the klog

One downside of reading newspaper and magazine articles on the web is that you don't get the nice big photos you get in print. Not only is the screen's resolution lower so that a full-screen image doesn't have the detail of a full-page photo, typically the image is only a tiny fraction of your screen.

Alan Taylor at the Boston Globe's website decided to do something about it. He launched a thrice-a-week feature called The Big Picture. In it, he features, well, a dozen or so big pictures that fill the browser window of some event, or around some topic. Here's one from the latest entry. Click for the entry:

Note that the main page only highlights one photo per entry, but you can click through to see all the rest. Good stuff!

As of July 1, 2008, anyone under 18 is not allowed to use a cell phone at all while driving. Those 18 and over must use a hands-free set or risk a $20 fine for the first citation, and $50 for subsequent ones. The citation will go on your driving record but not generate any points. This SF Chronicle article cites a CHP officer as saying that text messaging while driving is illegal even though it's not explicitly mentioned in the law, though my guess is that they would use generic distracted driving laws against you, and that it would be open to debate.

In any case, as I've already ranted about a year ago, a 2003 study showed that hands-free cell phone use is just as dangerous as hand-held cell phone use because the real danger factor is driver distraction, and a 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that cell phone use, hands-free or not, is as dangerous as having your blood alcohol level be at the legal limit. And I quote: "Telephones that allowed the hands to be free did not appear to be safer than hand-held telephones."

And finally, as I mentioned the last time I ranted about this, there are studies about the effect of anti-handed cell phone use laws on number of citations and amount of cell phone use, but I have yet to see a single study demonstrate that anti-handed cell phone use laws have any significant positive effect on lowering accident rates. I worry that hands-free sets might actually have the perverse incentive of causing people to stay on the phone longer, leading to more accidents, instead of less. I wonder if anyone's collecting data on this sort of thing this time around?

In short, my advice is to obey the law, despite its stupidity, and stay of trouble, but also to minimize the amount of time you spend using your hands-free set and not assume that it's safer in any way because it's hands-free.

I hate these sorts of unscientific, potentially counterproductive laws that are just enacted so the politicians pretend they're accomplishing something.

Sometimes I have wacky dreams and then wake up. I quickly grab my laptop and type out what I remember, because I know it'll all be gone within the minute. Unfortunately, sometimes, I'm not quite fully functional as I'm typing, and my notes don't really help me recall things all that much better. Here is an example from last night, verbatim what I typed:

Going back in time ina VR/time travel machine to reduce te hillary election. But there are evil dudes. We are doing it like real life, but more. But then suddenly the vr mahchien (like on a big pilar0 stops. we're stopped. adn then me, millem dafoe, and a girl maybepl yaing hol'em.

and hten ink the VR work, me adn teh oterh guy are getting tested supre speed.
boobooboobooboobooboo boing! arms strapped, floating in slappers, flip perosn around, legs go up , etc. i was hoping for happy hour. cf

Um.... Right, Kenneth. *backs away slowly from self*

So what I remember now is that I was with a group of people (including Willem Dafoe) going back in time through some sort of giant cylindrical time machine. The part that's still vivid is that it suddenly turned out we were actually in a virtual reality world, and we were no longer in control of ourselves. We were frozen in place, and then our unseen captors started toying with us to interrogate us.

Imagine seeing someone suspended in mid-air, and then flickering rapidly into different positions, far faster than a physical body could possibly move. It was like a glitchy recording or Max Headroom talking or something. Both Willem Dafoe's and my own arms and legs were just rapidly oscillating back and forth, and then they'd suddenly stop in some unlikely arrangement. (That's what the booboobooboo boing bit was about, I think.)

Hm. I'm doing a poor job of describing it, but I guess I found it fascinating because it wasn't something I had actually seen in any movie or anything; it seemed like an actually novel way to mess with someone in a VR world. I might have to draw it or animate it at some point.

When I went to New York City recently, I saw that their MOMA allowed photography when I was in the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, while I wasn't allowed to shoot the same exhibit when it was at SFMOMA. I've always thought that their strict no photography policy was backward-thinking, but that was the last straw. I fired off an angry email to them. While writing the email, I did a little research, and I found that the De Young, Legion of Honor, and Asian Art Museum all allow photography except in special exhibitions. That's been my experience with all the major museums in New York, London, and Paris, too. Only some smaller museums seem to ban photography, and some in Italy, where many policies are stingier. :P

I totally didn't expect them to listen to me, but, to my surprise, they've actually already decided to change that policy! From Thea Stein, Marketing & Communications Assistant:

Thanks for contacting us. Actually, as of July 14, SFMOMA’s photography rules are changing—this matter has been under discussion for quite some time. Photography with no flash will be allowed in our galleries with the exception of some special exhibitions. I hope you visit us again soon and feel free to ask me any questions in the meantime!

