Mokka mit Schlag

A New Mac Pro

2010-07-27T14:30:45Z

A new Mac Pro is long overdue, and I need one. Lightroom’s too slow on my vintage 2007 MacBook, and more importantly Warcraft is only giving me about 5 FPS. :-) If the new machine is fast enough, maybe I could even use Parallels/VMWare/Bootcamp instead of my Windows 7 desktop PC (which clocks 60 FPS in WoW without breathing hard). Maybe Apple will release new models tomorrow? If it does, I want to compare it to today’s prices, so if I bought today behind door #1 we have:

Specifications
One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
8GB (4×2GB)
640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
One 18x SuperDrive
Apple Magic Mouse
Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User’s Guide
AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n
$3,019 before taxes and discounts

I would likely add at least two more third party hard drives to this, one 2 TB internal and one smallish SSD drive. Do I need more memory? 4GB is not cutting it. Will 8GB be enough? Should I just configure with the minimum and then buy 3rd party RAM? RamJet has 16GB for $575.99, way below Apple’s price.

Behind door #2, we have the same system but with eight 2.26GHz cores instead of 4 2.66GHz cores for about $3619. Which is likely to perform better, especially for Lightroom?

Behind door #3, we have the same system but with eight 2.66GHz cores for $5,069.00. This is over my budget, but maybe tomorrow it won’t be?

Behind door #4, we have the same system but with eight 2.93GHz cores for $6,269.00. This is way over my budget.

Behind door #5 is a quad core 3.33GHz system for $4,219.00. If raw CPU speed is what I need, this is the best I can do.

Finally, behind door #6 is something completely different, a 15″ MacBook Pro:

2.66GHz Intel Core i7
8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2×4GB
512GB Solid State Drive
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 15-inch Hi-Res Glossy Widescreen Display
Backlit Keyboard (English) & User’s Guide

The big advantage here is that I could then sell my MacBook to offset some of the cost since I don’t need two laptops. On the other hand, I do prefer a smaller laptop when travelling. I could even drop down to the 13″ model but I really want to max out the CPU. Would this system be fast enough to suit me? I don’t know. Certainly it should be faster than the 2007 vintage MacBook I’m using now. But I really want a system that has as close to zero delay as possible when moving between images in Lightroom. Are today’s MacBook Pros fast enough to deliver that? Even when the images are stored on an external Firewire drive? If not, then I’d be happier with a Mac Pro. Three critical questions I don’t know the answer to:

How many external monitors can I drive off a MacBook Pro?
What makes the biggest difference for Lightroom 3 performance: RAM, CPU clock rate, number of cores, internal drive speed (where the system, app, and catalog are stored) and external drive speed (where the photos are stored)?
How efficiently does Lightroom 3 make use of multiple cores? Lightroom 2 had major issues here and so did Lightroom 3 beta.

Still I have a feeling that even if I go with a Mac Pro tomorrow, it may be the last desktop I ever buy. There is a point at which a faster system just doesn’t matter, and even for heavy RAW file processing today’s systems are getting close. Video can still suck up a few more generations of hardware, but I think we’re nearly topped out on photo editing performance. Hard to believe I can remember times when Macs had special add-on cards just to do JPEG compression! In 2010 poor computer responsiveness is almost always the result of really bad programming that fails to take proper advantage of available CPU, rather than wimpy hardware.

Update: 8:08 AM EDT and the Apple Store is down. Looks like something is coming.

#505 Hudsonian Godwit

2010-07-22T11:55:02Z

Sunday morning Janet Schumacher and I drove out to Cupsogue Beach County Park on the south shore of Long Island to look for the Hudsonian Godwit that had been reported there since the previous weekend. I first saw it at low tide around 9:15 AM on the first sandbar in the bay, visible from just past the trailer parking area. However the bill looked a little off and I wasn’t sure before the bird took off. Could have been a Dowitcher in intermediate plumage. Then, after walking a mile out to the point and back again, we relocated it at exactly the same spot and got much better looks at it, including a few (bad) photographs.

