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fascism
On message
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We don't have to burn any books.
The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well‑educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.
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[more]
thanks to Bad Attitudes
darwin
Little Charlie Darwin,
God Bless Him.
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This is nuts. Darwin's all famous now, right? His name comes up now and again. But before he was, he wasn't. He was a confused, pimply, brash, confused, and also pimply kid. He got his real start on this snoopy-sounding HMS Beagle. Sailed around the world in the aftermath of a failed romance and a list of ups and downs, he did.
He's 22. It's the 1830s. Already dropped out of med school, already pissed off Dad, already decided to just suck it up and become a man of the cloth, get himself a real nice Anglican parish in the countryside. And he's got this scheme: over summer break he and this guy Ramsay are gonna get a boat, sail down to the Canary Islands, do the fashionable thing for landed gentry, you know, botanizing, entomologizing, maybe geologizing. It's big. It's on. He's up.
But comes time to get ready annnnd ... Ramsay dies. The guy's not yet 40, not too old. It's a surprise death. The expedition, clearly, is off. He's down.
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[more]
thanks to Pharyngula
republicanism on the ropes?
Fall of the Rovean empire?
Drunk on power, the Republican oligarchs overreached. Now their entire project could be doomed.
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President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the “neocons” who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own — a political one: Blame the Administration.
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The conservative crack up
The neocons develop an exit strategy — a political one
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President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the “neocons” who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own — a political one: Blame the Administration.
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[more]
thanks to Politics in the Zeros
photography
BEYOND MEMORY: Photography and Photo-related Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union
[more]
thanks to wood s lot
katrina
Scattered in a Storm's Wake and Caught in a Clash of Cultures
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They were among the tens of thousands of people forced out of the Gulf Coast and into unaccustomed holding places where no one knew quite what to make of them. They had suddenly become nomads in their own country - pitied, gawked at and shuffled from place to place, stuck in the middle of a long journey that would take them through several states merely to get to this way station from which to plot the rest of their lives.
In time, they found themselves caught in a web of red tape and cultural miscues, clashing with locals over the tiniest of things, like how to cook grits or season meat, or over the life-and-death question of why they did not get out of harm's way in time.
Tensions rose, and by the end of the month, the Louisianans, grateful though they were, could not wait to get out. And the local people, well-meaning and overwhelmed, were just as relieved to see them go.
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[more]
photography
No Place for Children:
Voices from Juvenile Detention
Photographs by Steve Liss
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
global climate change
The truth about global warming
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Could the skeptics be right, and the majority of the world's experts wrong?
The history of science shows consensus doesn't guarantee success. The collective wisdom of the early 1900s declared continental drift bunk. Some Nobel laureates attacked Einstein's theory of relativity.
Those blunders occurred when science was less sophisticated and connected than it is now, said Weart, the historian. With the unprecedented study devoted to climate change, the odds that this consensus is wrong are slim, he added.
"The fact that so many scientists think it's likely a truck is heading for us means that the last thing we want to do is close our eyes and lie down in the road."
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Amazon hit by worst drought for 40 years
Warming Atlantic linked to both US hurricanes and rainforest drought.
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Parts of the Amazon rainforest are enduring the worst drought for 40 years, prompting local government to declare several cities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas as disaster areas. Researchers say that rising sea temperatures in the North Atlantic, perhaps prompted by climate change, are probably to blame.
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[more]
thanks to Magpie
World temperatures keep rising
Climate data show 2005 on track to be hottest on record
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New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures.
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B.C. told to brace for global warming
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Global warming is devouring our forests, killing our salmon and lapping at our shores, a panel of scientific experts has warned mayors and councillors from across B.C.
Climate change researchers made it clear the crisis has gone far beyond an effort to put the brakes on human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
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[more]
thanks to Politics in the Zeros
transportation
My future transportation plans include two wheel motorized vehicles. Aside from the fun factor (not inconsiderable), they do get good gas mileage. I have a 1982 BMW R100RS which hasn't run for several years (yes, I know that would be considered a crime by some). I will be getting it running again. It gets 40mpg. Not bad for a high speed touring bike. But that may be a gas guzzler if when gas prices go up. I have a project to combine two Yamaha SR500s that haven't run for 16 and 10 years, respectively, into one good one. The SR500, a 500cc single, gets 70mpg. Pretty good. But my friend Blaine turned me on to these.
48cc Chinese 2-stroke engines mounted in a bicycle frame. 150mpg and 30 mph. There are 60cc and 80cc engines for those that are mad keen on speed. I need one.
