Random Developments

So, I’m planning to buy a digital SLR camera in the near future. I currently use a film SLR which is almost 10 years old (a Minolta Maxxum 300si) and a digital point-and-shoot that is almost as old (an Olympus D200Z, I think). I’ve been doing a lot of research online to try to decide which camera to buy, and herein lies the problem.

The fact is, there is an amazing amount of information available about all models on the market. There are manufacturer brochures, specs, reviews, owners’ comments, side-by-side comparisons, “walk-throughs”, videos, audio recordings etc. etc. etc. But the problem is that there is way too much information. I have now read enough material that I would almost be able to write the user’s manual for the Canon EOS400D, the Nikon D60 or the Sony A100, and I’m nowhere near actually deciding for one of them. (At least I narrowed it down to these three models — plus the Sony A200, which is the almost identical twin to the A100, only two years younger)

The Nikon seems very good, but the auto-focus depends on the lens being able to do it, so the lenses are more expensive and the selection is a bit more limited. The Canon is, by far, the most popular of them, and it’s almost the “default” starting DSLR camera out there, but it is a 2006 model (its younger sister, the EOS450D, seems to be a bit too much for what I want) and the lenses included with the camera are universally described as crappy (yes, I can always buy the body only and get decent lenses separately, but this brings the price up). The Sony is, at its heart, an updated Minolta, and in fact it can use any Minolta lens (and I do have a Minolta); in fact, I can’t think of anything bad about the Sony models, but I’ve read much less about them than about the others, so I might have some surprises later. If no surprises show up, I am leaning towards an A200…

In the US, before each episode of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie ask people never to try at home what they’re going do in the show (in Australia this warning is not shown, for some reason).

This is why. (and this is the episode I’m talking about) (this one too)

This weekend I went for a walk in the Sherbrooke Forest, part of the Dandenong Ranges National Park. I followed a track described in the book 150 Walks in Victoria, by Tyrone Thomas and Andrew Close, and everything went fairly well.

To get to the track, I took the train to Belgrave and, from the station, walked approximately 1km (uphill) on Old Monbulk Road to the gates of the park. From there, I followed the trail in a clockwise direction, first north up to Grant’s Picnic Grounds (close to Monbulk Rd and “infested” with cockatoos trying to get food from the families eating there), then approximately south-east on Lyrebird Walk, continuing south on Neumann Track then south, and later west, on Paddy’s Track leading to an apparently unnamed track going west from a clearing known as Jack the Miners back to the starting point. A map of this path is here, including some pictures I took on the way (more pictures at my Flickr page).

The length of the path is around 6.3km, with some significant vertical movement as well; the first leg of the track leads steadily up, while the southward leg goes a bit up and then steeply down. The final few hundred metres go steeply up and reduced my average speed significantly…

This was also the first “field test” of the GPS unit I bought (and mentioned here), a Magellan eXplorist 400. It did very well (as the map linked to above shows), but I did find a few things out:

• the “trip odometer”, which should tell me how far I’ve moved, is either very inaccurate or using the wrong units; at the end of the track it was showing “4.0km”, while the recorded route was actually 6.31km long (which equals 3.92 miles…); this is definitely not good
• when you turn the device on, it takes around 60 seconds to lock to the satellites and get your initial position; that’s normal and more or less unavoidable because of the way the satellites transmit data; however, if you are moving — however slowly —, it seems the device won’t reliably find the satellites after any amount of time; this is not very good, but I can live with that (after it finds your initial position, it can be moved with no problems; also, being inside a backpack is not a problem)
• it won’t find the satellites from inside a train; I’m honestly curious about how it will perform inside a car
• marking positions is a very easy and quick process, but “typing” using that on-screen keyboard and mini-joystick is a pain

I really like GPS; it’s one of the cooler “general use” technologies out there.

