my, I briefly switched my beacon to search to play with it. To my utter surprise, not one was transmitting.

Standing at the backcountry gate at Alpental yesterday, I did the same test -- this time rather than to play with the beacon, I wanted to see how many of the large group of 10-15 people currently heading out had a beacon. It should have been no surprise, even given their backbacks and shovels, that not one had a beacon.

In Which "Do No Evil" Buys "Evil"

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google, of "Do No Evil" fame has bought Doubleclick, the absolutely evil track-you-everywhere pop-under pop-up advertising company.

Is this sort of like matter and anti-matter -- very shocking when it happens, but in the end it all just cancels out? Or maybe it's more like a proton and an electron -- no charge left?

Microstock Photography

If you look at any online forum where professional stock photographers congregate, you'll notice a lot of hateful attitudes towards "microstock", or stock photography sold for pennies as compared to the typical $250. These pros argue that their livelihoods are going to go away. They argue that any picture worth buying is worth more money. They argue that my time spent shooting, uploading, and keywording, and of course post-processing, is worth much more than the pennies I get.

These photographers are all, every single last one of them, entirely and completely wrong.

When I shoot for iStockphoto.com, I don't do magic post-processing. I do spend some time editing to occasional photo, and I of course spend time keywording. And yes, it probably wouldn't be worth my time for $0.20. The fact is, however, that I never get just $0.20. The minimum I can earn is 25 cents, and that's just for a tiny photo not much bigger than the samples on the site. More often than not, I earn upwards of a dollar per sale. However, this is not my primary source of income. My photography just doesn't command thousands of dollars per photo, though someday I hope it might. The prices, ranging from $1 to $100+ (and I have earned commissions of $20/sale from time to time) encourage more people to license my photos than would choose to do so at higher prices. I make up a fair bit of the low price in volume.

This is the point where most professional photographers bring up the old joke about the businessman who sold his goods at a loss, but made it up in volume. But that doesn't apply to photography. In business, if you sell goods at a loss, then you take a loss each time you sell something. Photography is much more akin to the software industry -- building Windows Vista took 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, but every sale Microsoft makes simply brings in more money without increasing the development costs. Similarly, once I put in the time to make a photo available online, each subsequent sale doesn't cost me anything -- I gain each time the photo sells.

Another popular argument against Microstock is that the images are of lower quality. You can see counter-examples for yourself, or you can look at NPR's story about Mt. Everest and Mt. Chimborazo with a photograph of each mountain. Without looking at the captions, try and guess for yourself which one is the professional photograph sold through Corbis, and which is the "amateur" photograph licensed through iStockphoto. Go ahead, I'll wait.... There's no real quality difference now is there? In fact, I suspect the only reason NPR used the Corbis image was because iStock only has two photos of the mountain.

The professionals who are complaining about Microstock aren't idiots by any means -- they simply realize their old model of stock photography is going to lose. The problem with these pros is that they don't want to adjust to the new marketplace.

Secularization of Christmas

Christmas really is a religious holiday, that's why so many Jews leave the country in December. But to me it isn't -- it's simply an excuse to give gifts. We're currently in the process of secularization -- like the first day of winter, which stems from the winter solstice, which was a pagan holiday.

We get to currently witness something going from a religious sacred ritual, to a yearly occurrence with no religious connotations -- only we haven't yet shed the last of those.

Growing Sugar Crystals on a String

Fundamentally, the concept is simply. A supersaturated solution will crystalize spontaneously if it can. So what you do is dissolve sugar into boiling water (since boiling water can hold more dissolved solids than can cool water). Then you dip a string into the water, which provides a nice rough surface for sugar crystals to form, and you let the water cool, causing it to be supersaturated with sugar.

Yum!

Volunteers

I came across a very interesting idea recently about people who volunteer at work. That is not to say they contribute to the company's habitat for humanity crew or that they bring in canned foods to share in the bin next to the receptionist. Rather, they are volunteering at their jobs. Of course, they're getting paid, just like everyone else. However, these special people are so in demand because of their ability to do their job that they can get a job at any company, at any time, in any business climate. They're not concerned with a recession nor with hiring freezes. If they apply to work at a company, the company will make room for them. So in that sense, these people are volunteering their time to come into your particular office, as opposed to any other office at any other company. If they didn't want to come in, they wouldn't -- they'd simply get a job elsewhere.

Are you a volunteer?

Wartime Presidency

A lot of the news media keeps referring to the Iraq war, or to the "wartime president". This really bothers me. We're not at war in Iraq. Only congress can declare war. We're in Iraq bombing the crap out of some civilians who are fighting back. They're doing a remarkably effective job, which makes me wonder why no one thought they would.

An old college roommate majoring in political science once told me that the reason the US would never be taken over by a foreign government is because of the second ammendment. He said that an armed populace would fight any invaders if the military lost the battle for some reason. The foreign troops would be subject to attack at every small town, at every gas station, at every house they entered. We'd call it patriotic, this guerilla defense of the country. The invading government would call it rebel insurgency.

Amazing what a bit of perspective can do, isn't it?

Dating

Something seems unbalanced here:

Problems With Blogs

Blogs are often mis-used. They're fine if you're just trying to share your thoughts at the moment, and don't really care if people can go back and see what you thought last week. They're also fine if you're a site like Gizmodo, where your reviews of gadgets are outdated by the end of the day. They're fine for link-of-the-day or picture-of-the-day stuff too.

Blogs are not fine when you're doing anything that has an order. All too many people blog about their trip to Swaziland. If you ever look at someone's completed blog, you start reading about how it is to come back home, then you read about the flight back, then about how the traveller has finally figured out the local customs, then about how confusing the customs are, then about the plane flight there, then about packing and last minute preparations. It's all backwards!

Anything where you're documenting a process, a blog is bad for. Not building a house. Not taking a vacation. Not the first year of your child's life.

The only reason I think blogs are so popular is they're easy to write, and you're provided with all the infrastructure. There's no page layout issues -- you have posts and you can display 1-999 posts per page. That's it. No linking, no navigation.

Someone should invent a reverse blog at the very least.

Digital Rights Management, Redux

What did I say?