Random photos from the camera phone

From Stone Mountain Park


The Scott Boulevard Ace Hardware. It's a close second to their best billboard, which is "Grills, Grills, Grills!"

Midweek rapid fire

• Real life Pac Man - hysterical
• One must not question the existence of Global Warming - This is in line with a trend I've been noticing in the media and it's associated hacks, which is the annoying "No serious [insert either scientist, economist, expert, industry insider, analyst] disputes the existence of [insert theory that one is pushing]" mantra.
  
• Proportionate responses - one of the more daft comments on the Israel -Hezbollah conflict was that Israel's response was disproportionate. Intentionally proportionate responses went out with the Greeks, and it's only by accident now when the response is proportionate. The whole notion of strategy is matching strength to weakness. That is most of Sun Tsu's Art of war.
• AcousticFriends.com - MySpace for the bluegrass/acoustic crowd. I'm listed on there as "Pale Rider".
• Townes van Zandt Lyrics - and some tab
• A guide to black and white photography
  

Funny

Via Marginal Revolution

Chinese officials have decided to crack down on the practice at some rural villages of hiring strippers to perform at funerals. The practice is intended to attract more attendees to funerals because many people believe that a greater number of people improve the deceased’s chances for better afterlife.

Interesting article about service in Iraq

From the Washington Post

Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 "person-years" in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
...
The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 -- 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq. Part of the reduction in the death rate is attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq.

The usual caveats apply of course, but it's an interesting read.

Why doesn't the AJC have editors?

This is easily the most poorly written article I've seen in a long time. Granted, its all filler, and contains no new data. And being, the AJC, it mentions diversity (for no obvious reason) at least twice. The bolding defies explanation as well. Some strange passages:

It's no secret in the world of big-time drug trafficking, federal agents say: If you want to be a major player in interstate drug peddling you have to have an operation in metro Atlanta.

Recent multimillion-dollar drug busts suggest that Gwinnett County has become that place in metro Atlanta for these drug cartels.

...
In 2005, Gwinnett's local task force seized a total of $34 million in illegal drugs. Those figures dwarf the amount of drugs seized in surrounding counties. A Cobb County drug task force, for example, seized $9 million in illegal drugs last year.

The words flow like a piano through a blender.

The Digital Tool Company makes another step

Andrew and I did some very good work yesterday, here are some stray shots from there. Our first tool should be ready for public beta soon.

A good move from the FDA for once

They make the morning after pill available over the counter for consenting adults, but not for minors, which is exactly what I would have done. It's rare when the government and I agree on something. Presumably it will still be legal for not to stock it if they have moral objections.

Quick round up

• Criminal caught due to Skype trace
• Al Gore in fact environmentally friendly, or at least environmentally correct.
• Trees that grow 90 feet in six years sound really cool
• This was the problem I had with my car
• Annoying quote of the moment, from CNN.com which has been irritating me lately, after such good coverage of the Israel-Hez conflict (absent Anderson Cooper)

  In the immigration debate, I've tried to do three things:
  
  One is to deplore the degree to which the debate is driven by the dark impulse of racism. What concerns many Americans about illegal immigration is the sense that it speeds up the Latinization of the United States -- where Anglo-Saxon culture is replaced by Latin culture, where English gives way to Spanish, and where we Americans become strangers in our own land.

  He "tries to deplore"? Even, or perhaps especially, in our secular public age need the trappings of religion and loud protestations of faith, but this is taking it to the riduculous. How is it racist to want to keep English as the dominant language, and to not want to become a "stanger in our own land"? That's dumber than claiming Islam as a "race".
  
• Women and their brains
  

The funniest thing I read today

From this article

Cook County prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately didn't want her to know he'd packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.

So he told security it was a bomb, officials said.

Weakest statement ever

From CNN

With higher gas prices and tax incentives, some hybrid vehicles make economic sense, Edmunds.com says

Wow, some!

Best Photoshop action ever

Check out the B&W Selective Color 3.0. The best color to black and white converter I've seen. The 3x3 Action (also on that page) is surprisingly handy as well.

Virtual Photographer is way cool as well.

