Overheard / participated in:
A: “Wow, there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake off Chile.”
B: “I think it was closer to 8.8.”
A: “Does the 0.3 make a difference?”
C: “Well, with moment magnitude, that’s 2.8 times the energy.”
A: “… oh.”
San Francisco Appeal: SF Chronicle Columnist: Bigotry Not So Bad.
The Chron startled the Appeal today when their columnist Chip Johnson defended a bigot in Oakland. The situation is this: Lorenzo Hoopes, a Mormon, donated $26,000 in support of Prop 8, more than any individual in Oakland, a city with one of the country’s largest lesbian populations. (Really!) Hoopes faces re-appointment to the Board of Directors of the Paramount theater; but now that he’s shown himself to be an anti-gay supremacist, some community leaders are opposed to his continued presence.
After all, as we’ve seen during this week’s Prop 8 trial, discrimination against gays has real consequences — to society, to individuals, and to families.
But Chronicle writer and Oakland resident Chip Johnson is outraged! In an piece that might as well have been titled, “Aw, Give the Old Bigot a Break, He’s Probably Real Nice,” he lamented that anyone would actually dare hold Hoopes accountable for his actions.
Unlike many of our respected friends in the San Francisco news space, The San Francisco Appeal does not practice advocacy journalism. We have no dogs in fights, and do our best to report as objectively as we can without being totally boring and cheesy. However, we are, indeed “anti Prop-8 cheerleaders.” This is because we are not fucking bigots! Therefore, we called on Oakland resident Jip Chonson to provide us with a rebuttal to the Chronicle’s piece.
And then “Chonson” goes and re-writes the Chronicle’s piece by doing a s/gay/Jew/ on it. Go ahead, feel uncomfortable. You’re supposed to.
I stole this link from jwz’s LJ. A commenter there writes, “Isn’t it interesting what happens to all of these initiatives and talking points when you take the word, “homosexual” and replace it with, “negro” or “Jew”? Why, you get the very bigotted language we used to hear back a century ago! Who’d have ever thought?”
Bigotry is bigotry. It is not an unfortunate social habit, nor is it in bad taste — it’s just wrong. This isn’t really complicated, yet the ability of a great many people to fully miss the point is sad.
Hey! Have you been over at my SmugMug lately? If not, you might have missed my gallery of dog pictures, a very soothing collection of blossom photographs, and a huge gallery of underwater work.
“Didn’t you get the message I sent you?”
“No, what message? When?”
“I sent it last week.”
“To my mailbox?”
“Yeah!”
[rummage rummage rummage]
“No, not here.”
“Really? I’m looking at it right now.”
“What address did you send it to? Work? My personal one?”
“No, your Facebook account.”
Waaaaaugh!
E-mail works. I know you and Mark Zuckerberg only discovered the Internet in about 1999, but hey, there’s a history here, we have tools that work very well for doing certain things, and there’s a reason they’ve been around longer, in some cases, than your parents have been alive, you nitwits. Yeah, OK, I am not, and will never be, one of the Cool Web 2.0 Kids, but I’m also betting my messaging application is a lot more robust, can be made a hell of a lot more secure, and is a lot easier to deal with than some crufted-on proprietary Web-based e-mail clone.
Holy cow! I updated 365 to bring us to Christmas! Yay me; it’s only two months overdue.
Blame the new camera breaking my workflow. Yeah, that’s it.
I caught Sneakers, Phil Alden Robinson’s 1992 film with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, and President Laura Roslin last night. It was tempting to add the word “classic” in there, but I’m not sure that’s an accurate description. And yet, Sneakers might be my favorite movie I don’t own. Sure, some of the scenery is kind of dumb — crypto doesn’t work that way, of course — but it’s shocking to see that a movie about a group of nerds being, well, nerds managed to get the “nerd” part so right.
