Displaying My Photos Online

I've been looking for some good sites for sharing my photos and I've come across a couple I'm going to try out.

500px - I hadn't heard of this site until recently. There's a couple of different membership options and I'm just driving with the free one now. So far it seems relatively simple to use.

DeviantArt - I have heard of this site and perused it before. Like 500px, it's relatively easy to use so far.

I think I'll link to these sites when I upload new pics rather than hosting them directly here on the blog.

One thing that became exquisitely clear on both of these sites is that there are some damn good photographers out there and I fell almost embarrassed having my photos on the same website. I plan to keep working at it, though, and maybe some day I'll feel like I belong there.

Kicking Obama in the Balls

The Onion, as is their wont, nails it.

Death Czar

Gleen Greenwald, always worth reading, has a post up about the power now being invested in John Brennan, torture cheerleader.

Now, Brennan’s power has increased even more: he’s on his way to becoming the sole arbiter of life and death, the unchecked judge, jury and executioner of whomever he wants dead (of course, when Associated Press in this report uses the words “Terrorist” or “al-Qaida operative,” what they actually mean is: a person accused by the U.S. Government, with no due process, of involvement in Terrorism):

...

Needless to say, all of this takes place in total secrecy, with no legal framework and no oversight of any kind. Indeed, even after they had Brennan publicly defend the CIA drone program, the Obama administration continue to insist in federal court that the program is too secretive even to confirm its existence. It’s just a tiny cadre of National Security State officials who decide, in the dark, whom they want dead, and then — once the President signs off — it is done. This is the Change with which the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate has gifted us: ”some of the officials carrying out the policy are equally leery of ‘how easy it has become to kill someone.’”

This is so far from candidate-Obama's words that it's just baffling. The power of the Executive continues to grow seemingly unchecked and there seems to be no obstacles to stopping it and no future path visible to reverse it. This way lies madness.

What is the Outreach Strategy?

I often wonder what extreme Christians are thinking when they say we should do things like, "Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there... Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out… And you know what, in a few years, they'll die."

In a sermon blasting President Obama for his same-sex marriage support, Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, offered a novel — and horrific — solution to the so-called gay scourge: build an electric fence and let "lesbians, queers and homosexuals" starve to death.

"I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers," he says in his sermon, delivered on May 13. "Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there... Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out… And you know what, in a few years, they'll die."

Has Mr. Worley read a Bible? I have. A few times. I'm struggling to recall a place where Jesus talked about treating people like this. Maybe it's in some apocryphal book I'm not aware of. In my Bible, Jesus talks about loving people. He hangs out with outcasts - lepers, whores, tax collectors. I'm pretty sure he didn't advocate locking sinners up somewhere and letting them die. In fact, I'm pretty sure an idea like that runs counter to everything Jesus talked about. Again, maybe this is in a text that was accidentally and erroneously left out of the New Testament. It would be nice of Pastor Worley to share this text with the rest of us, though.

In addition to wondering where these people come up with these ideas, I wonder about their perception of the efficacy of these statements. Do they think that someone hears a message like this and thinks, "What? That's how bad homosexuality is? I had no clue. I guess I better get my act together." Do they imagine that someone hears this and thinks, "That's a church I'd feel comfortable going to. Those people aren't judgmental at all."

Look, I get that some people have honest religious convictions about issues like homosexuality and abortion. What I don't get is how people like Pastor Worley think that this is a good way to get that message across. This isn't the 18th-century anymore where nearly everyone is going to church and local pastors have a lot of control over what happens in their communities. People have enormous freedom and are bombarded with numerous messages, spiritual and secular. The bottom line is that people are going to go where they feel comfortable, where they feel welcome. Preaching that we should lock homosexuals up and let them die is unlikely to offer many outside a very small community a welcoming message whether they are LGBT or not.

Weekly Photographs

I went to Riverfront Park for these pictures. It's a great place. Two things became apparent, though. One, I really need to get some more lenses. There were a few shots I really wanted to get, but couldn't without a telephoto lens. If anyone has any spares lying around they want to get rid of, I won't say 'no.' Two, I really need to make sure I'm taking enough memory with me. I had 3 Gigs of memory, but I forgot the 2 Gb card was full. I had to cut the shoot early because of that. Ah, well. I still think I got some decent photos.

