It’s about time …

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/06/28/pol-nanos-poll-the-house.html?cmp=rss

I was literally stunned when Ontario voters gave our Conservative party the majority in the last federal election. The government had already prorogued parliament twice to escape close scrutiny, they were lobbying for harsher drug laws (instead of something progressive like legalization), they were pushing megaprisons (a US model that is proven to not work), and they were buying jets and quite publicly misleading us over the costs, at least according to many articles that came out around that time.

Yet they got a majority.

Well now, it seems that the population at large is as sick of these antics as I am. And it’s about fricken time.

Of course, it really helps that the Liberal party no longer has an embarrassment at the head but in fact has a strong young leader with fresh ideas and an incredible pedigree. The NDP lost Jack Layton (r.i.p) recently and is fading fast in my opinion as a credible alternative. So maybe we can get back to a two horse race and finally get the government we deserve after so many years wandering in the political desert …

Marketing and Marketers … legal pick pockets, culture changers, and the harbingers of doom …

Sorry, was that a bit over the top?

No, as it turns out.

First, please read this piece by Seth Godin – it is nothing short of brilliant: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/06/the-perfect-crime.html

I’ll give thanks here to Yoni Freedhoff and his blog Weighty Matters for this post: http://www.weightymatters.ca/2013/06/saturday-stories-godin-rudeness-tragedy.html

Ok, you are back. Here is my very short take. The lay-take as it were, since I am not trained in marketing …

• We have witnessed a complete change in the way we eat over the last half century. Pretty much since big food realized that they were not just a small chain of restaurants any more.
• We have witnessed a spectacular rise in obesity that tracks almost perfectly to the rise of big food as culture changing marketing machines.
• We have witnessed sky rocketing health costs in direct correlation as heart disease, type II diabetes, and related illnesses track the obesity curve.
• We have recently begun to see our governments lowering labeling standards and partnering with big food. In Canada, a big deal was made when Tim Horton’s – our nations biggest donut shop – announced that they were part of the solution and our federal government publicly solicited more of same. This amounts to an abdication of their responsibility to manage the nation’s health and the costs of its health system. And for big food, it amounts to cheap protection against the zealous protection of the population that would require tougher laws and regulations.

My conclusion from all this is pretty much my conclusion about all related calamities … we have allowed a resurgence in manipulation by what amounts to the “new rich” … i.e. executives and shareholders who have decided that anything goes in the quest for “growth” and “profits” …

Destroying the middle class (and the main source of tax revenue in the process), destroying our health, destroying our economy (what else would you call the rampant destruction wrought by Wall Street) … all of it is apparently fair game so long as someone benefits.

Why do governments allow it? This should give us all pause … I know what I think, but what do you think?

Corruption perhaps? … shhhh …

Anyway, we know that cigarette advertising was dramatically crushed because the health risks were understood a long time ago … and rates of smoking have commensurately dropped over the years.

Big food has a much more palatable product to a much larger segment of the population. But their product is no less damaging to long term health, and has probably destroyed more peoples’ health than cigarettes. The effects are also much more obvious -- smokers have an advantage to go with their choice for a slow and unpleasant death – they get to stay thin and look somewhat cool. Fat people have no such advantages … and I know this from experience, so please don’t suggest that I am picking on fat people. They get to shop for ugly clothes, breath hard walking to their car, sit on the couch because it is embarrassing to be out in public, and basically live a crappy life. (I’m generalizing, but you know who you are.)

Note: Some will say “but just stop eating that crap.” Well, I pretty much have … but it took me decades to finally tame the effects of big food’s marketing and products. It is one of the hardest things to do, along with quitting smoking. And most people don’t get there without some form of intervention.

My point here being that big food is due pretty soon for their comeuppance … and I hope that either Canada or the USA finally gets a leader with the balls to deal with them. Our conservatives are not only gutless, they are philosophically in bed with the sleaze. And in the USA, the current Democratic party has shifted right of Ronald Reagan, so you know that what would be positioned by big food as an “attack on freedom” is just going to happen until another Kennedy type comes along.

