Christmas in Boston

For the first time in remembered history, I spent Christmas away from the tropical San Francisco Bay Area. Bonnie and I flew to Boston (and boy were our arms tired!) Since I had a real ticket, and she had a stand-by buddy pass from her pilot son, I got to Boston a full day before she did. I had the dubious honor of getting the rental car at midnite and then plowing steadfastly through unknown freeways and streets, through intersections lined with last week's snow drifts, to find Bonnie's daughter, Nina, waiting at her place in Medford, Mass. I only had to stop once and get out the directions and puzzle it out.

We had a wonderful time the next day watching Nina's Battlestar Gallactica Mini-marathon. I'd never seen the new show, and it's one of her favorites, so we vegged out and enjoyed it.

Bonnie showed up at Logan airport that night, in the midst of a midnite traffic jam. Three jets full of folk arriving almost at once, each person with someone in a car coming to get them.

The next few days were filled with books, DVDs, sightseeing, Christmas tree cutting and decorating, Chinese food, more sightseeing, visiting friends, and general lethargy. The dry air, or something, produced a mild cold in my nose. I grew to hate the bright yellow Chevy Cobalt rental car. I drove way way too much. Bonnie and I went all the way to the end of Cape Cod with an old old friend of hers who lives in Sandwich. Who'd have even known there was a Sandwich to live in? What a concept.

We both returned to the west coast yesterday, not quite on the same plane, but close enough that we both ended up being picked up by her mom -- me in downtown San Francisco where I ended up (after taking BART (the SF version of a subway) and then failing badly at navigating the town by bus) and Bonnie at the airport. We got back to Petaluma last night, and are nearly back to what passes for normal today.

Look! It's a stereo picture, looking out the jet window! Try to superimpose the two images into a composite image in the center. See? It's 3D!

An Incredible Day in America

Here's a short and pithy little post on Huffington's website. A fellow I don't even know, Martin Garbus, writes how today two amazing things happened.

One, the supposed Bush/McCain comprimise was not, as widely reported, a case of Bush capitulating to McCain and outlawing torture.

Rather, it was the establishment of a titanic "legal excuse" for torture -- all the accused has to do is say a "reasonable" person in that situation would think it was ok to do it. Sort of like "I was just following orders, so I figured it was ok."

Who figures out what is "reasonable?" Sounds like it's the very agency accused of sanctioning torture.

Of course, this doesn't change international law, which, since Nuremburg, has outlawed torture, and which is US law.

Two, in the words of Mr. Garbus:

Secondly, the President in authorizing surveillance without seeking a court order has committed a crime. The Federal Communications Act criminalizes surveillance without a warrant. It is an impeachable offense. This was also totally missed by the media.

As someone later comments on the blog, how exactly does this compare with Nixon, being impeached by over a cover-up of one illegal break-in which he ordered? Let's see. Bush has not only authorized 500 illegal wiretaps at a time, but then pressured the media to not report it for a year.

Sounds like an impeachable offense to me.

Senator Diane Feinstein doesn't quite go that far, but in her statement on the issue she gets as animated as I've ever heard her to be about the illegality of the administration's actions.

What seem to gall her is that at the same time she was defending the Patriot Act and the US government to her constituents who feared the immense power that the Act gave the president, telling those constituents that we are a nation that respects the rule of law, the administration was ignoring the need for authorization from the FISA court, authorization demanded by Congress itself.

The way she put it was:

I was heartened when Senator Specter also said that he believed that if the New York Times report is true -- and the fact that they have withheld the story for a year leads me to believe it is true, and I have heard no denunciation of it by the administration -- then it is inappropriate, it is a violation of the law.

How can I go out, how can any Member of this body go out, and say that under the PATRIOT Act we protect the rights of American citizens if, in fact, the President is not going to be bound by the law, which is the FISA court?

And there are no exceptions to the FISA court.

She goes on to say, "I am so proud of this Government because we are governed by the rule of law, and so few countries can really claim that."

What I'd like the Senator to explain is how she, or any other congressperson, can at this point justify our very presence in Iraq, a sovereign country, which we have invaded and overthrown and occupied. Preventing such acts is the very basis of international law. How exactly do our actions in Iraq today square with being governed by the rule of law?

Bush, Cheney, and Rice can say that any "reasonable" person would have thought it was OK. But what can those who actually believe in the rule of law say?

Panexa

Feel the need for a little more medication in your life?

For that something that you don't know if you have or not, try a little Panexa!

Someone put a lot of time and energy into this. Read the fine print. It gets better and better...

Watch the Watchers

Have you ever been to a demonstration? A political meeting? A (gasp!) Protest? You know, exercising those things that are guaranteed by our Bill of Rights? Like, your Rights as a citizen of the United States? Inalienable rights?

What would you say if I told you that, simply by doing these things, you may have landed on a Federal Terrorist Watch list? Things are truly getting out of hand.

Don't believe it? Check out these real, actual news items:

Quakers are "suspicious" domestic groups:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/

Official of the Green Party grounded:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0216259

The assistant legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights is stopped at airport and forced to pull her pants down in public. That keeps us safe!
http://old.newhavenadvocate.com/articles/grounded.html

Senator Kennedy stopped from boarding an airliner:
http://www.randi.org/jr/082704gluton.html
(scroll down to "Homeland Insecurity" - or read the whole page- it's great)

What can you do? How about going to this site - the American Friends Service Committee - as you see, they've been personally singled out for this harrasment by the Feds. They have a form where you can customize a letter to send to your representatives, asking them to do something about this.

