Here’s a man worried about aliens. He’s writing on Comment Is Free, and he’s worried about aliens. It seems Russian astronomers have been actively sending messages to ‘distant star systems’. David Cox is worried about the aliens. Thing is, the Earth has been blasting out electromagnetic radiation since the 30’s. We stick out. But, I suppose sending direct messages could conceivably alert civilisations to our existence, and serious people have worried about implications before.

This is not one of those times.

The problem is obvious. If we discover alien life ourselves, we can decide what, if anything, to do about it. If, on the other hand, we alert aliens to our own existence, we’ll be at their mercy. There’s no reason to suppose they’d be friendly. On the contrary, Independence Day may provide us with a more useful model than Close Encounters.

Is that all? No problem! We’ll quickly plug a MacBook Air into the alien mothership. Sorted.

After all, we earthlings have hardly shown an invariably benevolent attitude to such new lifeforms as we have come across. Why should aliens be any different? Any who prove capable of interpreting our messages are likely to be far more advanced than we are.

I’d argue that, for at least a proportion of the Earth’s population, benevolence correlates with advance. Also, there’s plenty of planetary real estate and it’s hard to think why a race capable of attacking would actually bother. But, still, let’s assume the aliens are religious fundamentalists intent on forcibly spreading the word of, say, Xenu.

Though we can’t at present envisage a means by which they could travel the vast distances that would separate us from them, they might well be capable of destroying, transporting or dismantling us by some form of remote control.

I need to take a minute.

Ok, I’m back. This is a glorious sentence. It takes making things up to a new level. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. But it doesn’t follow that advanced aliens can do anything you can imagine.

Travelling vast interstellar distances is an engineering problem. If you continuously accelerate at 1G you can circle the known universe in half a century; the downside is that time will pass more quickly for those back home, so you’ll never see anyone you love ever again. But it’s nevertheless possible - any of us could travel to distant galaxies given a ship and no attachments. Not easy, but perfectly possible within the laws of physics.

Remote control does not fall into this category. It’s just magic. You can’t gloss over this with ‘might well’.

Firstly, what exactly is being controlled remotely? Robots would still have to travel across the ‘vast distances’, so it can’t be that. Could it be random particles of matter? Done, of course, with Magical Advanced Technology that we can’t envisage. Ok, so aliens cause matter to spontaneously form into…some kind of awesome attacking machine. Got it.

This would be a terrible battle strategy. If you want to control a Mars rover, you can’t just drive it around from a computer screen back home. Light takes ten minutes to travel between the two planets. Tell the rover to move five metres to its left and it’ll take ten minutes to do so; it’ll be another ten before you find out whether it worked. Aliens, for all their matter-controlling machines of delight and wonder, would have to wait, at minimum, years between moves, in a game of incredibly dull interstellar Worms. In the meantime, humanity could figure out counter-attack strategies. Or move.

So far, there’s no reason to suppose that, if the Russians manage to discover any alien life, they’ll be seeking to marshal its firepower in the new cold war against the west.

There’s also no reason to suppose the Russians are looking for supernovae in which to breed Evil Space Cats with powers like that dude from Superman IV. I’ll mention it anyway, though.

Isn’t it time for Mr Miliband to tell President Putin in no uncertain terms that HMG will accept nothing less? Thereafter, we could all sleep safe in our beds once more.

Yes. Do that, Mr Miliband. I cannot sleep for worrying about the Russians harnessing alien technology. This is the only thing standing between me and blissful slumber, and it’s actually making me unsafe. Get it done.

A love of that universe is inextricably sown within me. There’s nothing I can do to stop this trailer giving me the shivers.

Via Lisa, I have determined the form of my daemon. It is ridiculously accurate. I’m sure you’ll all agree that I am:

Assertive, modest, shy, sociable, and a leader.

Yes, I am shy and sociable. I’m impressive like that. What animal do I therefore deserve? A siberian tiger, of course. Named Bryanna.

A siberian tiger. Oh yes. That is one kick-ass daemon.

Tip for any occasional visitors to London: railcards can now be linked to oyster cards, reducing the off-peak daily cap from £4.80 to £3.10. I think this is only useful for a small group of people who don’t buy season tickets, but happily I meet all the criteria For me it offsets almost exactly the increase in rail fares, which is handy.

