PicLens should be gimmicky, but somehow isn’t. It’s a browser add-on for viewing images (plugin for IE, extension for Firefox), that understands the major photo sites. This means it can display all relevant pictures, rather than just those currently visible. It’s easier to explain with an example:

I was making mockups for a uni project this evening, and needed a picture of a juggler, with specific criteria: it had to be a full-length, side-on view. I searched for ‘juggler’ in Flickr, and the search results showed me 20 pictures per page. This was a bit slow, and by page 10 was getting frustrating - it turns out most people don’t shoot jugglers this way. Eventually it occured to me that PicLens might help. It places a small ‘play’ icon over images from supported sites, and once clicked brings up a full-screen, 3D wall of images:

PicLens understands that I’m on a Flickr search page, so performs the search progressively as I scan along the wall. The scroll wheel zooms in, and dragging left/right pans along at variable speeds. This is approximately a billion times faster than going through individual pages. I glanced at hundreds of pictures before spotting something appropriate, at which point I double-clicked it. This downloaded the high-res version and displayed it full screen - I could then jump to the photo’s Flickr page via a button at the top of the screen (although I only discovered this later after watching the tutorial video - it could do with being a little more obvious).

I’ve been merrily browsing my contacts’ photostreams and sets all evening - the wall is visually gorgeous, and it’s just good fun. Plus, photos generally look better on darker backgrounds. It’s technically polished, too: the wall appears extremely quickly and I’ve experienced no processing delay when browsing, which is impressive for a full-screen app¹. It’s possible to scan faster than new images can be downloaded, but they appear fast enough that this is rare. I should mention that it’s stalled on me a couple of times, but re-clicking the play button solved it.

PicLens supports Google Images, Yahoo Images, YouTube, Facebook and deviantART, amongst others. There’s also a Wordpress plugin to add support to individual blogs. I predict somebody will buy this company pretty sharpish. Definitely worth installing if you spend any time browsing images, imho.

1. having said that, my Firefox install is less than a week old and everything’s quick at the moment [↩]

Have you seen the Vatican’s list of modern sins? Is most helpful. If you’re catholic, this is divine guidance on how to avoid going to hell. If you’re not, it might seem like an overgrown cult trying to induce guilt so people will go running to church, but let’s not be so hasty. Maybe we can all learn something - let’s examine the scourges of our time:

Environmental pollution

Yep, pretty bad. I’d like some quantitative measures, though. I mean, I should clearly go to confession if I leave the heating on while on holiday, but what about putting too much water in the kettle? Will God hate me? Is there a pits-of-hell-seconds / milliwatt-hour conversion table?

Drug trafficking and consumption

Let’s assume this means illegal drugs and not aspirin, or Tesco is totally screwed. Trafficking illegal drugs is indeed not good, but the evils of consumption are somewhat dubious. You could come up with hypothetical situations in which nobody is being harmed: if I grow my own marijuana, smoke it in an enclosed room and never tell anyone or endorse the product in any way, will God still hate me?

Inflicting poverty

Fair enough.

Accumulating excessive wealth

Seriously? Getting rich is in the top seven evil things? What if you bequeath it all to good causes? What if you’re Bill Gates, and you use your fortune to get direct access to important people who can help you give billions of dollars to charity? What’s ‘excessive’, anyway? I agree there may be a moral case against hoarding money, but it’s pretty low on my list of Things To Fix.

Genetic manipulation

That’s just ignorant. Genetic manipulation could and probably will save billions of lives, by producing varieties of food that can be grown in areas of most need. Any opposition that isn’t “I’m just making sure this is properly regulated” is medieval and verging on the bonkers. I’d also point out that having sex means random splicing of genetic information -far from the carefully controlled small numbers of genes manipulated in labs - and God doesn’t seem to mind that (providing you don’t have any fun in the process, obviously).

Morally debatable experiments

If this were ‘morally wrong experiments’, I’d call the argument circular. What’s evil? Evil cats! As it is, the argument is not only circular but completely insane. Anything morally debatable is a sin?! Based on the Vatican’s debating team, presumably. I’d like to give this pregnant woman a new drug to prevent her dying in childbirth; of course, as with any medical procedure there’s a million-to-one, unforeseeable chance her four-week-old feotus could react against the drug and die. Can I still do it? Can I try feeding millions of starving people with this genetically modified grain, granting that the scientists who created it are evil sinners? Can I use these embryonic stem cells, that were going to be thrown away anyway, to help cure disease and alleviate suffering worldwide? Can I compare the energy usage of normal and energy-saving light bulbs, given that the experiment will add extra environmental pollution?

Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

Well, yes. And these are…? I was aware that bad things are bad; this seems somewhat broad and already covered by commandments and things. Clarification would be appreciated. I don’t know what they could possibly be referring to, here, so let’s pluck something out of the air…say ‘freedom of religious belief’. Well, it’s clearly wrong to outlaw religious belief, yes. Oh, wait, you want ‘freedom from anything that insults our religious belief’, too? That’s not logically possible I’m afraid. Sorry.

Frankly, this list isn’t much use in avoiding eternal torment. Bad cult. Must do better. 

These sins are better than the previous seven, as they aren’t uncontrollable human instincts and laughably obvious ploys. But they’re all redundant or self-serving. It’s also unclear how any of these ‘mortal sins’ relate to the commandments: they’re the only official lists of ‘grave violations of the Ten Commandments’, but neither list contains, say, ‘genocide’, or ‘don’t fight with protestants’.

I just walked into my bathroom and got a mouth full of spider web. Where the hell did that come from? I’m sure it wasn’t there an hour ago. Now I’m on the lookout for a super -spider loose in my flat.

So I’m on the train to London and my book on photographic theory starts relating people’s responses to photographs with Freudian theories of the fetish. The fetish, says Freud, is a male pursuit caused by, wait for it, psychic trauma over the mother’s lack of a penis. The male viewer looks and looks away from the genital region, and this like/not-like dilemma can be related to photographs which produce the same response. Much analysis follows.

I plugged this into my Is-This-Bollocks-O-Meter, and it came out with a resounding ‘Yes, this is Bollocks’.

Now, it’s clearly wrong to jump to conclusions. Proper skeptical reasoning demands I take into account my own biases and lack of knowledge. Have I read Freud? No. Am I an expert in psychology? No. Am I particularly knowledgeable when it comes to photographic theory? No. Do I have a deep suspicion of psychoanalysis anyway? Yes. But, I’ve read modern psychology guides saying psychoanalysis was rejected a long time ago. I’ve seen this from more than one source.

I plugged this new data into my Is-This-Bollocks-O-Meter, and it came out with a resounding ‘Yes, this is still Bollocks’.

This issue was still bouncing around my brain as I arrived at uni the next morning and headed into the weekly theory lecture. It started off very well. On Surrealism and the city, the first half was fascinating and generated much discussion in the cafeteria. The second half, though, went off the deep end rather quickly. Apparently much of Surrealism was intended as an expression of the unconscious mind, and this lead to a discussion of Freud. The unconscious mind was explained, and this somehow resulted in a student interjecting with the theory that our destinies are pre-planned in our heads and we just follow a set path. The lecturer, a perfectly likeable chap, pandered to this by noting (not sure why) curious coincidences in his life - for example, he lives only fifteen minutes from where his parents first met! Could there something else going on?

I thought this was all a bit stupid, but kept my mouth shut. We then heard a brief explanation of the fetish, which mercifully didn’t mention the whole lack-of-penis thing, and then came a powerpoint slide on dream interpretation, claiming that our dreams are full of unconcious meaning. By this point I’d had enough.

In a manner most unlike me, I leapt into a conversational pause and stated that modern psychology rejected Freudian ideas decades ago. It’s not that there are no elements of truth, but we now use a different framework. Dreams aren’t full of unconscious meaning, they’re just random neurons firing in the brain¹. So why is psychoanalysis so prevalent in photographic theory? Is it just because it was around in the 60s and 70s, when much of the initial theory was formulated? I finished my little speech in rather unfamiliar territory, wondering what was going to happen next.

You’ve never seen anyone back away from a theory so fast.

He agreed that the prevalence of psychoanalysis at the time might contribute, and suggested that I’d hit a sore point in regards to modern thoughts on photographic theory. This was nice to know. But his main explanation for the eminence of the theory was that Freud wrote incredibly well - he is apparently a joy to read. The lecturer wasn’t endorsing this as a valid piece of reasoning, but it was quite the astonishing thing to say, given that we’re meant to be taking the theoretical ideas seriously. He didn’t seem annoyed that I’d raised the issue, thankfully

A bit later we somehow got onto the effect of tv/games/films on young people, and the lecturer said he thought it was obvious the rise in knife crime could be attributed to media depictions of violence. I bristled, but decided I’d objected enough for one lecture; thankfully one of my classmates challenged him.