At least I hope that’s the bird. (Lower right foreground) It was easier to see through the scope which give you much several times more magnification than my 400mm lens, which is roughly equivalent to a pair of binoculars. To get this much I had to scan along the sandbar snapping away and then blow up the photos later at home.

If anyone wants to try for it:

Check the tide tables. Aim for low tide.
Drive to the far west end of the parking lot.
From there, walk down the unpaved sand road till just past the trailer camp.
Scope the sandbar in the middle of the bay (right hand side of the road) until you spot a Dowitcher sized bird with a noticeably ruddy breast.

Also, if it’s a weekend get there early. Although there were few folks around when we arrived, by the time we left at 11:30 the parking lot was completely full, and the police were turning away a long line of cars.

The bird may be associating with some Dowitchers, or it may just be a coincidence. At one point we saw the Dowitchers appear to get annoyed with the Godwit and chase it off. However the color and patterns are clearly distinct from the Dowitchers. I would have been less confident in the ID if we hadn’t had both species standing right there for easy comparison. By itself, the Godwit is easy to mistake for a Dowitcher at this distance. interestingly, we could see that the feeding pattern was also distinct. The Dowitchers probe the mud much faster than the Godwit does.

Other birds seen included:

Double-crested Cormorant
Great Egret
Osprey
Black-bellied Plover
American Oystercatcher
Spotted Sandpiper
Greater Yellowlegs
Willet
Hudsonian Godwit
Ruddy Turnstone
Red Knot
Sanderling
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
Least Tern
Common Tern
Forster’s Tern
Tree Swallow
Barn Swallow
Northern Mockingbird
Song Sparrow
Red-winged Blackbird
House Finch
House Sparrow

The Most Important Books I’ve Ever Read

2010-07-13T10:47:37Z

Not necessarily the best books I’ve ever read, but these are the ones that changed my life (in no particular order):

There’s also one more book (a fantasy novel about calculus circa 1983 of all things) that should be on this list, but I haven’t been able to dig up a copy or remember what its title was. I do recall it involved a demon who posed problems that the king and courtiers then tried to solve. If that rings a bell with anyone, please post a comment. Update: I’m pretty sure this was the first edition of Calculus the Easy Way by Douglas Downing.

There’s one more book in my private list that I’m deliberately omitting here.

I’d sort of also like to include the entire non-fiction ouevre of Isaac Asimov, but while his books were very important, I’m not sure I can point to any one book that stands out.

I’m also leaving out all my own books, which in many ways changed my life too, but in very different ways than the ones shown here.

The earliest of these I read in late high school. The most recent (the one I’m not mentioning) just last year.

Some of these were important in total. Some of them just had one or two crucial ideas. Looking at the group of them though, I am struck that they’re all non-fiction (with the half-exception of Calculus the Easy Way). There are a lot of novels I’ve read and loved, many more than once, but I can’t say any of them had a noticeable impact to the point that my life would be different if I hadn’t read them. The one that perhaps comes closest is Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy but like Asimov, Wilson’s non-fiction work had a much bigger impact on me.

No textbooks made the list, or rather no textbooks actually used in a class. Chris van Wyk’s Data Structure and C Programs is a textbook, but when I read it, I’d not yet taken any courses in computer science. (And since then I’ve only taken two.) Nor did any assigned reading make the list. Outside of science and math, I can’t even remember most of my course books.

Subject wise, history is notably lacking. I’m not sure why that is.

Some books seemed important at the time but didn’t stand up to the test of time, and I eventually rejected what they had to teach. Others failed to make the list because they weren’t unique enough. Pretty much everything I’ve ever read about physics or economics falls into that category. There were many important books but they were more or less interchangeable with each other. No one stands out.

