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Photography has always had a tenuous relationship with the real word, but as we get further into the digital age, the links between photographs and reality are disappearing.

We entered the age of photography with an industrial attack on the landscape and portrait artist. Before the daguerreotype only artists could document the world for posterity. After, anyone could do so, and thus we have an extensive record of the world from about 1850 forward.  For scores of years, photography provided indisputable evidence of reality. However, today the digital manipulation of photographs can lie and cheat, or create an alternate reality.

And if that wasn't enough, now we have a post-modern take on photography where the intent is to fool us into thinking that a picture of something real is a picture of something fake. This started when Olivo Barbieri started taking photographs using a special tilt-shift lens that manipulated depth of field to fool us into thinking we were looking at a model. (Follow the Barieri link for some examples of his work). Ironically, this illusion relies on a limitation of photography--close-up lenses have poor depth of field--plus assuming that everyone is familiar with this artifact.  And, just as the digital domain makes it easier to fake reality, it also makes it easier to fake fakery.

Here is a recent on-line magazine article that is a must see: 50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography.  For do-it-yourself buffs here is a Tilt-Shift Photoshop Tutorial, there is a tilt-shift Flickr tag and it brings up these examples, and for the obsessive, a comprehensive Tilt-Shift Link Collection.  If you want to do this in the analog domain, here is a nice $2k Nikkor special lens to get the effect. Finally, there is my attempt above, taken along Cienega Road in Hollister, California, which will pop up a larger version if you click on it.

On February 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless while on the STS-41-B Space Shuttle Challenger mission, tested the MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit). At one point he was 320 feet from the Challenger, the farthest from a spacecraft in free space that any man has ever been. A famous photograph was taken that day, which NASA suggests may be one of the most remarkable photographs ever taken of a human being. I'm not going to disagree. See the continuation for the photograph.

Have you ever wondered what the carbon footprint of an exercising shrimp is? Maybe these researchers have, or maybe they are studying if exercise can prolong the life of a crustacean. As for me, I don't know if exercise will really make a shrimp live longer, but more to the point, I'll bet exercise makes the flesh tougher!

You'll certainly want one of these for your own!

USB MISSLE LAUNCHER!

This is clearly a harbinger of a new kind of toy. Since all kids now have computers, why not use the computers to control the toys? Seems logical!

It would probably cost more than $30, but the launcher could have two optical sighting devices on it that would show the target and its range on the control panel. It would adjust the launch angle, depending on the distance of the target, and it would show red when the target was out of range.

Lots of potential here.

According to Information Week: 90% Of E-Mail Will Be Spam By Year's End.

This cannot be what J. C. R. Liclider and Ray Tomlinson had in mind! The unanswered question is what percent of Internet backbone capacity is consumed by e-mail?

Here is the link to the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Resource Center. Note the four marketing blurbs on the left below the text.

Things have really changed in this industry. It used to be that product announcements might say: "Produce professionally typeset documents at Home!" (Apple and HP Laserwriter). That was something!

Now we get: "Help Protect & Manage Content" Ugh. It's really hard to get excited about that, and it certainly doesn't make my checkbook itch. Some may say this is driven by grey-suit-itis at Microsoft. I think it is more the maturity of the industry, and the fact that we aren't seeing really cool things for the first time, but it also sounds like marketing by a committee.

So, I listen to what Microsoft was saying about all of tremendous improvements made to Office 2007 and Window Vista and I couldn't wait to try it. Good marketing, eh?

First I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, and it advised I needed a new video card, and that I should have a copy of the device driver for my Network Interface Card to use after Vista was installed. New video card procured, and CD with drivers in hand, I figured I was 30 minutes away from experiencing the splendors upgrade heaven. 'Twas not to be. I was installing a clean copy from scratch onto a new hard disk, and the Windows Vista install program spent a very long time (10 to 15 minutes) sitting there was a splash screen, finally letting me pick the language. Then it proclaimed "Required cd/dvd drive device driver is missing" and there was no further progress to be had. A search of the web (on another computer) suggested I needed to have the IDE ATAPI drivers at hand, but that didn't seem right. I unplugged the CD drive (leaving the DVD drive containing Vista installed) and tried again. Same result, but at least I knew it wasn't unhappy with the CD drive.

Finally I removed the DVD drive (a recently acquired LiteOn LH-18A1P) and replaced it with an older model. This time everything worked. There were no abnormally long waits and no complaining. My guess is that the Liteon is too new for the installer, and since it didn't know about my 3Com 3C940 LOM NIC either, it couldn't go out on the web and get updated drivers. So I was almost stuck, only being saved by the stacks of computer equimpment I have lying around, and by the desperation to try anything necessary. After Vista was installed (including the NIC drivers) I swapped back to the LH-18AP1 and it worked fine.

