Friday Photo #3 (special Sunday edition)

Falls on Rock Bridge Branch

A much more recent photo, this was taken on New Year's Eve. We'd taken a trip to Red River Gorge for a long weekend, and taken some short hikes to see notable features in the area. This little falls, about 300 yards from Rock Bridge, provide a beautiful highlight of the stratified sandstone ridge.

The composition provides an interesting challenge, at least in the winter. There are only a few good shooting locations if you're not willing to get wet, and the main one is really the only decent choice. I tried a few different compositions, which both offer a larger field of view. I change my mind regarding which one I prefer. This one provides the best sense of the surrounding forest, surprisingly green for late December. The exposure time here is 0.8 sec, which does a good job of streaming the falls without adding unusual effects to the more still pools of water.

I haven't yet worked on this in any detail. I'd be inclined to crop the bright sunlit rhododendron leaves on the right side of the image. That's tricky though because I don't want to lose the darker shadowed rhododendron behind it, which offers a nice counterpoint to the falls.

I'd love to come back here when it's well below freezing; this must make a beautiful scene in the snow, or when it starts to melt. Late summer would be interesting too.

Macworld 2008 Announcements

Several new things were announced at Macworld yesterday. Here's my brief, uninformed take on each.



MacBook Air: New ultralight laptop. The message boards are pretty negative on this one, but I think it mostly misses the boat. This is not designed for a tech-head or intensive user. Frankly, it's designed for people who could use the vanilla MacBook but want something cooler. I don't think they'll sell a ton of them, but they're probably good for staking out some more 'cool design' territory. It's eye candy for the coffeehouse set. And for that, it's pretty tasty. Very curious to hear about the performance of the 64Gb SSD drive option.

Time Capsule: Combined WiFi base station and backup device. If it works well enough, this could be well positioned. Home users are just starting to realize how much they need to care about backups. If it's really plug-n-play when combined with Time Machine, they might have a good lever to crack open that market.

iTunes Movie Rentals: Renting movies (both regular and HD) via iTunes. Personally I'm not a fan of rentals, I'm not a fan of DRM, and I'm not a fan of proprietary technology. So I'm not excited about this in a lot of ways. However I think it's the right move in the market. It will be very interesting to see how many rentals they sell.

AppleTV Take Two: Refresh of the set-top box that brings iTunes, iPhoto, and other things to your AV system. It's a very nice system, and integrates a lot of cool pieces. But I think that's the problem -- most people have some portion of these features on their DVRs or other tools. Without actually offering a DVR I think it'll be a tough sell. And they're probably going to run into annoying download problems, especially with people on slower DSL connections.

iPhone software upgrades: Some very good incremental upgrades here. The movable home icons are fantastic but also a no-brainer, especially with 3rd-party apps coming before long. The win will come from the position locator. If that works well people will love it. (A loss would come from the stability of the upgrade.)

iPod Touch upgrade: Some nice features that should have been in the original Touch. The $20 cost to upgrade will be a shock for most users. I suspect they'll not sell a bunch of upgrades, meaning they're now dealing with two versions of the software.

Just my initial take. I haven't used or downloaded anything yet. Maybe soon!

Sabbath Piano

This is a Unclassical Piano, a 14-year-old kid who's uploading video to YouTube. Well, "video" -- it's really just him playing piano, so the major point is the audio. The pieces (he has 16 online) are all covers of classic rock tunes. And, uh, they're pretty good. He's not working from sheet music. He's listening to the songs and working out the arrangements himself. That's incredibly cool, and he's going to learn a heck of a lot more that way.

It also makes the interpretations a lot more interesting. These are songs that have been played on the radio constantly for the past 30 years or so. I couldn't guess how many times I've heard them. Now for my tastes, he does miss some crucial components of the songs. Obviously he has to make choices what to include -- he's not going to replicate a 4- or 5-piece ensemble on the piano. Sometimes, he makes choices that skip little bits that I think are crucial to the songs.

And I think that's incredibly cool. Despite being overplayed, these are great songs that have some interesting parts. And it's easy to get set in your ways in listening to things. It's great to hear them from a fresh viewpoint and catch the elements that stood out for him.

For some reason I've been growing more interested in classic rock again. Part of that is because local radio is pretty much nothing but, at least for what I might be interested in, and most times I won't take the time to set up the iPod for short trips. So I'm spending more time thinking about these songs -- the classic rock canon, if you will.

