Father and Son, Prada, Tokyo

Father and Son, Prada, Tokyo Photograph by pmorgan.

Notes on Japan

Nanzen-ji Temple, Kyoto Photograph by pmorgan.

20 Nov 05 Nozomi Shinkansen Car 7 Seat 12A Depart 15:15 Arrive 17:33 Distance 533km (avg speed = approx. 230 km/hr). One-way ticket cost 135 $CDN. Check-in via bilingual machines or agents, downtown to downtown.

iPods to be sold in 7-11 convenience stores.

Extreme liberalism

What is the problem with being liberal these days?

On Friday morning, as Bush was meeting the leaders of Southeast Asia, his press secretary issued an unusually blistering statement responding to Representative John Murtha's call for a pullout from Iraq. The statement charged that Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who had often backed Bush's military initiatives, was endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore, whose movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" attacks the Bush administration, and "the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Hu helped guide China's initial market-oriented economic reforms, rehabilitated many people who had been purged or disgraced under Mao, and pursued ideas for deeper political change through much of the 1980s. He left power under pressure in 1987, accused by party conservatives of having "bourgeois" tendencies that undermined stability.

Political analysts said that the rehabilitation of Hu was unlikely to lead to policy changes, noting that President Hu has tightened controls on lawyers, journalists, human rights activists and intellectuals and warned about the threat from "liberal elements."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Photography, Architecture: Tokyo City Hall and Kenzo Tange

Tokyo City Hall

A 20 second exposure of Tokyo City Hall and clouds. The building cost more than $1 Billion US. The architect was Kenso Tange.

Tange's early thinking was influenced by Le Corbusier, as evidenced in his urban philosophy calling for comprehensive cities filled with megastructures that combine service and transportation elements. Other artistic influences included Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo and 20th-century German-American architect Walter Gropius.

"Tange, in turn, was influential on the next generation of architects. His practice expanded to employ 130 architects around the world by the late 1980s, including architects now well known, such as Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki.

"Tange came to international attention in 1946 when he designed the master plan for rebuilding Hiroshima after its devastation during World War II. His design included a memorial and museum complex where the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945.

"A recent review of his life by Reuters reports: '...Tange's trademark was a boldly spare and elegant style, blending Japanese and Western aesthetic principles... [He] captured the spirit of a rapidly developing Japan with his swooping 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, often described as one of the most beautiful structures built in the 20th century.'

Source: ArchitectureWeek

More detailed information is at GreatBuildings. Here is a google search for relevent images

Still another aspect of architecture and cities in our informational/communication society is inter-architectural relations. In the industrial society, strong emphasis on costs and intense demand for functional sufficiency of individual buildings meant that less thought was given to large functional units, including the building's neighboring structures and surroundings. I think it is difficult to determine which of the two is more important, but in a society that places great stress on communications, relationships with the surroundings probably deserve as much consideration as the functional sufficiency of the individual building.

Source: Pritzker Prize Acceptance Speech

His firm's website has a nice line drawing on the main page:

Planning: Radical Tactics

Precise site with good insight about following ones dream; being organized.

Knowing your dream and living it--this is the whole purpose behind simplifying your life. By knowing your dream, you have a powerful motivator to make changes in your life. By starting to have pieces of your dream, your life takes on a joy that makes the sacrifices of simplicity worth it.

Source: Live Simple: Radical tactics to reduce the complexity, costs, and clutter of your life

Google Cheat Sheet

Site: Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet) by Nancy Blachman

Education: Instructional Design Models

Martin Ryder has compiled a comprehensive and instructive list of instructional design models.

"Models, like myths and metaphors, help us to make sense of our world. Whether derived from whim or from serious research, a model offers its user a means of comprehending an otherwise incomprehensible problem. An instructional design model gives structure and meaning to an I.D. problem, enabling the would-be designer to negotiate her design task with a semblance of conscious understanding. Models help us to visualize the problem, to break it down into discrete, manageable units.

"The value of a specific model is determined within the context of use. Like any other instrument, a model assumes a specific intention of its user. A model should be judged by how it mediates the designer's intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the design activity."

Source: Instructional Design Models

The defintion referenced in the work:

Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs and goals and the development of a delivery system to meet those needs. It includes development of instructional materials and activities; and tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities.

fail! This is because the defintions put the focus on the instruction rather than on the learning. I suggest the definition above be modified:

Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional materials using learning and instructional theory to ensure that the highest possible quality of learning takes place. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs, setting of goals, the development of a delivery and support system, design and production of appropriate materials and the use of coherent instructional strategies to meet the needs of the learner. It includes tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities.

Ryder links to the useful A Brief History of Instructional Design by Douglas Leigh.

