RIP Ingmar Bergman

Tyler Cowen has a short write-up here. He made two of my favorite movies of all time in The Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, both Symphonies in black and white. All very gloomy and subtitled, but magnificently done. His passing leaves the world without one of the best visual storytellers of all time.

Hysterical

Via Jane Galt

And the best photo site is...

Lost America - Night photography of the abandoned West. Absolutely brilliant. This makes it to the BlogRoll.

Garrison States

I was listening to this diavlog recently and one of the participants (Daniel Deudney) remarked that the Wilsonian "Make the world safe for democracy" mantra of World War I was not so much referring to bringing democracy to monarchic parts of the world so much as making the world non-threatening enough so that America could maintain it's non-militaristic way of life and avoid becoming a "Garrison State".

I haven't thought about it for a while, but several years ago I thought that was the strongest argument for the Iraq war. Not sufficient on it's own, but a good reason. The threat in WWI was European militarism; now it's "The Gap" but the example still holds. The term "Garrison State" is a useful one to describe a militarized police state.

Back from Chicago

And everyone had a blast. The festival was great. More details and tons of photos soon.

We arrive in Chicago without incident

Driving exclusively at night resembles time travel. The vulgarity in the car reached new heights and several new terms were coined, none of which can be shared on this family blog.

Off to the Midwest

Photos to come in a few days.

Another interview worth reading

In this case, with industrialist Charles Koch. It's seems that most interviews on the internet are with either celebrities or analysts, and seldom anyone who has taken his own risks and created his own empire.

Quick link round up

• Long range acoustic devices
• The Agitator has a list of questions that should be asked of all presidential candidates, well worth reading
• Ward Churchill has been fired.
• Black straw lighting from the Strobist and Lighting Mods.
  

A funny two

I don't usually read the contents of my junk mail folder, but the sender name sounded vaguely familiar so I took a look at it and see

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://thoseeven.cn) are bad.

And check this out, from the Onion - I didn't realize they had a video news service now. HT: Captain Ed.

Great minds think alike

I do some Googleing, and find out that someone else has taken cool pictures of the old Pullman railroad yards as well. It's good stuff.

A milestone

I just found out today that someone wants to pay for some of my art photos! I've been a "professional" (been paid for it) photographer for awhile, now I'll be a real artist! I think I'll shop for a beret and a narcissistic attitude on Amazon.

A sad day

I just read Mike Hendrix' (of Cold Fury.com) wife Christiana passed away in a motorcycle accident over the weekend. I first met Mike in the late 90s at one of his Belmont Playboys shows. They remain the best rockabilly group I've ever seen. I don't think I ever met Christiana.

A sad day.

This is cool...

I just checked my Technorati profile, and see that someone added me to their BlogShare account. How cool!

Reagan and the Cold War

One of the many annoying things I often hear is "Reagan won the Cold War". It's the wrong question. While the Cold Warn certainly wasn't won by Jimmy Carter, it wasn't Reagan either. Here is the analogy I use.

Imagine two men in a bar. They've just finished fighting other people together. After that fight is done, they start to squabble amongst themselves. Both men pull guns and a tense standoff ensues.

Neither side has a clear edge as both guns are comparable and effective. The standoff continues for quite some time. Both parties upgrade their weaponry periodically. One of the people spends all of his non-weapon money on health food, while the other spends all of his non-weapon money on crystal meth and salty snacks. After a while the first health food person buys a pricey new SA80 rifle. The meth/salt guy complains about a new arms race, then has a heart attack and dies.

That's the end of the Cold War. The canard "We outspent them" ignores the fact that Communism is not capable of utilizing resources efficiently, and if the Soviets hadn't been using their resources on weapons they would be wasting the resources some other way. While Reagan did see the evil nature of communism accurately, he wasn't responsible for the heart attack. Happily, communism is self-limiting that way.

The cyber-crime map of the world

Check out this article in Forbes.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

How to make Google Earth creepy yet funny

Check this out, From Slate. It starts a bit slow, but watch the whole thing

Friday in appreciation, volume II

The In Appreciation for this week goes not to a person, but to the economic force known as Capital Flight. Wikipedia defines it accurately as

when assets and/or money rapidly flow out of a country, due to an economic event that disturbs investors and causes them to lower their valuation of the assets in that country, or otherwise to lose confidence in its economic strength. This leads to a disappearance of wealth and is usually accompanied by a sharp drop in the exchange rate of the affected country (devaluation).