And the thing is, they're pretty good. It's easy to get sick of them because they're so incredibly overplayed, but there's a lot of very good music in there. I sat in the driveway on Saturday listening to the last few minutes of Stairway to Heaven. That's almost the poster child for overplayed, overindulgent 70s arena rock. But you know? It's a pretty good song. It features great work from all the band members. Plant doesn't even screech until the last minute or two.

There's a lot of stuff like this. It's easy to rant against classic rock, because that's just about all you can hear. Almost once a week I'll flip stations to hear the same song in two places at once. That's why WTTS is so disappointing. It's a good radio station and has the most independent playlist in the area, at least of anything bigger than a high school station. They're willing to play songs that don't get airplay anywhere else. And yet they still spend the majority of their time on stuff that I can hear ten different places on the dial.

It's a real annoyance, but it doesn't make these songs bad songs. It's easy to conflate "overplayed" with "not good". I'm going to try to get out of that habit. I'm not going to stop buying new(er) music. But I do think I'll go back and add some of the older stuff to the mix.

Polling, Polling, Polling

It's now exactly a week after the New Hampshire primary. So I suppose I'm completely too late to comment on the results. However, they're not as interesting to me as the fact that Clinton's win was very much unpredicted by the polling. Much has been written about this and I don't have any particular insight into why the polling was wrong. What's more interesting to me is whether polls are all that useful, and whether there's a trend towards people actively working to subvert them.

I have no data, only anecdotes. As with any US citizen over the age of 18, I've responded to numerous polls and surveys, through mail, phone, and online. I remember for instance being about 19 or 20 and keeping an Arbitron (?) radio listening diary for a couple weeks. Even then, I remember my first thought was "what radio stations or DJs or programs do I want to help?" I didn't create a completely false diary; most of what I wrote down was pretty much what I was really listening to. But I did make a point to listen to programs that I thought deserved attention, and if I caught myself spending time on something I disliked -- or if I got mad at something I heard -- I made a point to not record it. And I thought about who needed help: I didn't worry about recording data for shows that were already wildly successful, but I did for things that I was worried would be cancelled.

Why'd I think that way? There are a couple of pretty useful defensive mechanisms here. When a stranger asks you to do something, it's not a bad habit to ask both "what do they get out of it?" and "what's in it for me?" I wouldn't recommend making decisions based only on those questions, but it's worth knowing the answers even if you don't make use of them. So with Arbitron: what did I owe them? I think they were paying me $5 or something, which was nice but certainly not a complete compensation for the work I did for them.

I have used variations on this theme in many surveys and polls since then. I doubt that this demonstrates any particular insight, and I wouldn't be surprised if many people follow the same approach. More generally, I would bet that people just don't care a lot about giving thoughtful answers. After all, this person on the phone is asking for ten minutes of your time. What do you owe them?

As our culture gets more jaded and over-saturated with targeted marketing, I think this kind of thing will only increase. Polls will get less reliable and people will start to question their value.

Does it matter?

Friday Photo #2

Dunes at Sunrise

Another shot from my big Rockies trip in 2006. This is taken at Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. The sand dunes are formed in a pocket of the Sangre de Cristo range. Winds pick up sand as they cross the wide San Luis valley, dropping it as they funnel into the mountains. The dune field actually seems small in some ways. It's about 8 miles long, which isn't tiny, but you can view the whole thing from Hwy 17. The dunes themselves are massive, ranging up to 750 feet tall (above ground level).

I visited GSDNP early in my trip. I consciously had no agenda, but had headed south through Colorado Springs simply because I hadn't seen much of that part of the state. So that put me close to the dunes. They are known as a 'major photographic opportunity,' but this actually made me reluctant to visit as they're so commonly photographed. But since I was in the area I definitely wanted to visit one of the newest national parks. And I'm glad I did, because the photography really is spectacular.

I spent about a day there. I arrived in the afternoon, set up camp in the campground, and took a photos at sunset. I then arose early and hiked into the dunes at sunrise for more photography. Sunset is probably the better photographic opportunity, because the dunes are all about shadow. With the Sangre de Cristo range just east of the dunes, and the wide San Luis valley to the west, the horizon is much lower at sunset and you would get more dramatic shadows as a result. Still the morning photos are quite dramatic as well and I'm very happy with what I got.

The photos are all very good but probably not quite great. This one is a fine example. It has major lines angling down left-to-right, including the mountain skyline and the edge of the dunes. These are balanced by the strong dark shadowed dune which angles up left-to-right at the bottom of the composition. The weakest element is the washed-out blue sky; I left very little of it in the frame for that reason.

