The Internet and the Age of Ignorance
10:33 Thursday, 30 June 2016
Words: 866
Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.
If you don't know what the four fundamental forces of the universe are, Google it.
I started watching The Newsroom, a discontinued HBO series by Aaron Sorkin, the other day. I'd read about it on the internet when it was in production, and it was in its initial run. Seemed to get good notices. My girlfriend said I'd like it, and Game of Thrones is wrapping up for this season, so I started watching it. She's right. I do like it.
It's typical Sorkin. Well written, topical fiction about a world you wish you lived in, and people you wish were really in the roles they're depicted in. Flawed people, but better people than we are. Their flaws are pretty sanitary. We're not talking Jamie Lannister kind of flawed, which, to my mind, is much more realistic than Sorkin's characters' flaws.
Anyway, I digress…
It was just a coincidence that I started watching The Newsroom at the same time that the United Kingdom was holding a referendum about whether or not to remain in the European Union. But it was the kind of coincidence that makes life seem a little more interesting than it really is.
Apparently there may be some second-thoughts on the part of some of the folks who voted to leave the EU. And Google Trends noted a spike in UK citizens googling "what is the EU?" after the result of the referendum. The natural take is, "a little late for that, eh?"
Technology, for most of our history, has helped to lift humanity out of ignorance. I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Access to the internet was supposed to be this great, liberating force. "You can't stop the signal!" (Obscure cultural reference. Apologies if you don't get it. Google it.)
"Gatekeepers" were going to be swept aside. "Sources go direct!" Formerly, gatekeepers were the people who controlled access to mass media; publishers, editors, producers. With the internet, my little blog could theoretically reach as large an audience as any form of conventional media.
The capacity to disseminate information exploded exponentially. The capacity of individuals to receive and process information changed not one whit.
With the "gatekeepers" swept away, people were left to their own devices to decide where to give their attention.
"Social media" thrived because we're all apparently fascinated by what all of our friends and acquaintances are doing, and we all believe we're our own publicists as we edit and promote our own lifestyle brands on Facebook and Twitter.
Since we're all a bunch of busybodies and exhibitionists, we spend a hell of a lot of time in these social media platforms, where the platform providers are most interested in keeping your attention so they can sell it to advertisers. They don't really care what you're looking at, as long as you're looking at it on their platform.
So there are thousands of "new media" outlets. For whatever type of perspective you have, there's a media outlet that purportedly covers the stories the "mainstream media" is ignoring.
The result is noise.
And we haven't become any better at detecting the signal. You can't stop the signal, but you can bury it by elevating the noise.
The Newsroom, at least the first few episodes that I've watched, seems to be about trying to help people detect the signal. It's fiction, I know. And it got cancelled, so there wasn't an audience for the story either I guess.
Personally, I try to look for the signal.
I ignore cable television news. It's utterly useless.
I ignore most of the alternative news outlets on the internet. I recently stopped reading Talking Points Memo, which was a decidedly liberal or lefty political outlet, when Josh Marshall started losing his shit over Bernie Sanders.
I subscribe to the New York Times, which is not a perfect platform by any means. If anything, they're far too guilty of "false equivalence," where they give "both" sides of a story, where one side is clearly bullshit. I mean clearly bullshit, which is how a lot of this nonsense has been elevated to what passes for civil discourse these days. But for the most part, the Times offers at least a lower noise level than other outlets.
I subscribe to The Economist, and by "subscribe," I mean I pay for it. I support these outlets with my money. The Economist is pretty "fair and balanced."
I also subscribe to The New Yorker, because they have some good in-depth pieces. I will be adding The Atlantic Monthly to my subscriptions, as soon as I get finished with Ancestry.com.
And I support NPR with a contribution, because I listen to NPR when I'm in the car.
If you want good information, you have to find reliable gatekeepers, not sources. We need editors, because we don't have the time or the cognitive resources to filter through all the bullshit.
The internet is not the boon it was imagined to be. All the triumphalists who celebrated the democratization of "the press" should be eating their words.