What struck me about the film last night is how well it has aged — it’s old enough to vote this year, and yet, it feels like it could have been made yesterday. One does not even need to look solely at the broad strokes of the plot in order to draw that conclusion: though some of the specific technology dated rather badly, if anything the details of the plot are somehow more meaningful today than they were in the early 1990s. A film about the importance of privacy in our lives, with large number theory and cryptography as a major plot point, capped off with a tacit admission that the United States government is spying on American citizens without their knowledge?
Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines… today!
I love signs, and I love signage. Lovely Wife will tell you that, if I can be said to have a photographic “theme” in my travels, it is of signs. And I particularly love wayfinding signs — I do not claim to be an expert on them, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do love me a well-designed, well-executed wayfinding system.
This is a relatively new interest for me. Predictably, it started in hospitals, where I noticed that no one could agree on best practices for indicating where people should go or how to get there. A mishmash of dots, lines, arrows, wall-mounts, hand-written, laser-printed signs (with maps added in for good use) has come to be the accepted standard in a lot of places. Most people find this frustrating, yet when faced with a proper, intelligently conceived wayfinding system, they immediately relax — even though they don’t know why.
It never occurred to me that there would be a whole field of study dedicated to the subject, but of course there is; I first encountered it in Jain Malkin’s Hospital Interior Architecture, a 4.2 pound hardcover monster of a book that can be used to fend off aggressive committee members in meetings who don’t believe in its contents. The content is — well, anyone who works in a hospital should probably at least look through a copy, if only so you can see some of the achingly beautiful designs that are out there (and gnash your teeth in misery at the world around you). Malkin has written a whole host of papers on the subject of wayfinding; I won’t link to them, but I will point you to a paper from the Center for Health Design (warning: a PDF lives at the end of that link), a couple of case studies from Corbin Design, some of which I like better than others, and the most bizarre wayfinding I’ve ever seen in a hospital. This last is the signage for the Katta Public General Hospital, the exterior design of which is really weird in and of itself. This is Japan, after all; what did you expect?
(As an aside, likely the closest example of good hospital wayfinding to local readers is probably Vancouver General Hospital, particularly the Pattison pavilion. Unless they’ve changed something dramatically in the last 3+ years since I spent any time there, I’ve never been lost in the new parts of the hospital. The old parts… well, we’ll leave that for another day. The Vancouver Island hospitals are universally awful in their wayfinding systems, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.)
In the Center for Health Design paper I linked above, Barbara Huelat asks why it is that hospital signage systems suck so badly, while airport ones as a general rule do not. Says Huelat,
Successful airport wayfinding relies on the process called progressive disclosure, which provides only enough information necessary to get the visitor to the next decision-making point. For example, as travelers approach the airport on the highway, airport wayfinding provides them only with information regarding the next exit. Then, once the travelers have exited, the signs provide information concerning parking locations and drop-off areas. Airports do not provide parking information on the highway signs.
Hospitals rarely employ this model, and provide too much information at inappropriate locations. Signs should direct hospital visitors with the same ease as travelers to and through airports. While signs frequently identify hospitals from highways, airport-like signs should continue to direct people after exiting the highway. The progressive disclosure method should direct people to correct buildings, hospital parking and drop-off areas. Once in the buildings, the method should direct wayfinders to the next decision-making intersection. Each sign should offer no more than three possible directional options.
You probably won’t have to spend more than about 30 seconds of brain power thinking about how many wayfinding systems you routinely run into that break most, if not all, of those simple guidelines.
What about those airport signs? Lots of people have the same affectation as I do, and, oh, there’s loads of stuff out there about the design and development of various airport wayfinding systems. This guy argues strongly in favor of following the existing conventions, which the hospital world might be wise to consider adopting. Much work went into the rebranding of Dusseldorf airport, and this is the link that I really wanted to post, a showcase of 20 or so wayfinding systems in airports around the world. Normal people would have just posted the link and left it at that, but for some reason I instead felt compelled to write an 800+ word entry on the subject. Freak!
(Also: I would be remiss if I did not mention the most alienating airport in the world.)