GPS is the closest thing we have to a worldwide information network. Granted, it doesn’t really give you that much information: it will tell you where you are and what time it is (assuming you know your time zone), but nothing else. And, ok, it doesn’t really work indoors and accuracy is not great in urban areas (because of shadows and reflections caused by buildings), but it’s still very cool. Think about it: I can be (almost) anywhere in the world and a small handheld device will be able to tell me, in just a few seconds, exactly where I am using only information from a constellation of satellites flying overhead, unseen and ignored by most people. Fifty years ago this would be the stuff of sci-fi.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I recently bought a handheld GPS receiver, and I spent a few hours playing with it yesterday. The reason for that is that I’ve recently started engaging in bushwalking (or “hiking” for those outside Australia and NZ) with the Melbourne Bushwalkers. After my first somewhat “serious” walk, in the area of the Lorne waterfalls (about 13km downhill in the rain…), I tried to identify the path the group followed on a map and failed miserably. So, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to be able to record the track so I could, later, trace it on a map?”. Well, a GPS receiver is a good way of doing that.

The model I bought is a Magellan eXplorist 400. It’s a discontinued model, but it is fairly decent and there’s a healthy market of new units on eBay for very good prices. It can track up to 12 satellites and will use ground-based (WAAS) and satellite-based (EGNOS) auxiliary signals to increase accuracy where available; none of those are available in Australia, alas. It has a grayscale LCD display with a reddish (amber?) backlight and can display fairly detailed background maps (it won’t give you address-based directions or convert addresses to positions without additional software), and it uses SD cards as additional memory to record tracks, routes, points of interest and maps. It’s also fully waterproof (full immersion of up to 1m for up to 30 minutes), which is great for rainy days… And it comes with a USB cable to upload and download data from/to a computer.

I haven’t yet used it “in the field”, so I can’t talk much about it’s performance there; I hope to remedy this soon enough. I can’t talk about battery durability either, for now. I did try to use it in central Melbourne yesterday, with sort of mixed results… it does well in areas that are somewhat open, but “canyon-like” streets (with tall buildings on both sides) are usually blind spots (I wonder how it does in real canyons…). I uploaded the track log to Google Earth, generated a KML file and made a public Google Map from it, which is here; the recorded path is in a barely-visible light blue, and it actually covers about half of the path I followed; I guess it lost the signal in the other areas. The receiver was inside my backpack, which may also not be the best possible position for it.

I will be using it in future walks (and in a trip to remote areas later this year, where I plan to use GPS data to geotag the pictures I’ll take — and to not get lost, also), and I’ll write about how it does later on.

G’day Mate: tomorrow’s Internet, today. Courtesy of Google Australia.

By the way, the theme of Google’s jokes today seems to be “time travel”. Speaking of which, someone in today’s Buzz Out Loud was complaining that, because April 1st starts early in Australia, they were seeing jokes on 31 March. Well, spare a tought for the Australians who will only see the American jokes on 02 April, waaaay too late for them to be funny.

And this has got to be a joke: Sydney’s stressed brains are shrinking, says the ABC. “Stress from high house prices and sporting failures is shrinking Sydneysiders’ brains, compared to those of their counterparts in Melbourne”. Well, I knew I had picked the right city!

Best Seinfeld episode ever: The Marine Biologist. Best Friends episode ever: The One With All The Haste (but not with Channel Ten’s cuts). Best McGyver episode ever: Hell Week (close second: Ugly Duckling). Just thought I’d say it.

In 1987, the American ABC network started broadcasting a show created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, of The Bedford Falls Company, with music by W. G. “Snuffy” Walden. “thirtysomething” (not capitalised) was a drama dealing with the lives of, well, thirty-somethings: the main characters are Michael and Hope Steadman, interfaith couple (he is Jewish, she’s Christian) with two kids; other characters include Elliot, who works with Michael in advertising; Michael’s sister Melissa; Elliot’s wife Nancy, who develops cancer later in the series; Michael’s former roommate Gary, who dates Melissa but then marries Susannah and later dies in a car crash, just as Nancy recovers from cancer; and a few others. It was a show about real life without being about anything in particular; it’s sort of a drama version of Seinfeld. It was very well received by critics and public, and aired for four seasons (85 episodes in total); it also won one Golden Globe and several Emmys.