Googling around using the error message text shows that I am not the only one to find this bug. Here's hoping that Microsoft fixes this soon in an updated distribution disk.

UPDATE: It turns out the LiteOn drive didnt' work well after the install. It would read the TOC, but had trouble with actually reading data. Turns out I was using a 40-pin IDE cable and this drive needs an 80-pin cable! So it was user error all along.

Educated, driven, and financially successful, Japanese women are dissatisfied with marriage to an old-fashioned Japanese man. They don't want to quit their jobs and become a full-time homemaker, while their husbands spend most of their time at the office.

Honda to the rescue with the amazing ASIMO!

Rumor has it, you can rent your very own ASIMO for $150,000 per month, though it isn't known if ASIMO throws its dirty shirts on the floor.

I've written about the Astronomy Picture of the Day before, but it is just so cool. You should bookmark it.

Ceci n'est pas un Meteore, et ....

People speak of the Internet as if it were a place. It certainly is filled with stuff, and you can't put something nowhere, so, logically you must be SOMEWHERE.

A fun project would be to create a map of the entire Internet, where you could eventually drill down to each file on every server on the planet. Google probably has a big enough database to undertake this project, perhaps they'll get around to it one day after they get their Boeing 767 corporate jet finished. Perhaps they'll call it GoogleSphere! (Remember, you saw it here first).

Anyway, I'm not Google, and I can't show you a map of the entire Internet, but I can show you a graph of Sweet and Sour Spectator as of this very instant (I trust you have noticed it by now; you can click on it for a bigger version if you are so inclined).

This complete map of all the links on this site certainly proves something, though at the moment, I don't have the time to explain exactly what it is.

If you want to map your own website, or Googl'e website, the very cool tool is here at Websites as Graphs.

Postscript: this blog now contains about 65,000 words, enough for a novella, but only about one-third of a novel. I really think writing a novel is impossible and those that can do so, must be from a superior alien race (double that for people who can write a symphony!!)

So my brother says to me, "No one ever uses watches anymore. Everyone uses their cell phone to tell time." This comment got my attention... it was a surprise. Then I started thinking about it. If I've got my cell phone in hand I'll often look at the time display even though my watch is on the wrist attached to the hand holding the cell phone! The calculator in my cell phone rarely gets used, the games never get used, it is so tedious to send text messages that I never do, and the camera in the phone has been used three times in two years with absolutely abysmal results. However, I do use the phone to tell time, and even appreciate the fact it will adjust to different time zones when I am traveling.

If I were to be honest, I'd have to say my watch has been transformed into a piece of jewelry and is much less a timekeeping device than it used to be. Do twenty-somethings even wear watches anymore? If I were an executive at a company making commodity level wrist watches—for instance a company like Timex—I'd be worried. I'm certainly not going to be buying any Timex stock!

One complaint sometimes lodged against the modern American male is that every project is an excuse to buy a new tool. I'm worse than that—I don't actually need a project: I'll buy a neat tool and then find a project for it. When I saw the hand-held infrared themometer on the shelf at Costco (only $50! It's CHRISTMAS!!!), I knew with a certainty far beyond faith, experience, or divine revelation that I needed it. The fact that I didn't know what I needed it for was completely immaterial.

The thing itself is kind of like a hand-held barcode reader, but it displays the temperature of whatever you point it at. It has a 10-to-1 cone ratio, so if you have it 10 inches from an object, it measures a 1-inch diameter circle. You just pick it up, pull the trigger, and one second later, it displays a temperature.

It is a really big deal that five robotic vehicles have finished the 132-mile course at the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005.

It also showcases an efficient method for the US Gov to make rapid advances in technology, by sponsoring technology competitions. The DARP Grand Challenge was one example, and though it wasn’t government sponsored, the Ansari X-Prize won by Scaled Composites with Spaceship One, is another great example. I think NASA should scale back their manned space flight operations, including the shuttle, the space station, and the new plans to revisit the moon in 2018 using wheezing 50-year-old technology, and use the money to sponsor new technology like the Space Elevator.

UPDATE: Here's an article from today's New York Times: In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner but Not a Driver.

Imagine that your credit card records are on a computer somewhere. And then add your health records, your income tax filings, your employment records, your library records, and your air travel records.... oh yes, and your phone calls. That's not so hard to imagine, is it? Especially, since both you and I know that those things are on computers somewhere.

Now suppose that someone could pool all of this information and sell it, perhaps to a Customer Relationship Magement (CRM) software company. But wait, you don't have to imagine this, because the ACLU and their ad agency have already done a very good job of imagining it. Check out the: Pizza Store CRM Application from Hell.

History of the ViseGrip.

History of Duct (a.k.a Duck) Tape.

UPDATE: Here's some compelling proof on just how useful Duct Tape really is....