A friend later asked if I was feeling a bit uppity (in a friendly way, though). We all agreed that the lecture had taken a bizarre turn in the second half, and the role of media violence came up in conversation later.

I feel a bit odd about speaking up, as I’m deeply suspicious of anything suggesting I know better than the teachers, especially as I’m in the first few months of my course. I’m happy to be shot down in flames if I am wrong, though, so I think it’s ok. All things considered, I think it was justified.

1. I think this is actually a bit more complicated, to be fair [↩]

Concerted efforts to abolish the blasphemy law appear to have paid off, as the Lords have passed the latest amendment to the Criminal Justice bill. This started a couple of months ago when Evan Harris proposed a bill to repeal the outdated legislation, getting a fair bit of publicity in the process. I asked my MP to support it but he never replied, in fairness possibly because the amendment was withdrawn a few days later, after the government said it would propose its own version. I was a little skeptical at the time, but it was indeed added to the Criminal Justice bill amendment, and is now set to become law (or, not-law). Hooray!

The House of Lords Bishops weren’t best pleased. Rowan Williams supported it initially, then made various impenetrable speeches suggesting he thought it was all a bit mean, and finally wrote a wishy-washy letter saying it was maybe a bad move.

It should not be capable of interpretation as a secularising move, or as a general licence to attack or insult religious beliefs and believers.

Those two problems deserve to be placed in the same sentence, of course.

He voted in favour, but the aforementioned speeches suggests he wants more powerful legislation in its place. Well, tough.

I don’t like waiters arranging knives and forks for me. I do need help, somebody who knows the rules of restauranting to liaise between me, the other guests and the kitchen in an efficient manner, and am happy to pay for this. But pouring drinks, arranging cutlery and pulling back chairs is too much like slavery. Don’t like it.

I picked up The Feeling’s new album ‘Join with Us’ a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been looping pretty much ever since. I adored their first album¹, and its final track “Blue Piccadilly” is my 2nd all-time-most-played song, according to iTunes. I’m happy to say I like their second just as much - it’s happy, fun and eminently sing-along-able. iTunes says my most played track is “Don’t Make Me Sad“, although the endearingly bonkers “Turn It Up” is close behind. Highly recommended by me.

There’s one caveat: I have heard complaints over the compressed nature of the sound. I’m not particularly sensitive to that kind of thing, but can pick up on it at times. My computer and car speakers aren’t all that great to begin with, so it’s not too annoying, but it could be a problem on a better system - just thought I’d mention it.

1. currently £5.49 on iTunes [↩]

My computer had never worked properly since I put in together in late 2005. I got random static bursts, and most USB devices would crash the system if left plugged in. I replaced the motherboard in desperation six months later, but it didn’t help much - the same problems came back. Research suggested the CPU and motherboard (both of them!) conflicted in some bizarre way, but no solutions were forthcoming, and I eventually gave up removing this or that piece of hardware every few weeks to see whether it made a difference. I didn’t have the money to replace both, so I lived with it. This happens sometimes with technology - it just never works right, and you end up having to buy something new. I got used to working around the problems for a couple of years, but a confluence of problems last month finally did me in. Before February it would have been a luxury, but it crossed into the sensible-decision bracket, so I didn’t have to feel guilty. I was going to need more RAM and a new hard drive anyway, so I finally gave in and ordered a totally new system, this time based around Intel rather than AMD.

I’d decided early on that my priority would be processing and editing photos. I’m not bothered about playing games - I’d like to be, but nothing other than guitar hero has grabbed my attention for ages now - so I concentrated on RAM and CPU power at the expense of graphics. My friend Ben helped me choose the most appropriate equipment, and we ended up with a Q6600 quad-core processor with 4gb of RAM, plus a larger HD. It all arrived yesterday morning and I put it together in the afternoon.

The hardware setup took a few hours, after which it worked first time, which is a rarity! I then spent as long trying to talk the XP install into understanding the SATA drivers, and my twitter followers will know how frustrating that became - sorry! After that, though, everything was smooth as Captain Jack. XP is now all installed and I’m nearly done getting it all configured.