Stray Geese Strut

Geese Whisperer

The Elusive Squirrel

The "Mountain"

My niece kept pointing at the hill in the distance and saying we needed to walk to the mountain.

Swim Lessons

Moral Humility

This is one of my favorite TED talks.

Humility, moral or any other kind, is hard. But necessary.

Have the Geeks Won?

Freddie deBoer writes that geeks need to stop playing the victim card because they've won.

The success of the Avengers is only a small part of a broader phenomenon: the rise of “geek culture” as the single most powerful force, commercial and cultural, in the art and media landscape. The major genres and media once consigned to the realm of geek or nerd culture, such as science fiction, high fantasy, comic books, and video games now dominate both in terms of commercial success and popular attention. They are simply unavoidable. Year in and year out, the most highly promoted and widest opening blockbuster films come from broader geek culture. Superhero movies have become so ubiquitous that filmmaker demand is outstripping the supply of comic book characters that could plausibly carry a movie. (Jonah Hexx happened for a reason.) Coverage of video games is now prevalent in general-purpose newspapers and magazines. Television shows like Game of Thrones and Grimm bring Dungeons and Dragons-inflected fantasy—once a bridge too far even for many genre fiction fans— to a large audience. Even the traditionally high-brow cultural media, publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker, devote more attention to sci-fi and superheroes than they do to opera, orchestral music, and ballet.

Yet despite this dominance, there remains a remarkable sensitivity towards perceived slights among these genres’ most dedicated fans.

It's a good essay. I wonder where this feeling comes from. As deBoer points out, it wasn't that long ago that geeky things weren't taken quite as seriously as they are today. However, I don't think it's proximity to the recent past that is fueling the aggrievement. My guess is that it comes down to two things.

One, on a large scale, geeks may have won. I don't think the same can be said on the individual level. A pasty-white, math genius who loves Dungeons and Dragons is a lot more likely to get teased and picked on and bullied than the star quarterback. It's hard to proclaim that geeks have won when you're getting shoved into lockers on a regular basis.

Two, geeks are still portrayed as sort of oddball losers in many forms of media. Not in every show and movie, of course, but in many. People are good at taking portrayals of their group in media and making it their own whether or not it matches their own experiences.

These are just a couple of off the cuff thoughts I had while reading deBoer's essay and not any sort of rigorously thought out ideas. Maybe I'll think differently tomorrow.

The Lowest Difficulty Setting

John Scalzi, sci-fi author and blogger extraordinaire, wrote a post analogizing being a straight, white male to the lowest difficulty setting in life.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

It's a good analogy. What I find most fascinating, though, are the comments. Plenty of SWMs pop-in to cry foul and "what has being a SWM ever done for me?!?!"

Many SWMs listen to someone talk about the privilege they have and immediately cry foul which is why Scalzi avoids using the word in his analogy. "I was born poor," they say. "I've contracted cancerAIDS," they say. "Some minority got a job instead of me just because of Affirmative Action," they say. Naturally they miss the point. Scalzi is not saying that being a SWM is a guarantee of riches and an easy life. He's saying that it gives you a leg up. Of course a SWM is (usually) still going to have to put some effort into life to get ahead. It's just that it won't typically have to be as much as someone who is, say a gay, Arabic woman. More doors open more easily for SWM than they do for people who are not.

The larger point that Scalzi is making is that the people who are privileged, the SWMs, need to be aware of this. Being aware doesn't mean needing to feel guilty or to run around making apologies for what they were granted by accident of birth. It means understanding that others have not been granted the same. It means asking, "What can I do, what can we do as a society to reduce the privilege gap so that all people have the same opportunity (not the same outcome) for success.

This is not a simple problem by any means and it's not something that will be solved overnight even if everyone agreed that it was a problem that needed solving. There are still people out there who think white supremacy is a good thing. But the first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging that there is one. That's what Scalzi's post aims at doing in the clever way he's so good at.

Town Outlaws Texting While Walking

File under "Annals of the Ludicrous." A New Jersey town has outlawed texting while walking.

