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42 is no longer the answer

And now a quick study in shutter speeds. This first moody shot was taken in bright, filtered morning sun at 1/4000th of a second at f/6.3. This would fall under the category of “Usually looks better in the camera’s LCD than on the computer screen:

Now, the same shot. Just a few heartbeats later, the composition altered only by the vagaries of imprecise body movement. Our subject is still in the bright, filtered morning sun. I shot this one at 1/400th of a second at f/6.3:

Mostly I’m amazed she stayed perfectly still for that, even at high shutter speeds.

Actually, she doesn’t mind the camera so much. She will not cast her countenance upon your phone, however. Every shot I’ve ever managed with the phone has been by some means of deception or another. And the camera is much larger and has the always-popular swaying strap.

Today’s study in autumn foliage is to the opposite side of the dogwood, where we can study the new buds, already present and patiently waiting for next year. Even if you grow maudlin at the passing into winter, there is always a sign of escape. Dogwoods, then, can be instrumental for your morale, should you need them.

The paper is happening as I write. Who knows where the paper is when you read this. The next newspaper could be happening. Next year’s staff could be happening over a newspaper next year. This could be printed in a paper at some later date when you read this. This could be the first thing anthropologists pull up when they figure out how to connect their power with ancient power supplies a few millennia from now.

Cats and leaves. Yes, great-great-great-great grandchildren, this is what we often did with the Internet at a slow moment. It truly was a marvelous time. Now come grab some of this hard candy before promptly getting off my lawn.

Spent the morning in the office, pecking away at things. Spent the afternoon in the library, pecking away at things. Spent the evening on The Editing Of Things. Now this, and then back to pecking and editing.

The thing I am editing is the upcoming family present project, which I have sort of alluded to here in passing from time to time. We are presenting the finished product this coming weekend, which means I am now finishing up the actual project. I’m ready for it to be done because I am anxious to deliver it because I am uncertain at how it will be received.

You always are, when you make something, aren’t you? How will this go over? It isn’t the same if you’re just buying a thing. Doesn’t fit? Wrong color? No problem. I have a receipt. What’s one trip to the store? To make something, to envision it, and to put in the effort, to visualize and re-visualize the finished version, to contextualize and add and subtract from the context of what it all means, to put it all together, hoping there are no typos or that everything is straight or accurate or the right color or under the proper protocol and on and on. It can get to you, if you are a crafty person.

My friend Kelly, who is easily one of the two or three craftiest people I know, agrees with me about this. You start out doing something, decide to do a nice thing for someone and then you introduce a little anxiety and stress about this nice thing … it is amazing, I think, that anyone ever makes anything for anyone.

But, then, I am not especially crafty.

I do, however, admire those that are. Even more so than I usually do. Which is why it is hard to let go of things people occasionally make for you. Which is why I always look forward to when the leaves turn because behind that comes cooler weather and that means I can dig out the awesome blanket that Kelly made me years ago. It is colorful and warm and sturdy and it was made with love.

Which I think will be the theme of the inevitable speech that will surely be given with this project this weekend. As it should be. That’s what it has been, an exercise in searching and exploring and persistence and assistance and, ultimately, love.

So, really, I’m down to the giving. With the giving comes some receiving, he said, staring off into the future, but also the past, while in the middle of The Editing Of Things.

I’m not a crafty person, but there are few things I’ve looked forward to giving so much as this. All will be revealed this weekend.

Today I learned that there are believed to be some 8.8 billion planets in our galaxy alone that fit in what we think of as the Goldilocks zone for life, as we know it. Tonight I got to use the expression “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

I always smile when I get to use one of the old journalism cliches — which are the only ones you needn’t avoid like the plague, it seems. Even more with this. Verify what you’re told, being the point. If an astronomer tells you there are 8.8 billion planets, any of which could support life, just roll with it. “And the people that live on two or three of those planets, at least, are made of cookie dough. Hey, we’re astronomers. What are you going to do?”

Some of that is just how we perceive and conceive things. Comedian Steven Wright said “Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.” Whether or not you look up that quote probably says a lot about how you perceive and conceive reality and me in it. Whether he stole it from someone else, says a different thing.

But we all like cookie dough.

And that conversation right there, that’s probably how quantum physics or postmodernism or postmodern quantum physics got started.