Calculating Levels in Lightroom

2010-06-26T13:20:27Z

Suppose I edit a raw file in Photoshop with levels as follows:

What are the Lightroom equivalents of these values? Is there a mathematical formula that converts from Photoshop’s black, white, and midpoint slider values to Lightroom’s Exposure, Blacks, Recovery, Fill Light, Brightness, and Contrast sliders?

Adobe Development and Auto Tone Algorithms

2010-06-20T14:40:03Z

I shoot raw, and develop in Lightroom. (Version 2; just haven’t upgraded quite yet but I suspect the questions are the same for the recently released version 3.) Sometimes the results are pretty good out of the box, but usually they require a lot of manual tweaking to make the light work. I suspect they may be designed more for wedding and portrait and landscape photography and the like and less for the wildlife and macro photography I like to do. There are two areas I have questions about, the initial settings and the auto adjustments.

Here’s a harvestman with Lightroom’s default settings:

Here’s the same harvestman with manual tone adjustments. Notice how much clearer it is, and a lot closer to its “true” colors in the field:

And here it is again with auto tone:

In general, autotone seems to have more trouble with darker settings than with brighter ones. It may also have trouble with a darker figure at the center compared to a brighter background (not uncommon when shooting tiny bugs.) though that’s not obvious in this picture.

The initial tone settings on all photos are:

Exposure: 0.00
Recovery 0:
Fill Light: 0
Blacks: 5
Brightness: +50
Contrast: +25

Recovery 0 and Fill Light 0 make sense. A properly exposed photo doesn’t need either of these, and how much of which will vary widely from one photo to the next. Buy why set Blacks to 5? That’s almost always too high for my photos.

Why is Brightness set to to 50 and exposure to 0? Why not set exposure to .5 and Brightness to 0 instead? Or why 50 and not 45 or 55? or 25 or 65? How were these numbers arrived at?

Why is Contrast +25 and not +20 or +30? Where did these values come from? Is it plausible that they’re all multiples of 5?

Second question: Auto Tone. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It almost never picks a reasonable recovery or fill light value if a photo needs that. How is it calculated? Has Adobe ever explained what’s happening here? The one thing I’ve been able to determine is that cropping doesn’t seem to affect the results. I.e. Lightroom makes its adjustments based on the entire photo rather than the cropped portion. It might do better if it would just look at the piece of the image I want to keep.

As I said, I use Lightroom, but I suspect the questions are the same for Photoshop and anything that uses Adobe Camera Raw. Can one play with the algorithm at all? I know how to make a preset that chooses fixed values, or that uses Auto Tone, but I’d like a little more control, something that can consider the nature of the photograph itself before choosing the adjustments. Is there any way to do that?

Verizon Incompetence

2010-06-15T00:13:42Z

Verizon’s level of incompetence is stunning. They are so bad they can’t accept payments online or over the phone. They have to out source that to another company. Instead of a simple form like every other e-commerce company on the planet, they want you to install software to pay them. And then the install doesn’t work!

The flow will not proceed due to Missing Hand-off Parameters:
customertype
AcctCategory
service_provider

guid value=c572db93-fac6-b141-a9c0-001d4ffb756e
ver value=6.2.0
accesstype value=
service_provider value=
customertype value=
sp value=0
thd value=610152
password value=
language value=english
line value=
ordernumber value=
regstep value=wba1
cpu value=2147
txtype value=
cdtype value=
ram value=2047
ie value=
oscode value=10.6.3
shd value=73548
zipcode value=
username value=The flow will not proceed due to Missing Hand-off Parameters:
customertype
AcctCategory
service_provider

guid value=c572db93-fac6-b141-a9c0-001d4ffb756e
ver value=6.2.0
accesstype value=
service_provider value=
customertype value=
sp value=0
thd value=610152
password value=
language value=english
line value=
ordernumber value=
regstep value=wba1
cpu value=2147
txtype value=
cdtype value=
ram value=2047
ie value=
oscode value=10.6.3
shd value=73548
zipcode value=

username value=

Just another example of monopoly incompetence.

Warcraft is a Comic Book. It Should Be a Novel.

