Archive heaven?

Interesting tidbit on Kurzweil AI, about a new storage medium.  Yes, the title's a little over the top; it isn't unlimited, but it's ridiculously huge (something like 360TB in a CD-sized disc, if I'm reading it right).  Like just about everything appearing on that site, though, it's a long way from commercial availability, unfortunately.  (I'd read the site a lot more often if that wasn't the case.)

Switch to Z

I'm a little behind on my comics reading, and just got to this one.  Having two kids, and a third on the way, it just killed me.  Doonesbury doesn't often have me laughing out loud (laughing in pain at how incisive the sarcasm is is far more common), but this one did.  And the one before it was actually quite touching, as well.

Some minor game updates

I haven't played Jetpack Joyride in quite a while.  I just stopped playing Tiny Tower today; I'd passed my goal of reaching 1B dollars in it.  I was hoping the game would go haywire or something.  No such luck.  I just picked up Where's My Water? (free today) and played a few levels, just to see what it was about.

I'm also playing a bit more Candy Crush.  My wife got that one, and I started playing it a while ago.  I stopped when I hit the level where you had to pay to continue.  Apparently, they decided to change that so you could play quests to move on; essentially, you replay earlier levels with more points required to move past them (and a wait of a day after solving each level of the quest).  I've gotten past two of the three quests (the first was quite easy (lv 23); the second quite tough (lv 33; I managed to get all the jellies once without getting the requisite points).  Thinking third likely to be easier than second, though we'll see), and am hoping to move on tomorrow.

I've been playing bejeweled a bit lately.  I'd gotten to around 1.5M in classic mode quite a few times, and recently broke through for much bigger scores (~6M once, then several more 3-5M, then 9.5M.  Suddenly, 1.5M is barely in my top ten).  Mostly, the difference has been more care in making sure that matches lead to more matches instead of just picking matches willy-nilly.

I've also started playing Words with Friends.  I've had it for eons, but wasn't playing.  Now, I'm giving it a better try, and mostly having fun.  Definitely good practice for keeping the brain in shape.

Future is now?

I was pretty surprised to read that Trey Ratcliff is switching from Nikon to Sony NEX.  I knew he was at least playing with those after he talked about his shots from the CN Tower in Toronto (which I liked seeing, as I had been there fairly recently, although I didn't go outside like he did).

I remember his article about mirrorless overtaking DSLRs in the not-too-distant future, and generally agreed with him.  I was a little skeptical about his time-frame (seemed a little optimistic), but mostly agreed.

But he's decided that that time-frame was actually pessimistic, and is already switched over.

His reasoning is interesting, and it makes a lot of sense (I have a friend who fairly recently switched from Canon 1D to Sony NEX; it also made total sense for him, as most of his shooting is on hiking trips).  I don't think NEX would make a lot of sense for me, at least not now (I do too much shooting of my kids in some combination of fast action and low light, where NEX would have problems.  I also do a little bit of sports shooting), but I can still see going in that direction in a few years (especially if they come out with a full-frame mirrorless with very fast auto-focus).

I did wonder about a couple things he mentioned.  One, images looking very grainy in the viewfinder when shooting at night seemed to conflict with what he said about being certain of focus.  Maybe the focus peaking makes that not a problem.  Two, he was saying something about a weakness of the NEX that I was unclear of what he was saying.  He seemed to say that, whatever the problem was, shooting on a tripod largely obviated it.  Would be curious to know what the actual problem was.

I liked his suggestions for what Sony could do to improve; I'd go with all of them.  The second one was particularly interesting to me; I'd never heard of that feature, but have had a few situations where I was wishing for that (trying to shoot long exposures with people moving, and had no idea how long of an exposure I really needed.  I wanted an indication of those people there, but also to see them move.  Of course, while I tried to work around it, I really needed my tripod and neutral density filter for those shots, too).

Anyway, it's an interesting read.  If I get a backup camera, I'll definitely think about something along those lines.

I want to teach the world to sing...

Not sure I can go into the mental perturbations leading to that title, but a friend and I saw Man of Steel yesterday, and it was quite interesting.

It's a reboot (re-imagining, perhaps) of the entire Superman mythology.  The arc of it is pretty familiar to anyone who remembers the old Superman movies, though the vision (and technology) are quite different.

I've never been a huge fan of Superman (liked it, but never followed it closely), so I was never wedded to any view of Krypton, and liked what was in this movie.  It was not without flaws (I'll get back to this), but it was quite interesting.  The flight sequences (especially the four-winged steeds) seemed a tribute to Avatar (though I didn't see it in 3D, so I can't compare them in that way), and Russell Crowe (as Jor-El) did a very good job.