Things to read …

Look how transparent Apple is and is not in this transparency report. And scroll to pages three and four to see tables demonstrating what your government is doing in your name. Compare that to other countries. Come up with your own observations.

This may be another perspective on something I’ve already linked to here, but I’m of the opinion that all of these perspectives matter. So let us Kirsten Berg’s thoughts on America’s Shackled Press:

Since its establishment by a group of American correspondents in 1981, the Committee to Protect Journalists has focused on defending the rights of its counterparts abroad, naming and shaming the most egregious offenses against press freedom around the world. Incarcerations in Iran. Crackdowns in China. Retaliations in Russia. Slayings in Syria.

But now, for the first time in its history, the CPJ said it felt compelled to commission a special report on its home country: The United States.

It’s an irony that is not lost on Joel Simon, the organization’s executive director. But, as he told an audience at the New America Foundation last Thursday, the recent actions taken by the Obama administration—from its aggressive pursuit of leakers to the campaign-like media relations firewall it erected to control the information that comes out of government agencies—led them to conclude that there had been a fundamental, chilling shift in the ability of journalists in this country to report the news.

This is the second of such features I’ve read recently. I like these stories. Doing good in the community, giving people confidence, meeting police officers and beating them up in the name of science? Good stuff. Lee County Sheriff’s Office offers class aimed at empowering women:

Alicia Cohill delivered one final blow to the aggressors and ran back to a cheering group of women.

“It’s exhilarating,” she said, catching her breath. “You kind of go to that place. Especially the last one, when you have to close your eyes and rely on touch. Once they grabbed me, it was automatic… It takes you out of your comfort zone. You just kick butt.”

While the women also learned grappling and quick escape techniques, Jones said the course is not just about physical self-defense.

“It is not a self-defense course, per se,” he said. “It is also about awareness, giving women the tools they need to avoid becoming a victim.”

Plus you get to wear the cool pads.

More here. If you are tempted to leave now, dear anthropologists of the future, please scroll on through. Our society’s answers to the meaning of life are hidden in these pages. Hint: It is the cookie dough.

friends / journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
4
Nov 13

The kind of Monday where the traffic clears before you get there

I got a call on the drive into work. It was a friend who was some miles ahead of me on the interstate. He was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and was thoughtful enough to offer this heads up. He screen capped a picture of his favorite traffic app map and sent that to me. I compared what his phone said to what my phone said. I was able, while safely not in traffic, to consult a news source on line. Ten miles of interstate were closed.

Surely this means there was a nuclear reactor meltdown at a place where no one realized there was a nuclear reactor meltdown.

By the time I made it to the area, after a bite of lunch to wait out the traffic, it was all gone. The road had reopened. There was a car, Brian said, that had ran off the road. He also sent pictures of a fender-bender or two, the sort of thing that happens in the backup of a larger accident and just ruins your week. He never saw anything that merited a 10-mile shutdown.

Which still doesn’t mean that there aren’t spent fuel roads on some county road overpass.

But my friend called me from his stationary vehicle with a phone he wears on his hip. That signal went off a tower, probably to a satellite synched up to a static Mercury orbit, came back down to me and we conferred like air traffic controls. Then he sent me digital imagery, the stuff no one would have conceived of 50 years ago. And then he beamed me photographs, which would have been a fanciful plot device in a television show even 20 years ago.

And, what a world, we do all of this without thinking.

The only problem with autumn this far south — he said with a vacant sigh, as if any sigh could truly be vacant — is that it doesn’t last very long. Three days, The Yankee says. She’s being sarcastic about it, but only just. So you spend a little time in this beautiful weather, and it has been amazing the last few days, lingering a little bit longer under each tree, for no other reasons than you can and should.

The only problem with autumn anywhere — he said with a more resigned sigh, as if any sigh could be anything more than resigned — is that it is impossible to capture the feeling of autumn, even the muted version we get, in an image. You don’t get the sun just right and the air feels different and the smells you never notice are just shifting in that way that makes you notice them for 23 minutes on a Tuesday, but not again until some day early next spring. If spring is a shout to the senses and summer is a testament of being able to filter out the overwhelming then fall is a gentle nod at imperceptibility. It only barely says “I’m coming.” It usually only whispers “I’m here andnowI’mleaving.” There’s a big heave at the end, of course. “I was there.” Those are the leaves on the ground.

Makes you wonder why we call them leaves.