Another useful compendium of instructional design models has been prepared by Clyde Bassett.

Politics, Technology: Benetton's Colors Magazine on Oppressing Journalists

Grim and unpromising

"“China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad–reaching system of Internet filtering in the world,” according to a recent report by the OpenNet Initiative. Highly sophisticated filters can block up to 500,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) simultaneously, leave some parts of a website accessible while blocking others, and make e–mails disappear. Technological surveillance is backed up with the human kind: Thousands of state employees are thought to monitor web traffic, and 800 Internet Security Monitors will soon be dispatched to cyber cafés. And who is helping in this powerful and intricate clampdown on Internet freedom? Western companies desperate to do business with China: Firewalls and filtering systems have been provided by the American Cisco Systems, while Chinese Internet users wanting to start blogs on a site hosted by US company Microsoft are told that “democracy,” “human rights” and “Tiananmen” are examples of “prohibited language,” and advised to find an alternative."

Source: Benetton's COLORS

Politics: The Flow of Oil Money

Detailed Economist article on where the oil money is flowing:

"Despite the lack of hard data, many economists are sure that a big dollop of petrodollars is going into American Treasury securities. If so, the recycling of money via bond markets could have very different effects on the world economy from the bank-mediated recycling of previous oil booms. If petrodollars not spent flow into global bond markets, they reduce bond yields and thus support consumer spending in oil-importing countries."

Source: Recycling the petrodollars in the Economist.com

Music: Nick Hornby: "Earlier on in the week that I met Bruce Springsteen"

He looked younger than the last time I saw him, and he's clearly incredibly fit. He is one of the few artists I've met who is able to talk cogently about what he does without sounding either arrogant or defensively self-deprecating.

NH: Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?

BS: Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out ... The other two aren't quite into that yet. My daughter's 12, 13, and she likes the top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every top 40 act ... I'm all over the place.

No brilliant insights, but for the believers, its good stuff.

Source: Guardian Interview of Bruce Springsteen by Nick Hornby

Sringsteen's site has a podcast that shows the inner workings of the making of Born to Run. The New York Times has a review of the boxed set version of Born to Run. (Hopefully the Times will leave it publicly available, rather than behind a for pay gate.)

Photography, Film: CBC film on War Photograpers

Riveting

"BEYOND WORDS focuses on the world's top war photojournalists, and attempts to turn the lens of attention onto them. Many have been wounded. Some have seen colleagues die. All have been scarred by what they do: some become disillusioned, even ashamed of what they do, and leave the profession because they feel it's pornographic. Yet some remain charged by the excitement of it, and others committed to the idea that where there are no images, there is no sense of history."

Source: CBC: Beyond Words

A really worthwhile 10 minute version of the documentary is available on the site.

Photography: Sage Adice for Starting Out

"Question: What's the best piece of advice you have for young photographers starting out?"

Source: Editorial Photo.com

Technology: TinyURL.com

"Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires."

Music: RollingStone Magazine Chooses the Greatest Albums

Site: RollingStone.com: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Politics, Environment, Photography: Thick Smog over Beijing

the scale on the source image (click the picture to go to it) shows this photo to cover an length of area around Beijing of about 1000 km.

"Thick pollution obscured the sky over Beijing and nearby regions on November 4, 2005. According to news reports, the cityÂ?s pollution index reached the highest level on the scale between November 4-5, and residents were warned to spend as little time as possible outdoors. Children, elderly, and those with respiratory conditions were cautioned to be especially careful."

Source: EO Newsroom

There is another image from the same source, this time about Smog and China, which I briefly noted.

Photography, Art: Jeff Wall - Canadian, Classicis

"'A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)' is a large colour photograph displayed in a light box. It depicts a flat, open landscape in which four foreground figures are frozen as they respond to a sudden gust of wind. It is based on a woodcut, Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri (c.1832) from a famous portfolio, The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, by the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Wall photographed actors in a landscape located outside his home town, Vancouver, at times when similar weather conditions prevailed over a period of five months. He then collaged elements of the photograph digitally in order to achieve the desired composition. The result is a tableau which appears staged in the manner of a classical painting."

Source: Tate Collection

Art: Canadian

Useful magazine about the Canadian Art Scene, called, logically, Canadian Art

Photography: "A bleak society that has lost meaning ..."

"This new book The New Life, La Vie Nouvelle, (Twin Palms Publishers, October 2005) ... features a series of fifty photographs by French photographer Lise Sarfati. The photographs were taken in cities like Austin (Texas), Asheville (North Carolina), Portland (Oregon), Berkeley, Oakland and Los Angeles (California), New Orleans (Louisiana) and some small towns in Georgia.

