Bulbous, Not Tapered

Hmm… perhaps I should do the dishes.

I’ve had my camera for a couple of weeks now and have been snapping away like mad. Some patterns that caught me eye…

Google likes to put cute math problems in their employment ads.The first time I saw this was when they took out an ad in the Cornell Daily Sun, and I thought it was amusing enough to clip and hang on the wall of my geek cave.

This weekend I caught the bug to solve it and see if I’m smart enough to work at Google. Apparently I’m not, because I ended up cheating when I checked my initial (and I thought correct) solution against what others had found. By the time I realized I had made a mistake, I also realized what I needed to do to correct it. I did independently fix my code (as evidenced by its extreme ugliness). Download it, smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no.

My Canon A70 digital camera gave up the ghost after a year a half. Luckily, the folks servicing my Staples extended warranty came through and cut me a check for the purchase price of the camera, after determining that the repair was too expensive to bother with.

Update 9/2/05: It’s worth mentioning that Staples was more of a pain than I first thought to deal with. They originally sent me a Staples gift card (after telling me I would get a check, and which arrived after I had already bought my new camera at Best Buy), and it took me over 2 months of frequent follow-up calls to get my check.

This put me in the market for another camera. I wanted something with a longer zoom. I was always trying to shoot things with the A70 that were too small or too far away to frame properly with the 3x lens. I eventually decided on another Canon, the Powershot S1 IS, which has a 10x zoom (equivalent to a 38mm-380mm lens on a traditional SLR camera). It’s only 3.2 megapixels, but since I rarely print photos I have never felt limited by resolution. After using it for a few days, I find that I enjoy using this camera much more than my last one. In addition to the big zoom, it has several features that make it fun to shoot with:

• Good Controls: Almost everything I do while shooting can be done in one or two button presses without taking my eye off the “action”. I almost never need to use a menu when setting up a shot.
• Electronic Viewfinder: The badness of the A70 viewfinder defies description. I never ever used it, no matter how much I had to squint to see the LCD screen in the sun. The viewfinder in the S1 IS is nice, I like it better than the LCD most of the time.
• Focus Zoom: While adjusting the manual focus, a zoom view automatically pops up so you can see what you’re doing. This combined with the well designed controls make manual focus a worthwhile alternative when the auto focus has trouble (which it sometimes does in very flat scenes or in low light).
• Sleep Mode: The camera optionally switches into a low power mode after a short period of inactivity, and it can wake up again in less than a second.
• Intervalometer: The camera can shoot unattended at regular intervals. Most people wouldn’t care about this, but I think it’s great and I use it all the time.
• Image Stabilization: This feature is supposed to smooth out the natural movement of your hand, allowing you to shoot longer exposures than you would otherwise be able to without blurring the image. I expected that it would work so poorly as to be worthless, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I hate flashes, and the IS has allowed me to get halfway decent shots using available light in situations where I would otherwise end up with a blurry mess. My most amusing IS shot to date is a 1 second handheld exposure that looks soft but not sloppy.

I did briefly consider getting a 5 megapixel superzoom. I even went so far as to purchase a Kodak DX7590 on impulse because it was 5 megapixels and had a big, beautiful LCD display. I ended up returning it unopened after reading that it has substandard image quality and long write delays. There are some recently released 5mp superzooms that are supposed to be very nice, but they are also substantially more expensive than the S1 IS, so at least for now I’m not second guessing my choice.

My interest was piqued when I came across this CNN story about a recent survey asking high school students, faculty, and principals about the first amendment. Even though I don’t normally post news commentary, I found some moderately amusing facts that I didn’t see noted elsewhere…

Update: CNN seems to have taken down their writeup, so I removed the link.

It’s true that the results are pretty distressing, the students did atrociously on the fact-based questions in the survey. A disturbing percentage of them also seemed willing to accept moderate or even severe limitations on freedoms of speech and press. They didn’t fare too much worse than faculty and administrators at their schools, though, and it’s hard to imagine how students could have done well given the knowledge of those responsible for their education. The poor performance of teachers was downplayed in articles about the study and is not mentioned at all in the key findings of the study itself.

• Nearly half of the teachers surveyed don’t feel that musicians should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics that might be offensive to some. Younger generations are a little more liberal, less than a third of the students felt similarly.
• One out of five teachers aren’t sure that newspapers should be allowed to publish stories without government approval, but surprisingly almost half of the students feel the same way. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that most high school faculty and principals feel that student papers should require the approval of school authorities.
• Three quarters of the students surveyed incorrectly believe that it’s illegal to burn a flag in political protest. One third of the teachers are under the same misconception, and apparently they’re doing a fantastic job getting through to their students on that issue.
• Half of the students incorrectly believe that the government can restrict indecent content on the internet. Faculty and principals don’t know, either… also evenly split. It’s a funny question, though. The government absolutely does regulate content on the internet. There are currently existing federal statutes restricting the distribution of obscene material and child pornography. A 1997 Supreme Court ruling did narrow the scope of material restricted by the Communications Decency Act by allowing publication of “indecent” material, leaving in place restrictions on “obscene” material… but it seems a little dishonest to write a survey question directed at high-school students whose correct interpretation depends on the definition of a word that had its meaning disputed all the way to the Supreme Court.
• More than half of faculty and principals surveyed think they’re doing a good job teaching about first amendment freedoms.
• 2% of faculty aren’t certain what the highest level of education they received was. Kudos to the survey team for anticipating the need for a “Don’t know” option on that question.

The survey, partially funded by the Knight Foundation, didn’t explore non-governmental impediments to free information flow, such as consolidated media markets.

Anagrams are fun and educational. Cornell University can be rearranged to spell lots of fun things (not all of them appropriate for children). Find out which one is on the back of my car!

It kind of looks like it was stuck to the window by a three year old, but it brings me great joy nonetheless. Go play on the Internet Anagram Server, or read some of my other favorites:

• cruellest ivory inn
• nor ivy slut recline
• recently loin virus
• cleverly i iron nuts
• cleverly i ruin snot
• run evilly snort ice
• i run celery in volts
• yon vertices run ill
• vinyl silencer tour