Modern technology makes it easy to move money from one country to another; giving an immediate cost to bone headed economic decisions and plundering. For examples, think of governments defaulting on debts and anything that has happened in Zimbabwe over the past few years.

So Capital Flight, for enforcing some degree of fiscal and monetary responsibility on the governments for the world, you get my second Friday In Appreciation.

The in-laws crack the mainstream media!

Actually it's my brother's in-laws, but anyway, they were recently recognized by the Atlanta Journal Constitution

Cobb couple showing soldiers they care

Mary and Ed Ettel spend most weekends in their basement creating care packages for troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Kosovo/Serbia. In 16 months, they have mailed 376 boxes weighing 5,723 pounds and helping 6,365 service members.

The east Cobb couple and about a dozen volunteers packed 16 boxes Saturday with snacks and hygiene items. During summer mailings, they add baby wipes, salty snacks and water bottles. They also put in Beanie Babies, candy and sometimes soccer balls for soldiers to give to the children they meet.

The Ettels get requests for items through a program called AnySoldier.com. Soldiers post items they need on the Web site and volunteers kick into action.
...

How cool!

The Dark Tower

Since I can never find the link easily, here is the Coming Anarchy post on The Ryugong, the Dark Tower of North Korea.

Thursday morning link rapid fire

• Fast Failure's and Google
• HDR in Photoshop CS III - I still haven't gotten that to work right, more at this site.
• Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
  

Finally, a problem we can blame on the Mexicans

It's not a major problem, but from some reason they (Mexicans) bicycle approaching traffic, which is the way it's done in Mexico, but not in America. This endangers the cyclist as the amount of time between perception and action is dramatically reduced for both parties, which means that they have less time to avoid each other. It's particularly bad at night. Also the Tullock Effect is reduced as avoidance is not the clear responsibility of either party.

I saw three people doing it yesterday.

Setting the bar quite low

Randy Barnett has an interesting article on libertarian opinion and the Iraq war in the Wall Street Journal. It had this little nugget of pessimism disguised as hope

They hope that the early signs of progress in this offensive will continue, so that American and Iraqi forces can achieve the military victory necessary to allow the Iraqi government to assume responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people from terrorists, as well as from religious sectarian violence. They hope this success will enable American soldiers to leave Iraq even before they leave Europe and Korea, and regain the early momentum that led, for example, to Libya's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program.

WWII ended in 1945, the Cold War in 1991, and Korea has been at truce, if not at peace since 1953. that means we would be in Iraq until 2040 at the earliest?

The quotable Dwight Eisenhower

While perusing WikiQuote while waiting for some files to upload I came across these nuggets of wisdom

if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, "How stupid can you get?"

The runner up

The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.

Any my favorite

Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer.

That crazy Putin

From a slighly hysterical article on MSNBC.com

Equality, to Putin, means no more patronizing lectures from the West on Russia's history—or its dismal human-rights record. Russia, he believes, has nothing to be ashamed of. As he told a group of visiting teachers last month, foreigners "must not be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us—after all, we did not use nuclear weapons against a civilian population [like the United States in Nagasaki]."

The two data points he seems to be using for this comparison are America 1776 to 1945, and Russia from February to late April. Curiously unmentioned is the 50% of Chechens that were killed in the 1990s. Oh well. Russia is always going to be Russia I guess.

The Jimmy Carter killer rabbit story

Subadei posted about the giant badgers the British have supposedly unleashed on Southern Iraq (and if they haven't, why are they holding back?) and I did a quick search for "Jimmy Carter Rabbit Attack" on Google and it returned 341,000 results! The more notable ones are

• News of the odd
• The Straight Dope
• and of course, Wikipedia
  

Sunday rapid fire

• The wealthiest Americans in history
• Lead exposure and crime - interesting if not convincing
• A preachy CNN.com article on vacations - and why some people don't like them. Evidently any deviation from the middle class norm is unhealthy
• The Battle of Omdurman by the War Nerd
  

A wonderful adage

Via PurpleSlog comes "until robots get better" which is a fine life motto. Much more appropriate these days than Woodie Guthrie's "Until we outnumber 'em"

Days of rage

Not only have I worked for free for 30 hours in the past two days on a Classic ASP (obsolete in 2003 if any one is curious) project mind you (a long story I won't share here) but now I find that my car won't start.

Predictably, I've noticed that I'm fighting the urge to grind my teeth and have a sudden urge to clean the house. It's odd those are always my responses to anger and stress.