"In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity : within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel. We are talking here of a kind of parallel reality, an interstitial territory which doesn't understand geographical spaces or political systems, which no longer belongs either to a completely real reality or to a consciously conceived fiction, but rather finds itself fed by its own rituals and codes of behaviour, where the dividing line between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity or reality and fantasy is extensively blurred."
F. Javier Panera

Source: Lise Sarfati's website.

"After the end of the soviet empire marked by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Sarfati started work on various projects in Russia, photographing there almost exclusively for the next 9 years. This work formed the basis of her first monograph, 'Acta Est', Latin meaning 'it's over' or 'the play is done'. Her pictures show with small areas of Russian cities, exteriors and interiors, viewed frontally in colour with an often brutal intensity, remarkable for their emptiness. Towards the end of the work we also see some of the people she has photographed, who seem to be mainly dysfunctional families, trans-sexuals and the mentally ill. It is powerful work and provides a bleak view of a society that appears to have lost its meaning."

Source: About.com - Lise Sarfati

Photography: Unconventional Iraq

Intriguing photos by Christoff Bangert

Writing, Poetry, Politics: "I feel your pain, Scooter"

Garrison Keillor weaves parenting, current events and life's lessons in a concise article:

"A person can learn a great deal if you're lucky enough to get into serious trouble and of course it's more beneficial if you do it when you're young. But trouble is a good teacher at any time and it's a shame so many people try to skip the School of Hard Knocks. If only they knew the good it would do them."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Keillor also skillfully selects a daily poem, which one can have emailed, on The Writers Alamanc.

Poetry: Newfoundland's People

A friend's comment about Poet John Ashbery's 'Interesting People of Newfoundland':

This is quite a good prose-poem that really conjures up a little vignette of Newfoundland life. Interesting to see how mundane and basic a lot of the descriptions are: some would not even call this poetry in any kind of a formal sense. I would have to read more of his work, but it appears as if he is deliberately being prosaic and undercutting the lyricism to create a straightforward slice of life. How does a phrase like “worship of the chthonic [definition] powers” end up here?

"Interesting People of Newfoundland"
by John Ashbery from Where Shall I Wander: New Poems (Ecco Press)

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There was the Russian who called himself
the Grand Duke, and who was said to be a real duke from somewhere,
and the woman who frequently accompanied him on his rounds.
Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon
when he wasn't completely drunk, which was most of the time.
When only half drunk he could perform decent cranial surgery.
There was the blind man who never said anything
but produced spectral sounds on a musical saw.

There was Walsh's, with its fancy grocery department.
What a treat when Mother or Father
would take us down there, skidding over slippery snow
and ice, to be rewarded with a rare fig from somewhere.
They had teas from every country you could imagine
and hard little cakes from Scotland, rare sherries
and Madeiras to reward the aunts and uncles who came dancing.
On summer evenings in the eternal light it was a joy
just to be there and think. We took long rides
into the countryside, but were always stopped by some bog or other.
Then it was time to return home, which was OK with everybody,
each of them having discovered he or she could use a little shuteye.

In short there was a higher per capita percentage of interesting people
there than almost anywhere on earth, but the population was small,
which meant not too many interesting people. But for all that
we loved each other and had interesting times
picking each other's brain and drying nets on the wooden docks.
Always some more of us would come along. It is in the place
in the world in complete beauty, as none can gainsay,
I declare, and strong frontiers to collide with.
Worship of the chthonic powers may well happen there
but is seldom in evidence. We loved that too,
as we were a part of all that happened there, the evil and the good
and all the shades in between, happy to pipe up at roll call
or compete in the spelling bees. It was too much of a good thing
but at least it's over now. They are making a pageant out of it,
one of them told me. It's coming to a theater near you.

Music: Green Day - Working Class Heroes

RollingStone on Green Day's origins:

"Massive concussive explosions (rigged by the band's pyrotechnics team) periodically shake the house and unnervingly call to mind the attacks in New York, Madrid, London and Iraq. Four songs into the show, the houselights go out and the arena is plunged into blackness. Armstrong, lit by a satanic red spotlight, pans a hand-held searchlight over the crowd and recites, in menacing tones, the Pledge of Allegiance, while bassist Mike Dirnt pumps out a paranoia-inducing bass line and drummer Tre Cool taps his snare rim like a bomb ticking down to detonation. They explode into 'Holiday' -- an incendiary anti-government song in the tradition of Dylan's 'Masters of War.'"

Source: RollingStone.com: Green Day

Photography: Winogrand

Scan courtesy of Masters of Photography.

Photographer Resnick on his experiences at a workshop put on by Winogrand, who pioneered street photography:

"Winogrand's photos showed an amazing lack of adherance to any rules of composition. Like the streets below, the images were filled with people in motion. There was a precarious, dynamic balance between humor and loneliness in the odd angles--an unfamiliar but powerful combination."