Those Cute Little Chinese Bike Engines
Canadas Skyhawk WD
Spit-Fire Motor Works
Gru Bee Motorized Power
Simpson Motor Bikes
second chances
Surprises of 2005 (So Far)
By Rebecca Solnit
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"The smart thing is to prepare for the unexpected" said my most recent fortune-cookie advisory. Many people presume that the future will look more or less like the present, though that's the one thing we can assume isn't true. If some Cassandra had come to us in 1985 and declared that the death squads and dictators of Latin America would be replaced with left-leaning elected regimes and populist insurgencies, if she had prophesied the vanishing of the Soviet Union and the arrival of AIDS retrovirals, same-sex marriage and the Red Sox World Series victory, if she had warned us of pandemic fundamentalism and more dramatic climate change sooner, who would have heeded her? From the vantage point of 1985, 2005 is already wilder than science fiction and less credible, rife with countless small but deep changes as well as many sweeping ones. Of course who in 1965 would have imagined the real 1985, so like and yet unlike Orwell's 1984, with spreading information technologies, shrinking public spheres, and changed social mores? Even from near at hand, the future throws curveballs, for few if any in the gloom of post-election 2004 anticipated the wild surprises of the first nine months of 2005.
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pinholes at last!!!
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gordy's image archive index
It's been a frustrating couple of years trying to make a pinhole camera out of my 6x9cm Mamiya Super 23. It started on Pearl Harbor Day in 2003
That's the Mark I version. I took it on my trip to New York City (I need to finish that site) for it's shakedown cruise. I made it out of cardboard, installed in a mounting ring from a bad lens, and it started to disentegrate before the trip was over. And then, when I got the negatives developed I discovered a terrible flare problem so, in September of last year, I made the Mark II version.
The Mark II was a much more robust installation. Unfortunately, the flare problem, while not as bad, was still there. I played around with it and found that a lens hood solved the problem but making a lens hood that didn't interfere with the shutter was getting very cumbersome. So the project sat on a shelf. It was frustrating because the quality of the images was what I wanted, sans the flare. Then a mention on an APUG form, by an f295 member, mentioned using old medium and large format shutters to mount the pinhole. Eureka! I had a large format Alphax shutter with a lens that was pretty weird that would be perfect and the Mark III version was born.
First I covered the body and back with gaffer's tape to stealthify it.
The shutter is in its mounting ring which is attached to the old Mamiya mounting ring by a few dabs of bondo.
I mounted the pinhole behind the shutter leaves. It made it more wide angle than the Mark I and Mark II and put it pretty close to the optimum position for the .0126" dia pinhole. And the shutter made a good lens hood. The pinhole is getting a little beat up mounting and unmounting it but still seems to work.
I used a piece of hardboard epoxied to the rear of the shutter with more gaffer's tape to seal everything. The press type shutter with a T setting is great to use. The slow speeds don't work. They could be useful but I can work around that with slow film. The field of view seems to be close to the 65mm lens (28mm equivalent) I have for this camera. I've got some shots on the next roll with the 65mm lens to compare. The first picture of this post is a Mark III picture. No flare. I love it. At last!
And the Super 23 has a bellows back so I will let me use different focal lengths. Might be interesting. Might not.
Update 10-2-5: Here is the information on the pinhole. I purchased it at Pinhole Resource. It's a .318mm/.0126" dia pinhole drilled in a 1.5 in. square sheet of .001" grade 400 full hard stainless steel. The focal length is 2.5"/63.5mm. I use f/190 on 6x9cm film
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Wednesday October 12 2005
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another gordy picture
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gordy's image archive index
This was just a test shot comparing two lenses but I like it so here it is. Gerry and I go out to lunch once or twice a week. We rotate through several restaurants in Freeland. Gerry's is my favorite. That's Gerry's (Zoe's mom, not the restaurant owner) car in the lower right reflection and you can just make out my Gerry to the left of me. Shooting the Leica is a joy. It is with me whenever I go out. I'm thinking of maybe moving the 35mm J12 to the Leica. Maybe not.
gerry
Gerry's (Zoe's mom) Alzheimer's has gotten worse. The rate of decline seems to be increasing. And as the decline increases the time spent taking care of her also increases. Some moments are better than others. But some times it is just her making like things are normal, when they are not. She can be talking like everything is normal and then ask when is she going home, forgetting that she lives with us. Or she will ask "Where am I sleeping tonight?" Then she is surprised when I show her her bedroom with all her clothes. When she is off she will come upstairs to sit with Zoe and will forget that her bedroom is downstairs or I can be with her in her bedroom, right under our bedroom, and she will ask where Zoe is and be surprised that Zoe is upstairs or that there is an upstairs. Sometimes she is surprised and relieved and other times she is overcome with emotion and cries realizing that something is terribly wrong but she doesn't know what it is. She still recognizes us. We dread the day that she doesn't. This has been hard on Zoe. It didn't help that her therapist's mom just died. She had Alzheimer's, too.
Zoe is arranging for some people to come in in the mornings and evenings. Hopefully Gerry will accept them and that will help with her care and give us a little time back. And it also doesn't help that Zoe is going to have surgery for her Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. She has it bad in both hands. She goes in for a MRI this afternoon. She has some apprehension about the MRI. Do check out the link.
So things are a little slower around here.
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