In the comments of yesterday’s post Ben asked whether any other 400D owners had run the calibration process. I hadn’t thought of that. I’d searched for Lightroom ‘presets’ that fixed the colours and come up empty, but it didn’t occur to me to check for raw results of the ACR calibration script. A bit of googling and I found this post, in which a wedding photographer lists the results of his 400d calibration. I copied the settings into Lightroom and there was an immediate improvement. It was a touch too saturated for my tastes, but a quick fix later and I’ve got something that’s great. It’s not quite perfect - I imagine the values change based on individual cameras and specific colour temperatures - but easily good enough for the meantime. I’m happy. Thanks, Ben!

Friends, stalkers and the easily bored might have noticed that I haven’t uploaded many pictures to Flickr of late. This isn’t because my Year 25 project has stalled - I have the last couple of weeks worth of images ready to go - but because of a problem between Adobe Lightroom and my new camera. Two problems, actually, both related to colour. Here’s the first:

Problem #1 - RAW Colour Deconstruction

Every time a digital camera takes a picture it gets a stream of raw data from its sensor. The camera then converts this data into an image file. Higher-end cameras, though, are capable of saving the raw data so that it can be processed on a computer rather than in-camera. This has a few advantages:

Firstly, RAW files contain slightly more information of the extreme shadows and highlights in an image, so extra detail can be extracted.

Secondly, RAW files allow the white balance to be manipulated after-the-fact. If you hold a white piece of paper under the noon sun, then under a motorway lamp at midnight, you’ll see the same white piece of paper both times. But the lighting is actually very different - it’s obvious that motorway lights are very, very orange compared to daylight. Take a photograph in both circumstances and the digital camera has no way of knowing what colour things ‘really’ are, so it makes its best guess. A standard image file takes the guess, alters all the colours and saves the results. You can manipulate it manually afterwards by pointing out which particular area of the image should be white, but a RAW file skips the guessing part - it lets you say exactly ‘I was standing under a light emitting light of this particular colour, please adapt all colours appropriately’.

Thirdly, RAW files aren’t compressed. Even the highest quality standard image will exhibit signs of compression. Zoom in on a blue sky in a normal digital photo and you’ll eventually see unpleasant blocks.

There are disadvantages, too. For example, RAW files are larger and therefore slower - my camera can take 27 consecutive JPEGs but only 9 RAWs before its buffer fills up. Also, processing RAW files takes time, and needs special software. Here’s where Adobe Lightroom steps in.

Lightroom is a powerful and very capable RAW processor, as well as a library management tool. I think it’s fantastic. It can recover shadow / highlight detail while keeping the rest of the image stable, it can apply changes to batches of images simultaneously and it can edit a photo while rendering a PDF contact sheet and importing from a memory card. I used it for months and eventually paid £200 for a license, figuring I’d use it for years. It is the business.

At least, it was with my old camera.

The problem stems from differing RAW files. My old 300D used CRW files, while my new 400D uses CR2 files. Both RAW formats are proprietary, meaning that the exact structure of the file is known only to Canon. I don’t know whether Lightroom’s programmers reverse-engineer the formats or there’s some other scheme, but either way the result is the same: Lightroom interprets the RAW data in the best way it knows. With the CRW this was spot on, and Lightroom’s processing would produce results as-good-as-if-not-better-than the camera’s own processing (a Canon camera knows exactly how to deconstruct a Canon RAW file to display the optimal image). But the CR2 is broken - the colours just aren’t correct.

It’s most noticeable in the reds. Here’re three different versions of the same holiday scene:

On the left is a JPEG produced in-camera; on the right is Lightroom’s interpretation of the RAW file; in the middle is the RAW interpretation by Capture One Pro, a rival to Lightroom. All used the same aperture/shutter speed/white balance/flash power. As you can see, Lightroom is waaaaaay orange compared to the JPG and Capture One. Visually, I’d say the JPG has the most accurate colour rendition, if slightly over-saturated. This makes a big difference in skin tones, and I have a fair few pictures of sickly-looking babies.