Source: Rambling with Resnick

Most of Winogrand's best pictures - let us say all of his best pictures - involve luck of a different order than that kind of minimal, survivor's luck on which any human achievement depends. It is luck of an order that can perhaps be compared to the luck of an athlete, for whom the game is devised to make failure the rule and conspicuous success never wholly in the hands of the hero. The great Henry Aaron hit a home run 755 times in his career, but failed to do so almost 12,000 times.

As Winogrand grew older and his ambition grew more demanding, the role of luck in his work grew larger. As his motifs became more complex, and more unpredictable in their development, the chances of success in a given frame became smaller...

Source: Masters of Photography: Garry Winogrand. (Masters of Photography is a great site!)

Photography: LensCulture

Site: LensCulture Web Log

Politics, China: Maopost.com - Vintage Chinese Propaganda Posters

"Poster of the month: 'Carry out the struggle of denouncing Lin Biao and Confucius to the end.' Printed in February 1974."

Source: Maopost.com - Vintage Chinese Propaganda Posters

Writing, Technology: Ftrain.com

"When I write, when I think, the Internet is just too much for me to fathom. It's a wonderful tool for research, a good way to kill a few hours. I grew up with computers, started hacking away when I was twelve. I always thought that the Internet would make me more productive, more aware of the world around me but instead I'm using technology that was laughable in 1995 and getting much more done. I feel more in command of my own mind, more reliant on my own thoughts, when I work in this stripped-down fashion."

Source: Ftrain.com

Photography: Editing digital images

A useful guide:

"The levels dialog is pretty strictly a 'hone in on the contrast and balance' thing. The curves dialog is where you can get more interesting results and more subtle control, like being able to lock down a dark midtone that you don't want to shift and adjust the brightness of the shadows right next to it independently."

Source: Editing your digital images without the mystery : Page 5

Photography: Taking Note

Notes
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Technology, Ideas: Digital Imperfections

Steve Albini, the engineer who has recorded thousands of albums including ones for Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies and the Breeders. His studio prowess is legendary among musicians; he's known for arranging mikes in a way that gives drums that elusive, compressed sound and brightens the tone of the guitars. Walk into Electrical Audio, his studio in Chicago, and you'll find a trove of vintage consoles, mikes and tape machines that many bigger studios long ago replaced with newfangled digital gear.

Another of Albini's beefs: auto tuning, or the practice of correcting the pitch of a track's vocals so they are perfectly in tune. Ella Fitzgerald, he says, was said to have perfect pitch, meaning she could hear a note in her head and, without the aid of an instrument, sing it exactly on key. But even her singing had minor inflections that would have been corrected by digital tools routinely used today. He says the result is vocals that take on a robotic quality and lack the feeling of a live performance.

Source: Wired News: Don't Fear Digital Mediocrity

Movies: Johnny Cash

His gravel voice is instantly familiar, and so is his outlaw image as the country singer who dressed in black and sang for convicted felons at Folsom Prison in a best-selling album. As a hell-raiser, he blazed a trail in the early days of rock, wrecking cars, getting arrested, battling drugs, all while leaving his distinctive stamp on American music. But that didn't explain the essence of the man.

Source: The Secrets That Lie Beyond the Ring of Fire - New York Times

Art, Politics: Mark Lombardi - Diagramming the Affairs of State

'I am pillaging the corporate vocabulary of diagrams and charts - rearranging information in a visual format that's interesting to me and mapping the political and social terrain in which I live,' Lombardi told the videographer Andy Mann in February, 1997.

Source: (Mark Lombardi) arts / w b u r g

"A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper, Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and international terrorism.

"In other drawings, Lombardi explored subjects ranging from the collapse of the Vatican bank to the Iran-Contra scandal. The results are not only detailed slices of history, but also works of art -- some looking like constellations of stars on a dark night, others swirling clouds of abstract lines and points."

Source: NPR interview with the curator of an exhibit of Lombardi's diagrams/art works. The exhibition catalogue is at Amazon. (The diagrams are still hard to read, even in the catalogue.)

A very useful collection of images, notes and links is at Pierogi2000

Photography, Religion, China: Xiahe Nun Emanates Good Will

Devotion
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Photography: Digital Photography Review: 8 posts/min

"Today we crossed a pretty amazing milestone, the ten millionth message posted. We are fortunate to have a very high ratio of helpful and knowledgeable posts and regular posters who make our forums the place to learn and develop your digital photography. The dpreview.com forums average over 11,000 new message posts every single day and we have just over a quarter of a million subscribed forum members."