2010-06-02T00:33:37Z

Although I used to be quite involved in and interest in World of Warcraft, I gradually grew tired of it, and about a year ago I canceled my account. It wasn’t that I was bored with it. I still wanted to play it, but the game had moved away from me, and no longer offered the experience it once did. When Wrath of the Lich King came out I was so far behind the curve I decided to cancel rather than upgrade. Here are some thoughts on what a game might do to get me back.

I thought I was a fairly serious player, but by the standards of most raiding guilds I was a relatively casual player. My main toon was at maybe 45ish when the Burning Crusade was released, and I didn’t ding 70 on a single toon till shortly after Lich King dropped. I’ve never gotten a Horde toon to 70. I’ve done very few raids or end-game dungeons. There is a lot of content I’ve never seen. And honestly I have little interest in seeing nerfed content with Level 80+ raiders and a group of folks who use add-ons and wikis that tell exactly how to precisely optimize each dungeon and quest. The game was a lot more fun in the early days before it became mostly an addiction for min-maxing button mashers.

I wish there were a way to instance more of the content so that I could effectively start from the beginning and experience it with others. The current situation is more like a comic book than a novel: e.g. reading Batman today you’re hopping in deep in the middle of the story (a major problem in comics for attracting new readers). Whereas with a novel series like Harry Potter, you start at the beginning and work your way through no matter whether you read it in 1998 or 2010.

I do like WoW’s general sense of world progression and world events, and I don’t want to see that go away. Nor do I want to play on an empty server. However I do wish there were a way for a character starting today to experience Ahn’Qiraj, Naxxaramas and the rest of it. I still remember when Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire were cool rather than the ghost towns they are today, but I never actually got to them.

I would love to see a fully instanced/phased game that allowed one to start a character at level 1 and work through the game at your own pace and experience the opening of the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj, the opening of the Burning Portal, the Scourge Invasion, etc. And be able to play the entire world with players of similar levels and progression without getting ganked by 80s or having my competition funded by level 80 alts. A player starting today at 1 misses so much. A 12 year old can pick up the Lord of the Rings and read it for the first time. She can watch Star Wars for the first time. She can play Oblivion for the first time, and still get pretty much the same experience her brother/mother/grandparent did 10/30/60 years ago. But there’s just no way to come at WoW as a newcomer any more. The magic and mystery, I’m afraid, is gone.

Here’s a thought: suppose servers had an in-game calendar? A new server could be started with an in game date of November 1, 2004 and run from there? Or maybe not even all servers start this way, but some do? Perhaps the calendar can be compressed a bit so eventually the servers catch up (but not too quickly). Allow characters to transfer backwards or forwards in time by switching servers if (and only if) they’ve reached or haven’t reached certain milestones. For instance, if my mage is still 45 when BC is rolled out to her server, let her move backwards to a v1 server. If a warrior dings 60, has killed Onyxia, and cleared Stratholme, Scholomance, and The Molten Core, let him transfer up to server at the next level.

Don’t allow gold and loot transfer between servers on different calendars. Do use the original experience tables. Don’t offer Recruit-a-friend and other bonuses. Twinks should be possible, but make them be earned from below, not bought from above. Blizzard doesn’t need to reproduce every bug from the early days. They could even upgrade the graphics and gameplay. (I would love an unlimited number of open quests.) But make it possible to play through the original game with the more-or-less the original mechanics and the original rules.

The point is to allow the old content to be experienced as new at a leisurely pace by those folks who haven’t seen it yet, not to be raced through on the way to Level 85 by someone leveling their seventeenth alt. Nor should people playing on a new server have to compete with gold-capped alts outfitted in T8+ gear. (On the flip side Blizzard might want to start Level 58+, 68+, and 78+ servers where anyone can roll any class at that level to start off to recruit more players who are bored with the original content.)