I first heard about this show in the early 90s, and I first watched an episode in 1996 or 1997, when a cable network in the US was showing repeats every night. I really enjoyed it, despite the fact that I wasn’t then in my 30s (I am now). This is one show I would like to buy in DVD, but it’s not legally available (there are a few illegal versions that you can buy on the net, but they’re not cheap and the quality — so I’m told — is very poor). Apparently there’s a company now working in restoring the original film stock used in the series and converting it to digital formats, which might be a first step towards releasing a set of DVDs…

A few years later, in 1994, the same ABC network started broadcasting another show created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, with music by W. G. “Snuffy” Walden. “My So-Called Life” wasn’t too different from “thirtysomething”, but it focused on another period of life: the high school years. The main character is Angela (brilliantly played by Claire Danes), who is in the process of finding her place in life — as are most teenagers at this time of their lives. We also get to know Brian, the geeky neighbour who’s in love with Angela; Jordan, the not-so-smart handsome guy Angela’s in love with; Rayanne, the party girl; Rickie, the latino bisexual friend of Rayanne’s (and later Angela’s); Graham and Patty, Angela’s parents, also going through interesting changes; and many others. This show was also loved by critics, and had (still has, in fact) a huge and amazingly dedicated following. Not huge enough for ABC (or maybe not huge enough at the time), as the show ran for only one season of 19 episodes. It still managed to win a Golden Globe that year (for Claire Danes).

Once again, when I first watched this show (probably in 1995) I was not in the right age bracket. Still, I fell in love with the show. I could see myself as Brian, and the way Angela showed the indecision of the teenage years was very convincing; it was beautiful. And the parts of the plot involving her parents were sort of a “fortysomething” embedded in the middle of the show. I used to have all the episodes in VHS (recorded from MTV, oddly enough), but those are long gone… I do have the soundtrack CD, though (as I do for “thirtysomething”).

Not long after, in 1996, ABC did it again with “Relativity”, another Herskovitz/Zwick show with soundtrack by Mr Walden. This one was about two twentysomethings who meet in Italy, fall in love and continue their relationship after they get back to the US; it dealt mostly with family relationships and the interaction between the relatives of the main characters. It was also short-lived: despite a large fan following, it was cancelled after 17 episodes. In 1999, the trio had a bit more luck, as their new series, “Once and Again”, had three full seasons, with a total of 63 episodes. I have to say that I watched the first few episodes of “Relativity” and didn’t like it that much, and I’ve never watched a full episode of “Once and Again”… it’s in my list for the future, though.

Which finally takes me to the point of this post. Last month, NBC aired in the US the first episode of a new series by Herskovitz and Zwick, “quarterlife” (once again, no capitals). It is a peculiar series, as it was first shown online: starting last November, short episodes were released every few days, and NBC “stitched” them together to show them as a regular 48-minute TV episode. It is about a group of twenty-somethings; the main character, Dylan, is a hopeful writer who works for a women’s magazine and keeps a video blog where she talks about her life and her friends. All other characters are somehow artistically inclined (a dancer, two film producers etc.), and the website of the series actually acts as a social network for artists. I’m not sure how it did online, but it didn’t work too well for NBC: they cancelled the show after airing a single episode (of a total of six that were produced; the other five were aired, all together, on cable a few days ago, and everything is still available online).

My impression of that first episode was that it showed some promise, but it was probably trying to hard to be “cool”. I don’t know why the ratings were so low as they were, though; it was not a particularly bad show, and I don’t think everyone had watched it online already. Sadly, we’ll never see whether it would deliver a good result… at the end of the day, Herskovitz and Zwick (and their company) have a track record of producing TV of great quality, which doesn’t always attracts that much of an audience as one would expect. Their shows are always very close to real life and real situations, and they make you think, and feel for (and with) the characters. That’s not something you see every day.

I’m pretty sure the Oscar ceremony shown on Channel 9 was “abridged”. I don’t remember seeing the award for best foreign language film, and I’m 100% sure the award for best documentary short was not shown (in fact, I think the award for best documentary feature was only shown because one of the winners is Australian) — the rather sudden appearance of Tom Hanks on the stage was a give away. Also, there wasn’t any mention of the scientific and engineering awards ceremony; they usually show a short clip during the main ceremony.

If “Duck Power Cleaner” kills 99.9% of the germs, it also selectively breeds the strongest 0.1% of the germs. Think about it.

I’ve yet to find a cat that sits as passively as the one in the ad while that Revolution anti-flea medication is applied. They don’t like the smell of the product and they’re not very fond of cold, wet products being applied on the back of their necks.