So we wait …

iPod Shuffle – Washer and Dryer Survival Story

When I realized that I had passed the tiny shuffle and a set of headphones through the heavy duty cycle of my front load washer and dryer … I fully expected it to have lived up to its name and shuffled off this mortal coil.

Yet when I turned it on, it played just fine. I am sure that it helped that I did not find it for a week, which gave it lots of time to fully dry out, but you have to admit that it is pretty impressive.

I really don’t understand, but I sure am not complaining …

WTF is wrong with the world …

This quote comes from an article on gutting the reporting requirements for unions …

Segal's amendment raised the threshold for salary disclosure from $100,000 to $444,000, the same as the maximum amount a senior deputy minister can earn. It also changed the amount for disclosure of union spending to $150,000, up from $5,000.

Two things blew my fricken mind. First, the bill really is gutted. Spending $149,999 is ok with the senators … no need to report that to the people who actually pay for it both directly through dues and indirectly through our taxes. Remember that this from the house of ill repute where you have a job for life and where the celebrity shame fest recently was spawned with Duffy and Wallen getting caught with hand in till … so why am I not surprised?

But … the truly shocking salary thresholds raise a much more serious question ….since the fkcu did Canadian bureaucrats start to deserve almost half a million dollars in salary? what is happening in a world where the vast majority of taxpayers have gone with nothing but decreases in compensation for decades (check the graphs on middle class and lower class salaries and compare with CEOs if you don’t believe this imbalance is as bad as I am suggesting) …

And we wonder why our governments have a little problem understanding the plight of those whom they have screwed for decades by allowing corporations to send the middle class jobs overseas …

And let’s not forget that a gold plated pension is piled right on top of that half million per year … step back if you are puking right now. Don’t want the keyboard to stink like these numbers do …

If “top” deputy ministers were the world’s best leaders and administrators, the salaries would still be ridiculous. But we are quite clear that they could not lead or manage their way out of a soggy paper bag … the waste in government is very well documented every year by the Auditor General …

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And then there is union management … there aren’t all that many unions around these days, but apparently the few that exist have enough people who make almost half a million in salary to make that number plausible. Again – WTF?

Did unions suddenly start creating jobs and generating trade surplus and tax revenue?

Next thing you know, the rich will be bending over backward to scratch each others’ backs and protect their own lol …

Never Wet – Water Proofing that will blow your mind!

Thanks go to my friend Sue for this incredible link …

As she put it, “for those times when you drop your phone in the toilet”

Raising the bar on sensor size … what size is good enough to be your only system?

This, of course, depends entirely on what you like to shoot. As we know, the bar where we think of image quality has been rising over the years ad technology advances. We have small sensors now that would embarrass much larger sensor from 5 years ago. For example … shoot the CX 1” sensor on the Nikon V1 at a soccer game in the evening and you will be very pleased with the results if you compare them with the results from the D70 generation of cameras. The high ISO required for the action is going to allow much crisper images and of course noise is far less obtrusive on the modern sensor, despite its 2.7 crop factor versus the D70’s 1.5 …

The larger the crop factor, the more depth of field you see at the same framing size. I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say that smaller sensors use shorter focal lengths (wider angles of view) to get the same framing of the subject, which has the effect of putting more of the subject in focus. This brings backgrounds into play and can be a real problem for those who like that nice blurred background …

But worse than that, smaller sensors bring with them smaller amounts of area and thus gather less light. The square of the crop factor is the area difference (or close enough) and that means that the m4/3 cameras gather 1/4 of the light because of their 2x crop factor. Thus, they are 2 stops behind full frame in noise and other image quality considerations. The laws of physics are not to be denied on this point, yet we see the silly prediction all the time that smaller sensors will “catch up” to larger sensors one day …