While you’re at it, if there’s any way the content can be more effectively randomized (e.g. different maps on different servers; more unpredictable distribution of monsters and loot) do it. Quest Helper and Thottbot have completely eliminated the magic and mystery that Warcraft once held. And I don’t just want to not use these cheats myself. I don’t want to play with people who use them. Today the only real unpredictability and interest the game holds is PvP. World content is just too well known and documented. Even new players are rapidly spoiled.

I’ve tried other games (Age of Conan, Aeon, Warhammer) but none of them came close to matching WoW’s usability, interest level, and depth. I’m considering reactivating my account for Cataclysm and see what the new races are like. Blizzard says they’re reinventing Azeroth and levels 1-60 in this release with new towns, new quests, and more. That could be fun. However if the game just turns into another race to 85, with every tip and trick already spoiled by Quest Helper and Thottbot, and where 90% of the players have already run three toons through in beta, I won’t stay long.

Religion is like Sausage (The Only Thing I Ever Wrote on Facebook Worth Saving)

2010-06-01T10:38:54Z

Today is Quit Facebook Day, and I have deleted my account. Bottom line: Facebook’s culture, beliefs and attitude all seem to indicate that they want everything to be shared with everyone. Nothing they have done indicates any change in their core values and beliefs. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with a service that shares everything with everyone by default. That’s what this blog does, and Twitter. However Facebook promised something different, and then they took it back, exposing users’ private information in the process. Furthermore they have given every indication that they intend to keep doing so just as soon as they can get away with it.

Even if I trusted Facebook to keep their promises for more than a week, the bottom line is I just don’t need the service they want to provide. Facebook’s value proposition was always a way to share content with friends and family that you didn’t want to share with the whole world. For sharing with the whole world we already have Buzz, Blogs, Twitter, and many more options. For sharing one-to-one we have e-mail. Facebook, for a time, sat in-between; and it was useful. It no longer is. If there’s an existing service that offers what Facebook used to offer, I haven’t found it. Linked In comes closest, but its focus is different.

In any case, I mostly used Facebook to keep up with a few old, geographically diverse friends. I never used it much for writing. In fact, in the years I’ve had a Facebook account (going back to when you had to have a .edu address to join, and your network was your university) I think I’ve only written one significant item I’d sort of like to keep. So here it is for posterity, after a little editing. In the meantime, if you need to find me I’m easy enough to google and I put my real, unobscured e-mail address on most of my web pages.

This originally appeared as a comment in a thread on married Catholic priests, in response to the (true) claim that priestly celibacy had no support in the Bible.

Christianity and the Bible

The more I learn about both the Bible and the Church (and not just the RC church) the less they seem to have to do with each other. Aside from a few ethical principles honored more in the breach than the observance and mostly shared among the major religions, the Christian religion practiced today–rituals, sacraments, theology, etc.–has very little to do with the Bible. If we were really following the religion of the Bible we’d all be Jewish, much like Yeshua himself.

I thank Jesuit High School, both Jesuits and the lay teachers, for setting me on the path to a more rational, adult understanding of the church and of religion. I do wonder these days how many of them knew where it led. I can’t imagine they didn’t. There’s just too much scholarship about these matters, and my teachers were all far too educated not to be familiar with it. I suspect they knew just how far they could go. Debunking the loaves and the fishes, Book of Job, Lazarus, walking on water: safe. Resurrection, Virgin Birth, and Immaculate Conception: keep your mouth shut and hope the kids learn about it in college.

I also recall one class in the history of the early church taught by our parish priest. It amounted to a litany of heresies and schisms, most of which formally died out centuries ago (and all of which are still believed by many professing Christians today who don’t realize they’re heretics.) One of my older classmates expressed wonder that out of all these heresies and false beliefs, God had engineered it so that only the one true faith survived. Even then I could see this was as silly as thanking God for making our hands so neatly fit into our gloves. The sensible answer is that we believe what we believe because it’s what won historically, even if by complete accident. Aside from occasional converts (and not most of them) we’re almost all Catholics or Mormons or Lutherans or Jews or Buddhists or Muslims or what have you because it’s what we were raised as, not because we made any sort of reasonable decision based on evidence or divine revelation. And if God decided what we would be by placing us appropriately as children, he must have a really wicked sense of humor. I know no other way to account for him dividing humanity into so many different groups that all believe they are the one true path and who will periodically slaughter each other to prove it.

