My university information arrived late last week. I’d heard nothing since May and was half-expecting a phone call saying “sorry, we thought you were the guy with the pictures of the stairwells; obviously we can’t offer you a place”, so it was a relief. Included was a reading list, with two particular books listed as recommended reading before the start of term. This was great: there are approximately a million books on photography, and it’s hard to know where to start without some guidance. I ordered them from Amazon, whose super-saver delivery only took a couple of days.

Photography books are great. They’re large, colourful and printed on high-quality paper. If I had a coffee table, that’s where they’d be. The two I ordered are no exception; one is a reference for the technical side, and the other an introduction to critical theory.

I opened the latter and had a flick through. One of the first sentences I read declared that a key component of critical theory is psychoanalysis. Oh god.

Obviously, I am not a psychologist. But I’ve read something on the topic, and was under the impression that psychoanalysis forms no part of modern theory. It’s not that studies have shown Freud was completely wrong about everything, it’s that…actually, yes, Freud was wrong about everything. I looked up the reference just now, and it says the other key component of this type of photographic theory is post-structuralism. Oh good.

But, like I said, I’m not actually a psychologist and can’t claim to really know what I’m talking about. I’m trying to be appropriately skeptical about this. I really am. I shall read the whole book and, you know, take the course and stuff, then see what I think. They’d better have some evidence to back this stuff up, though. Otherwise I shall, um, complain about them on my blog.

I can’t move for hearing about the new xbox/PC game ‘Bioshock’, and was going to download the demo just now. Unfortunately, it’s almost 2gb. That’s a serious chunk of my 12gb monthly limit, which I usually skirt anyway, so I’m thinking twice.

I’m sure this problem won’t exist for much longer. It can’t: transfer limits are increasingly out-of-sync with average need. It’s been all about speed for a few years, but transfer limits must surely be the next battleground.

Most broadband customers have 2gb monthly limits. 2gb/month is only 67mb/day, which on my connection takes about ten minutes to download. Surely there must be a lot of people already getting charged more / cut off? Even if you’re not BitTorrent-ing (and a lot of people are), chances are you’re watching movie trailers, emailing photos and downloading music. And with high-quality video streamers like the BBC iPlayer just around the corner, 67mb a day is quickly going to look pitiful.

I don’t know how cynical to be about the responses of BT etc.. Chances are there’ll be a period where they just charge everybody more, then somebody will take the ‘revolutionary’ stand of offering higher transfer limits and everybody else will quickly catch up. The worry is they’ll use the issue as a chance to demand money from websites, as they’re currently threatening in the US.

Not content with already getting paid by everybody, telecommunications companies want to instigate a tiered-system by which Google etc. will have to pay more for their data to be transferred at higher speeds. It’s not a big step from there¹ to demanding money for basic accessibility, which completely breaks the democratic nature of the web. Currently, the smallest startup can compete with Google: if they’re successful enough, they’ll be able to find investors to help with bandwidth costs. But having to pay for basic accessibility would prevent them getting off the ground. There’s no reason for telecommunications companies to care, so it’s up to governments to regulate.

The counter-reaction of the “Net Neutrality” movement is vocal, but it’s not hard to make a convincing-sounding case for the other side using words like ‘government interference’, ‘freedom’ and ‘free market’². I don’t think it’s yet clear which way governments will go on this issue.

1. yeah, I know slippery slopes are logical fallacies, but remember that BT tried to demand money after claiming they owned copyright on the hyperlink - I don’t think this is beyond their capitalist brief [↩]
2. I wonder how libertarians deal with this particular issue. Democratic internet = yay, but regulation = bad. Probably the latter - hatred of government tends to trump all other considerations, in my experience [↩]

Skype had a major outage at the weekend. Their explanation is:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

I’ve no real reason to doubt their statement, except to wonder that, given their fifty million users, don’t a significant percentage shut down their computers overnight? Windows Updates don’t arrive instantly, either - mine take up to 48hrs to filter through…just thinking out loud.

Despite possible skepticism, I think people wondering ‘if Skype was planning to refund them for all the calls they had to re-direct to other, usually more expensive, phone numbers during the period of disruption’ should get a grip. Firstly, Skype charges per call. If you can’t call, you can’t get charged. But maybe they’re talking about Skype’s incoming phone numbers, which do cost. Maybe the problem is with incoming callers having to use a more expensive number? Is there any phone company in the world who would even attempt such an open-to-abuse “refund”? I’m sure Skype are well covered by service agreements anyway. I can think of hypothetically costly examples, but doubt they actually happened. I can see how someone might be aggrieved at losing the ability to conference call, or something, but the extra pennies involved? Really?

