where climate change shows up

Some places have gotten warmer, a few cooler. What should worry people — farmers and the customers, you know, people who eat — is the change in hardiness zones, ie, where you can grow stuff.

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What if you can’t grow your cash crop because it needs chill hours it’s no longer getting (peaches, apples, cherries, etc.)? It’s not like you can move a region to follow it’s climate: if the weather we rely on to grow wheat and corn moves north, what happens then? Half of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina used to be in Zone 7: now perhaps a third of it or less. Is it any wonder hurricanes are retaining their sub-tropical power to far north, if the sub-tropical conditions are preceding them?

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are these facts related or not?

Harper’s Index for April 2006 (Harpers.org):

Percentage of U.S. adults in 1985 who said they found overweight people less attractive than others: 55

Percentage who said this last year: 24

Estimated number of Marshmallow Peeps that will be consumed around Easter this month: 800,000,000

Estimated number of pigs who died to make them: 125,000

I’ll argue the first three are: the last is just deplorable. I’m guessing the pigs are rendered for their gelatin: yuck.

is modern photography realizing Fox Talbot’s idea or trashing it?

William Henry Fox Talbot was one of the pioneers of photography, capturing the first images to light sensitive paper, as a way of recording what he was unable to draw or otherwise record. This image — his Oriel Window — is the oldest surviving artifact of the negative to positive film process, dating back to 1835.

Orielwindow
Revisiting this post:
To Print or Not to Print?:

An anonymous commenter on an earlier post remarked that he never prints his digital images, preferring instead to use the Web as the exclusive destination for his work. He wondered how many others do the same. I wonder, too.

Personally, I consider a print the final destination for a good image. It’s the only form that presents a long-lasting and accurate representation of the photographer’s intentions. But how many peoples’ vacation photos, for instance, still end up as prints? The rapid and pervasive acceptance of camera phones, online sharing, and “publishing” to a CD or DVD has undoubtedly increased the percentage of digital images that are never printed.

I don’t know hard statistics of the number of digital photos that ultimately meet paper versus those that never incarnate to the physical world. But I do recall reading an extensive paper prepared by Kodak several years ago that highlighted the lack of basic, accessible snapshot printing facilities for digital photographers. The premise of the paper was that lack of simple printing services for digital photographs (akin to what people used to pick up at the drugstore) represented a significant barrier to broader consumer acceptance of digital cameras.

This addresses some of the points I was poking at earlier: amateur photographers want the same thing as professionals — the physical encapsulation of memory, of the visual history of some event — but for different reasons and with differing expectations.

Consider the photographs here, part of the collective memory of the United States. A friend of mine works on these as a historian, documenting the history and writing up the descriptive prose that people refer to about a given structure or place. These photographs are not snapshots, not digital, not even color. The methods are defined as a documentary process, in large format (4×5 or larger) monochrome. For the Park Service they are the equivalent of the pictures taken by Joe and Betty Tourist as they drive through Yosemite: the technique and quality involved in each is no more and no less than what each expects or requires.

As for Joe and Betty’s pictures, they may never be printed: they may be edited in the camera, then transferred to the home computer, emailed around to friends and family, then preserved for trips down digital memory lane. In this case, I would say the “final destination” of an image, to use the phrase cited above, is the eye. Isn’t the express purpose of taking a picture of some place to share it, to say, “hey, look at this?”

It’s easier to do that now than it’s ever been. That’s not a bad thing, just different.

On the other end of the spectrum, those bulky black and white negatives will be scanned, cataloged, and archived for future generations to use. Perhaps they are no more likely to be printed than vacation snapshots. But the detail they contain — 4000 lines per inch worth — is unattainable any other way.

So to return to my earlier point. Photography is not going away or becoming less important, though photographers may feel that way. There will always be room for craftsmen to capture the reflections of light from an object and fix them to paper or a screen. Where photographers have made a clear case for their value — weddings, architectural shots, documentary work — there will be opportunity. Film may be of lesser value to many, though for some purposes it is unsurpassed. Where people used to be frustrated by the physical limitations of film — running out of it, the attendant expense, storing the prints and negatives — digital does away with a lot of that. For many, it’s worth the tradeoff, since the difference in quality is not noticeable.

the real costs of oil addiction

MPG Calculator > Sierra Club:

Real Savings

The biggest single step that automakers could take to reduce the cost of driving is to use existing technology to make our cars, SUVs, and light trucks go farther on a gallon of gas. This simple step would also curb global warming pollution and move America closer to energy independence.

To say nothing of where we would be if we started down this road 30 years ago . . .

How do you score?

This saved me a few hours of work

This is exactly what happened to me. I had a several page Word doc with 30+ images, all of which I needed to extract. Even doing it one at a time was going to take forever, given how slow Word is. You’d think I could drag and drop to the Desktop: no such luck. This saved my bacon.

macosxhints.com – Extract pictures from Word documents via Pages:

I occasionally receive a MS Word document with embedded pictures which I’m supposed to use further. Once when this happened, there was no time to ask for the original pictures. So I opened the Word document in Pages, saved it as a Pages file, and switched back to the Finder. I then Control-clicked the new Pages document, and chose Show Package Contents from the contextualo menu.

No big surprise, but the pictures are there in their original resolution, uncropped, with no color shifts. I had tried it several times before, using Word’s “Save Picture As…” command, or PDF exports, but this solution was just what I wanted. Thumbs up, iWork! If only you had that spreadsheet now!

when the storyteller becomes the story

“Media Matters” by Jamison Foser:

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the “global war on terror.” It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.

The dominant political force of our time is the media.

Worth reading in full, if you can stand it. I found it pretty maddening, but not surprising at all.