Freedom Parkway (again)

No really good ones from this particular evening. I was hoping to catch the city in fog, but it was quite clear.

Tuesday round up

• External GPS camera mount - it looks kind of tricky, but cool nonetheless.
• A Meditation On the Speed Limit - large scale annoyances by UGA students are probably a sign of increasing value to the UGA degree.
• The uses of anti-semitism
• Cool noir photography from Mr Riddles on Flickr
• A blogging conference I might actually attend. Why are none of these in Atlanta?
• C# bar code generator
• An interesting article on archetypes
• The decline of Western civilization, part 938.
  

Well put description of our times

From Josh Trevino

In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question.

On a more practical level these days we treat one's religion as their race (which is to say involuntary and not subject to questioning or criticism), and we're already far too touchy about race these days.

Quote of the yesterday

"You sure do have a lot of interesting scars"

Said by Stephanie yesterday. I realized just now that they're all on my right side too. She was referring to the faint one of my head, the fading one on my right hand, and the large one on my right leg, which, while healing, still bears an uncanny resemblance to a hamburger.

The heart of Saturday night

Saturday I decided to go for a quick 16 mile ride before it got dark. Somehow it turned into a 35 mile trek from Avondale to Stone Mountain to the Freedom Parkway area and back in the dark. Riding at night, in the relative cool, is soothing and pleasant. Much like the other times I've ridden that late, people became abstractions and it was like having the city to myself. This ride was for much longer though. I kept the darker parts mostly in neighborhoods and the path so there was a large degree of safety.

I mapped it out, it's available here. I haven't figured out how to get the maps to display in the blog posts themselves yet. On an unrelated note, the camera on my phone is working again. The photo above is from a pedestrian bridge over Freedom Parkway.

Sunday night round up

• Vile behavior from the bench
• Interesting thoughts on Hezbollah
• One off furniture
• Ipod photoshop style
• Bashing Al Gore
• Scary police impersonators
• Product photography
• Cool bike photos
• The right wing look at the NY Times. This is the only worthwhile thing to appear on the Huffington Post so far.
• An apt cartoon
  

If you haven't seen this already

The Samuel Jackson Snakes on a plane phone message.

Blah

These all night work sessions get harder and harder to do.

Why is Lou Dobbs taken seriously?

His latest CNN.com column is the best example. His latest bloviations about our "shrinking manufacturing base" are dispensed with quite handily in every Econ 101 class. There's some apt criticism of American fiscal policy there but overall it's quite silly.

A fawning portrayal

I read this article about Fidel Castro in the Toronto Star. I honestly don't know how it could be more sycophantic.

He lives to learn and to put his knowledge in the service of the revolution. For Fidel, revolution is really a work of reason. In his view, revolution, when rigorously adopted, cannot fail to lead humanity towards ever greater justice, towards an ever more perfect social order.
...
His intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. He is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.

Combined with a Herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes Fidel the giant that he is.

Those who bite the hand that feeds them will lick the boot that kicks them. 47 years of tyranny can be washed away instantly. HT: Tom Palmer.

Monday rapid fire

• The best use of graphic thumbnails I've seen
• Calculate your Body Mass Index. This seems a tad unrealistic, and if this is what people are using to measure America's obesity "Epidemic" I'm much less impressed. It seems over broad and crappy. For instance, my ideal weight range is between 137 and 183, a difference of 46 pounds.
• Stirling Engines!
• Kurdistan, the other Iraq, it's where all of the American troops will be should a full fledged civil war break out. Described my Michael Totten as "a Muslim Utah". Shoul Iraq break up, this will be the country we subsidize most, besides Israel.
  
• $10 Panoramic Tripod Head - I need one of these.
  
• Apex Predators
• How much is inside....
• Cheap Handlebar mounts - something else I need.
• Milton Friedman TV!
  

Annoyances from the New York Times

This time it's about "Men who never marry". It was more patronizing than usual.

Choice Quotes

She speaks from experience. She married her high school boyfriend right after graduation, a 2-week-old baby in arms. But her husband, who never graduated, was unemployed for most of their marriage, and the couple broke up after six years.