The internet is a tool for the entrenched interests to keep us frightened and ignorant.
What to Do With Apple Photos?
12:52 Thursday, 30 June 2016
Words: 1590
tl;dr version: Store 3MP jpegs of all your images in iCloud Photo Library and have access to all your photos on all your devices. Use Aperture (or Lightroom) to import your images from your cameras, and export 3MP jpegs for import to Photos. 3MP is enough for a reasonable print, and plenty for on screen sharing.
Allow me to vent my spleen here briefly on what an utter piece of crap Apple's Photos app is on iOS, and the Photos iCloud architecture. The MacOS app is slightly better, but it's still crap too.
The apps themselves are inadequate for anyone other than a casual snap-shooter, and maybe that's all Apple cares about anymore. They used to be interested in photographers, with things like Aperture. Now, they don't care. Lowest common denominator is the only game in town. Suck your photos into iCloud and keep you tied to iOS.
That's life. I've gone through the five stages of grief regarding Aperture, though I still revisit anger every time Photos crashes, and I've reached acceptance.
Having stopped fighting Photos, I've tried to figure out how to use it to some advantage, and I think I have some ideas.
In the ideal Apple world, all of your photos live in iCloud. The full-resolution, RAW or jpeg images are stored in the cloud, for which you will pay extra for additional storage.
Your photos on your Apple devices will be "optimized" in size, so that you can see your entire photo collection on every device, regardless of how little storage it has.
This idea has some merit, though the current implementation is completely deficient, inasmuch as smart albums don't sync across devices, and you can't even create smart albums in iOS. But I digress…
A few things happened that led me to my current "solution."
First, I gave my 27' iMac to my daughter. Previously, I was maintaining two Aperture libraries on two computers with Photostream as the mechanism for getting pictures I imported into one Mac into the library on the other Mac. This was a dumb idea, and I don't know why it took me so long to see it. With one computer, I just maintain one Aperture library. So much less work.
Second, I bought a Canon Pixma Pro-100 photo printer. Makes big prints, up to 13"x19". So I started reading about printing. It turns out, we have far more megapixels than we truly need. (Now, before anyone panics, yes, there is a case that can be made that there is no such thing as "too many megapixels." More image data is better, assuming you have a good composition, good exposure, and it's an image worth printing large. Most aren't. Sorry.)
On Father's Day, I wanted to post a pic of my Dad on Facebook, but I didn't have a shot of him in my iOS devices because I hadn't enabled iCloud Photos because it's such an utter piece of crap. Dad's pics were in my Aperture library, and I was away from the computer. I should have looked online, because I have a bunch in shared iCloud albums (which you can still have in Aperture without enabling iCloud Photo Library). But it did make me think about the utility of having "your entire photo library" in the cloud.
Most of my pictures are shared online. To share a nice image online, all you really need are about 3 megapixels. Most of the shots I take are just kind of fun shots for me, they're not necessarily intended to be "art," and I had seldom printed them, though I occasionally did through a service bureau, usually Apple.
My 12.9" iPad Pro is my highest resolution device, and it displays 5.6MP (megapixels). My oldest camera, an Oly E-1, shoots 5MP images. My newest camera shoots 16MP, and my next camera will likely be an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk 2, which is expected to have a 20MP sensor. My iPhone 6s Plus has a 12MP sensor.
I'm shooting and storing all this image data that never really gets displayed, either on screen or in print.
So I've made a few changes in how I shoot.
I've mostly shot RAW+jpeg, where the camera records both the original sensor data ("RAW" format, though "RAW" doesn't really stand for anything, and some people are insisting it's correctly depicted as "raw.") and a compressed jpeg image. There are various settings for jpeg that determine the size of the stored file. My practice has been to store full-resolution images with the least amount of compression. So a 10MP Oly XZ-1 RAW image would be around 10MB, while a 10MP "superfine" jpeg would be a little less than half that at about 4.6MB.