Source: dpreview forums: Ten million posts

Planning: The Noguchi Filing System

"A book I read has prompted me to try a rather unconventional filing system, the system proposed and used by Noguchi Yukio, an economist and writer of bestselling books about such things. Implementation of the system requires the user to discard many conventional notions about how to store paper documents."

Source: The Noguchi Filing System

Noguchi's material is all in Japanese, which limits access. One [ed. 'you'? more personal, but somehow more directive?] can attempt a simply version of one aspect of the system using windows search function and not putting any criteria in the search field. Sort the files from oldest to newest. Review and prune from oldest to newest. Provides a sort-of David Allen-like modest zen sense of order/accomplishment.

Photography: Digital Blending

Useful strategies on the Luminous Landscape site:

"In nature when doing landscape work that includes sky, especially early or late in the day, the contrast range encountered often exceeds that which film or imaging chips can handle. It's therefore necessary to find a way to reduce the contrast range to something that the camera can handle so that the highlights don't burn out and the shadow areas don't turn inky black."

Source: Digital Blending Tutorial

See also: Peter Bowers blending post to the Flickr techniques group. (That is a lot of links because it isn't easy to search flickr [longer thought, yet to be written].)

Photography: Grain and the Blue Trees

Blue Trees and Mist
Originally uploaded by
peter bowers.

Hey pete - cool picture. I was 'pleased' in a schadenfreude sortof way to see some grain in the sky in the largest version. Is that in the original as well? Or is it a product of posting a smaller file? How does one ensure a solid, grainless sky, assuming that is what one wants? (I think in the old film days, a certain grainyness was expected or even desired?)

For example:

Digital photography has changed not only the magazine's workflow but also its visual aesthetic, says Geoff Michaud [of Sports Illustrated]"There's a different quality expectation with digital vs. film. With film, grain was accepted and tolerated. It was a by-product of sharpness. When we moved to digital we found that the expectation changed. I'm not 100% sure why. Now a softer feel image [is considered good], and when noise becomes apparent it's a negative thing, where it wasn't with film.

Source: Geoff Michaud.

Technology, Maps: pointingit

"Finding architecture with google earth." Site: pointingit

Technology, Entrepreneurship: Don Dodge - Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Never get too far ahead of the market. Creating new markets, new business models, and value propositions is very difficult and takes lots of time and money. Pioneers are usually unsuccessful, the fast followers make most of the money.

Understand who your customer is, what problem you solve, and how much they are willing to pay for it. Sounds simple enough but you would be surprised how many start-ups get excited about their technology innovations and forget about the basic business proposition.

Never start a business focused on solving a big company’s problem. They don’t know they have a problem…and they are probably right. That is how they got to be so big in the first place. The record labels didn’t know they had a digital distribution problem and were not interested in our solution to it.

Test your assumptions before spending lots of money. Interview your potential customers. Understand what their top 10 problems are. Don’t try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don’t know they have. Take a survey of 100 potential customers. Ask them to list their top 10 problems, without prompting from you. If you don’t see your problem area listed…move on to another problem."

Source: Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Napster - the inside story and lessons for entrepreneurs

Movies, Writing: Wired says Serenity's a Smarter Space Opera

Serenity feels cutting edge. Why? It's smart and very well-written. Good writing, of course, predates the silicon age. But with most sci-fi, horror and fantasy films semiliterate at best, decent dialogue seems like a technical innovation. The movie is nearly as soulful, charming and funny as Firefly.

Source: Wired News: Serenity's a Smarter Space Opera"

Photography: Like Meditation

"Photography is like a meditation for me. It is such a concentrated moment." - Stephanie Torbet


Source: Get The Picture: Postcards

Photography: rion.nu

"rion nakaya is a design director and street photographer in new york city." Source: ..: . rion.nu | new york city. :..

Development, Economics, International Relations: 60 Seconds With Jeffrey Sachs

Fast Company: What are our biggest problems?

SACHS: I'm focusing on a world divided between rich and poor, and a world that doesn't seem to be able to manage the natural base of our lives: air, oceans, or biodiversity. It's a mistake to think that globalization is automatically beneficent and should run its due course--but also to think that it ought to be shut down.

FC: What have you learned about the very poor?

SACHS: That there are different problems in different places. Development can really work everywhere. But most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Andean region, and Central Asia face obstacles [of disease and isolation]. These are not cases of whether government cares or doesn't care, or is corrupt or uncorrupt. The haphazardness of life and death is absolutely shocking.

"FC: So if a bunch of CEOs walked in and said they wanted to help, what would you tell them?

SACHS: Let's say you had ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil saying, We're investing in West Africa, what do we do? Well, the model of the past 20 years--protecting staff from malaria while ignoring the dying among you--is no longer workable. You have to engage with what business does best. Set real targets. Have quantifiable goals. I would tell these businesspeople that if they took up ending malaria in Nigeria or deforestation in Ghana, they would find a lot of partners. You don't have to start in the hardest places: I'll take you to governments that are ready and empowered to act. But don't believe it can happen without you."

