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A long time ago, I still walked around with a camera. I dug these up from my backups. These are my second greatest fear after caterpillars. The full album is here (you have to click on the post title to see the … Continue reading
Connect can be so inflexible at times.
This answer is right!
This calls for a response. I CHALLENGE THIS ANSWER!
FUUUUUU
There a billion posts on the internet about this already. I’ll just let the photos do the talking.
f/2, wide-open
f/2.8, smaller
f/16, very small
At f/2, you have a narrow depth of field.
At f/5.6, you have higher depth of field.
Therefore, if you want your dolphins to be in focus when you are in focus too, use a medium to high f-number. If your dolphins are blurry because they’re moving too fast, then increase your shutter speed and increase your ISO sensitivity.
There’s also something neat I want to say about properties of light, but I’ve got Spanish homework due in 2 hours, so I have to take care of that first.
Every dystopic future, survival-mode book or movie has a scene, or several, in which after a long day of killing zombies and being bums, the main characters sit down by the campfire to heat up a tin of beans. Apparently Chef Boyardee did not make it. Or maybe these stories take place too far in the future and everyone’s finished the ravioli leaving only baked beans.
I remember the first time having baked beans. It was at the S.T.A.R. after school program back at Marquez Charter Elementary. I guess they ran out of Nilla wafers that day, so instead they gave us canned beans. Wow, it as a gastronomic failure.
Maybe my tastebuds have died. Maybe I acquired a new taste. But beans are actually really good. Me gusta.
Me gusta los frijoles.
It’s been a while since my last time being a patron of the arts. By arts, I’m talking fine arts, a.k.a. something I usually don’t understand a.k.a. modern dance. So this past weekend, I attended February Dance at the Krannert Center. It was a great show and it was probably my first time genuinely enjoying modern dance. Part of the reason definitely has to do with the music accompanying the performances. In fact, I feel that music is the defining factor for the average joe to enjoy modern dance.
To be very blunt and honest, I don’t understand modern dance at all. Modern dance is strange. I don’t know even know how to start to appreciate the performances. Modern dance to my friends and me, is analogous to a child and medicine forced down his throat. It’s unpleasant because we don’t understand it and it certainly isn’t a sweet experience. I really feel like it’s not an instantly accessible art.
Though music isn’t the focus of dance, it’s certainly a mood setter. As a layman at modern dance, it’s important for me to find something to relate to. Unfortunately, I can’t easily relate to the dancers, so I turn to their movements. But when the movements get boring I listen to the music. However, it’s rare to hear nice music at these shows. Usually the audience just gets blasted with industrial sounds or random chatter. That’s describing a good case, things can get much worse. For example, last year I listened to a girl scream for 15 minutes as she walked around in spilled milk. Obviously, the dancers and choreographers should be commended for their extreme skill and effort, but what’s the point if the general experience is so unpleasant for the untrained viewer? Even if there’s a message to the piece, it’s lost if I can’t engage myself.
In any case, February Dance was an eye opener. The show opened with exactly what I expected. I saw people move around and jumping for 15 minutes while I got drowned by industrial noise. But from the second piece on, everything just took off and soared away. The greatest contributor to my sudden surge in interest and approval was the music. The rest of the performance was accompanied with exciting or lively music. The dancers were moving to the guitar melodies, to the French singing, to the folk songs. Through the discord there was also a pleasant accord. So really, to the average joe, music is really what can make or completely break a modern dance piece.
But folks, I didn’t write today to tell you about how I’ve finally enjoyed a dance piece. That would be silly. I have written today to bring the subject of Coughing Audience Syndrome to the public. Through all of this dance, I was reminded of one extremely annoying thing. Why is it that people cough so much at artistic performances? I’ve noticed this only happens in old-school performances like classical music and other performing arts. At every intermission, the whole theatre starts to cough. It’s ridiculous. This never happens at the movie theatre either. This phenomena is isolated to the performing arts.
I don’t fully understand this Coughing Audience Syndrome, but I promise as a responsible citizen of the United States, that I will investigate this thoroughly. I will update soon.
I can see that that we are clearly moving into a different era especially since my funny family photos aren’t from cameras and are really just screenshots. Please observe.
Umami Burger
Hello, tonight I watched a documentary on DMT. I really want to experience a trip now.
DMT
What to do? I guess a better question would be how to do?
Anthropology 399 is focused on crime. It’s great! I’m glad I’m taking a class whose purpose is purely intellectual and not at all vocational. My EE courses make me think, but this LAS class lets me daydream.
Anyway I read a passage. I don’t even know where it’s from. I just know some Frenchman called Durkheim wrote it a while back. After reading this passage twice, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve actually understood it. The funny thing is none of what he mentions is very profound at all. Unless I read and interpreted it all wrong, I feel like I’ve thought about a lot of this while letting my mind wander or while conversing with friends and family. I wish the translator had done a better job putting things in concise language. Perhaps my reading comprehension has gotten worse since high school. Anyway here are my notes:
Ethics are ideas. The science of ethics should not then study the nature of these ideas, since they are synthetic constructs and have no meaning by themselves. The science of ethics should thus study the observable nature of these ethical ideas.