Well, not in this universe

However, what people probably mean (were they engaging in a bit of critical thinking) is that the “excellent image quality” bar has been met by smaller and smaller sensors with each generation of sensors. Here is where I think we sit today …

Note: This diagram illustrates my “excellent” bar for various sensor sizes … this is not exclusionary, in that I shoot inappropriate sensor sizes and live with the results quite often :-) … but it is what I use as a guide as to the size of system I will consider “all purpose” …

Any camera except for a smart phone can produce a terrific image in sunshine and open shade. I think I would consider the CX system to be the smallest sensor that can reliably shoot in deep woods, which are a lot darker than people who do not walk in the woods might think. ISO rises pretty quickly …

Indoors, studio lighting allows any sensor again, except perhaps for the phones. I know that some pros have used phones as a gimmick and they do ok with them, but the limitations are extreme with these sensors and the ergonomics od a phone, so I would never consider it appropriate to use them except for snap shots when they are the only camera at hand. Indoor lighting is where the rubber meets the road, though … for a long time I thought that FF was the only size that could handle indoor shooting. But over the years I got more familiar with modern sensors and have settled on m4/3 as the last sensor to cross the indoor ambient light bar.

Perhaps CX will get there soon … it looks pretty promising, but my experience with the J1 was that it is more work than I want to deal with to shoot it in ambient light, so I can wait. Besides, the m4/3 system embarrasses the Nikon 1 system where completeness and compactness of lenses is concerned. So I am happy right where I am for now.

However, remember that I was a system that does it all. If you are a street shooter, then you might follow different reasoning. If you are an indoor sports shooter then m4/s with contrast AF will not cut it … you should be looking at the dSLR phase detect AF and that means minimum APS-C. Of course, I would probably go D600 and FF just to get much better focal ranges on pro lenses and of course to get that extra stop of noise control and thus shutter speed.

In other words … YMMV.

Orwell’s 1984 … are we finally there?

Much has been made of recent revelations that the NSA is basically tapping everything, including the entire Internet, in order to fight terrorism. The implicit invasion of privacy is unmistakable, yet the story has swung wildly from one extreme to the other, depending on who you read. For now, I choose to believe that the NSA has taken a lawful approach that severely restricts the use of said data to simply searching for patterns that imply terrorism. Until we hear that rendition has ticked up a notch, I think that makes sense. However, this does not mean that I disagree that the US government should be watched by its people to make certain that they are sticking to their own constraints.

What has me writing this piece is the fact that I have no such faith in our Canadian government, as the large C conservatives (who basically came from the Reform party, a somewhat more extreme right wing party than our previous progressive conservatives, and one that has ceased to be amusing as they seem to want to stomp all over our Canadian identity) have a track record of side-stepping the law (proroguing the government not once but twice to escape scrutiny, and wiping out the Wheat Board without following due process as written in law are but two examples) …

So I was not surprised, but also not at all pleased, to read this headline:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/06/14/f-sunday-edition-government-history.html?cmp=rss

*sigh* … really?

I reread 1984 very recently … and taking control of history (“tweaking” it as necessary) was Big Brother’s signature technique to get the population completely under control. The rest – duplicitousness and deceit – we already have that in our politics, obviously …

Mindblowing Aurora Video – Lights Over Lapland

Lights Over Lapland Photo Expedition video of CME impact on 1-24-2012 from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.

Where is Kim?

Why, I am right here. The problem is that I am up to my eyeballs in work … so I spend my days and nights talking on the phone or over chat sessions with people all over the world in time zones that span most of the 24 hours. This is, to say the least, a pain in the ass.

It leaves precious little mental energy for my real job … taking pictures and writing this blog

Anyway … I am trying to find an equilibrium and am so far failing miserably. I will do my best to finish the HS50 and F900 reviews (I have some more images and need to write them up) and so on … my apologies for the dead spot these past weeks …

Don’t Let Me Down

A cover of the Beatles that will make you smile …

Thanks to the blog Weighty Matters for that link!

Beautiful Story – Patrick Stewart on Violence Against Women