I love the wide range of textures and lines in the sand, leavened with just a bit of green scrub that highlights the barren dunes. The forested mountains in the background provide another contrast to set off the sand, and I think I'll try to bring out the green of the pines just a bit in the final print. (Have to be careful though, as the distance haze adds an important sense of the depth of the scene.)

I might also try this in black and white. Dune photos are a staple of B&W as they have such dramatic shadows and textures. Still, I'm concerned that losing the green of the scrub will change the impact of the sand.

I remember that as a wonderful morning for photography. I felt calm and relaxed, yet excited too. The excitement is a difficult element to balance in my photography, because too much leads me to rush and miss important things. Shoots like this that depend on 'magic hour' light require some haste, yet it's all wasted if I don't take the time to look for the less obvious opportunities. That morning, I was well balanced, and that led to photos I'm really happy with.

New Mac Pros

Apple introduced new Mac Pros yesterday. They look like reasonably useful upgrades to the previous machines, based on the new Penryn processors and including some tidy upgrades like bumping the front side bus from 1333 MHz to 1600 MHz. I've been considering a Mac Pro purchase for my Photoshop needs, and this would seem like a step in the right direction.

The interesting thing though is the timing, with Macworld less than a week away. I can't recall a time when Apple has released new hardware so close to the date of a Macworld keynote, except maybe when they were trying to kill off the summer Macworld in Boston/New York.

I think there's a few reasons for this. First, the Penryns were officially introduced at CES this week, and so every manufacturer is announcing their Penryn-based boxes. Second, Apple has very clearly pitched Macworld at consumers, keeping Mac Pro updates to separate events. For example, the January 2003 Mac Pro update was launched at a separate event on 28 January. Third, and most exciting, it's pretty clear that Steve Jobs will have a lot to talk about at the keynote. There are rumors of ultraportable Macs, movie rentals, a new version of iTunes, and updates to iPhone software. All of those seem relatively likely so there's reason to believe Jobs won't want to dilute the message with useful but straightforward updates to the pro platform.

There's a good chance I'll end up with a new Mac Pro this year. But I'm holding out to see what comes at Macworld. Because this is shaping up to be one with some very interesting developments.

Extreme Pareto: the 98/2 Rule

Oh, I so really don't plan to make a regular habit of this. But it is the Tuesday of the New Hampshire primary, making the second major milepost of the nomination process. And despite my earlier whining, I really am excited about the election. There is a very good chance that in November we'll elect a much better president than the one we have now, and that can only be a good thing.

I am however a bit surprised by the apocalyptic coverage. The net effect is that the primaries will be all but won or lost today. Statistically you could easily write off these the delegates and still win the nomination. The kicker, as usual, is the media. Candidates who don't do well in the first two contests are seen as not worth covering, and that's a huge handicap to overcome. If the media and punditry anoints a winner -- and probably a challenger -- it's then much more difficult for anyone else to raise money or get coverage. So it's not that I don't understand the mechanics, but still it seems so crazily premature.

How crazy? As of tonight, delegates are essentially allocated for two states, Iowa and New Hampshire. For the Democrats (as an example) that's 67 pledged delegates out of a total of 3,253... or about 2%. (The percentage is even lower if you look at unpledged delegates but I don't pretend to understand how they land on a candidate.) To put it in perspective, Tennessee -- the 18th-largest delegation -- decides 68 pledged delegates. So if Iowa and New Hampshire weed out all but two candidates from either party, that's based on a tiny fraction of possible delegates. Or to put it another way, 98+% of the delegates have minimal influence on the eventual nominee.

Everybody knows it's crazy, I just wanted to put some numbers on exactly how crazy.

Horse Racing

I'm wary of starting into a political blog topic, because it can be both painful and addicting... kind of like habañero sauce. But I will anyway. I guess it's Monday and I'm surrendering to Cranky Old Guy inside my head. Though in reality, this is more of a media post than a political post.

It stems from my usual Monday morning frustration with Cokie Roberts. She is always annoying, but at least she has the flexibility to find different ways to annoy me. Today's approach was Standard Option B. It's less annoying than Option A but more pervasive across the media so more in need of calling out.

What is Option B? Replacing political commentary with horse race handicapping.

Now I'm not the first to complain about this, either with Roberts or in general. It's a theme that's gained a small bit of traction in the last eight years or so. I probably had my thoughts on the matter focused when I read Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media?. There are worse examples of reporting and commentary in the media, but Roberts is particularly reprehensible because she has venue on the relatively serious NPR and because she's seen as a respectable commentator.