Here are a few from the yard. By the time I am back under this dogwood the entire thing will look sickly.

I’ll post a few more pictures like this this week. I know you can’t photograph autumn. I know it never catches the moment and, at the end of the day, you have nothing more than multihued tree extremities. But I keep trying, every year.

In class today we talked about public relations, what it is and isn’t. And we began discussing the all-important press release. This evening I worked on The Editing Of Things, which isn’t as ominous as it portends, just unending. I had a soup-and-sandwich dinner, because it was as cold inside as outside, which is to say mildly chilly outside, and ridiculous indoors.

I dipped the toasted herb focaccia bread into the vegetable soup, the flavors of which did odd things to the asiago, roasted tomatoes and basil pesto sauce on the slices of turkey. I say that just to make it sound healthy and exotic. Especially after I just mistakenly saw the nutritional value of that sandwich. Looks like I’ll need a new usual.

Things to read …

The list really shouldn’t include this. A local columnist, in his well-placed displeasure with people that have been elected to office and subsequently gotten themselves in heaps of legal trouble and the community in historic financial trouble, has gotten vivid:

That era of debt and corruption is going to burn for a lifetime. We laid ourselves down with Langford and these banks, and some of these lawyers, and woke up itching with an STD we can’t shake.

Commissioner George Bowman, the lone vote against the new deal, was right when he said poor people will be disproportionately hurt by perpetually rising rates.

Poor people are going to get hosed. Poor people – all residential customers but especially the poor – are going to get hosed worse than they did before the bankruptcy or during it. They are going to get hosed in perpetuity.

Shame there’s no municipal-grade penicillin.

Here’s the story: ” I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was.” The video is worth 53 seconds of your time:

The newest Pew surveys are out, and there’s so much to unpack. It all defies excerpting in a place like this, so I’ll just give you the headline, which is not as good as the actual read: Twitter News Consumers: Young, Mobile and Educated.

Follow me on Twitter, there is occasionally something for most everyone there. And be sure to come back tomorrow for more leaves and various other observations of the modern condition!

Auburn / football / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
26
Oct 13

Football fans — Florida Atlantic at Auburn

Auburn hosted overmatched Florida Atlantic today. So instead of worrying about football, here’s an opportunity to concentrate on the important people surrounding it. The Yankee approves:

I’m using a Holga lens, a gift from a friend who was cleaning off his shelf and sent the thing to me. The premise behind the Holga lens is to emulate the poor quality of the Holga, a cheap, plastic camera marketed in China. Even the lenses on some of those cameras were plastic, which allowed for a lots of soft focus, fuzzy edges and showed off whatever was happening in the emulsion of your film. (Remember film?) So Holga shots became hip, or hipster depending on how you see it, and now we have a niche lens. These are my first shots with it.

This first set are some of the people with whom we tailgate.

These are the hosts of our tent, Kim and Murphy. You’d have to look hard to find sweeter people:

In the stadium they’re running this feature before the game begins. The winner tonight was a guy who was unaware he was on the screen for 44 seconds. We saw him eat a fair amount of his hot dog. These guys were all on their phones, so the name of the feature was apropos. The young woman on the left was singing along, but she had no idea …

A few people inside the stadium:

Auburn won 45-10, in a game that was truthfully under control after the first two scores within the first five minutes.

books / friends / history / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Oct 13

Darth Vader is bad and his assistant is a mouse

I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:

One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.

Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.

This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.

Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.

This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”

Not sure that would have been my first response.

But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.

We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.

We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.

For example:

Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next

The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.

This is a topic that’s been going around a few days because of an essay at The Atlantic, which for about 48 hours tried to be something of a continental divide in journalism and education. USC’s Professor Robert Hernandez chimes in. Those required courses in journalism school are there for a reason:

A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.

A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.

If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)

But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.

How Website Statistics Changed Our Programs

Good news we can all use. Alabama’s economic development prospects improving, officials say:

Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.

A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.

And two items from the multimedia blog:

Twitter, Vine and people the world over make a film

Google media tools

Thanks for stopping by. Much more on Twitter. Hope you have a great day tomorrow.

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22
Oct 13

There is a great rhyme below

I rotate things onto one of my office walls, just like everyone who has large, blank walls. Recently I decided to make a World War II theme. I have two V-E and V-J editions of Stars and Stripes, dusty, yellowed pieces of newsprint from France and Italy. Sometimes they allow me to talk about the appropriate time to use the 72-point font. Sometimes they allow the opportunity to demonstrate how language we use today might be frowned upon in the future. Also, they are just terrific relics.