It’s really hard to seriously study religion (any religion, not just Catholicism or other variants of Christianity) while still retaining the basic faith of your childhood. Maybe the more philosophical variants of Taoism and Buddhism have divorced themselves enough from their history that learning the truth about the old stories no longer causes a crisis of faith. I don’t think anyone else has though. In many religions people taking religious vows end up living a lie: required by occupation to teach an official line they no longer themselves believe precisely because they’ve spent more time studying their own religion than the folks in the pews have.

Many scholars seem to end up where folks like Karen Armstrong, Paul Tillich, and Stephen Prothero did: theists, perhaps still believing in a personal and loving God, and maybe still going to church on Sunday (or Temple on Saturday, or Mosque on Friday) because they enjoy it; but no longer able to take the whole package too seriously. Religion is like sausage. If you want to enjoy it, you can’t learn too much about how it is made.

#504 Kentucky Warbler

2010-05-22T23:18:13Z

Today I slept in and went down to Prospect Park around 8:30 AM where I promptly ran into Tom Stephenson who informed me that Rafael Campos had found a Kentucky Warbler in the Vale of Cashmere. We hurried down to the Vale just in time to see it fly across the grassy path leading out to Nellie’s lawn. Unfortunately, all we really saw was a small brown bird fly very fast across in front of us. There was no way to ID it. However after a few minutes of waiting it was spotted again, and I got one good look at it. I saw it for less than a second, and I didn’t get a photograph, but it’s distinctive enough that there really wasn’t any doubt. It looks a lot like the Common Yellowthroat except instead of a black mask it has a slightly more patterned brown mask. The Kentucky Warbler is a Southern bird that usually doesn’t get as far north as New York City, but every year a few birds overshoot their marks and end up in Central Park or Prospect Park or Forest Park and similar environs.

The only other regular bird left for me to find in the city is the Mourning Warbler. Of course you can always hope for something rare to show up, though that’s more likely in the wintertime.

Other than the Kentucky Warbler, Prospect Park was relatively quiet this morning, especially compared to the Bird Fest last weekend. I only saw five total species of Warbler and a few over 40 birds:

Canada Goose
Mute Swan
Mallard
Double-crested Cormorant
Green Heron
Black-crowned Night-Heron
Spotted Sandpiper
Ring-billed Gull
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Olive-sided Flycatcher
Empidonax sp.
Eastern Kingbird
Warbling Vireo
Red-eyed Vireo
Barn Swallow
Tufted Titmouse
Carolina Wren
House Wren
Swainson’s Thrush
Wood Thrush
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Northern Mockingbird
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
Northern Parula
Magnolia Warbler
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Blackpoll Warbler
Kentucky Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Song Sparrow
Northern Cardinal
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
Baltimore Oriole
American Goldfinch
House Sparrow

Also of note, I also saw my first Green Heron and my first Black-crowned Night-Heron this season. these aren’t especially uncommon birds. I just haven’t had a lot of time to go out into the parks this year.

Come Birding with Me

2010-05-14T11:32:22Z

Tomorrow, Saturday, May 15 I will be leading a Brooklyn Bird Club field trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. We’ll Start outside the Eastern Parkway entrance at 9:20 AM, just down the street from the Brooklyn Museum stop on the 2/3. Spring migration is in full swing so I’m hopeful that we will have many interesting warblers, thrushes, tanagers, and other uncommon species. As bird club trips go, this is a fairly relaxed one. We start late and finish early, so it’s a really nice walk for beginners or folks just dipping their toe into the water for the first time. Bring binoculars. Hope to see you there.

Common Grackle at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2010-05-06