METAR CYYJ 210100Z 30006KT 10SM TS FEW025CB SCT036 BKN064 BKN092 03/03 A2952 RERA RMK CB2SC2SC2AC2 SLP996=
And more specifically:
WSCN31 CWEG 210058
SIGMET M1 VALID 210100/210500 CWEG-
WTN 10 NM OF LN /4917N12329W/15 W VANCOUVER – /4825N12256W/15 E
VICTORIA.
BKN LN TS OBSD ON RDR/LTNG DTCTR TOPS 260. LN MOVG NEWD 20 KT.
TS INTSFYG.
END/GFA31/CMAC-W/TSG
I miss thunderstorms, but only from the ground.
(For those of you who don’t speak aviation weather: the first is a METAR, or a current summary of local conditions, that shows a thunderstorm observed at Victoria International with 10 miles of visibility. The second is a SIGMET, a warning of significant weather affecting the safety of flight, describing a line of thunderstorms moving east of Victoria, intensifying as it moves.)
There were a lot of things that the digital revolution made easier in the photography world. I’ve been taking pictures long enough that I can remember using Polaroid backs to evaluate exposure with studio strobes, and fighting to get the exposure and compensation just right on the Polaroid before changing magazines and doing it all over again for the real shot. The instant feedback of a digital camera is awfully nice to make sure you got what you wanted, though the sluggishness of a lot of early generation DSLRs at processing the files meant that it probably slowed your workflow down. I’ve also noticed that I seem to spend a lot of time reviewing what I just took, rather than looking at the scene again to see if there’s anything else worth taking a picture of. With film you never knew what you got until you came back from the lab, so you’d never spend any time thinking about it; I see way too many people continually evaluating the results of their latest shutter press rather than looking around outside, and I’m just as guilty of this as the next guy.
One thing that digital decidedly did not make easier was picking a new camera. Used to be that you could simply evaluate the camera, particularly a point and shoot, in the context of its lens and how it felt in your hand, and be reasonably assured of getting a reasonable product and good results once you shoved some film in the thing. The limitations were really with your own creativity; I took some staggeringly good pictures with absurdly cheap cameras when I was a kid, and you can still have this kind of fun with something like a Lomo if you’re willing to put up with the crappy lens. (This is how things like the Yashica T4 turned out to be such brilliant deals — great lens + compact form + right film = woo!)
Now, however, it isn’t enough to evaluate the lens and the form factor. You have to have some understanding of noise reduction algorithms and methods. You need to know whether a camera has an anti-aliasing filter (and, indeed, what an anti-aliasing filter is). How does the white balance work? What’s the sensitivity at the various ISO levels (which aren’t really ISO levels at all)? If someone had tried to buy a film camera and had to make decisions about not just the camera and lens but also the film, the lab, the printer, and probably the framer at the time of purchase I think that person probably would have gone nuts. It would have been a frigging miracle if anyone had actually managed to buy anything.
It reminds me a little of trying to buy medium format gear; you have to, before you can even think about lenses or bodies, decide — sometimes with basically no background information — what size you want your originals to be. Of course, there actually is a correct answer here (6×6), but I remember the heat and light that these discussions used to generate on photo.net and rec.photo.* — it was intense. But medium format, like all film photography, could in some senses be saved by film choices; if you got a crummy slow lens you could play around, find the right aperture, park it on a tripod, and get the finest grained film you could find, and generally figure out how to salvage your work. With a digital camera, though, you’re stuck with the same film, the same lab, and the same printer, as well as the actual hardware. Forever. (Well, maybe not: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the CHDK project, which is interesting and probably useful if you’re trying to push the limits of what the small-sensor Canons can do.)
And then you get the yahoos for whom cameras are gadgets, and for whom pixel peeping is the end-all, be-all of photographic quality… oh, it’s really irritating. I suppose this is why people use shorthands: “Buy the top-end Canon and don’t worry about it too much.” OK. I did this twice and it worked all right; what are the odds it works the third time, too?