I also liked the way the story was told via flashbacks; those were blended in quite well without bogging down the story.  And the way they showed Clark having problems adjusting to Earth was quite interesting.  Similarly, the handling of the "Fortress of Solitude" was pretty neat, and I liked the back-story they came up with for that.

And as action, it was fast and furious for quite a bit of the movie, but I was glad they didn't feel the need to make that the entire movie.

The ending, where Superman confronts the general about a drone, was a pretty cool scene as well.  I think the dialog could have been improved (the captain giggling about him being "hot" was particularly lame, but also making Superman sound a little less stuck-up seemed appropriate to me), but it was a good sequence.  The friend with whom I watched it said that came out of a graphic novel; I'm minded to look up the original.

Despite the problems I'm about to mention, I did end up liking the movie overall.

But here are some of the problems.  On Krypton, Zod says he wants the Codex, but tries to kill Jor-El a couple of times to get it.  Problem there?  He would have destroyed the Codex in the process, if he had succeeded.  He also tried to destroy Superman's ship, which also would have destroyed the Codex.  Secondary, the Scientist (Jor-El) outfights the Warrior (Zod).  Extremely unlikely at best, given what we find out later about Kryptonian genetics.  Also, the process to get the Codex seemed awfully easy, for something so valuable.

Less important, but Zod's rebellion seems to have lasted no more than an hour.  For one which resulted in killing one of the ruler's, that's an awfully brief insurrection.  And, thinking about it now, he gave up awfully easily.  I can't see how he knew he was defeated.

More important, Krypton's leaders seem not to have believed Jor-El about the planet dying, despite the amazing technology to which they had access.  Also despite the fact that it seemed to blow up almost immediately.

Similarly important, why let Zod live, when you know the planet is about to die (as seemed the case at that point)?  It seems more like rewarding him than punishment.

The sequence where Superman is coming into his powers was pretty cool; I mostly liked it (the sonic booms were especially cool).  But the animal fly-bys were not a good idea; the wind of his passage at that altitude and speed would have killed them.

There was also the ghost of Jor-El taking up residence in Zod's ship; he took a lot of control when Lois was there, but never showed up again.  It seems like he could have done a lot of things to subtly hose up Zod.

But the biggest flaw gets back to the Codex.  They had Superman's blood, so what need did they have for him after that?  And yet they kept chasing him.

Anyway, despite all that, I did end up liking it overall.  I'll probably get it when it comes out on Blu-ray.

Oobleck-icious

I'd heard about oobleck quite a while ago, but never experienced it for myself.  Well, a couple of weeks ago, for reasons neither of us can remember, it came up in conversation with a friend of mine.  That might have been it, but a friend of his visited last weekend, and mentioned it to him when they were visiting the Air & Space Museum downtown.

I wasn't there, but they did a small experiment with it that weekend.

But when he came over for our annual barbecue, he cleaned out the corn starch from a local Safeway, and brought all of it over.  We found a decent-sized rubbermaid tub to put it in (18"x24", maybe, and ended up with a depth of four inches or so), and mixed it up on the back patio.

That was amazingly cool, and started being that way while we were still mixing it.  You can put your hand into it easily, but have trouble pulling it out (this was actually a bigger problem when I was trying to step in it).  Or you can punch it, and, if you do it right, end up with a hand still dry.

You can grab a handful, make a ball out of that handful, and it will just drip back between your hands as soon as you try to stop shaping it.  You can run on top of it (and again, keep your feet dry if you're fast enough), then sink into it as soon as you stop moving.

I need to get the video from another friend; I was too busy playing to even take pictures, let alone video.

But he and I will need to try again; I've got some interesting ideas for pictures/videos to get from it.

Even less fair than I thought...

I've long been much less than a fan of college sports; the amount of money going into the system is far beyond what's needed for corruption, and there's been no doubt of corruption for many years.

I was pleasantly surprised by the NCAA's final sanctions on Penn State.  I didn't think it was great, but it was a lot more than I expected from them (I thought I'd written about that, but if I did, I can't find it).

But beyond that, there are many examples of schools getting pretty nominal penalties for what seem like fairly major problems (usually recruiting violations).  And there are plenty of examples of athletes getting the book thrown at them for pretty minor violations (usually, very poor kids accepting gifts.  Frequently very small gifts).  And there are whole books to be written about how unfair all that is, no doubt.

But what I just found out about today is how coaches at NCAA schools are given the ability to be very vindictive towards "their" athletes.  The lede:

It’s obvious to anyone who cares enough to look that major college sports are fundamentally unjust. The NCAA rakes in billions of dollars while the players get nothing. Most Division I athletes aren’t even guaranteed a four-year education—tear a ligament or get passed on the depth chart and your scholarship can vanish after a single season. But ask a bunch of coaches, and they’ll tell you that something else is rotten in college athletics. The problem with NCAA sports, they believe, is that the servants aren’t indentured enough.