I'm still shooting RAW+jpeg. But now I've set the jpeg settings in the camera to record 5MP images. This doesn't crop the image, it's still everything you see in the viewfinder or the LCD, it just down-samples the 16/12/10/8 MP image into a 5MP image, and stores that as a jpeg. In the case of the XZ-1, that 5MP jpeg is about 2MB.
You can make a nice print from a 5MP image. But if it's a potential "work of art," I've got the RAW image to process into a full sized TIFF (with no compression) to print.
This has had some immediate payoffs. Flickr automatically uploads my jpegs as soon as I insert the SD card or connect the camera, and the smaller images upload much faster than the full-resolution images. Flickr is a giant image sump, and I don't spend much time "curating" my images there, so it's hard to find things, or I'm just not very good at it yet. But it's a nice sort of backup solution.
I still import my images into Aperture. There's no way I'm going to let my originals reside only in Apple's cloud storage infrastructure. They've shown no real expertise in doing it reliably yet. Hopefully they will one day, but that day's not today.
In Aperture, I review the images, discard the obvious clinkers and decide which ones I'd like to have available on all my devices. I rate all those images with 3 stars. A smart album in Aperture gathers all those 3-star images, and I export that album to a folder on my desktop. The export settings further down-samples the images to 3MP jpegs. I do this because I mainly intend to share images online from my iCloud Photo Library, and 3MP is about the most I need. So they take up less space in my paid-for storage, upload faster, and download faster if I want to do an edit on an iOS device. In Photos on iOS, if you wish to edit, you have to wait for iOS to download the full-resolution image from iCloud. 3MP downloads faster than 5MP and uses less bandwidth.
Once the export is complete, I select all the images in the 3-star smart album and rate them 0-stars. They leave the smart album, but they're still in the Aperture library.
The 3MP images export to a folder that's monitored by Hazel, a utility that will perform certain actions on files in a folder it monitors, one of which is to import images to Photos on the Mac. One problem has been that Hazel isn't 100% reliable. Sometimes it gets all the images into Photos, sometimes it leaves out a few, sometimes it only manages to get a few into Photos. I haven't investigated that issue very much yet, but I hope to figure out what the problem is. If it doesn't get them all, I have Photos check the folder and it'll grab the ones that Hazel missed. But I'd like to make it completely hands-off.
Pictures I take with my iPhone are, of course, automatically uploaded to iCloud and unfortunately you can't really manage those jpeg settings. Depending on the scene, the jpegs weigh in between 1 to 6MB, so it's not gross. And it's probably handy to have the full resolution with iPhone images to allow you to crop.
I've also started going back through all of my Aperture libraries and organizing them by years. I go through each year and select images, usually of family and friends, that I want to upload to iCloud Photo Library. The earliest go back to 2000, when my camera had only 2MP, and pretty heavy jpeg compression, so those go straight up into the cloud, no down-sampling. I think I have enough storage already paid for to allow me to have most of my most "meaningful" images available on any device. Though I still have twelve years of images to go through!
So iCloud Photo Library just turns out to be like Flickr or Smugmug, only with more integration with the OS, so you can access and share the images more readily from any application.
If iOS ever gets the ability to create smart albums, or if the contents of smart albums at least sync across devices, it'll be more useful. As it is, you can't search images on iOS other than by browsing, or using dates or locations. Maybe faces. Apple really needs to expose exif data in Photos in iOS and iCloud if they want to be taken seriously.
That's how I've made my peace with Photos.
It's still an utter piece of crap, but I'll use the iCloud Photo Library.
Hanging in there...
10:08 Saturday, 30 June 2018
Words: 830
I just realized that yesterday was day five of the fast, and so I was writing about day four being hard! Well, day five was hard too. It's interesting to realize how the web and social media have become so much a "normal" part of my life, that I feel discombobulated when I can't be "on" it. I struggled a bit yesterday trying to distract myself and find other, more "productive" uses of my time.