Source: 60 Seconds With Jeffrey Sachs

China, Photography, Travel: Entering Shanghai

Took the maglev train into Shanghai - top speed on 30k run was 430 km/hour. Cost less than $10. Of course at the maglev station at the other end the taxi's are all refusing to use meters. (One just walk out on the street, but in the rain it is tedious).

Environment: Becoming Carbon Neutral

Pragmatic and the most effective of the sites doing this sort of 'calculate your damage and make a contribution so we can plant trees to deflect'.

Question: Do trees hold onto the carbon forever, or do they, eventually, 'off-gas'?

Observation: These sorts of sites assume an 80 year payback. You actually do a lot of damage on your one flight/drive etc. but since the tree will be absorbing carbon for 80 years, you only need to plant one tree. Seems like we might need to be planting 80 tress at a time.

"Offset Your CO2 Emissions": Tree Canada Foundation

Photography: Heading East

Extract of a moving post from flickrite The Mexican:

'You are lucky. Your world is very big. You can travel where you want and do what you want and you are free. You have friends in many places. Maybe I am just a friend you will forget. My world is small. I am not free. I will not forget this talk or this night. Maybe you will return. But maybe you will never come here again.'

Source: Heading East: Aba-Amchok

Poetry: "the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat"

Self-Portrait
by David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.

I want to know
if you belong or feel abandoned.

If you know despair or can see it in others.

I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.

If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.

I want to know
if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.

I want to know
if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.

I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

Source: Fire in the Earth

See Also: David Whyte's website

Politics, Books: Coffee: A Dark History

In this polemical, grandiose, yet thoroughly entertaining book, Antony Wild looks at the historical influence of coffee, for better and for worse. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Wild, a veteran coffee trader, credits the drink with opening the eyes of the world, literally. Once coffee usurped ale as Europe’s morning beverage of choice, the Enlightenment followed. The coffee shop is, he writes, “the place where all the best revolutions began.”

Ever since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have seen coffee as a symbol of their independence, and Wild insists that without the stuff, we would not be the hyperactively ambitious nation we are today. Instant blends helped GIs slog through World War II, while back home, caffeine fueled entrepreneurial baby boomers’ all-nighters. In this story, destiny always takes a second cup.

The flip side of such boosterism is the devastating effect the coffee trade has had on the developing world. But Wild is hopeful that some benefits are starting to trickle down to Third World farmers. By paying extra for a cup of “fair trade,” latte lovers might make coffee finally live up to its revolutionary potential."

Source: Coffee: A Dark History:

Environment, Photography, politics: Smog Over China

"A huge, thick cloud of haze hung over eastern China in early September 2005. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard the Terra satellite captured this image on September 10, 2005. In this image, haze covers China from the Bo Hai Bay coastline in the east to the mountains in the west."

Source: EO Newsroom: New Images - Smog over China

Another post about a similar image/topic, this time specific to Beijing is here.

Foreign Policy: A Trail of Diamonds

Striking photo essay: "It takes only weeks for a diamond, once uncovered in an African mine, to travel to India to be cut and polished and land in the showrooms of Paris or New York. The journey reveals some of globalization’s greatest fault lines—inequality, child labor, and outsourcing—and the people who too often fall through the cracks."

Source: Foreign Policy: A Trail of Diamonds

Photography: What is Hyperfocal Distance and Why Should I Care?

Whenever you focus your lens there will be an area that is in focus and areas that are out of focus. The in focus area is referred to as the "focal plane". The important thing is that 1/3rd of the focal plane is ahead of the thing you're focused on and 2/3rds of the focal plane falls behind what you're focused on.

Source: Vivid Light

Photography: Dwanda Tyler in the French Quarter

Dwanda Tyler in the French Quarter
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

Good NPR interview with Washington Post photographer ('we need a front page shot in 2 hours') Ricky Carioti via the Post's Photo Editor.

Also, Keith Jenkin's on alternate front pages.

Technology, Writing: I think, therefore I consider blogging

Not really blogging as much as putting stray tidbits on line and toying with blogging - you can see it goes back several years, although intermittently. Keeping this blog below the radar though. The effort to transform proto-neurons into something comprehensible to others - and to what end? - seems too much. But fun, when inspired!

Also, struck by how time either culls the trend or it becomes easier to partake. Blogger is much more stable/easier than the software was at first, although it does seem to have been left deprived of features other blogging software has, like tags.

Paper PDA

"The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner."