Yeah, there's a lot of deserved irony in there.

And will the NCAA do anything to improve?  Well, past experience has shown that they need to be dragged, kicking and screaming.  Let's hope things get better.

Startup nation

I was just reading Paul Graham's latest essay on startups, and there's some very interesting things in there (although I don't agree with all of it).

He mentions a couple of things; the first of which was how starting a startup now seems like a reasonable thing to do after getting an undergrad degree.  I never thought about that, and I wonder what today's undergrads think of it (no, I'm not saying I have any insight at all into that, let alone more than Paul;  I just wonder about perspective).  Still, it's a very interesting thought.

And an interesting twist on it that he didn't explore (as a VC, he'd likely see it as irrelevant for investors) at all is the effect of Kickstarter and similar "capital markets" (for lack of a better term).  If you can get your costs down low enough, you can go directly to customers now, and that's a new situation entirely.  I've bought (or thought about buying) a couple of gadgets that recently came out of kickstarter.

I also thought it was interesting what he revealed about how Y Combinator makes its decisions about which companies to fund.  Not sure what to make of it, but interesting, nonetheless.

This paragraph, though, I found particularly interesting:

One thing we can say for sure is that there will be a lot more startups. The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th century are being replaced by networks of smaller companies. This process is not just something happening now in Silicon Valley. It started decades ago, and it's happening as far afield as the car industry. It has a long way to run.

To take it apart, I certainly agree with the first statement.  But I'm not at all sure I agree with the second; the amazing amount of consolidation across most industries is impressive (well, depressive, actually).  I really don't see the replacement happening.  Mostly what I see are the big companies buying up the small ones.  How many phone companies are there?  How many broadband companies?  How many media companies?  How many airlines?  How many banks?

Aside from a couple of companies (Yahoo! and Google are the two I can think of off the top of my head), I mostly see startups doing some shaking up of industry, and then getting bought by one of the behemoths.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but it mostly boils down to the government not caring about antitrust.

So I'm not terribly sure startups have really had that much effect, broadly speaking.  The potential is there, for sure, but I'm not sure it's really happened.

The part where I strongly disagree with the article is actually in one of the footnotes (referenced at the end of the above paragraph, I now note).  It says that the networks of companies are a prime cause for the concentration of wealth in this country.  I can list a whole bunch of reasons that have more effect.

1. The idea of companies existing to create shareholder value.  This idea has been an enormous rip-off that has actually decreased shareholder value by putting more money into executive leadership.
2. All that Merger and Acquisition activity to which I alluded has removed a lot of middle-management and administrative jobs (particularly the latter).
3. The destruction of the labor union.  Unions represent about 9% of workers nowadays.  In the 50s, it was more like 70%.  That allows for a lot more downward pressure on wages.  These three factors, together, have sent CEO salaries from 50-ish times average wage to 300-ish times it.
4. The failure of the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.  In the 60s, minimum wage was, in today's dollars, about $10.50.  Working full-time at minimum wage, back then, was enough to stay out of poverty.  That is certainly not the case any longer.
5. Tax policy from the 80s onward has largely been targeted at concentrating wealth into one clade.  This has accelerated greatly in the last twelve years or so, but has been ongoing since '81 or '82 (trickle-down economics).
6. The gradual dismantling of the public school system.  It hasn't happened yet, but it's well underway (especially see what's happening in Michigan and Texas, which are much further along this path than most of the country), and this might completely undermine much of what Paul theorizes is coming.  Why?  Because education is a major, driving force for people working in startups.  If they can't get that education (because only the rich can get the fundamentals), then there won't be any workers to drive that.
7. One could even make a case that the money being allowed back into politics (particularly via SuperPACs) since Citizens United is a bigger factor.

All in all, a very interesting read.

Aperture thoughts

I previously mentioned having some problems with Aperture on import.  Those problems have continued (off-and-on), but I'm still using it.

More importantly, I mentioned wanting to see an update to the software.  That still hasn't happened (other than a point update with support for some more cameras (D7100, most notably)), but here's some thoughts on what I'd like to see from it.

The biggest is more support for ETTR.  That is, an exposure adjustment to use during RAW conversion (the current exposure adjustment is just done on the TIFF that comes out of the RAW).  The next would be automatic lens-distortion corrections.  The next biggest would be better object removal; not something I use a lot, but every so often it'd make a big difference.

I'd also like to see some feature additions.  Any of panorama stitching, HDR, or focus stacking would be fantastic, since I could cut down on the number of packages I use.  Working with Topaz, so their packages could be better integrated, would also be nice, although there's probably nothing there that Topaz couldn't do, themselves, if they wanted.