This is surprisingly cheap

Hang gliding at Lookout Mountain. And tantalizingly close. I think I'll do that sometime this summer.

Frustration

Though I've said this before, never again will I try to fix someone else's work, or deal with client's at the end of a project if I haven't dealt with them in the beginning.

An enraging day was had by me.

Update at 6:15 - it's sad when a different server error is the high point of a (so far) 12 hour day.

The start of the Friday In Appreciation Series

I've decided to start a more or less weekly series about the people and forces of that don't get enough credit in our society. I call it the Friday In Appreciation Series.

We live in age when sanctimonious piety rivals hydrogen as the most common thing in the universe. Be it suburbanites railing against city-dwellers not having children, Ultra-Calvinist urbanites railing against Bushies standing in the way of progress, or Muslims from loser countries blaming Danish cartoons for their crappy lives, it's hard to walk five feet without getting smacked in the face by righteous outrage, backed up by the usual litany of reasons people have for telling other people to run their lives.

But there's one group that not only walks the walk and talks the talk; they also handle the snakes. Yep, I'm talking about Snake Handlers. It's refreshing to see someone use the fine print and not bother other people. They actually follow the fine print just because it's there. They even keep going when their leaders die of snake-bite. Now that's faith!

Thus I begin the series.

Free Photoshop Actions for my loyal readers

As my Nikon D80 makes it quite easy to take several hundred photos per session, and converting from the RAW format to psd takes forever (per photo) I recently created a couple of new photoshop actions to speed conversion and color correction.

They are both part of an action set I call "Mass Photo Actions"; you can download it here.

There are two actions in there that serve different purposes. The first action "RawToPSDNoTweaks" just takes a RAW file from a particular directory, converts it using the default settings, saves it as a psd file, and then closes it. It does no color correction, use this one if you intend to make a lot of manual color corrections later.

The second one "RawToPSDWithTweaks" opens and converts the file like the one above, and then does a safe amount of color correction and image sharpening to the image, saves it as a psd and then closes the file. Use this one if you took a bunch of well-exposed photos and just want to do some small automated tweaks.

None of these functions are that notable in and of themselves, but when run in a batch on hundreds of files they save hours of time.

To use it, first download the action, put it somewhere on your hard drive, bring it into PhotoShop using the "Load Actions" option on your Actions toolbar. Now it's ready to be used on an individual file.

To run it in a batch, just go to File > Automate > Batch - and then choose the proper photoshop action and the source and destination directories.

No warranty is expressed or implied, you do this at your own risk. I've only tested this on PhotoShop CS Two on Windows Vista. Use at your own risk.

I just felt like sharing. These two actions save me hours of time after every photo adventure.

Best metaphor ever

From the War Nerd

If we couldn't get people on our side after deposing a monster like Saddam, what chance do you think we have of winning hearts and minds in Iran? The kids in Iran are pissed off at the way the old Mullahs won't let 'em rock and roll, but the idea that they'll support an American invasion because they're bored is totally insane. It's like imagining that the kids in Footloose would've backed a Soviet invasion of Nebraska because John Lithgow wouldn't let them hold school dances.

Classic.

Quick Thursday links

• The linguistic capabilities of the candidates
• A story about the old Pullman yards I explored a few months ago. Photo gallery here.
• ASP.net and Validation Groups - I can't believe I didn't know about this earlier.
• The NYT breathlessly points to a supposed new trend in econ departments. Intelligent Design is a new trend in biology in the same way I suppose.
• E-Prime is the way to go
• Austin Bay has seven possibilities for Iraq. Number one is the most likely I think.
  

An odd correlation

For whatever reason, the hits to this site, and my other major public site, JargonDatabase.com move in inverse correlation to each other. Odd.

New Jersey outlaws sale of many bikes

Read this post on Asymmetrical Information. It would seem to outlaw both of quite a few bikes no matter how you read the law.

You would think that not having the wheel fly off is incentive enough to secure it properly, but if someone says "it's for the children" then it must be a good idea.

3 random link

• Meaningful advances in battery technology
• A 24 inch monitor for $229. My, how the prices have fallen
• China executes ex-drug chief for graft

  China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand.

  Can you imagine that happening in the US? I can't.
  

A thousand curses upon Comcast Broadband

I've been getting 90% packet loss on all upstream traffic all day, which pretty much kills any and all productivity on my part. The tech support couldn;t do anything and had to schedule a service appointment for Thursday.

