Month: February 2006

Fear The Blobby American!

I’m not generally a Mark Morford fan, but he did a good column in the Chronicle today about obese America vis a vis his recent vacation to Cabo. Here’s a snippet:

Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing.

They Didn’t Wait Long, Did They?

Three states have ruled that a Federal law banning late-term abortions is unconstitutional, but SCOTUS has decided they need to look at the case as well. Uh oh. That doesn’t bode well.

And Shakes delivers a nice smackdown in response:

The big question, of course, is what is the point of ramming through this legislation [that restricts abortion] without a provision that allows it in cases where the mother

On David Irving’s Trial Outcome

So famous Holocaust denier David Irving has been sentenced to three years in jail in Austria for violating this law:

whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.

Given the recent debate over free speech issues regarding the Danish cartoons, a lot of people are probably going to say that Irving should not be jailed for what he did. I’m not so sure.

I don’t see this so much as a free speech issue as an issue about lying. I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that in countries such as Austria, if you’re going to talk about the historical record of WW2, you have an obligation to do so accurately. Irving is entitled to whatever opinions he wants, but he’s not entitled to his own set of facts, and I think it’s acceptable to call him on that difference.

We send people to jail for perjury, after all. Why is this so different?

Shopping is Hard! Let’s Do Math!

Seriously, I’d (almost) rather be doing my Finance homework than shopping for a new digital camera.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I have a very nice SLR camera I use for what little high-end photography I do, so the digicam is just for day to day snapshots. I don’t have a long list of “must have” features. I have a reasonable budget. There’s a ton of cameras out there to choose from.

But that’s the problem. Even narrowing down the options to just two or three manufacturers, I still have dozens of cameras to choose from. And narrowing it down beyond that gets really tough. Every camera has a huge list of features, all with plusses and minuses. Every camera has both positive and negative reviews. But how to decide? Should I really care that a cover ‘seems flimsy’ or that a few people complain about blurry photos? How do I know if these people are being too nit-picky or pointing out real issues?

And the online guides are not all that helpful. Take Digital Photography Review, which several people pointed me to for guidance. There’s a very long list of features you can use to search their listings, but if you don’t narrow your choices down enough, the site only gives you the first 10 options back as a result. You don’t know if that’s the first 10 of 12 or 120, so you don’t know if those 10 cameras are a representative sample or not. And a lot of those choices, I either don’t know or don’t care about the option in question. What the heck is ‘white balance override’, and why should I care about uncompressed format types? Beats me. In short, if I cared more about high-end digital photography, it would probably be very useful, but for a hobbyist like me it was too much.

CNET’s search was more useful for my needs, but still tended to produce too many results for me to effectively deal with. A list of 125 possibilities is just too much for me to deal with. I don’t want to have to spend hours on this. I just want a list of 12 or so good options so I can pick the one that I like best.

Scott’s trying to be helpful and searched out two options for me to look at, one Sony, one Canon. It’s a help, but I’m still feeling paralyzed by all the choices I have. As much as I want a better digital camera, it’s actively stressing me out trying to pick one. I suppose I could go to the nearest store that sells digital cameras and simply buy one rather than over-analyzing the situaiton, and I might end up doing just that if I can’t get my head around all the information.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Or am I making it too hard?