Pedestrians in Fort Lee, New Jersey will have to stop to text, following the passage of a new law that imposes $85 fines on walkers caught texting. Fort Lee Police Chief Thomas Ripoli cited numbers of pedestrian crashes to support the ban: Last year there were 74 crashes involving pedestrians; three pedestrians were killed this year, according to The Record's NorthJersey.com.

“It’s a big distraction. Pedestrians aren’t watching where they are going and they are not aware,” Ripoli said during an announcement of the ban.

Following a brief warning period, New Jersey police began issuing fines to distracted walkers near the end of March, with more than 117 violations recorded to date.

This sounds like an excuse to collect money from the citizenry. Sure, distracted walkers are getting into accidents and getting killed, but how is criminalizing it going to solve the problem? Oh, that's right. When we ban things as with alcohol or drugs, no one uses them anymore. Got it.

An Enterprise in 20 Years?

An engineer is saying that if we dedicate the resources, we could have our own starship in twenty years.

In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.

"We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise — so let's do it," writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.

This "Gen1" Enterprise could get to Mars in 90 days, to the moon in three, and "could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse — rovers, special-built planes and satellites,” BTE Dan says.

I'd by lying if I said that this doesn't make me feel giddy. This guy isn't some dreamer, either. He actually is an engineer. He's got plans on the website for the ship including plans for funding the endeavor.

The importance of dreaming big cannot be understated. Dreams inspire us to achieve new heights, to strive for better things. They challenge us to be better than we are today. Without dreams we stagnate. NASA inspired so many people back in the 60s and 70s, but it has lost that these days. Just check out this recent Onion headline: "NASA Announces Plans to Put Man on Bus to Cleveland." How sad that it has fallen so far.

There are a lot of anti-science people out there and there's a lot of people out there who argue that "we shouldn't spend money on space stuff until we fix our problems down here." Guess what? There will always be problems here on Earth.

We are humans, imperfect constructs. We have messy feelings and emotions and an inability to perfectly reason. That's not going to go away. But dreaming big and aspiring to new heights will help us solve problems. Look at this list of technologies that came out of the space race. And that's just the start! It's hard to overestimate what the drive for space technology did for those of us stuck on terra firma. A new push for space will have the same effects. It will inspire new scientists in all sorts of fields.

Maybe this specific project isn't the answer. Or maybe it is. The sad fact is that there is far too little talk of space exploration. Check out his website, though. Check out NASA's website. Bug your Congressional representatives to fund more space exploration. Make your kids watch Star Trek. Inspire them.

Updated Blogroll

I just updated my blogroll over on the right hand side of the screen. I try to read a variety of stuff from around the spectrum. And it's all interesting. It makes me think which is the requirement for any blog I read. Check 'em out. They're worth your time.

Battling Robots During the Inevitable Uprising

This is crucial information. I hope you're taking notes.

Crazy Lady Says Crazy Things About Gays

This is the funniest video I've seen in awhile.

"Don't go gay. It's not healthy."

"Jesus was kissed by Judas, a homo."

You can't make this stuff up.

Cellphones and Etiquette

An interesting new study says that cellphones make us more selfish.

Researchers from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that after a short period of cell phone use, people were less likely to partake in “prosocial” behavior — actions that are intended to help another person or society — compared with a control group. For example, after using a cell phone, study participants were more likely to turn down volunteer opportunities and were less persistent in completing word problems, even though they knew their answers would provide money for charity.

The same drop in prosocial tendencies occurred even when participants were simply asked draw a picture of their cell phones and think about using them.

The study involved college men and women in their 20s, but the researchers think the findings would apply to any group.

So why would an innocuous thing like making a cell phone call make a person less giving? The researchers think it has to do with feelings of social connectedness. All humans have a fundamental need to connect with others — but once that need is met, say by using a cell phone, it naturally reduces our inclination to feel empathy or engage in helping behavior toward others. “The cell phone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong,” said study author and marketing professor Rosellina Ferraro in a statement.

