I know I’m a softy, but this just makes me sad to be member of the species that came up with Western Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny, and Wal-Mart parking lots.

December 14, 2011 | 6:58 pm

1,500 birds die crashing into Utah parking lot, roads

. . . Utah wildlife officials were cleaning up thousands of dead and surviving migratory birds that crashed into a Wal-Mart parking lot, roads and other land after mistaking them for bodies of water.

Thousands of eared grebes, a duck-like aquatic bird, were migrating toward Mexico when they apparently mistook solid areas around Cedar City and St. George as water. Storm clouds above the city lights probably confused the birds, said Lynn Chamberlain, a spokesman for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. . . .

I suppose there were individual birds who realized that it was reflections on blacktop, not water, and flew on to reproduce another day.  But we human beings sure make evolution tough. (See my article “Doctors Thwart Darwin”)

Somebody tell me please (since every Adobe / NYTimes/ Apple HELP service seems unable to) how do I “page-down” when reading the NY Times on my iPhone?  My desire is NOT to gently scroll; I want to jump down to see the next “screen’s worth”.  On a desktop with a mouse and scroll-bars, it’s built in — you click on the bar part below the thumb.

P.S. I see that OS X Lion is making scroll-bars intermittent. . .so will paging just fade into oblivion?

Call me a tri-focaled fuddy-duddy if you wish, but it seems to me that there is plenty room on speedometers displaying MPH (as opposed to km/h) to label all the 10-MPH increments, i.e. 0-10-20-30-40-50, etc.  Every car I look at these days skips every other label, ending up as 0-20-40-60. . . .  The long and short blips anchoring the numbers mark the 10s and 5s, like |.|.|.| though, as I said, every other big blip is unlabeled.   I agree this ends up looking less cluttered, but almost every time I glance at the speedo to check if I’m doing 70, I see that the needle is pointing at a biggish unlabeled blip, which is next to an (unlabeled) little blip, which is next to a big blip labeled 60.  I run the little Plus-10 algorithm in my brain that calculates the correct answer and that satisfies the plausibility-check that it falls in the series of odd integers multiplied by 10.  I also calculate the milliseconds required for this operation and perhaps how many feet have whizzed under my vehicle during the calculation.  Then I’m reminded of my obsessive compulsiveness and I get even madder.  So to calm down, I lapse into philosophizing on the spatial relations between the adjacent MPH and km/h scales.  Ach!

Is it because the Human Factors Engineers in the Dashboard Design Studios of every Asian, European, and American automobile manufacturer are under 30 (for whom both reading glasses and accurate velocities are laughable)?  Or because they have a built-in bias against the old-fashioned miles after converting their speedos from their native closer-spaced kilometer markings (for which a case can be made for skipping every other 10-blip, since they have to squeeze in more of them, plus if your speed is off by 10 km/h, it is still within the legal margin of error)?  Or is it just that style has trumped intelligibility (the classic HFE sin)?

It all makes me even prefer a fat soulless digital readout displaying exact MPH in 1-inch high characters.  Go ahead.  Call me a tri-focaled fuddy-duddy who is somewhere between 60 and Blip.

Massa Unpeeled

I managed to peel the Eric Massa bumper sticker off our car today.

How did we get so fooled? He seemed pretty smart back during the campaign, at the living room chat and the log cabin barbecue fundraiser. He reminded me a little of Senator Jim Webb, with that ex-career military kicked-around-the-world and wrote-a-book-or-two kind of wisdom. We helped get him elected in a solid Republican upstate New York district that hadn’t voted a Democrat into office for decades. (Though we couldn’t quite tip the county to Obama, embarrassingly.)

Massa’s arguments against our Afghanistan involvement were pretty brave; I love seeing an ex-military officer go ballistically anti-war.  He had long been vocal over the abominable folly of the war in Iraq.  But then he disappointed us with his stand against the health care legislation because “it didn’t go far enough.” . . .A classic case of allowing the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. Or of the Better-than-Nothing. A chance to advance civilization comes around only once every fifteen or twenty years; don’t let it slip through your fingers because it ain’t perfect.

And now this bizarre resignation: for medical, or political, or personal reasons? I hope the doctor’s reports turn out to be good news for him. But as for all his bad news, the blame lies with Eric Massa. These wounds are self-inflicted. True, he accepted limited responsibility in the coded admissions about not “living up to his own standards.” Which only makes his subsequent ranting at environmental or political pressures seem more like attempts at deflection or dissemblance. Sadly, in this strange behavior and abandonment of his post, he has disappointed many, many people who had given him their support and trust. What emerges with each rambling interview is an intuited truth, disconnected from his admissions and protestations; a truth purposely unspoken. This exercise in deception is the saddest act to witness: an aware, worldly man so unable to come face-to-face with his own self-knowledge.

I didn’t know what to do with the bumper sticker. . .it was laden with so much history and personal investment, I couldn’t just throw it away.

Nightlight Unretouched, originally uploaded by LlewellynL.

Remember reciprocity failure? Sometimes you just don’t need Photoshop.

This is an actual unretouched photo of some unretouched structures in my nightly meanderings (Feb 7, 2009 ~8:30 PM).  No super-saturation or false-color IR.  All I added was my name and copyright.  How fair is that?

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All the color here comes from the various monochromatic artificial light sources and of course the wonderful hues you can coax from the evening sky with a 4-second exposure.

I used to love to shoot out the apartment window in the middle of the night and let my Nikkormat EL stretch towards 60 seconds with slide film to get the ‘real’ colors from the Upper West Side tenements, topped by urban nimbus streaks. Besides the amplified subtleties the results incorporated the non-linear sensitivities of the different color layers when exposed outside the roughly 1 to 1/1000 second range they were calibrated for, hence reciprocity failure.

Another note about this image is the lens: the little Nikkor 50mm 1.8 (effective 75mm in DX). The VR zooms are pretty amazing but if I want the sharpest of the sharp, I snap on this baby (and lock my vision into medium-telephoto for better or worse). It provides that extra kick I look for in the detail and undoubtedly adds to the overall subliminal effect on the viewer. (It makes me kinda yearn for one of the Micro Nikkors, except they are all longer and slower and bigger and cost 20 times as much.)
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