Why don’t I use Capture One Pro instead? Because it sucks compared to Lightroom. Also I paid £200 for Lightroom, and I’m not giving it up, so there.

I investigated the issue, and it turned out to be a common complaint with CR2 files. But no easy fixes presented themselves. So, I figured, why not just use JPEGs? In practice the extra exposure data isn’t useful very often, and compression isn’t noticeable in high quality images. White balance can be convenient, but that’s the trade-off to get decent colour. For a while this was exactly what I did.

It was like taking a step backwards. A series of images from a cold New Year walk were just…annoying. The white balance would shift depending on whether the sun was out or hidden by clouds, and in the most extreme pictures people’s skin tones vary wildly. I can fix this in post-production, but only roughly - it’s not like I had people holding a grey card in every shot. Obviously I would have this problem with RAW images too, but I can at least say ‘the average light from a cloudy sky is this colour, please show me the appropriate colours’, rather than having to slide things around until it looks right. Even after fixing there’s still a fair difference between shots taken only a few minutes apart. Also, altering the exposure was far more tricksy. With RAW I can say ‘alter the exposure by one stop up’, whereas with JPEG it’s, again, an approximation.

I found JPEGs far more limiting than I expected. Often the results were great - the camera’s guesses are usually excellent - but whenever I wanted to alter anything I’d get frustrated by the lack of precision. I didn’t like it. So it was back to the RAWs.

Reading up on the topic revealed that plenty of people are having the same problems. But others say: so what, RAW is meant to be more work! I apparently shouldn’t expect perfect results - RAW just gives you a basis from which to start. I should just fix the colours manually in Lightroom and apply the same fix to every photo I import (Lightroom can do this automatically, even limiting it only to photos from a particular camera).

Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me get Lightroom to match the JPEG colours. It’s more than upping the reds - there’s extra blue in there too, along with saturation differences and blah. I’ve tried pretty hard, and I just can’t match it with Lightroom’s calibration tools. Others have struggled similarly. I can get it not-too-bad, but that’s not good enough - I want it pretty-good.

Some people are very cross about Lightroom’s obvious problems with CR2 files. I admit that it’s frustrating. But, there is a solution. It’s just not cheap.

Solution: Get hold of a Gretag Macbeth ColourChecker chart. This is a 6 x 4 grid of reference colours. Take a photograph of one of these in RAW, and run the Thomas Fors ACR Calibrator Script in Photoshop CS. Because the colours are standardised the script knows exactly what they should look like, and it’s capable of telling Lightroom exactly how to adapt its colours to get the correct results. Brilliant!

But, a Gretag Macbeth ColourChecker chart is £60 (I don’t actually have the £130 Photoshop CS either, although I may have to bite the bullet on that soon as my course will probably require it). £60 on a piece of cardboard is simply unjustifiable at the moment, even if I can use it as a grey card afterwards.

So I’m not sure what to do at the moment. I can run RAW files through a demo of Capture One Pro and manipulate the resulting JPEGs, I guess, but that’s far from ideal. I might put out a call to see whether someone has a ColourChecker chart I can borrow

I ran into another colour-related problem recently, but I’ll save that for another post.

Update: I found a non-expensive solution! Ben in the comments suggested searching for 400D owners who’d already run the calibration, and something turned up! It’s not completely perfect, but easily pretty-good.

I am increasingly aware that half the people I know regularly ‘freak out’. I don’t know precisely what this involves, but it happens a lot. It seems to be an interesting mixture of catch-all emotional reaction and a way of responding to the unknown. I’ve been trying to classify the different types:

• An exaggeration of ”I had a negative emotional reaction”. People get ‘freaked out’ in films that make you jump, but saying ‘it freaked me out’ sounds more primeval, mysterious and uncontrollable than ‘I jump when things frighten me’¹.
• The basic “I didn’t like it”. Put a fork anywhere near your eye and half the table will ’freak out’. I think this is just another way of saying squick.
• Unknown emotional reactions / cognitive dissonance; for example, coincidences. The brain doesn’t know how to resolve coincidences as there’s no pattern to detect, even though it seems like there should be. There’s no particular emotion associated with cognitive dissonance, so ’it freaked me out’ substitutes as a way to react.
• Related to the previous one - “I don’t understand what’s happening.” I know of people who won’t watch Derren Brown because he freaks them out.