While working at PC World I once had somebody ask whether we were going to pay for the petrol incurred in his coming back to swap a box of floppy disks. Sometimes the world screws you out of pocket change; that’s just how it is.

One of my favourite people on one of my favourite podcasts died last night. Perry of the Skeptics’ Guide had been in hospital for a couple of weeks, but was expected to be back shortly. I was just listening to him early this morning…I didn’t know him, but have been listening to his thoughts and observations weekly for 18 months and can’t help but feel a passing acquaintance. It’s awful he died so young, and I feel for the rest of the team.

The local cinema had a very early preview of Atonement today, followed by a live-via-satellite question and answer session with its director: Joe Wright. Abi and I were there, and the following is spoiler-free…

The cinema was only half-full, and I was probably the only person in the room not to have read the book. It’s been heavily recommended by many people over the last few years, but after getting distracted two chapters in I never got around to carrying on - there’s nothing duller than re-reading for forgotten but necessary details¹. It’s one of Abi’s favourite novels, and she was very concerned the story would be changed for the film. She’s not a purist, and shares my view that it’s unreasonable to expect what works on paper to work on-screen, but didn’t want the spirit altered, particularly in relation to the ending. We thought it would be interesting to see our differing reactions if this did happen, given that I didn’t know the story in advance.

Abi was very, very happy to find the film was almost completely faithful to the book, and she had no quarrel with the ending. She’ll have a review up shortly on her blog², and will likely focus on this aspect, so I’ll stick to the non-book elements.

I enjoyed it. I liked the different, clever story, and thought it was well-structured. I was concerned for a while that it might wander off into Closer-like endless introspection, but it didn’t: this made me happy. I don’t think I’m as easily moved as I used to be³ but plenty around me were in tears for one reason or another, and I could see that it was touching at times. There was plenty for the filmmaking-geek in me to watch, too: interesting camerawork and filter effects, and one shot in particular was stunningly composed (waiting; outside; green dress; you’ll know it when you see it).

Joe Wright said afterwards that he felt Keira Knightley had grown into a woman since working with her in Pride and Prejudice, and I could see what he meant. She’s always had a girlish element - not a criticism, by the way - but here she was fully mature, and completely convincing. I couldn’t fault any of the acting - spot Brenda Blethyn, if you can - but she was the standout performer.

The Q&A session with the director was fascinating. He apparently read and completely rejected the original script, which changed the entire structure and major plot elements of the story, then worked with the same writer to fix it. That can’t be an easy conversation He had some insights into working with actors, notably the trick of spotting and eradicating the ‘tick’ that actors default into when they don’t know what to do - for Miss Knightley, it’s apparently pouting. He also slagged off the ‘adolescent’ notion that happy endings are always trite, and had things to say about the stand-there-and-look-pretty portrayal of women in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Los Angeles audience asked questions, which ranged from pretty vague ‘I love James McAvoy, please talk about him’ to specific questions on styles of camerawork, all of which were eloquently answered. Perhaps the most interesting was the woman who asked what he’d like to improve upon, which, to his credit, he answered honestly - he picked out a scene which doesn’t match the vision in his head. The session lasted perhaps 45 minutes, and although a little sycophantic was definitely worthwhile in my view.

I could have done with a little longer between the film and the Q&A to get my head around some of the themes. It doesn’t give anything away to say that the concept of storytelling has a major structural and thematic role, but I’d have felt more intellectually satisfied if I’d figured it out myself rather than had it explained to me. That’s my fault, though - I should have read it before
I personally can’t see anybody leaving the cinema and not thinking it time well spent. Even if you don’t like the story, it’s interesting enough to linger, and fun to analyse. Definitely recommended by me.

Incidentally, such an early screening prompted huge security from the cinema. A burly security guard on the door warned the queue that all mobile phones and recording devices must be switched off. This was reiterated once we were seated, and there was somebody sitting next to the screen throughout the film, watching the audience. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, I’m intrigued that cinemas are willing to do it, and wish they’d bother for enjoyment as opposed to copyright protection. I’d happily pay more to attend a cinema that has guards watching for people making noise - I’d say it’s a problem in 1/3 films.

1. I’m 2/3 through Saturday, my first Ian McEwan, atm [↩]
2. may not be spoiler-free [↩]
3. which annoys me, actually - I like dramatic emotional responses! [↩]

I saw The Bourne Ultimatum this evening. After really enjoying ‘Identity’ but getting rather bored in ‘Supremacy’, I had a fun time in the third. Plenty of well-crafted and inventive action scenes, plus the sheer class of Joan Allen to raise everything up a notch The sound also impressed me - the combination of clear, vicious effects with the loose, chaotic camerawork made for some brutal fight scenes, and I thought the music was particularly atmospheric. Sure, the film was full of less-than-plausible ideas - this is the nature of spy thrillers. Nevertheless, one scene went too far:

There is no way the CIA use Norton Internet Security.