I bought the cognitive productivity book and skimmed it. Hot take: Possible waste of money. There seem to be some worthwhile nuggets in there, but they're buried amidst an editorial blizzard of superfluous verbiage. (See what I did there? - Hey, this isn't a book, and it's free. Sue me.) Not only is the author unable to be concise, he spends a lot of time criticizing other points of view. From a supposed cognitive "expert," who at one point states that one's time and attention are finite resources, he wastes much of his reader's time and attention in no value added editorializing!
Irony™, the fifth fundamental force of the universe.
I'll take a closer look at the book and offer my thoughts on the worthwhile nuggets later. But the initial impression is discouraging.
I opened a number of other books and read sections, but only one got any traction. I made a dent in Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. I'd bought that book back in 2011! The topic is resonant, because I'm exerting some of my meager resources in willpower by avoiding the use of the web and social media.
My first impression is that it's a worthwhile book, but I have much the same criticism that I had for the cognitive guy — I'm not interested in disparaging other views, unless it's done in a way that better illustrates or explains the author's main argument. For the most part, they read like drive-by cheap shots.
Since I don't like to write margin notes, or I didn't have a pencil, possibly both, I used the camera in my phone to record pages where I found something I may want to revisit. In the introduction, the authors outline the history that preceded much of the research on behavior before insights into the role of the executive function and self-regulation. They write:
Most social scientists look for causes of misbehavior outside of the individual: poverty, relative deprivation, oppression, or other failures of the environment or the economic or political systems. Searching for external factors is often more comfortable for everyone, particularly for the many academics who worry that they risk the politically incorrect sin of "blaming the victim" by suggesting that peoples' problems might arise from causes inside themselves. Social problems can also seem easier than character defects to fix, at least to the social scientists proposing new policies and programs to deal with them.
And I suppose if you're of a particular political persuasion, you'd find your view validated and be encouraged to read on. But my reaction was different, a visceral interior "Bullshit!" response. It does nothing to diminish the power the authors' argument about the role of self-regulation to consider that external circumstances may affect peoples' behavior. Indeed, it's at least conceivable that everything from fetal exposure to maternal stress, environmental toxins, poor nutrition and other "factors outside of the individual" may affect the fetal development of the brain overall, and the portions responsible for self regulation. Which is to say nothing of epigenetic effects experienced after birth that may vary according to the external environment and thereby affect the development of the brain and the networks responsible for self-regulation. It does nothing to diminish the value and utility of the idea of self-regulation to acknowledge that there may be better or worse environments for the developing brain. And, unlike much of the interior wiring of the brain, the external environment, as the authors correctly note, we can change.
This, to me, is useless editorializing and likely even wrong. So it pisses me off, but I read on because I suspect they do know some things that I'd like to know, and I'll place that new knowledge in my own context, than you very much.
Willpower, editorializing aside, is better written, and better edited than Cognitive Productivity, so it's a far easier read, occasional visceral reactions notwithstanding.
Anyway, my experiment with an internet fast is beginning to be revealing in terms of how I spend my time, and the many alternatives that are available to me. My plan remains to allow Monday as a day to use the internet and social media in any way I choose. On Tuesday, we'll be traveling to New Orleans to visit one of Mitzi's relatives for the 4th, so I'll just bring a couple of books and a camera. The environment should be sufficiently novel that I'll be sufficiently distracted that I won't feel the compulsion to get "on" the internet.
Dawn Launch
Current Wx: Temp: 76.35°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 6.91mphWords: 16
Put the DJI Mini 2 up this morning. Figuring this workflow (a word I hate) out.
✍️ Reply by emailNot In Kansas Anymore
06:36 Sunday, 30 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.19°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 0mph
Words: 248
Too much media. Everyone knows more than anyone else. Pay little attention to it. Focus on essentials. Breathe.
Focus on this moment. What's "your best," in this moment?
Spent yesterday with Mom. Spoke to all of my siblings. All the local ones came by. Had pizza and strawberry-rhubarb pie. Spoke to my son and my youngest daughter. Did more genealogy with Mom with the screen from the computer projected on the TV.