Does anyone know if you can get DSL without a phone number?

A good time was had by all

My first ever gig at Limerick Junction was a success. Everyone seemed to have a good time. The songs "I Miss Ronald Reagan" (written by Tommy Womack) and my song "Heroin and Cheetos" seemed to go over particularly well. My would-be guitar showcase of Bonaparte's retreat fell a bit flat. The room sounds noticeably different when full than when half full and that threw me off a bit as the set progressed.

On the whole a good night. The A-Sides rocked as usual. The photo was taken by my brother, who also recorded the show.

Come see me play tonight

If you're in Atlanta come out and see me play in my first ever scheduled gig this Sunday at Limerick Junction Pub. I'll be going on at 8:00. Atlanta legends the A-Sides are the headliner.

A minor improvement on the bleeding edge

As a result of fixes in the last version the Ajax Toolkit, it is now possible to do a full compile of an Ajax.net website! There's not huge improvement in anything, but the resulting application is much cleaner.

Eight random facts

Subadei tagged me with the eight random facts meme a couple of days ago. With no further ado, here are the eight.

1. All dogs, no matter what temperament or breed, like me, at least a little. I can't recall a single dog that has been at all hostile to me.
2. I am immune to fleas and mosquitoes. They simply don't bite me.
3. When I was 20 I fought in a toughman contest and got knocked out in the first round by a tough redneck about 25 pounds heavier than me. For the record, I was up by eight but the ref declined to let me continue. It taught me two important things, namely that while I can take a punch, I can't take eight punches, and to be very careful about making promises in front of women you're trying to impress (namely that I would fight in a toughman contest.)
4. I earned the permanent enmity of a boss of mine with an artful quip. He once remarked "I'm pushing forty" to which I replied "yeah, from the North." I found out later he was 54.
5. While my speaking voice is abnormally low and quiet, my singing voice is abnormally loud. I present a challenge to the sound guy. Luckily for them my guitar style is loud too.
6. I think Thomas Sowell's theory of the constrained vs. the unconstrained view of human nature does more to explain Western intellectual history than anything else.
7. I think "Bonaparte's Retreat" is pound for pound the best song ever written. While the original Irish version is seldom played, the melody is simply more suited to acoustic instruments than anything else in the traditional catalog. The version on the first Doc Watson family album shines in it's harsh minimalism, while his later more fleshed out renditions work almost as well. Norman Blake and John Hartford have good versions too. Doc's version of "Lone Pilgrim" still has the most primal impact on me though, I'm not sure why.
   
8. The life and writings of Eric Hoffer are a source of endless fascination to me. Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken are close seconds. All three of them managed to unload their thoughts onto paper with a minimum of distortion. All three were also solitary and dispassionate observers of human nature.

I now tag Dan Tdaxp, CodePoet, Purple Slog, and Dave Henson.

National brain drains and blog posts - the easy way

One of my grand unformed theories is that the 20th century's genocides and ethnic cleansings have acted as a categorical shift in evolution, both social and biological.

A significant part of that theory is that talent leaves one country for another (AKA - a brain drain, as part of the Ricardian Triangle of Land - Labor - Capital) but I've never formed the thoughts that much. I made a comment on Dan Tdaxp's blog on a related post noting that I was surprised he hadn't written anything about it either.

Imagine my surprise when a day later he writes The Consequences of Brain Drains in Developing Countries. Life is much easier when other people do all the work...

Sony VAIO customer service - an exploration

Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it's lame.

In the post she states

So instead, I'll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I'd like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.

Let's remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.

So if you're reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn't mind linking to this post, preferably with the words "Sony VAIO customer service" in the link, I'd appreciate it awfully.

Sure, it's revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they'll stop doing it. To all of us.

We'll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.

That would be a good company to start - a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.

Quick Friday roundup

• E-Snailer - Write a letter on the internet
• High Trust Societies
• Fair and Balanced Radio - by Radley Balco
• Better and better car batteries. From Wired. We probably need at least one generation more of advancement before plug-in hybrids are feasible.
  

A belated Fourth of July post

The Declaration of Independence
translated out of 18th century English and into 20th century American
by H.L.Mencken
from The Baltimore Evening Sun 7 November 1921

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else. That any government that don't give a man them rights ain't worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don't do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum's rush and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don't mean having a revolution every day like them South American yellow-bellies, or every time some jobholder goes to work and does something he ain't got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons, and any man that wasn't a anarchist or one of them I.W.W.'s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain't hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won't carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won't stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

...
Read the whole thing.