But like I said, this morning is mostly about the horse race handicapping. Consider this, the next time you're reading or listening to political commentary. How much of the coverage is about who the candidates are and how they would govern, and how much is about their electoral strategy, where the 'momentum' goes, and who's moving up or down in the polls? The vast majority of political coverage you hear will focus on either who leads in the horse race, or handicapping on what's going to happen next in the horse race. Hint: any time someone talks about a poll, this is what they're doing. But it goes beyond that too, into discussing what's the strategy of a particular candidate, or how are they changing their message.

We're so used to this that it's a bit tough to take a step back and think about why that's kinda crazy. Think of it this way: if you're making a decision on who to vote for, what do you need to know? Well, you certainly need to know what the candidates will do if they're elected. That includes things like their plans, their history, their stands on general issues, and so forth. It's probably also worthwhile to know about their personalities: how they function, who they associate with, what's their past history. (I'm used to being annoyed by coverage of this personal stuff, and it does get overblown, but it is relevant to how the person would govern.)

You can start collecting that kind of information straight from the candidate. They will tell you all about themselves and what they want to do. And that's good, but of course it's also highly biased. To some extent you'll get contrasting stories from their opponents, but that's going to be just as biased. Debates and live exchanges can help with this but it's still not a complete picture. So it's critically important to have somewhat evenhanded media coverage of these things, so that you can get an independent story on what the candidate is about.

And yet the bulk of the coverage is not about the candidates and their ability to govern; it's about who's going to win. That's a lot easier because it has a clear storyline. (It' an incredibly lazy way to report, because you can just keep writing the same basic story while changing the names and numbers.) It also defends a bit against accusations of bias, by focusing on metrics like poll numbers and dollars raised or spent. Most importantly, I think it drives a sense of excitement about elections, because races are exciting, right? And that excitement drives TV ratings or newspaper sales or what have you. But all of this is completely unhelpful in deciding who you should vote for.

It's not that this horse race coverage is inherently wrong. It's good to know what is happening with polls or money, and it's an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how political machinery functions. But that should be way down the list of topics to cover, instead of #1 through #3 in every news story.

It's really tough to avoid this stuff. I mean, as a reporter you need to talk about these candidates every day for 18 months or so. How many times can you write about their health care ideas? If the candidate is even mildly competent this stuff isn't going to change very much. But it can be done. Matthew Yglesias is making a pretty good effort at it. He's not religious about it but his balance is pretty close to right. I'm sure there are others out there too who are doing a good job, but after 2004 I had to cut back my political blog reading quite a bit.

Friday Photoblogging

I think I'll use Fridays to show one of my photos. That said, today's photo wasn't taken my me at all.

In September of 2006, I took a three-week driving trip west, spending my time in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. In New Mexico I stayed with my good friends Miya and Andrew in Dixon, and we did a few hikes in the area. This hike is to an area called Valle Vista, which gives a great overlook into the Rio Grande gorge.

Miya took this photo while I was lining up a vista of the river. Her photo is a lot better than what I came up with. It does a great job of highlighting the curve in the river, with the person in the foreground giving a sense of how far up we are. And the angle makes it feel that the person is right on the edge of the cliff. (I was plenty safe, though I did feel a need to be very careful!) Anyway it's a great illustration of what I was doing on that trip, and of my somewhat random photography habit too.

Music, Sweet Music

Tons of coverage recently of the RIAA decision to sue music owners for ripping CDs that they already own. It's a completely brain-dead idea, and it's interesting to see a Motely Fool column that argues this is a good reason to sell your music company stocks -- not because they're, you know, evil, but because they're going to start losing money by doing stupid stuff like this. Contrast this with an article in Wired about Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. Mr. Morris has been notoriously hostile to music customers, calling iPods "repositories for stolen music", but has since set up open MP3 downloads through Amazon.

I put this all under the heading of "Intellectual Property" -- IP. I find the whole topic immensely interesting. Companies like Universal do a great job of playing the villain. Even when they take steps like the DRM-free downloads they still come off as clueless or evil. And, well, that's right. It's also true that there's a certain strain of wild-eyed, feral anarchism that lurks behind some of the less sophisticated "information wants to be free" crowd. "How are you going to stop us?" it asks, adding very little else to the debate. Because after all, that's not an answer either.

I am a philosopher, both by inclination and by training, and we're pretty good at debating moral questions. This is a topic where the debate really means something, because the technological reality is undermining the regulatory and moral reality that drove the current situation. Not only that, but I also have an interest in intellectual property, both as a consumer and as a content creator through photography and (formerly and maybe again someday) through writing.