That’s all I’ve picked up on so far. Anything else?

1. this is not to mock - I jump at everything. Close a car door on the other side of the street and you’ll find me at the top of the nearest lamp post [↩]

My university doesn’t accept essay submissions via post or email, so it was a trip to London this morning to shove an envelope through a letterbox. Still, the trains worked perfectly and it took almost exactly 5hrs, which isn’t bad going.

Classes don’t start again until February, but we get the project briefings this Friday. So that gives me three worry-free days to, oh, I don’t know, earn some money or something.

We bought Guitar Hero III for a friend this Christmas. Mistake. Should have gone for Dancing With The Stars:

Is it bad that I quite want it? Unfortunately it’s apparently not up to much:

While you’re moving your hands around, your couple will be dancing up a storm, doing their best to impress the judges. This is where one of the biggest faults of this game appears: namely the complete and total disconnect between your motions and the actions of your couple. While you’re going through the motions, your couple will dance impeccably, regardless of how poorly or how well you’re hitting all your moves. In fact, putting the Wiimote and nunchuck down and not doing a blasted thing while the song plays results in your couple having the time of their lives with the only indication that you’re not doing so well being the boos of the crowd and the disgusted looks of the judges.

Shame - the risk of ‘doing a Matt’ would be an incentive. There’s doesn’t seem to be any real element of competition either. But:

herein lies the hidden fun of Dancing with the Stars, however — in a group, it’s both fun and hilarious. Like any other rhythm game that gets you off the couch, Dancing with the Stars becomes exponentially more fun the more people you have around. What’s more, since it’s user-friendly and features something a lot of people know about (celebrities and music), it probably won’t be too hard to rope family members and non-gamers into the swing of things

Hmmm, his birthday’s coming up.

I like steampunk. I feel I miss out on a lot as I have the engineering knowledge of a small Rhodesian fieldmouse and lots of the literature is heavy on the technical details, but the mixture of faux-Victorian grandeur and advanced macro-machinery makes for entertaining stories and great constructions.

I also like superheroes. This goes without saying. There’s been some crossover, but nothing quite so cool as the steampunk Justice League:

A guy modded his action figures after reading the Batman graphic novel “Gotham by Gaslight”, in which a 1880s Batman faces Jack the Ripper. Gotta get that book. He deserves a lot of kudos for finding a Superman action figure that a) doesn’t completely suck and b) making it look good. There are close-ups of each figure on his site.

We went to an intermediate jive class on Monday. It wasn’t our usual venue, but I admit to being fairly confident about my ability to keep up, as the jive has generally come fairly naturally over the past few years.

Ha.

They used a different timing. Where we go quick-and-quick quick-and-quick quick quick, they go slow slow quick quick. It was like a different bloody dance. Lynsey adapted without a problem. I was pitiful.

The thing about getting to an intermediate dancing level is that you begin to do things automatically: muscle memory takes over and you can even forget what comes next then find yourself doing it anyway. This leaves you free to concentrate on arm movements etc.. Which is what we did. Except I couldn’t concentrate on steps and arms simultaneously. I got a bit pissed off before realising this was pathetic. Sorry, Lynsey!

I’ve been practicing around the kitchen. Don’t want to make a fool of myself again next week. The bright side is I won six lessons for me and a partner in a competition last year, so it’s not costing us anything.

Meanwhile, here is what jive looks like done properly:

See look, they go quick-and-quick quick-and-quick quick quick.

I’ve spent the last two days writing an essay on the ‘rhetoric of photography’. It is not my finest work. I did quite well on the last essay, but it was standard English Lit.-style compare-and-contrast stuff that doesn’t require much thought prior to writing. This one’s different, as it requires actual research. Never really had to research an essay before. It turns out reading the ‘required texts’ and appropriate chapters from a couple of other ‘recommended texts’ I quickly grabbed from the library before leaving for Christmas is not even vaguely enough work.