PocketMod

Politics: Obama on Katrina on NPR

Photography: Every cup of coffee drank ...

"Lloyd was a boring rural health policy wonk who went through an early mid-life crisis. He already had the cool convertible, so the crisis manifested itself with him taking pictures of each cup of coffee he consumed and posting it on his website. He soon found that life, when unfiltered and fully caffeinated, can be quite compelling. Something interesting is about to happen."

Source: http://thecoolkids.us/coffee/

Books, Ideas: Ultimate Reality

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation.

Does this, then, mean that the world is dull? Far from it. The naturally occurring computations that surround us are richly complex. A tree's growth, the changes in the weather, the flow of daily news, a person's ever-changing moods --- all of these computations share the crucial property of being gnarly. Although lawlike and deterministic, gnarly computations are --- and this is a key point --- inherently unpredictable. The world's mystery is preserved.

Mixing together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, Rucker teases out the implications of his new worldview, which he calls "universal automatism." His analysis reveals startling aspects of the everyday world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the internet, fame, free will, and the pursuit of happiness. More than a popular science book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is a philosophical entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the fullest possible extent."

Source: http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/index.html

Rudy Rucker's useful Writer's Toolkit is available for free download.

My father had an interest in the idea of ultimate reality.

Books: Alan Alda

"That long career -- and the variegated life he's led -- prompted Alda to write up some of the things he's learned along the way in his new memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed -- and Other Things I've Learned."

Source: Alan Alda interview on NPR about his memoir.

I remember Alan Alda doing a brilliant performance of Our Town at a theatre in London in the early 90's. I very much enjoyed this book although toward the end when he goes on zoloft I got the feeling things dulled up a bit. His final bit of advice seems to be to enjoy whatever you are doing. I got the feeling pre-zoloft things were a bit more up and down and anguished and creative and less neat. A remarkable man.

Photography: Liquid Sculptures

Do you have to have a really fast shutter to stop the motion?

No, the shutter is open for 1/60th of a second (a drop could fall three inches in this amount of time.) The key is the flash unit: it needs to generate a very bright burst of light for a very short amount of time (about 1/10,000 of a second). This is central to high-speed photography.

Source: The Liquid Sculpture FAQ

Photography: Diffuse photo techniques ...

David Nightengale on Chromasia posts a useful tip:

In Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers for adding a slightly diffuse effect to an image (used to smooth the skin and hair in this shot).

1) Make two duplicate layers of the main image.
2) Set the blend mode of the first to Darken and Gaussian blur it by 40px.
3) Set the blend mode of the second to Lighten and Gaussian blur it by 60px.
4) Create a blank layer above these two layers, make sure all other layers other than this layer and the two layers you just created are hidden, then merge these three layers (Merge Visible).
5) Set the opacity of this layer to around 30% and unhide your other layers.
6) With a soft brush erase any of the areas of the images you want to be sharp, or use a Layer Mask (with a portrait this would be the eyes, teeth, and so on).

I’ve found this really useful for softening the skin tones in portraits without affecting either the contrast or the colour balance.

Prospect Magazine: Public sector IT failures

"Complex IT projects have a poor record everywhere in the world, in both the public and private sectors. An annual survey by Standish, a US consultancy, estimates that 70 per cent fail to meet their timetable or budget, or to come up to specification. Britain is thus not alone in finding computerising government difficult. The US has experienced a spate of problems at both state and federal level. In March, the FBI abandoned, after five years of work, a $170m attempt to create a "virtual case file" for tracking suspected terrorists. But the record cost-overrun in a civil IT project was probably the US internal revenue service's $30bn tax modernisation in the mid-1990s."

From: Prospect magazine a "monthly package of essays, reviews, reportage, columns, portraits and fiction".

Download a dodecahedral calendar after your own specifiation.

Brilliant

NPR on non-lethal acoustic devices - used in New Orleans

"An LRAD 500 device atop a Humvee, on patrol outside the hurricane-damaged Superdome in New Orleans."

Just classic - no sense just handing out food and water.

Create a book of Flickr Photos

Great!

2006 World Development Report

"Reducing inequality is central to tackling poverty and bringing about sustainable economic growth, the World Bank has said in a key report."

~From: BBC

Its a shame these truths aren't self-evident.

Vincent laForet: Photojournalist

“COCKPIT VIEW”
Lt Cmdr. Sean Williams of the VFA-113 Strike Fighter Squadron flies on an air defense mission over Iraq in an FA-18C Hornet. This photograph was made with a remote camera, triggered by Williams, in the one seat aircraft. 3/24/03 – Somewhere over Iraq.

"Aviation is a rogue sector and its environmental impact is out of control."

UK homes, firms and motorists will have to cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero due to air travel growth, a study says.