Mom needed a new Apple Watch. In case she falls. Got her a refurb from the veterans' store. Still pricey. Forgot to do the trade-in application. My brother can do that and use the credit.
Too much media. Breathe. Focus.
Too many pundits.
Focus.
Breathe.
One day at a time. One moment at a time.
Packing up the hotel room. Mitzi's in the pool. Say goodbye to Mom around 9:00. Three hours in the car to Trumansburg.
Fifty straight days of Expert in Quartiles. Never get all the words, but all the "quartiles," every time. It's the little things.
Seem to be missing my St Johns Riverkeeper ball cap. I liked that hat. Maybe in the car?
Read the Washington Post. Too much media.
All our infrastructure was built for a climate that does not exist anymore. This will gradually become brutally clear. A price will be paid for decades of denial and delay.
No one is saying Trump should drop out of the race. Why?
Too much media.
Focus.
Breathe.
Finish packing.
✍️ Reply by emailOn the Trail
Current Wx: Temp: 81.37°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 64% Wind: 7.29mphWords: 1017
Jack wonders where everyone was yesterday.
I can't speak for anyone else, but Mitzi and I made a brief excursion down part of the Finger Lakes Trail.
We live about two thirds of a mile from a part of the Finger Lakes Trail, and we'd never been on it before, so we decided to go check it out.
Now, the emphasis here is on "check it out," not "hike it." That two thirds of a mile to the entrance is all downhill. We have to keep in mind that we have to go back up the hill to get home. Again, Florida is flat, so we are unaccustomed to walking uphill. When I was living at Mitzi's place, back when Bodhi was alive and recovering from his knee surgery, we'd walk over the bridge over the intracoastal at Beach Boulevard. And we did that once in Nocatee on Palm Valley Road. That's what you had to do to experience "uphill."
So uphill is an unfamiliar experience.
Anyway, we hiked down to the entrance and started on the trail. Just as we started, a deer went bounding across the trail in front of us. (The beginning of the trail is through a grassy meadow.) We took that as a good sign.
Now, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that we only hiked about a third of a mile on the trail. It was fairly level ground, but lurking back in our minds was the return leg and the elevation gain. Once you get through the meadow, the trail looks like the photo above. It was a little buggy, and I hadn't worn any bug spray. We figured we'd only walk about a mile and see how we felt. I felt like I should have worn bug spray.
So we turned around and hiked back home. My Apple Watch reported 362 feet of elevation gain. So it was at least a bit of a workout.
Along the way home, we said hello to a neighbor sitting out on her porch and introduced ourselves. Her name was Bert, and her husband is Buck. We chatted a bit and pressed on.
When we got back to the house, I did a little yard work and had just enough time to take a shower before my Sunday call to Mom.
After that, it was time for the Tinderbox Meetup!
So, a busy morning, which is when I do most of my blogging.
It was a gorgeous day yesterday, Temps in the 70s, sunny, low humidity. We sat out on the front porch and watched the cars go by. I called a classmate of mine from the Academy. We're going to do a little virtual reunion of our company-mates on the 7th of July, the 50th anniversary of our induction into the Naval Academy. I had to say goodbye early, because the guy we bought the house from, and who built it, dropped by to say hello.
Mitzi took him inside to show him all the changes we'd made. He's a builder and we're almost certainly going to use him to build whatever it is we're putting on this property. We had been pretty set on timber frame construction, but we're worried about cost, especially since we don't know what we're going to have to work with since the house hasn't sold yet.
He builds with insulated concrete forms, or ICF. So he was giving us some insight into how we might do that instead. After he left, much of the remaining afternoon was spent doing a deep dive on ICF construction. A lot of advantages in a world experiencing cascading climate catastrophes. Of course, the carbon footprint of concrete isn't lost on me, but the energy savings and low maintenance offset that somewhat. That and it's likely that the house will remain viable for generations, although who knows if it'll remain in our family.
Anyway, that was Sunday. Little time for the marmot.