Determined to find a man who had better prospects, Ms. Rudolph entered a relationship with a basketball player and had three children with him. It ended when she learned he was married to someone else, a revelation that left her badly shaken.
..
Joe Callender, 47, a retired New York City corrections officer and a father of four, has had long-term relationships with two women but has never married. One obstacle, he admits, has been his own infidelity.
...
Mr. Cunningham, 41, a sanitation worker, seems to defy any theory about why he is single. He has, he said, simply not met the right woman.
...
He is a tall, athletic man with cropped, George Clooney-style hair who projects a kind and upbeat persona; surely a catch to some women in Fort Collins.
...
When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.

It's an interesting read. They start from the position that marriage is some inevitability that one must exert great effort to avoid (it's not). They also don't take into consideration the happy loner theory, nor active misanthropy. They all but call women genetically programmed golddiggers.

The Stone Mountain Punisher

My second attempt at GeoTracking turned out much better. I mapped my usual bike route, with a bit more attention to detail. The addition of waypoints helps a lot.

It's called the Punisher due to the extreme hills on the route.

Check it out

My first try at trackpoints

I'm having problems putting it directly in the blog, but here is the map on a stand alone page. Pretty cool. The missing parts are where I had turned off the gps unit momentarily or put it in a pocket and it lost signal.

A horrible dream

Last night I had a dream where I went back to work in corporate America. It was truly horrible, oceans of cubicles, schedules and faceless (literally in the dream) drones. How does anyone stand it? It was much like my time at CMD.

Interesting

A very good post on GeoThermal energy by Malcolm Gladwell. For a simple explanation as to what it is

Geothermal heating and cooling is based on one simple fact: that 6 feet down in the ground the temperature is the same—between 50˚F and 60˚F- the whole year round. This means that it is relatively cool in the summer, and relatively warm in the winter.
...
For geothermal cooling, all one needs to do is to circulate water in a pipe through the ground to cool it, and use this cool water to cool the air pumped through the house in the heating ducts.

Heating is done much the same way. The numbers seem quite plausible, I wonder why it's not more popular.

Funny police report

A tale of a daring milk robbery in Ohio.

Choice quote from the police report

"he realized this was no joke when the rotund robbers began pelting him with a flurry of chubby fists"

The GPS

The Garmin Geko 201 is way, way cool.

Thoughts on today

Another terror plot is centered in London and Pakistan, as were the 7/7 plot.

I wonder if the prime focus of radical Islam is not the Arab word but Central Asia. Perhaps Arab culture, for good or ill, is too strongly ingrained to be replaced by a pure (messianic cult) version of Islam. The Central Asian states, might be more pliable due to 70 years of Soviet purges weakening the societies.

Just a thought.

A circle of hell appears at Turner field

I came across this somehow

A Guinness World Record-Setting Event for Banjo Players!
...
We plan to bring together the most number of banjo players assembled at one location to play the same song at the same time.
...
All banjo players are welcome to attend. Only those who can demonstrate the ability to play the song Foggy Mountain Breakdown for 5 minutes will be counted toward the Guinness World Record. The tempo will be 120 beats per minute, and we'll play in the key of G.
...
We'll stand together on the field in small teams, according to the type of instrument played and the style of play.

That's a whole lot of banjo. I have all the usual bluegrass prejudices against the banjo I suppose.

Cynthia sings!

On video no less.

It begins already

McKinney alleges voting irregularities

...

Shortly after the polls opened on Tuesday, allegations of voting irregularities began appearing on U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney'’s campaign Web site.

I had no wait when I voted this afternoon. There were McKinney people waving signs outside the polling place though. I waved, they waved back.

Getting out the vote

I'm off to go vote in the McKinney - Johnson race. It's an open primary, so anyone (who is registered) can vote.