There were reports in the news recently about findings by researchers at the University of Copenhagen that show that all people with blue eyes share a single ancestor. This ancestor was supposedly the first person to express a gene mutation responsible for producing blue eyes; he or she lived in eastern Europe (probably around what’s Ukraine today) between 6 and 10 thousand years ago and all persons living today who have pure blue eyes (as opposed to blue eyes with brown spots/rings) are related through him/her.

Well, I have blue eyes (so do Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz; hi there, cousins!), and I mentioned this report to my wife; she asked “how do they know that?”. I started to answer something about looking at genetic details and then I realised… I didn’t really know. So I went after this information.

Looking for this on the net I found many copies of the same press release, with small changes here and there. It took me a while to find a link to the original article with the research results, and I have to say that it’s not an easy read for someone (like me) who is not a researcher in the area. Still, a few things were somewhat clear, and merging information from the article and from the press release I think I understand how they came to their conclusions.

So, the answer to “how do they know?” is, they actually don’t: they assume this is what happened, with a very high degree of confidence, due to what they found in the genes of the people they’ve surveyed.

Basically, the “normal” eye colour for human beings is brown; up to the moment when the blue-eye mutation first occurred, everybody had brown eyes. There’s a large degree of variation in the gene that codes for brown eyes, which indicates that it’s an “old” gene (in fact, it is shared with many other mammal species with brown/yellow eyes — other primates, cows, cats etc.). This also has the effect of introducing large variations in the actual colour of the eye (from pure brown to very dark brown almost black, to hazel, to blue with brown spots. to blue with brown ring around the pupil, to grey, to green — yes, green eyes are a variation of brown), due to differences in the amount of melanin in the iris.

People with blue eyes, on the other hand, display almost no variation in the gene coding for eye colour (and, hence, in the amount of melanin in the iris); they (well, we) all display the exact same mutation in the same location of the same gene, which causes an iris almost devoid of melanin. This indicates that the mutation is very recent and, at the same time, point to what the authors refer to as a “common founder” mutation - that is, a mutation that spread from a single person. As far as I could tell from the article, the date and geographical location of the original mutation is determined from the prevalence of the mutation in current populations and our knowledge of human migrations in the last 10,000 years.

Interestingly, the article does mention that the very high frequency of blue-eyed individuals in some areas of the globe (say, Scandinavia) indicates that this is a trait that is positively selected; that is, blue-eyed individuals have historically had a better reproductive success, at least in these areas (and this makes it harder to calculate the age of the original mutation). The reason for that advantage is not clear; it could be related to vitamin D absorption in high latitudes, or even to sexual selection (blue-eyed people being more successful in attracting partners). Your guess is as good as mine (and the authors’).

So, here it is; that how they know that.

Until very recently, I though all news headlines refering to “Fergie” were talking about Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. That made for some interesting moments.

Early morning in the city; girl in her 20s is running alone, wearing a t-shirt that says “Helsinki City Run”. At the corner of Elizabeth and Franklin she stops and looks around, seemingly very confused. I guess she was in the wrong city.

If I ever become the dictator of a small country (not that this is in my career plan), I will decree that car alarms going off in residential areas will be punished with the impounding and destruction of the car. Even if the car was being robbed.

For reasons that will become clear in the next few months, I’ve been recently browsing travel books about Japan. Amidst all the comments on the, say, interesting cultural aspects of the Japanese people, one thing that I found particularly puzzling was the number of Japanese words that seem to be derived from English words, adapted to the local pronunciation rules.

For example: “milk” is “miruku” (ミルク) (”l” sounds become “r”, consonants are always followed by a vowel); “beer” is “biiru” (ビール); and at least one book claims that “water” is “uota”, but that seems to apply only to mineral water; the “standard” water is “mizu” (水). And that’s only in the “beverages” chapter!

So, what has me puzzled is… what happened to the “original” words for these things? It seems obvious to me that the Japanese would have had words for beer and milk before being contacted by English speakers; the original words must have somehow been displaced by the imported ones. It is a common process for a language to acquire words from others, but it’s not so common that this would happen to words that are so regularly used.

Very interesting… I hope to find out what process caused this.

Seriously. Watch the video below. No further comments needed.

I don’t usually drive around Melbourne; I don’t own a car, so I take the public transport or simply walk to wherever I need to go. However, in recent weeks I had the need to drive to a few places, and I’ve made extensive use of the “directions” feature of Google Maps.