That's awesome! :) I look forward to going back there then! :)

So my new phone comes with The Sims 2 Mobile Edition. I've never played any Sims games, actually, so I was curious. The first thing I noticed is that it's a pain having to constantly go to the bathroom and shower and eat and stuff. It's like they're making up for all the games (not to mention TV shows and movies) where the characters go days without ever using the toilet. Here, you spend half your time on the toilet!

The worst part is going to bed. While you're sleeping to bring your tiredness meter back up, your bathroom, shower, hunger, and entertainment meters all drop, so that when you wake up, you have to spend a couple hours of in-game time just to be content again. My second day of in-game work, I didn't give myself enough time, my entertainment meter was too low, and my character didn't feel like going to work. I missed the carpool and missed work, apparently because I needed to watch TV for a while longer instead. :\

Anyway, you meet other characters in the game (played by the computer), and you can chat with them to befriend them. As you do so, your friendship meter goes up. I had my character, Clark, chat with the Ben for a while, and when the meter got to 45, it said, "You've made a new friend!"

I kept chatting with Ben, and when the meter got to around 70, it said, "You've fallen in love!" Whoa. I totally didn't expect that! Before I knew it, Ben and I had spent the night together, which the game depicts with the pictured image. (It also lets you "spend the night" regardless of the time of day, but it always takes exactly 3 hours) Later that same day, we got married! Evidently the game doesn't discriminate at all between men and women when it comes to love and marriage.

Of course, the game's model of love isn't terribly sophisticated. Your relationship with each character is totally independent, so you can fall in love with every other character while you're married, and spend the night with them while your husband is in the same room. :P

The best part: When I tried to get a divorce, the game replied directly and to the point: "You cannot afford a divorce." :)

(Eventually I learned that you get about $800 when you get married, and you lose the same amount when you get divorced. I guess it's supposed to represent tax breaks maybe?)

On a related note, Judevac spotted these in the Wilkes Bashford window display last night, on the eve of Pride Weekend in San Francisco:

I like how they're standing on cakes. :)

The Pride Parade is coming up in San Francisco this weekend, but that's not the big controversy facing the great state of California at the moment. That title belongs to State Senate Bill 1499: Foil balloon ban. The bill, passed by the State Senate on May 29, will ban those metallic Mylar balloons by 2010 (now extended to 2011), charging a $100 to retailers for the first two offenses, and a misdemeanor for the third.

The argument is that they cause power outages when they float into power lines, although the numbers you get for just how many differ depending on who you're listening to. The pro-balloon lobby (didn't expect to say that when I woke up this morning) has a Save the Balloons website, where they claim there have been no confirmed power outages, but utility lobbies say there were hundreds of outages just last year.

The latest news is that the bill failed to clear the State Assembly Business and Professions Committee on June 24, but then a new vote was made, and it has now cleared the committee as of yesterday, June 26, and it'll go before the full Assembly at some point.

Actual quote from the article about the initial failure to clear the Assembly, by a balloon-supporting private citizen who attended the committee hearing:

"To be against them is anti-American."

The Taipei 101 skyscraper has a giant ball hanging near the top that dampens any swaying motions of the building. Here it is in action during the Sichuan earthquake last month as the shockwaves reached Taipei:

YouTube Link

My apt has a carport, where I can park my car. John Travolta's house has, well, I guess an airport, where he can park his personal Boeing 707:

View Larger Map

Zoom out or pan left to see the runway.

Link from this Telstar Logistics post, where you can find more photographs.

Now this is what I call a concept car:

YouTube Link

YouTube link

(Photos: Mari Tefre/Svalbard Global Seed Vault)

This is the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Here's an old Wired article about it.

This is the world's ultimate backup food source. If the crops of the world are devastated, and all the other seed vaults also fall prey to natural or man-made disasters, we can come here and find a few million varieties of seeds we can use to start feeding the world again. This vault was placed on a remote Norwegian island because it's naturally cold, has low tectonic activity, and isn't likely to be the center of social strife.

I can totally see social strife coming to this place in the event that we actually need to use it, though. I imagine a post-apocalyptic movie in which the characters finally arrive here at the end and see this doorway as a gateway to hope for the couple billion human survivors left in the world. They've arrived after surmounting insurmountable obstacles, mostly consisting of biker gangs, of course. :P

(via Kitsune Noir via Blackbeltjones. (Interesting: It's not actually on Blackbeltjones' blog; rather, his RSS feed, where I got this link, includes his del.icio.us links.))