More Info Here

Quote of the moment

"You know the story. Most of my life in jail; the rest of it dead!"
Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest

Monday rapid fire

• Prediction Markets
• Shutter Speed
• Carter: Bush Israel's 'worst ally' in D.C. - this is American Politics at its most vapid. Two parties, or in this particular case, one party, arguing over who can better serve a foreign government? Is it so much to ask what we get out of it? Israel does have a knack for drawing the proper enemies, but this is a country that has spied on us and sank one of our warships, must we be this servile?
• Jack Handey's Art Ideas
• The Pickin' Barn
• Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD - Journalism at it's most vapid. It's bad enough the author uses the horrid acronym "WMD" but then he contradicts himself in the article. Half of the US still believes that Iraq had WMD, chemical weapons in this case, because they did, just not in meaningful quantity. The poll gave an accurate answer, but the author uses that as a mini rant, and it's billed as news, not commentary.
  

21 Inch Monitor - Free To Good Home

Hello all

I've just found a good deal on a new LCD, and now no longer have any use my old 21" CRT monitor.

It's a Viewsonic Professional Series P815. No problems with it at all. It's free to anyone who wants it, must be in the Atlanta area, I'm not going to ship it anywhere.

Anyone want it?

Friday rapid fire

• NutritionData.com - very good site
• Lebanon Metaphor One
• Web Photo School
• Lighting 101
• More on Kyoto
• Building the $14 steadycam, you can buy it here
• GPS Article One, Article Two, Windows Media Info
  
• Alt Energy Blog One
• WindHunter - a good idea, but like most energy ideas, doesn't exist
• Supacam
• An angry analysis of the current Business Week cover story (about Digg) over at 37 Signals.
  

Odd quote of the moment

From an article about solar powered wi fi on GizModo

even the poorest folks enjoy sick fetish porn from time to time

Yet more reasons to hate environmentalists

I just saw the creator of "Who Killed the Electric Car" on the Daily show. He did not address the problems raised by David Friedman (mainly cost), or any of the range argument. Instead it was the usual anti-corporate spiel.

That's to be expected. What I found reprehensible was his not mentioning the new vehicle by Tesla Motors, or plug in hybrids from CalCars. Too many people in the alt-energy environmental front prefer a great excuse to a modest accomplishment and the director was no exception.

I suppose that's why Solar Towers (CNN article here, WikiPedia here) don't actually exist yet.

Mike and I go along with the Black Rider

Last night was the first Tom Wait show in Atlanta since 1978, and it was quite interesting. The AJC has a nice review of it, along with photos.

I was quiet impressed by the band, two discreet percussionists and a discreet bass player make for a very smooth sounds where the instance of the sound doesn't vary much from the concept of the sound. It was surprisingly true to the albums. Tom Waits in person sounds exactly as raspy and rough as all of his records.

He did most of the songs with a band, doing only one acoustic (with the band) and about three on the piano. It had much more in common with a play than the average rock show (which it wasn't). The lighting and shadowing was well done and gave me many ideas for photography.

On the whole a good time. The only downsides were the oppressive heat inside the Tabernacle and the long (anti-scalper supposedly) lines. We spent a little over an hour outside in line, and about that inside waiting for him to start, which meant that we spent more time waiting for the show to begin than the show itself.

War quote of the moment

From Marginal Revolution:

...Thomas Ricks' says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

I've always thought that the odds of the government getting some large conspiracy right were much smaller than the odds of them getting some basic assumptions wrong. The complaints of "Bush didn't get the war planning right" crowd is baffling too. How else was it going to look. In many ways Iraq is much better managed than any of our other wars, only better lit. How else is it going to look?

It almost writes itself

Somehow I came across the book page for this book "Why Mommy is a Democrat". There is a link to a review from some outfit called "The National Center for the Study of Children's Literature". To quote some of the review

Mommy is a tufted-ear squirrel who embodies and makes visual all the good things Democrats like to think they do, like playing by the rules, treating everyone fairly, and sharing their toys.
...
Little lovable animals inhabit the very finely done colored-pencil illustrations, exemplifying abstract beliefs like tolerance and accessible health care.
...
the representative multicultural-looking down-and-out young man who is barred from an expensive school, sleeps under a tree in the park, or looks in trash cans for dinner

The jokes for write themselves. What I found strangest was the phrase "representative multicultural-looking".

Quote of the moment

A happy childhood is the worst possible training for life
Kinky Friedman

Give your tickets to the dog faced boy

Mike and I are going to the Tom Waits show this evening. I'll have a scouting report soon.