Color or Black and White?

Color or Black and White?
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

The same photo in black and white. What do you think of the color, contrast and brightness of these photos?

Color or Black and White?

Color or Black and White?
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

a color photo of my Go board...

The whole shebang

The whole shebang
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

This is all of the Go stuff (books, go boards, stones) I have amassed and kept over the years. I bought my first Go set circa 1988.

To be or not to be ...

To be or not to be ...
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

My nephew Christian contemplating existence

Houdini

Houdini
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

My sister went out to the back yard to smoke and found houdini here had gotten himself stuck in the patio table.

Goth training

IMG_1444
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

I'm studying to be a dark brooding goth guy. In addition to dying my hair black, painting my face white and dressing in black I'm also spending a lot of time in grave yards to connect with my inner mortality.

UPDATE: I got an F on this gothic homework assignment because I forgot to desaturate the picture to black and white (DOH).

Canon 50mm F1.8 II

IMG_1265_1
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

blah blah blah

Man's Best Friend

Man's Best Friend
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

The human face is a bit washed out here because when I turn the brightness down I lose detail on the dog.

I look forward to eventually learning how to use GIMP (I haven't bought photoshop yet) so I can fix problems like this. (blending 2 copies of an image using a transparency mask -- I know the general principle but the details of how to generate the desired mask are not clear)

All processing was done with DPP

Breakfast Time at Zachary's

Zachary's
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

Z's is one of our regular breakfast stops. If you drop in for a bite I highly recommend the 'Junior Mess' or, for the truly famished, 'Mike's Mess'.

Who are the people in the picture? I don't know...

First steps

First steps
Originally uploaded by funkyj.

I've had my 350D for less than a week. I still barely know how to use the thing (beyond treating it as an overpriced point and shoot).

I shot this in RAW mode, cropped it and converted to JPEG (no manipulation in DPP).

Evil Doers

I have a new blog called Evil Doers.

This blog was born out of a conversation with an acquaintance of mine I shall call "Pat".

In this conversation I made the hyperbolic claim that "Walmart would gladly render the entire continent of Africa uninhabitable by polluting it with plutonium if this would greatly increase their share holder value". I explained that this wasn't a literal truth (Walmart is not in the plutonium disposal business) but was meant to represent the fact that corporations regularly and knowingly make choices that result in human rights abuses (including torture and murder) and horrific damage to the environment. Pat objected to this characterization of powerful corporations and asked me to back up my claim with specific examples.

Evil Doers is my attempt to provide these specific examples. It is a laborious task to document even a single case with a moderate level of detail so I will add entries to Evil Doers slowly.

Here is a bit more clarification on my viewpoint.

• large corporations are powerful.
• The consequence of an entities actions are in proportion to the power they wield. The powerful are capable of both greater good and greater evil than the weak.
  
• Powerful entities have a greater ability to insulate themselves from the responsibility of their actions.
  

The phrase "power corrupts" does not mean that every corporation or person that is placed in a position where they can wield power without accountability will behave badly. What it means is that if you consistently put people in positions where they wield power without being held accountable you are guaranteed that someone will eventually abuse their power. The greater the power and the less the accountability the higher the probability of abuse.

Corporations have a greater tendency to evil than ordinary individuals because large corporations are far more powerful and have greater means to avoid accountability than an ordinary individual. Consequently we must treat large corporations (and other powerful entities) with much greater suspicion that we treat our neighbors.

"Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon" -- Alan Perlis

I'm reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which MIT Press has kindly made available on line. Here is a tasty nibblet from the preface to the first edition:

Our design of this introductory computer-science subject reflects two major concerns. First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Second, we believe that the essential material to be addressed by a subject at this level is not the syntax of particular programming-language constructs, nor clever algorithms for computing particular functions efficiently, nor even the mathematical analysis of algorithms and the foundations of computing, but rather the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.

As a hobby I've been learning Common Lisp. Several folks in the comp.lang.lisp newsgroup have recommended SICP to folks who desire to improve their knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of Lisp, so here I am.

It all started when someone in c.l.l asked "why does lisp need the 'apply' function?". As an exploration of this question I attempted the impossible task of implementing Lisp's 'apply' using Common Lisp macros and the 'funcall' function. If you resort to also using the 'eval' function then it is possible to define 'apply'. Of course having to resort to calling 'eval' is a terrible price to pay. This is why Lisp defines 'apply' as a primative. (it is trivial to define 'funcall' in terms of 'apply' -- you don't even need to use macros much less 'eval'. To wit: "(defun funcall (fn &rest arg) (apply fn rest))").

BTW, for you folks who don't know Lisp, Lisp macros are very powerful. The macro system provided by the C language preprocessor is nothing compared to lisp macros. Lisp macros are more powerful than C++ templates. If you haven't studied Lisp it is hard to conceive what Lisp macros are capable of.