Ethics and morals do not have to be utilitarian. It’d be very convenient if we could say that ethics are driven with the intention of deriving good from situations, but this is like viewing the subject matter through a filter. Durkheim suggests that to take a utilitarian approach to the study of ethics would be like asking a physiologist to reconstruct an organism. This violates the sanctity of the subject matter, ultimately corrupting the science with what may actually be incorrect or arbitrary descriptions. So the only way to formulate an accurate science is to observe first then formulate “ethical directives” afterwards.
But this then begs the question, “How exactly do we deduce such ethical directives?” Durkheim points out that deduction works well for obvious things, but as the subject becomes complicated and dependent upon a large amount of precursors and is subject to modification by the environment it occupies, deduction becomes increasingly hard to use. Furthermore, when a subject matter is less obvious, we will inevitably take certain liberties so as to make them easier to understand. Therefore, when analyzing complex subjects, we run the risk of interpreting them the way we choose to interpret them and not how they are objectively. In such a case an inductive method may prove more useful.
Durkheim also suggests that to study ethics is also to recognize that it is not a subsidiary of another field. Ethics is independent and has relationships to other distinct areas.
In studying ethics and morality, one questions why people are compelled to follow these rules. Durkheim agrees with Wundt that people feel an obligation to uphold moral rules because it is in accordance to a superior entity. However, this sense of obligation to authority is differs in Wundt’s and Durkheim’s approaches. To Wundt, an individual’s interest is ephemeral is therefore not as desirable as one that has permanence. Therefore, an individual will abide by rules in anticipation of a desirable future societal outcome. Durkheim argues differently. To Durkheim, authority gains its power from some form of absolute superiority. For example, we give authority to science because it is irrefutable in some aspects. Therefore we follow some rules simply because science is irrefutably better than of our personal sources of information. This authority is absolute and we bow to its whim out of pure respect, without regards to its consequences.
As a final note, morals follow society. As society changes and its expectations shift, so does morality and its rules.
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
-Bertrand Russell
Over winter break I forgot about a particularly costly mistake that had happened and decided to shell out some money to satisfy my inner nerd. It’s been a long time since I last bought computer hardware. Upgrading computers is costly and generally not worth it, but this time, it’s different. My Macbook Pro’s battery capacity has taken a nosedive, making today’s teardown at least semi-worthwhile.
The goods
So I bought:
The last three ones this list are actually interesting, though they are completely superfluous and unnecessary. What I’m doing here is I’ll first replace my laptop’s hard drive with one of those incredibly fast, but somewhat unreliable solid-state drives. Then, I’ll to remove my DVD drive and put it in an external case. To fill the void left by the DVD drive, I’ll install a hard-drive cage in which I’ll put in the my old hard drive.
Though this procedure won’t really make a difference on the grand scheme of things, it does yield some perks. The SSD will make my laptop power up and wake up from sleep stupidly fast and will also make applications start in the blink of an eye. Also, by moving my hard-drive to my optical bay, I’ll have 750GB of internal storage.
However, the caveat is that I lose my DVD drive, but who really uses optical media these days? Actually I still do, since my film scans come on CDs.
The one thing I’d like to point out here is my selection of SSD. I did my research and thought I’d share what I’ve learned and why I made my final decision.
1) SATA II vs SATA III – While SATA III is backwards compatible, the performance of SATA III SSDs when running in SATA II mode is generally worse than the performance of a good SATA II drive. Since my chipset only supports SATA II speeds, buying a SATA II drive was a no-brainer.
2) 34nm flash vs 25nm flash – Back a while ago, either to save money or decrease latency, manufacturers began using 25nm chips in their SSDs. Unfortunately this killed performance on such drives. It also made these things less wear resistant. So, I specifically bought the Mushkin Callisto Deluxe drive because it uses the less efficient, but more robust 34nm chips.
Installation was a breeze but I did run into one major SNAFU. I was trying to update my SSD’s firmware to the latest (3.6.1 at the time of writing) but despite following all of the instructions, the process failed. As it turns out, the Callisto line of SSDs from Mushkin has been updated to a new controller chip (SF-1200 to SF-2181). The firmwares currently available for download are for the older controller chip, and can’t be flashed onto the newer chip.
This is an aside for Mac users. SSD longevity is ensured by both garbage collection and support for TRIM. By default, non-Apple branded SSDs do not have TRIM enabled when running under OSX. To enable TRIM, open up Terminal and type the following:
sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x51)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg' /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage
sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel sudo kextcache -system-caches
After you’re done, reboot, and TRIM should be enabled. More detailed instructions can be found here.
With all that out of the way, I guess I should talk about how these components have impacted my computer. I’ll skip the battery because I haven’t installed it yet, and it’s not all that exciting. However, the SSD upgrade is just insane. I’ll just leave some bullet points:
If you’re on the fence about buying an SSD, do it. It breathes new life to your computer.
*** UPDATE ***
I was half expecting this SSD to fail like many other ones during hibernation. I’d like to report that this particular combination, Mushkin Callisto Deluxe and Macbook Pro (late 2009), does not kernel panic when waking from hibernation.