There should have been a scene where they missed capturing Bourne by twenty seconds after their computers locked up for no apparent reason. I wonder how much money changed hands over that little plug.

I’ve had connection problems for the last couple of days. My router never reports any disconnects, but things will Just Stop for twenty seconds or so if a page has more than a couple of pictures on it. I’ve tried turning down Firefox’s maximum connections, but it’s hard to know whether it’s made a difference. It’s a tricky one to debug, but I suspect that my router, never very splendid in the first place, is on its way to the big electronics dump in the sky¹. Which is good, because I’ve been wanting an excuse to replace it.

In vaguely related news, my website reliability has plummeted recently. Textdrive’s mysql servers seem to have issues. I’ve heard very good things about Positive Internet, but unfortunately they won’t respond to emails asking whether it’s possible to pay monthly rather than in one annual sum. Gah.

1. which I imagine being much like Robots [↩]

I am, it turns out, a bit of a cheat at my own game. I hereby declare Lewisham Kate official winner of inaugural webogies, and in some style.

Thanks for playing, Kate I seem to remember the traditional prize being a giant cup of snot, but I think we can all do without that…

I recently started listening to the Astronomy Cast podcast¹. It does a marvellous job of explaining the crazy universal physics I enjoy letting blow my mind. Dark matter, dark energy, relativity, spaghettification, black holes, the (endlessly fascinating) cosmic microwave background…it’s all wonderful stuff.

But it’s not all far-out frontiers of science. Sometimes it’s a little more local. I recently learnt that geysers regularly explode out of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. The water is flung out into the vacuum, where it instantly crystallises and over time has formed a ring. Isn’t that a beautiful image?

The title of the most recent episode was ‘Mercury‘. I was happy to listen while driving home from dancing, but didn’t anticipate anything special. I figured I knew the most interesting Mercury facts: it’s hard to see as it doesn’t get far from the sun, it was a good test of general relativity versus Newtonian gravity, something about a magnetic field…Otherwise, reasonably uninteresting, as planets go.

Despite years of ingesting popular science, it apparently hasn’t yet sunk in that a) I know nothing and b) everything is interesting. Mercury, unsurprisingly, is very cool:

• Ice. Radio telescopes suggest there *might* be (water-)ice in the pole craters, which lie permanently in shadow. Ice! Probably from comets.
• It’s made of iron, and extremely dense. The most dense object in the solar system, in fact. This presents a problem - how did this happen? Probably it’s the iron core of a once larger planet, in which case, what happened to the rest? Did something slam into it? Did a young sun blast its surface away?
• Venus is hotter than Mercury, due to the former’s runaway greenhouse effect.
• At times when Mercury is visible, we always see the same face. For decades it was assumed that the planet is tidally locked - it rotates once per orbit, like the moon to the Earth, only ever showing the same face to the sun. Radio telescopes showed this isn’t true: the back of the planet is incredibly hot, which shouldn’t be the case. It turns out that because Mercury’s orbit is particularly elliptical it’s become locked into a pattern of 3 rotations per 2 orbits.
• It has a magnetic field. Weird. Magnetic fields are caused by molten cores. Mars used to have a molten core and magnetic field, but cooled. Theory suggests that, despite its proximity to the sun, Mercury should have cooled similarly. Why hasn’t it? Current theories suggest that the aforementioned weird orbit pulls and pushes on the planet in such a way that its core remains molten.
• The far side of Mercury is mysterious. It’s incredibly difficult to observe, but tentative low-resolution imagery has hints of a massive crater and mountain. Did Mercury get hit by something enormous enough to seriously deform its iron structure? NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, en-route and scheduled for arrival in 2011, should provide answers.

There’s plenty more in the show.

It’s quickly become one of my must-listen podcasts, and is never less than fascinating. Large amounts of kudos and thanks to Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay for the hard work they put in - it must take some serious weekly research.

1. sometimes only half of it, as my iPod is dying. Sob. [↩]

There comes a point, while walking in the rain, at which you are completely soaked through. I have a penchant, at this particular moment,  for realising life is Good Times and starting to grin like a mad thing. I suspect the neighbours think I’m nuts, but I don’t care.

The Quark bit is just wrong. Via.

My insurance documents are unambiguous: if I claim for a new non-windscreen, I lose my no-claims discount. This being worth more than the cost of a new window, it’s not worth claiming for.

We’ll gloss over how completely stupid this system is.