Update: I found the original source of these photos, where there are a few more shots. I added one above.

This is the neatest Flash game I've played in a while: Chronotron. It's a standard single-screen 2D platform puzzle game, with the twist that you have to go back in time and then work with the past versions of yourself to accomplish tasks. (Ultimately, it's really more like programming multiple copies of yourself to all run at once, but calling it time travel is more fun. :P)

A week ago, I went to see my friends' friends' band Thrillionaires. Here's a shot of the band that played before them, The Playground Kings:

Amazingly, all four members of The Thrillionaires just got their PhDs. The stormed onto the stage in their graduation gowns! I wasn't ready for it, so I only got a shot of one of them:

I am only just beginning to learn the art of off-camera flash, but in the meantime, I'll settle for the poor man's off-camera flash, accidentally catching another photographer's flash:

All the colors of the rainbow:

(That was more or less how it came out of the camera; I just pumped up the saturation a bit.)

And finally, my favorite shot of the evening:

There are a few more shots in the full set.

Last Sunday night, I went to Bimbo's for the first time. It's quite a classy venue. All the bands were from Sweden. I was wondering what the deal was with this Swedish invasion of the last few years until Dan X pointed me to an New York Times article about how Scandinavian governments are subsidizing their popular music with funding for recording and tours. Wacky. (I'm not saying these particular bands were, btw.)

Anyway, the first act was Anna Ternheim [MySpace], a singer-songwriter type. She was quite good! Here she is:

Presumably she didn't have enough money to bring a whole band with her, and, well, you know how some bands use a drum machine or a synthesizer with recordings? Her backup band was her iPod. :)

I took that last shot with my trusty Fujifilm F30 compact camera. A security guy tapped me on my shoulder, and I was ready to put my camera away, but instead he said, "We're fine with you taking pictures, but no flash, okay?" I was like, "Sure!" I had noticed someone else using flash, so I guess they were bugging everyone with a camera. But see, then I thought, sweet! They're officially letting people take pictures! I had just just bought a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens, and I wasn't sure when I'd get a good chance to try it out. I immediately ran out to my car to get my DSLR. :) These next few pictures are all from my shiny new lens.

Next up was Lykke Li [MySpace], and she was an awesome indie pop singer. Easily my favorite of the evening:

She went from sorta slower songs to danceable songs, always just a little odd but less weird than, say, Björk (whose personality she reminded me of a little), and with sort of a mysterious sexiness through aloofness appeal. :P I like her guitarist's pose in the background of the above shot. Here's a her guitarist in focus:

The quality difference between these and the F30 shot isn't as obvious at this size (a testament to the low light ability of the F30), but click on the guitarist to zoom in, and see the detail on the hair, then zoom in on the first shot to compare. (The one of Lykke Li has a bit of motion blur.)

The headliner was El Perro del Mar, another indie pop band, though more mellow than Lykke Li. Here's the lead singer:

I like how the backlight on her hair makes it glow. They had an incense stick on stage that acted as sort of a poor man's smoke effects. It worked pretty well in the lighting:

I only thought that shot was okay at first, but my friends all seem to like that one the most. It oddly reminds me of a radio telescope and moon shot I took a while back.

There are a few shots I didn't post here; see the full set here, or watch the full-screen slide show.

I love the new lens. It's so perfect for concerts, at least! I'm totally gonna want to find more concerts that allow photography now. :) And I look forward to trying it out at my friends' weddings this summer.

Typically, we only notice supernovae hours or days after they happen in the visible spectrum, and we can then point our telescopes at them. When they first explode, they emit a lot of x-rays, but x-ray telescopes tend to have small fields of view, so we never catch anything. This January, Alicia Soderberg at Princeton was looking at a month-old supernova with an x-ray telescope when she happened to notice an x-ray burst nearby: another supernova! The burst was only about 5 minutes long, but she immediately called up lots of other people to aim their telescopes there, and so a ton of people got to observe a supernova sooner than ever before. Bad Astronomy Blog has a great writeup. I'm stealing this image from him:

The top row is in the UV spectrum and the bottom is in x-ray. The crazy thing that some of the news articles mess up on is that the two rows show the same field of view. That's how bright the x-ray burst was. Crazy, no?

Oh, and I wasn't kidding about a lot of people getting in on the action of gawking at this supernova. Check out how many coauthors are listed at the Nature abstract. :) Update: My physicist friend corrects me: "Dude, that's a tiny group by particle physics standards." :P