Today I'm trying to close the loop with the gym I've joined. Playing phone tag with them now. I need to collect an access card so I can get into the gym, and the woman who called me back said she couldn't find me in the system. I called her back and got voicemail, but I left her my member number, so hopefully all that will get squared away shortly.
I also spent some time at KEH.com and MPB.com getting quotes on six of my cameras. MPB offered a higher quote, so I went with them. After they examine them it'll likely be lower. The cameras are all in excellent condition, but because a lot of my stuff is still in Florida, I'm missing chargers and straps and so on. I don't know how much they'll penalize me for that, but it is what it is.
That'll clear some clutter, though I'll miss some of those bodies. I decided to part with my PEN-F, because it would bring the highest price, and it's also one of the oldest bodies I was selling. The OM-3 affords the same JPEG features, as does the E-P7, which I also decided to keep.
If the numbers work out, I'll probably buy an OM-5 Mark II. (The OM-5 I bought not too long ago was among the six I'm selling.) I like the new grip on the Mark II, it looks a lot like the one on the E-M10 Mk 4. (Do I have to be consistent and use Roman numerals?) That was a comfortable camera to shoot with using something like the mZuiko 75-300 because of that little additional contour on the grip.
I'm kind of hoping I'll be able to order one in "sand beige," because that would say, "Look at me! I'm a serious outdoor and adventure photographer!" I will say I was disappointed to learn that the color is only painted on, which pretty much guarantees it'll get scuffed off at some point. Maybe I should just be sensible and get it in all black.
And the beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailWe Have Footers
Current Wx: Temp: 78.24°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 8.68mphWords: 536
Had a bit of excitement in what should have been a routine day.
Brad the Builder had ordered two cement trucks with conveyors. The cement company sent one truck with a conveyor, and they started pouring the footers. A little later the second truck arrived without a conveyor. The thought apparently being that the second truck could position its chute over the first truck's conveyor.
Sure. In an ideal world.
We're building on a hillside. Although there's a construction driveway, it's not necessarily perfectly level. The second truck parked next to the first truck and to absolutely no one's surprise, concrete wouldn't run uphill into the chute. Hilarity ensued.
By "hilarity," I mean the kind of side-splitting slapstick farce that made The Wages of Fear such a classic cinematic comedy. At one point they had the second truck's front chained to a skid-steer so it could pull the front end of the truck away from the slope that leads down into our back patio.
My brother was visiting and we watched as the second truck tried to maneuver away from the slope, which resulted in it only pushing shale and moving closer to the slope. I suggested that we repair to the house so that we couldn't be called as witnesses in the event of an ensuing catastrophe. "Not my circus, not my monkeys," came to mind.
They eventually figured out how to re-arrange the trucks so they could get the concrete from the second truck into the chute of the first. I have no idea how they did this. I asked how we would preclude a similar circumstance going forward. I'm assured we're going to be using a pumper with a boom, and the trucks can line up like ducks in row.
All's well that ends well, but sheesh.
We're entering a hot spell after what has been a mostly lovely June. I have a meeting this afternoon with Energy Vanguard to discuss the results of our Manual J calculations. It should be interesting. I'm convinced we can decouple the latent heat load from the sensible heat load by using a whole-home dehumidifier. They want to use a fan-coil unit to handle both sensible and latent loads and duct cold air, which is not what I want for a number of reasons.
We have a limited "cooling" season here. I'm confident that the house is tight enough and well-insulated enough that our cooling loads will be modest, even at the design temps, such that we will be able to keep the temperature of the floor above the dew point.
I'm also looking at using a product that goes above the sub-flooring. It is a high-density EPS (styrofoam) that has embedded aluminum channels and fins to emit or collect heat. My concern is its thickness and how that might affect the doors. It's $7 a square foot, so it's not cheap. But if I can reuse the radiant floor for heating and cooling, and avoid buying a separate piece of equipment and ducting, I think it'll be worth it. I suspect it may also help reduce the sound of foot traffic in the basement.
The beat goes on...
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