I rang around for replacement quotes this morning. After various deep-memory recalls of the phonetic alphabet, as well as a few weird questions - I have no clue whether my Micra is ‘the new shape’ - I had estimates ranging from £115 - £250. But two separate people told me I should double-check with my insurance company, as these things are usually a) covered and b) have a smaller excess. I could really do with not paying £115 at the moment, but unfortunately Swiftcover don’t want to talk to me. Their helpline is ‘experiencing unusually high call volumes’ and recommends I email. Which I’ve done. Bit like I did yesterday. Ho hum.

Update: Sorted. To their credit, Swiftcover did get back to my email in under two hours, with exactly the information I needed. £65 + 1 year suspension of the NCD and it’ll be fixed tomorrow. Yay!

I really enjoyed it. I was a little worried it might just be a look at the bizarre things people believe, which would probably have been entertaining enough, but there was also an excellent explanation of the reasons we all stumble into supersition - I thought of Skinner’s pigeons seconds before they turned up¹ - and probably the best tv explanation of the scientific method I’ve seen. Rather than being overwhelmingly negative about the reach of the paranormal into society, there was a healthy dose of wonder: ’science is the poetry of the universe’.

I particularly enjoyed RD² calling out the cold-reading card guy, and the discussion with the magical-thinking astrologer was very revealing - the guy refused to validate anything he believed! I was also amused that Jonathan Cainer’s name was blurred, but it was obvious anyway :-) I liked the swipe at postmodern/relativists - Melanie Phillips take note - and the dowsers, while demonstrated to be completely wrong, were treated humanely. I’d be interested to see more of the interview with the ”I’ll be around for billions of years” spiritualist, although it was probably all as bonkers as the clip we saw.

I didn’t think the Warwick Uni sociologist’s point was followed up as well as it could have been. He claimed that people could interpret evidence in different ways, and that a stalemate could result. I can see that refuting this is fairly complex, though. Do you go with the concept of a scientific consensus, or argue that interpretations cannot be inherently opposed if taken from the same data - that any differences must be resolveable through logic³?

There could possibly have been more time spent on the reasons irrational belief is bad for society, but I suspect that’ll come in next week’s show on alternative medicine and the NHS. Astrology and psychics irritate and worry me, especially when you realise how much money they bilk from gullible-but-often-desperate victims, but it’s alternative medicine that’s the really despicable, dangerous area. Looking forward to it.

(update: this Richard & Judy interview sums up some of the main points. Richard M talks sense, Judy seems…less impressed)

1. I must have read about them in a Dawkins book, I guess [↩]
2. who channel 4 seem to have decided is ‘Mr Grumpy Face’, given the not particularly representative pics they’re using on their website [↩]
3. which I’m not claiming is necessarily true, but seems possible [↩]

There’s a cool discussion over at Photocritic regarding the future of photography. Are revolutionary changes in the pipeline? Or will current concepts just evolve?

I think it’ll be a matter of increased data collection. In the same way that a RAW photo currently (kinda) stores an extra two stops of exposure data, I think future sensors will be able to capture far more than just the final image. Quickly taking a range of exposures wouldn’t be a problem with current technology, and some decent post-processing software would be able to even out any differences due to motion-blur. Couple this with the plenoptic camera, which can focus after the event, and you’ve got a quasi-3d recreation of the scene inside your computer, and you can compose your photo after the effect. Would this detract from the skill of taking photographs ‘in the field’? Possibly, in some respects. But so what?

It brings up an point I’ve been wondering about: is there any physical reason why current CCDs require roughly the same exposure times as film? Is it that they became commercially viable once the technology reached the level of film, or is there more to it? Can we expect future CCDs to be incredibly light sensitive? Will grainy low-light photography become a thing of the past? Or is it a physics thing - we simply need x number of photons to resolve an image? My limited physics knowledge suggests that limit is a way off, but I could be wrong. Could future CCDs capture the full dynamic range available to the eye?

A commenter brought up an interesting extension to this, something that I haven’t thought about for a while: what’s with film and CCDs being worse than the eye anyway? Admittedly the eye isn’t actually as good as we think - what we see as a high dynamic range visual field is as much to do with our visual system continually re-exposing and filling in the image with as much detail as possible - but nevertheless it’s still superior to film / CCDs. I think. A modern CCD can handle, what, seven stops of exposure in a single image? Could this be increased? Hell, what’s to stop us eventually putting rod and cone cells onto a sensor? In an octopus-like manner, of course - the human setup would be silly.

Other commenters have ideas regarding photography as a social tool. Future photos will no doubt contain both time and GPS data. Flickr already supports searching by tag, place and time. A massive distributed network of such information would be a powerful tool against crime and for the seeking of wonderful things. Add video and sophisticated face-recognition software into the mix and things go mental. There’d be implications for privacy, as well as how much coolness the brain can handle.

I don’t think any of this is way out there. Some of it is way closer than the horizon. I think it’s a very exciting time to be alive and into photography.