Morning Surf, White Point Beach

Morning Surf, White Point Beach
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Tea with Nomads, Xiahe

Tea with Nomads, Xiahe
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Flickrite Peter Bowers paddling at dawn

Flickrite Peter Bowers paddling at dawn
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Potentially my most visited picture - ironically, taken of fellow flickite pbowers.

. Guernica interview of Kristoff

"G: How many emails do you get per day?

Kristof: Well, the bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

G: Now I know some of your colleagues claim that they read all the emails they get. Do you?

Kristof: I try to be careful about the wording on that… Usually my assistant, Winter, reads them. It varies. If I’m writing about religion, for instance, the number might go way up. Recently I came back from a trip to 20,000.

I try to respond to typical ones. One of the things I’ve tried to combat in my blog, kristofresponds.com, is the notion that we [journalists] are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership—so I hope that answering some of the questions I get can help combat that notion.

G: I imagine the most welcome ones are the ones where you get a story lead?

Kristof: Yes, when I was covering intelligence failures, for instance, I actually got a lot of helpful emails from members of the intelligence community. Or if I’m writing about
something I don’t know much about but am very interested in, I can get some very informative letters.

G: I gather that people sometimes send you money…

Kristof: Yes, that’s actually a big problem because sometimes they send cash and I always feel like I have to give them a receipt and then pass along the money. It’s quite a task.

G: What was the largest amount you ever got?

Kristof: Someone wrote in to say he wanted to give a million dollars. He had earned quite a bit from Microsoft dividends and wanted to know of a good charity that would help in Darfur. So I suggested donating it to Doctors Without Borders; they do good work. He ended up only giving $500,000, but…

G: And didn’t Bill Gates credit your articles for much of the philanthropy he does? He had had a plan to wire the third world, but after a series you did on poverty there, he said he decided to get more engaged?

Kristof: Right.

G: It seems like you created a monster.

Kristof: (laughs) Yes, he’s done some fantastic work. But I think one of my articles simply pointed him toward the issue and he did a lot of reading and research on his own. I don’t deserve much credit."

"G: I noticed in your columns lately, you seem to be focusing on less pessimistic aspects of the crisis in Sudan. Is this because you’ve found that Americans disengage from the gloom and doom?

Kristof: I think they do. There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed no matter what we do, no matter what aid is brought in. And so I’m finding lately that a little bit of attention can go a long way."

From: . Guernica

Nikon Lens Info: KenRockwell.com

Good source/starting point for Nikon Lens Info.

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center

GMail Drive

GMail Drive: is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

Photos: Imaging Famine

Intriguing photo exhibit called Imaging Famine

Hemispheres | Three Perfect Days

Great, brief upscale profiles of cities around the world from United's Three Perfect Days.

moleskinerie

The blog begat by the journal.

Islamic influence on China

I am puzzling over the Islamic influence on Central Asia, prompted by a trip to Kashgar where there are a number of obvious influences, particularly mosques. A useful (and authoritative?, given the author's pedigree) travel log explains the origins: "In the year of 622 of the Common Era (C.E.), Muhammad made his famous Hejira (emigration) to Medina from his birthplace Mecca, where he had achieved only very moderate success in winning converts to the new faith as revealed to him by Allah (God). When he died 10 years later, the strictly monotheistic religion he had founded had not only been accepted by most tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, but had also forged a new Arab state with Medina as the source of its spiritual and political power. Motivated by the new faith and strengthened by the new state organization, the Arab people set out on a path of conquest and established, within 100 years of MuhammadÂ?s death, a vast empire spreading out from Spain in the west to the borders of China in the east. "

Image America

Rediscovered BlogThis! and now we're in trouble! Robert Clark, a professional photographer, using a mobile phone on an American Roadtrip.

Pool Cleaners - Colour

Pool Cleaners - Colour
Originally uploaded by pmorgan.

Active FTP, Blogger and Technical Details

I finally figured that my domain host doesn't support passive FTP anymore and that blogger doesn't support active FTP. Drag, but minor mystery solved. Time to change domain hosts and perhaps blogging tools ....

Authors: Susan Orlean

Wonderful story about surfer girls on Maui. The story begat the movie Blue Crush.

"When I left Maui that afternoon, my plane circled over Ho'okipa, and I wanted to believe I could still see them down there and always would see them down there, snapping back and forth across the waves." Source: Susan Orlean - Adaptation

Technology: Charting the Gap

Useful Usability Guidelines Bibliography by Pauline Genise. Charting the space between humans and computers.

Technology: Home Automation

"Not everyone in your household will be as enthusiastic about home automation as you are." Source: Home Hacks section of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site. Kelly had an early had in Wired Magazine and the Whole Earth Catalogues