An interesting Vista fact

You can't use four gigs of DDR RAM on 32 bit installations of Microsoft Vista. I recently got another two gigs (it's very cheap right now) and was disappointed to see that Windows was only registering 3,326 megs. I do some research and find that 32 bit OS have a max of 4 gigs total memory it can use, and that includes sound cards, video cards, (everything) as well as sticks of DDR.

More details at CodingHorror.

Happy Birthday!

231 years old, and you don't look a day over 190. 143 years without a civil war too!

One the whole I think we're doing much better than can be expected.

I celebrated by driving around West Atlanta and attempting some HDR photography which didn't turn out too well.

Finding humor in the little things

From CNN.com

Al Gore's son was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of possessing marijuana and prescription drugs after deputies pulled him over for speeding, authorities say.

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

This isn't too surprising, he's been arrested for marijuana before IIRC, but he was dumb (and probably arrogant enough) enough to be going 100 miles an hour while while carrying an illegal drug and four(!) prescription drugs not prescribed to him. In a Prius, which makes it all much funnier.

History rhymes in funny ways

While perusing coverage of the latest British terror plots, I came across the words "Doctor's" and "plot" in the same sentence. Being morbidly interested in Russian History, I thought of Stalin's final purge, happily stopped by his death, the Doctors' Plot, which is thought to be his pretext for getting rid of Russia's Jews.. I was looking over the Wikepedia entry on the subject and came across this little tidbit

In the course of his career, Stalin became increasingly suspicious towards physicians. In his later years, he refused to be treated by doctors, and would only consult with veterinarians about his health.

Weird!

I coin a new phrase

I hereby dub Climate Change Activists "The coalition of the chilling".

And here's an article on public attitudes on Climate Change

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

A validation of my blogging existence

Subadei has tagged me with the 8 Random Facts meme. Eight interesting facts. Hmmm....

The Scooter Libby commutation inspires a detached nausea in me

One of the main selling points of the rule of law is that everyone has to abide by the same ones. Or not...

Bush commutes Libby's prison sentence
President Bush commuted Monday the prison term of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, facing 30 months in prison after a federal court convicted him of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.

Sure, the investigation seemed to be centered around something that wasn't a crime. Fine. But Libby had every opportunity to plead the fifth and he didn't. Instead he lied under oath.

I've long maintained that one of the great social blunders of my lifetime was not convicting Clinton for perjury in the Lewinsky case. Not that the crime itself was terribly notable, but setting a high, enforced standard of the rule of law would have changed subsequent presidents for the better.

We're entering the age of the Loner!

I came across this article on diversity and society somewhere on the City Journal. To quote:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

It all makes sense, the more diverse, the less one has in common with one's neighbors. The less one has in common, the fewer common goals, the more group competition and the payoff for community action is less. Therefore, you get less of it.

This would explain why people tend to live near people a lot like them. It would be upsetting to people who think we should all live in neatly arranged boxes supporting the "community" goals instead of our own individual ones. I think there's lots of hugging in those boxes too.

New Photo Gallery is up!

At long last, after much color correcting and tweaking in Photoshop, my last round of photography is online. I've put some samples on this page, just click any of them and it will take you to the gallery. Or you can just click here.

The lovely Michelle Overstreet was my model for the occasion. Her brother Scott (the only other person in any of the photos) was there as well taking pictures.

As you might notice the choice to go for color over black and white depends greatly on the total light available as well as the amount of concrete in the shot.

On the whole I think they turned out quite well. I was able to do some tricks with lighting I haven't tried before, and the fiddler against the city skyline remains a solid idea. I particularly like the use of the Flash (on the later shots) and the cool golden glow the lighter provided. In post processing I created several utility Photoshop Actions (I'll post those later) which sped up the color corrections and image resizing a great deal.

All of these were taken last Saturday on either Bishop Street in Midtown (near Atlantic Station, or at the North Highland bridge downtown. For my non-local readers, these locations are about five miles apart from each other in Atlanta. We started about 7:00 PM and went to 9:45. With the exception of the black and white conversion, cropping and color corrections, almost nothing was done in Photoshop.

Thoughts?

Two things worth reading

• A DIY guide to building your own CNC machine (for about $600)
• Interesting thoughts on Global Warming