Here's the one I just sent Senator Feinstein:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Remember the Bill of Rights? That quaint old document? Well, it needs your help!! Please speak out and act to protect the rights to free speech and the freedom of assembly.

The Counterintelligence Field Activity, an agency of the Department of Defense, has been spying on individuals and organizations who believe that the Iraq War has been a mistake. I, and The American Friends Service Committee, who has been targetted, have been increasingly concerned about this threat to our fundamental rights. Have you ever been to a protest, a demonstration, a public political gathering? Of course you have! Well, chances are you have a file with the feds. Your name may even be on a "terrorist watch list." Remember when Senator Kennedy was stopped from boarding an airliner? It's happening more and more.

As a constituent, I am deeply concerned, as I know you must be, by the idea of our government spying on people who are doing no more than speaking their mind on the issues of the day. Frankly, I am outraged. I thought that we left this sort of thing behind in the McCarthy era.

And, after all, you are part of the government.

The Department of Defense has characterized concerned citizens as threats. I see a government agency spying on Americans exercising their rights as the real threat.

I know that Congress is about to take its holiday recess, but this is an incredibly important issue. Please write back to me and let me know what you plan to do in the new year to protect our country's bedrock principles.

Sincerely,

Steve Della Maggiora

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera

Say WHAT?

What the heck does that mean?

Imagine a camera which can take one picture of a complex field of objects. Then imagine that this image can be recomputed later to put any object at any distance in the image in focus.

What?

Ok, imagine you've taken a picture of Uncle Fred, but later, at home, you see some blurry object in the background behind him. You want to know what that object was. Now imagine that, with software, you can change the focus of the picture from Uncle Fred to the object behind, and as Uncle Fred gets blurry and out of focus the object comes into focus, and then you can see it's really a flying saucer...

Impossible, you say?

Well, a student at Stanford has made such a camera. Just check out this site.

Don't believe it? Check out these samples, particularly the splash of water.

Here's a very short story about it, which explains it a little more understandably: Focusing after the shot, the plenoptic camera: Digital Photography Review.

(Of course, there would only be a flying saucer in the picture if there really was a flying saucer in the picture...)

Museum Painting, take two

At the last minute (like, the night before I delivered it) it suddenly seemed imperative that the sky in the Sharpsteen Museum painting be changed. As I repainted it, the trees seemed to need a bit more work, and then the foreground.

Here's what it ended up looking like:



I thought I'd lost this picture (which is actually a composite of two overlapping pictures I took of the painting, to get a more high resolution image.) The disc I was using in my Mavica refused to be readable by the camera, and when I tried to finalize the disc in the camera it just made whirring sounds until it gave up and stopped. I tried cleaning the disc, only to have the next attempt end with the camera saying "repairing data" - that sounded ominous. I bought a CD repair kit, only to find that, though it worked great on regular CDs, it lacked the capacity to work on mini CDs, like the camera uses. A search of the internet produced a post where someone reviewed CD repair methods and found Brasso and a cloth to be as good or better than any of the bought kits.

So I spent quite a bit of time with the CDRW from the camera, some Brasso, and a cloth. Polish, try, fail. Polish, try, fail. Repeat.

Then last night I got the idea to try to finalize the disc in my XP computer. Another internet google produced a couple of posts where folk mentioned in passing that their XP computers read unfinalized discs. Well!

I tried it. It worked! The pictures that I'd given up as lost forever popped up on the XP computer screen. Cool! Sometimes all this electronic magic surprises in ways that are good.

Global Warming Could Halt Ocean Circulation, With Harmful Results

Some years ago I felt like Chicken Little. I'd read about the possible influx of fresh water from melting ice sheets in the Artic and Greenland, and how this could slow or stop the thermohaline "conveyor belt" currents in the oceans, which transport heat to the North Atlantic.

This circulation process, researchers say, is not inevitable. Research suggests it may have fluctuated or even stopped numerous times in Earth's distant past, and that it's especially sensitive to moderate increases in temperature or influxes of fresh water. The same very cold, very salty water that sinks in the far North Atlantic Ocean simply won't sink if it's just a little bit warmer or a little bit less salty. And at various times, it appears these changes have happened not in geologic terms of thousands of years, but rather decades(*)

Everywhere I went, I cried,"The Gulf Stream is in danger of stopping! The Gulf Stream is in danger of stopping!" And, like Chicken Little, I was pretty roundly ignored. Even folk who agreed that the whole "human induced global warming phenomenon" was real tended to think such a catastrophic thing was unthinkable.

If you wish to continue to think such a thing is unthinkable, whatever you do, don't look at this link.

You know how sometimes the weatherman predicts "25% chance of rain" and you think, well, that's not much? But sometimes even with only a 25% chance of rain it does, indeed rain?

Here's a quote from the article:

"We found that there is a 70 percent likelihood of a thermohaline collapse, absent any climate policy," Schlesinger said. "Although this likelihood can be reduced by the policy intervention, it still exceeds 25 percent even with maximal policy intervention."(*)

"Thermohaline collapse" means no Gulf Stream, means the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream is gone, means mighty cold weather for the north eastern United States and northern Europe.

Sometimes "global warming" can mean "localized freezing."