In short, it works quite well. It got me to my destination every time. But… the directions needed some retouching every now and then. That is, it does make some interesting mistakes.

For example, this path, part of a trip from Point Cook to the city:

It seems very reasonable, and it is indeed the shortest possible path. The only problem with it is that the area shaded in dark grey is a Royal Air Force base, and they don’t really like random people driving through their roads. Granted, there is a road there, but there’s a heavy barrier and an armed guard on the way…

Or this, which is how Google Maps suggest you drive from the city to the western suburbs using the West Gate freeway:

One can see in this map a very sharp right turn from Kings Way onto the freeway, which seems odd. It seems even odder when you switch to the satellite view:

It looks like they’re suggesting that you drive over a barrier and across four lanes of traffic to enter the freeway. Hardly the best possible route.

One more: a path from the Franklin Street, in the city, going south to the Eureka Tower (which is at 7 Riverside Quay):

See that sharp left turn from Queensbridge onto an unnamed street just south of the river? Well, look at the satellite view:

The proposed path takes one onto the footpath and over a very tall barrier (the large red thing) before reaching the destination. Again, it’s a very good path, but not legally - or physically - doable. I guess you could do it on foot, of course…

Don’t get me wrong, Google Maps is very useful and helped me a lot. But, if I found these problems in just a few weeks, I guess their maps need some serious revision…

Word of advice: this post has spoilers after the fold (after the link to “read more”). I will discuss fine points of the plot and the ending. You have been warned.

So, I’ve finished reading the last Harry Potter book a few days ago, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I was honestly worried that it would not live up to the hype, but it does. Every last plot point is very well finished, all the mysteries are solved and everything fits together perfectly. Not only that, but details from all previous books (even the first two) are relevant to the story and to the conclusion; it seems that J. K. Rowling did know what she was going for from the beginning, and she got to the end in the best possible way. A co-worker of mine even joked that she should get a job with the producers of Lost, now.

There one minor annoyance, which I will discuss in the spoilers session below; nothing too serious, though. An advice to anyone who hasn’t started it yet: go re-read book 6 beforehand. I had read book 6 soon after it came out, and didn’t touch it since; that was a mistake, as I started reading book 7 with just a vague recollection of the previous events, and there was no “previously on Harry Potter” at the beginning… it took me a while to remember what, exactly, was a horcrux, or what relevance that locket had.

I did a long “stretch” to finish the book; I read the final 150 pages or so in a single sitting, and I was exhausted at the end. There is so much going on, so many details to keep track of and so many mysteries being solved that you end up physically tired at the end. Worth it, though, and I almost started reading it back from the start right away. I decided on starting from the beginning, though, and I’m going through the audio version of “Philosopher’s Stone” now (from the library; these audiobooks are unbelievably expensive); Stephen Fry’s narration is wonderful. And, by the time I finish the first 6, the audio version of book 7 should be available.

In short: great book. Spoilers to follow.

Continue Reading »

For those in Melbourne interested in seeing an iPhone “in real life”, there is probably going to be one at the Melbourne Twitter Users Meetup, this Thursday, 5:30pm, at the Horse Bazaar (397 Little Lonsdale St), courtesy of Ben Barren.

You can’t make calls with it here, but everything else works, and the Horse Bazaar has free wi-fi.

Last March, a member of the US Congress — Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) — announced to the public that he’s an atheist, becoming in this way the first openly non-theist member of the US Congress in history. It was big news at the time, it was even reported in the mainstream media in Australia.

A few days ago, an Australian Member of Parliament — MP Ian Hunter (Labor-SA) — sent a letter to a newspaper responding to a report that claimed that he was reading a book while other MPs prayed. His response said that, being an atheist, he does not pray and therefore chose to “improve [his] mind by reading” instead. That wasn’t exactly big news, and I guess most people didn’t even hear about that — even in his own seat of Adelaide (I don’t think it would have made the news at all, hadn’t he also said that prayers in Parliament are “an archaic practice which wastes the time of the MPs”).

Leaving aside the fact that MPs regularly pray in Parliament (every day, in fact, at the opening of proceedings), that shows a significant difference in attitude regarding atheism between the two countries… (and, yes, US representatives also pray in Congress).