This is very fascinating. I wonder how to combat it. I profess to being as guilty as anyone of being addicted to my smartphone even when I'm in social situations, though I do make some effort to not be constantly checking it every time it vibrates. I think the key is going to have to be peer pressure. Friends and family need to make pacts to have space away from phones and rigorously enforce it. It takes time for us to adapt to any new thing and smartphones really are still quite new. It's no wonder that we are still learning how to make them best fit in our lives.

Was the Death Star Worth It?

One of the greatest things about the internet is getting to read serious posts on serious topics like the Death Star and whether it was worth it for the Empire to build it.

But will it work? Only if it induces cooperation through fear. Every planet blown up represents a tremendous loss of potential future revenue, so like nuclear weapons today, the actual use of the DS is a calamity. Moreover, like nuclear weapons, they only work as a deterrent if they are used judiciously. Citizens throughout the galaxy must believe that failure to pay their taxes and comply with their Imperial masters will lead to detonation, but also that compliance will save them. The fact that the DS was used against Alderaan, however, would likely have had the opposite effect. Alderaan is “peaceful” and “has no weapons.” It was detonated because its teenage senator was secretly aiding the Rebel Alliance and waited too long to give up Dantoonie. To me, that’s a little too Caligula to induce rational compliance. One imagines the conversations on other planets:

Peasant 1: Did you hear the Empire blew up Alderaan? What kind of government blows up one of the richest planets in the galaxy because of one smack-talking teenager? It could be any of us next.

Peasant Windu: Enough is enough! I have had it with these [redacted] emperors on their [redacted] Death Star!

The whole thing is worth a read.

Our Broken Congress

Ezra Klein wrote a good post on his blog about how differently our Congress functions these days than it used to, specifically in regards to the filibuster. He included this helpful chart to demonstrate.

As you can see, things aren't quite the same as they used to be. No President or single member of Congress we elect, no matter how great they are, is going to be able to overcome the problems inherent in the way our government works. We need a different system and I don't mean throwing out everything we have and moving to a parliamentary system. I mean, we need to have rules that allow the majority to govern.

North Carolina Passes Sweeping Same Sex Marriage Ban

The polling made it look like it would and sure enough it passed. North Carolina has passed an amendment to their state constitution that will disallow any sort of partnership, homosexual or not, that isn't a "traditional" marriage. This is disheartening. I just try to keep in mind that demographics are on the right side and it's only a matter of time before more Americans in all age groups support gay marriage.

While younger adults and liberals remain at the forefront of support for gay marriage, the new results underscore its expansion. In an ABC/Post poll five and a half years ago, for example, under-30s were the sole age group to give majority support to gay marriage, at 57 percent. Today it's 68 percent in that group – but also 65 percent among people in their 30s, up a remarkable 23 points from the 2005 level; and 52 percent among those in their 40s, up 17 points. Adults 50 and older remain more skeptical, but even that's seen change. Most notably, 33 percent of seniors now say gay marriage should be legal, up from 18 percent five years ago.

As more and more people come to the realization that gay marriage hurts no one and is good for people, then more and more states will overturn these draconian laws. It's going to be a painful ride and it's not going to happen overnight. Opponents of gay marriage are not going to go gently into that good night. But as long as supporters keep making their case and more gay people come out and share their stories so people can see how normal they are, then I think the long arc of the universe will eventually bend towards justice on this issue.

Fringe Candidates

Elections are mostly depressing affairs, but occasionally something spices events up. Something like fringe candidates. Take a look at Keith Judd who is running against Barack Obama in West Virginia. He was a member of the League of Superheroes back in the day. He's also currently in prison for making threats at a university.

He's not doing too bad either, picking up about 40% of the vote. Those West Virginians know how to pick 'em.

Weekly Photographs

One of the things I thought I would do now that I'm blogging again is start featuring some of my photos. I don't do this because I think I'm some great photographer, but as an incentive to actually get off of my butt and get out taking pictures. I still have a lot to learn about the craft, but I'm not going to learn it sitting in my room. Here are a couple I took just today.

Flower

Self Portrait

A Question of Spaces and Periods Cont.

From the #realtalk from your editor tumblr. This cracked me up.

WHEN A GOOD WRITER SUBMITS A PIECE WITH DOUBLE SPACING AFTER THE PERIODS