Some time back our friend Adam gave me a lithograph of his cousin’s World War II plane. And since I decided to make a themed display, this seemed like a great place to put it. You may recall that I met Adam while asking him about his cousin, Dean Hallmark. I wrote a piece about Dean for TWER. Adam is a military man himself, a historian and we became fast friends. So I learned more about the Doolittle Raid of which Dean was a part, and then this poster tube arrived with a sharp print of The Green Hornet.

People should give each other more framable works, I say.

So I wanted to take a picture to send to Adam, since I have a series to show off. This meant moving a piece of furniture. This meant stowing that table elsewhere. This led to me destroying the wire archiving system we use for newspapers. This allowed me to recycle some old stuff I didn’t need to keep anymore. And that brought me back to rebuilding the wire crate structure which grows more precarious by the year.

That led to me cleaning a corner of the newsroom, looking under the sofa for runaway joiners for the wire-crate-frame-finger pincher device that had to have been developed in Eastern Europe.

And, finally, the picture I’d wanted to take.

That’s Dean on his way to deliver — and in this configuration on the wall, the Japanese are ready to accept — his payload. I think about Dean now and again, and what he and some of his compatriots went through:

It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, and finally made his way to China.

He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.

Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.

They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.

“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”

Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.

They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.

Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial.

We met Lt. Col. Richard Cole, who was Doolittle’s copilot on the Tokyo Raid, at Adam’s wedding a few weeks ago. We saw Dean’s marker at Arlington this summer:

He was 28 years old at the time. He would have been 100 next January.

I guess I’m thinking about that as I’ve wrapped up the big family project I’ve been working on. I found the last details I’ll likely ever be able to find on my great-grandfather’s time in the ETO. Now I just have to copyedit the text and finish assembling the presentation. I’m disproportionately excited to show this off in a few weeks. Between that and the new book I’m reading I just have the period on my mind.

Had a nice run this evening. I said on Facebook that it was a 5K that didn’t feel like a 5K and, thus, I did not know what was happening. I said that after my run, before dinner and before I had the opportunity to go down a set of stairs.

And then it felt like a run. Now I have the impression it is going to feel like one tomorrow, too.

I did this on a treadmill this evening, because it was already dark and threatening to be coolish, and I’m just not ready for that. On the treadmill there was a television. And on the television I watched a closed caption longform feature of a young baseball player doing something special, saving a life halfway around the world. You’ve got an All American kid, leading his college on the football field and on the baseball diamond. Then, with scouts watching, he gets a call that his bone marrow is a match for a girl in Ukraine. And then you met this beautiful little girl and you spend the next few seconds trying to keep it together on a treadmill in public.

What a good story.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … First a chunk of stories, if any of these headlines intrigue you:

Mobile is the ‘first screen’ for half of 18-34s

Twitter Overtakes Facebook as Teens’ Most Important Social Network

Louisiana police department will post photos of people who exploited food stamp glitch

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

From the multimedia blog: What is important is the money

Perhaps you heard about the student in north Alabama that recently killed himself. It has been in the news a bit because of some indirectly related things. Now his father has come forward, telling an incredibly moving tale:

Adamek said blaming Christian’s suicide on one event is “terribly over-simplistic” and called the national publicity over Christian’s streaking and subsequent death a distraction from the more important story. He explained that his family had been struggling in vain for months to find Christian the help he needed for depression.

“Nobody should have to make more than one phone call to get that kind of help, because there’s just not that much time,” Adamek said.

Adamek declined to go into specifics about Christian’s problems, saying “it doesn’t matter anymore,” but said that the family had tried for months to find the right mental health professionals for his son. They were met with obstacles like insurance issues and a lack of the right doctors.

“We followed every avenue apparently available to us, through the medical community, through the hospital system, but still couldn’t get the necessary diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that he so desperately needed,” Adamek said.

“We needed to know what he needed. That’s the help we were looking for.”

How heartbreaking that must be. And if the text didn’t get you, the video at the link, will.

And now for something funnier, healthcare and the highly efficient rollout! Jon Stewart:

Surprised he didn’t make a “Glitches don’t get you stitches” joke.