Lightroom and Photoshop are mind-bogglingly faster. Adobe products are one of the few that can take full advantage of four processors, and the extra RAM¹ means much less hard-drive thrashing. I can switch between the two programs without having to shut down everything else, and this morning I was happily editing in both programs with Firefox and iTunes running in the background. This is exactly what I wanted - editing photos should be much less frustrating now, and for the next few years of my uni course.

A couple of weird little problems have solved themselves, too. I was having issues with a) my mouse double-clicking when it should be single-clicking, and b) my router dropping packets so random bits of websites would fail. Both have Just Gone Away.

I’ve also seen a significant speed boost in Google Docs, of all things - I guess it relies heavily on local javascript processing.

I tried not to get too wound up over the old problems - there are worse things in life than the odd crash, or having to remember to unplug a card reader - but *tempts fate* it’s really very nice to have a stable system. Totally worth it.

1. only 3.5gb is accessible as I couldn’t stretch to a 64-bit OS [↩]

I’ve made some silly mistakes when ordering stuff over the Internet, but this afternoon I messed up in a frankly ridiculous manner.

I was ordering some gear from eBuyer, and paying through Google Checkout. I’ve done this plenty of times before, but was particularly excited as I’m finally, finally replacing my never-worked-since-I-got-them motherboard and CPU. My final kit selection had been worked on for days, and I’d checked the cart many times to ensure I’d added the correct items. I knew that if the order went through smoothly they’d be posted for next-day-delivery, which, being an impatient sort of chap, I wanted. So I completed the process and eBuyer confirmed they were waiting for Google to authorise payment. Google emailed me five minutes later to say my credit card had been declined and the order had been suspended.

Damn. I assumed the transaction was hitting not-usual-spending-pattern security flags, so the thing to do was phone my bank - Smile. I needed to fix the problem then tell GC to re-check my card, so I brought up GC’s transaction page. I grabbed the phone and tried to look up smile’s customer service number, but their help pages were down for maintenance, although I could still log into my account. I switched back to GC while searching the back of my credit card for hints, and in the process somehow dropped the phone.

It hit the keyboard, specifically the Enter key, thereby selecting whatever was focussed on-screen, which happened to be the ‘Cancel Order’ button.

Quite impressive, really. GC and eBuyer both emailed within seconds to confirm the cancellation and tell me not to worry - there was no way I’d be charged or the order would be retained. And that was that. Obviously it’s no big deal, but the elegance and speed of the operation were dazzling.

I ordered again, using a different credit card, and GC + eBuyer paused just long enough to make me think I’d confused the hell out of the system, but eventually accepted the order. It’s now with City Link and should be arrive tomorrow, although I’m a little concerned the fates may be against me.

The prisoner puzzle is apparently annoying other people as much as it did me, which is, you know, gratifying. It was a present when I was a kid, and became one of those items that pops up intermittently over the years, annoying me more each time. I confess I never figured it out, and I eventually stumbled across an explanation online. There are a few different versions out there, all using the same principle.

So, what’s happening to the extra prisoner? He’s being absorbed into all the others.

Look carefully at the remaining prisoners and you’ll see that each gains a small amount of mass - a bit of leg here, a forehead there. The puzzle is cleverly designed so that the individual prisoners appear to remain consistent between turns, but actually each body shape is duplicated, so they’re not ‘the same’ people after the turn. But, the duplicates are slightly different sizes. Check out Bushy Eyebrow guy just next to the ‘A’, going clockwise. When the wheel is at ‘B’ his legs are just that much longer than at ‘A’, and indeed all of the prisoners are slightly bigger. The extra guy is being chopped up into lots of little pieces and distributed amongst the rest. Cannibal prisoners.

Still don’t like it. I can understand it intellectually, just about, but I can’t grasp it properly. Writing this out has helped a little, but I still intuitively dislike that I can’t ’see’ the guy disappear. It’s a good one, though - I enjoy breaking my brain.

If my explanation hasn’t helped, there’s a particularly clear description here, and moillusions has further examples.

Here’s a puzzle that’s been on my wall since I was eight. 15 prisoners:

Rotate the upper surface and…

14 prisoners. Where did he go? Click on the images for larger versions.

I hate this puzzle. Even knowing the answer, I simply cannot get an intuitive grasp on it. I’ll post the explanation tomorrow.