That tension -- consumer vs. creator -- is how the conflict is framed. Consumers want the content; creators want to get compensated for creating it. Both sides bring a mix of desires to the table, some reasonable, some not, but neither side has a complete and clear understanding of what it wants. And of course, there's no real 'sides' on the issue, since content creators represent a large swath of very different producers, and they're all consumers too.

But it's important to recognize another tension happening here, and one that's often conflated with the rest of the debate. That's the tension between individuals and corporations. This is murkier water than the consumer-creator pond, as there's no simple breakdown of this axis. A 'company' is anything from Universal Music to Google/YouTube to an indie record store, while 'individuals' include consumers as well as content producers ranging from blog posters to budding singer-songwriters to JK Rowling. It's not a simple picture. But it is absolutely crucial to the conflict.

I guess this post is just an introduction to the things I want to write about, at least in terms of IP. But to do that I want to introduce one more oppositional axis. This is not an axis of people but one of 'stuff'. I guess the best way to describe it is 'objects' vs. 'information'. Again this is not a clean dividing line, since there's no way to separate the 'stuff' from the information that comes with it. Still, this dichotomy is fundamental to the debate in countless ways. Here's one example. Until about 2003 or so, Universal Music made 100% of its sales by selling objects -- records, tapes, CDs, and the like. Of course the consumers were mostly interested in the information on those CDs -- the music -- but the money flowed through the transfer of objects. That's no longer completely the case, and companies are still struggling to deal with what that means.

This is a long post and I've really introduced more questions but answered none. I do plan to say more about the topic over time. As I said, it's fascinating. Certainly Doug Morris would think so.

Big Bang Deflated

I haven't had a sitcom that I enjoy watching since Friends ended. Obviously I'm not asking a lot out of my light comedy entertainment. And yet I do need a little something. Unique and enjoyable characters, less-than-obvious choices, and maybe a few funny moments along the way. But most sitcoms violate all three of these. Characters are unloaded directly from the stereotype warehouse. The situations and plots are dead-on obvious. And the jokes are stale retreads, usually based on either stereotypes behaving stereotypically, or vaguely sarcastic comments that try for biting wit.

Unfortunately I saw all these faults in the first episode of Big Bang Theory. I watched it with friends on Monday, and they found it to be hilarious. Now these are people who generally have sophisticated and iconoclastic tastes, and I respect their opinions enormously. But in this case I just could not see it. I would love to enjoy a geeky sitcom, but so much of this episode was just mind-numbingly dreadful. Just off the top of my head:

• All of the geeks are rendered insensible by an attractive woman...
  
• ...and they do anything she wants just because she's pretty.
  
• None of the geeks know how to talk to non-geeks.
  
• The blonde girl who's rather vacant and has a limited imagination.
  
• Geeks who get their pants stolen by a stronger bully. That's the one that really horked me off... could you be any less clever about it?

Geek humor is frankly a major source of enjoyment for me; I love how it plays out in everything from Jonathan Coulton to xkcd. It's not like there's a dearth of material out there... and the subject is very ripe for humor. But the level of humor that showed up on this episode was just weak retreads of old Revenge of the Nerds jokes. It would be crushingly disappointing if it weren't so predictable.

Now, that said, it's possible that this is just a starting point. Frankly the first episodes of most sitcoms are rather stale; they're working so hard to establish the characters that they resort to broad stereotypes to define them. The initial episodes of Friends give you no hint that there would actually be something interesting about these characters down the road. As the plots grow in complexity and the actors begin to establish three-dimensional characters, they can grow into life. There were a few moments that give me hope; for example the incipient OCD of the #2 geek has some potential, and if they can add some balance to the misguidedly-social geek he could be a fun character. I'm going to try watching a few more episodes to see if it goes anywhere.

But as it stands, it's a singularly horrible example of why network TV is just about doomed.

The road home

We went to Red River Gorge (in Kentucky) to stay at a rented cabin with friends for the weekend. It was quite a blast -- I had a bunch of fun and feel relaxed to boot. Fantastic.

On the way back we passed through Frankfort. A sign on the highway said "The Kentucky Capital". Now, I would have taken that for poor word choice. But as it turns out, "capitol" is only appropriate for the building, while "capital" is right for a city that's the seat of government.

Huh.

I mean... that's pretty stupid. It's dumb enough that there are two different spellings for essentially the same word. But these two meanings overlap so much, and yet use different spellings? Who came up with this stuff?

I did like the image of a "Kentucky Capital" as being a giant "K" or something though.