Yesterday’s draft didn’t go well. I had a bit of a panic this morning, but thankfully managed to salvage something workable this afternoon, and now have something that could at least be handed in. I’ve used three primary sources and have brief appearances from a couple of others. I might be able to shoe-horn in something else, but the bibliography is going to look pitiful in comparison to the recommended reading list. Oh well, at least I know now.

Obviously this is a standard line, but I am so going to be better organised this term. Most of the class were working flat-out in the week before our last project was due, and it’s just not fun. It’s been the same with two essays now. I’m determined to be on top of things over the next few months, as otherwise I might go nuts.

Mediawatchwatch reckons the government’s response means the blasphemy law is on the way out. Here’s what the Ministry of Justice representative said:

Against that background, I can say that we have every sympathy for the case for formal abolition. However, we believe it necessary to consult the Anglican Church before bringing forward a provision that particularly affects it. That is what we are now doing urgently. Subject to that consultation, which I can assure hon. Members will be short and sharp, the Government intend to bring forward amendments in another place to achieve the aims of new clause 1.

Which does sound a little more active than first impressions suggested. Good stuff.

Bah.

The government will oppose a move by MPs to abolish the law on blasphemy, Downing Street has said.

A spokesman said ministers wanted to consult the Anglican community further before supporting such a change.

Yeah, ask them. They’ll be unbiased about it, seeing as it gives them special protection and all. What’s ‘the Anglican community’, anyway? Bishops? Some kind of pew-leaflet referendum?

Lots of Christians have supported the move, but some haven’t:

Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, agreed that there was “no real argument” for retaining the law, saying: “Everybody knows it’s not really going to be used again.”

But he warned that changing the legislation could “send out a signal” that “gratuitous abuse and offence” is acceptable.

Blasphemy isn’t ‘abuse’, the ‘offence’ is entirely in your head, and it won’t do any such thing, so shut up¹.

I can only imagine the government is worrying about offending religious people. As ever, playing the offence card seems to work every time. There’s a law against blasphemy. A law. How is this not a no-brainer?

1. in training to be a lobbyist, me [↩]

Jeremy Clarkson recently published his bank details in an attempt to prove that you can’t get ripped off that way. He promptly got ripped off, and apologised for giving out misleading information. He’s come in for some abuse, and I find myself in the unheard-of position of defending him.

If you’d asked me yesterday I’d have said the same thing as Mr Clarkson (admittedly I might have double-checked before writing it in a newspaper). He might have been wrong about what was possible, but it’s pretty stupid that it’s possible to take money out of someone’s account using only their account number and sort-code. My details are on my debit card, my cheque book, and if anyone wants to pay by bank transfer (it being 2008, and all) I have to give them information that would allow them to take money from my account. That’s broken. Is the onus on us to only deal with completely trustworthy people? I’m aware that direct debits can be cancelled as required, but it’s a b0rked system that doesn’t allow anyone to pay you - by anything other than cash - without also letting them steal from you¹.

Saying ‘how hard can it be?’ is usually asking for trouble, as the answer is often ’surprisingly so’, but Paypal works, doesn’t it? People can pay me via email, and a one-way password encryption (although I don’t know if they use this) means no worries about them leaving everyone’s details on a train.

Privacy campaigners have made much of this. I’m always suspicious of anything that makes privacy campaigners happy, since they’re, generally speaking, mental. They make the occasional valid point, but it’s usually so mixed up in batshit crazy anti-government paranoia that I can’t be bothered listening any more. All too often it’s about making sure no data is ever revealed rather than minimising the risks of said data. That’s never going to work! Mistakes get made, that’s just how it is. The way to combat identity theft shouldn’t be to make sure you don’t reveal any details, it should be to make those details useless. This doesn’t work for medical records, or the threat of crazy people getting hold of your address, but it’s still, I’d say, rather important. I’ve no idea how easy it is to fix - surely biometrics will be eventually be able to solve the problem? - but the storage of personal details isn’t going to go away, and endless whining about the evil capitalist monopolies who want to (prepare yourselves for this) show you adverts (privacy campaigners die if exposed to adverts) and governments who might, at some point, do something unspecified but evil with your address and personal details, is unproductive.

Hmm. That somehow got ranty. Back to work.

1. possibly only in roundabout direct-debit-y ways [↩]