Hooray for the mighty Euro! The importation of better standards and practices at conferences here in the States just might trickle down...

Are you familiar with the work of Edward Tufte? He thinks of PowerPoint as a kind of poison for the brain, especially for critical thinking skills.

Wikipedia has a very short piece on him, but if you google enough, you can find some other sites with more info about him.

As for that merger, I also heard that Google offered to help Yahoo beat of MicroSoft. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it is.

Tho your many 'infractions' throughout life, and tho you have crimson cheeks, you will get some marsh mellows ear rings to stick on your earlobes...

That's what a pope may say for saying coon?

I was censored one day on Salon's Garrosin Reefer piece for use of the saying, '...O, coon'...

It was the Springtime.

I'd seen some black and white bandit looking rauk'coons up in a cherry tree stealing crimson fruit.

Birds eat cherries and spit out the white seed pits. I have seen a groundhog up in a peach tree.

Mea Culpa to all and to all have some yellow mashed sweet yams with white marsh mellows.

Yam. The joy of "sin" is enjoyment in the forgiveness too. You can sin-good and still sing..

forgive me everyday....

We still have and use solid wood furniture that my wife's parents bought in the 1950's

-- Aycharaych

...And the rest of the post. I'm with you on that. As I am on other things. Truce.

Powerpoint really is dreadful. But I like Illustrator, and dragging AI files into Apple's Keynote is easy. For equations, Latex output can be rasterized and used in either; slow but effective.

But powerpoint is intended for about 32 bits of information per slide. Apparently that is the proper amount of information for the business community.

As usual, you take a very doctrinaire -- and to some extent, arbitrary -- position. No doubt you'd love one of those Muppet Labs diesel-powered shavers. :-)

I love a good hunk of brass and cast-iron as much as the next guy, but perhaps you missed the following parts of my meditation:

1) More people, less raw material per person, if reasonable standards of living are to be extended to all.

2) Technology makes this possible, but technology, although less material-intensive, is very much more energy intensive.

3) The consequence could well be either Armageddon, or returning to a two-tiered society of have and have not classes -- as in eighteenth century Europe -- or have and have not nations -- as in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonialism.

4) The only way out that makes sense, unless we let more than half the world's population die out, is a combination of technology and globalization which accepts sustainability as the sine qua non of resource exploitation.

5) This could mean chipboard Wal*Mart furniuture. It could also mean Italian furniture made out of modern lightweight materials, which is quite another matter.

6) You want to keep on using your great-grandfather's railroad watch, that's fine with me, but a $10 Timex has its virtues as well.

Actually, I believe what it is is that the ear can sense frequencies above 20KHz but only if they occur as a result of beats (overtones). In other words, we can sense, and notice it missing, if two notes beating produce a frequency well above the highest single frequency we can hear. Part of our identification system, the timbre of sounds is very important to identify them. I would have to work to produce a reference, but that was the thinking when they extended the standards (extending the standard downward for the 10-25Hz end was a no brainer, it had been cut off because it meant cheaper amplifiers and speakers, not because we couldn't hear it).

The beat frequency phenomenon has an analog (no pun intended) in visual perception. Our acuity for discerning single objects is less than what is called our vernier acuity, the acuity that compares lines for matching at their boundary if they are end to end (name comes from Vernier dials if anyone remembers them).

Don't know which is more despicable:

- The use of torture

- Dubya stating 'we don't torture' for a number of years then actually expecting the world community to believe him

- The silence of the government & media here (Australia) as well

As a constituent of one of the 170 countries mentioned (Australia I used to be proud to say) I can, will and do say that torture should not go unindicted and unpunished.

I wonder if we seeing the beginning of the end for the term 'Nuremburg Defense' in deference to the term 'water-boarding defense'. Oh of course the US, alleged defender of democracy (yeah right), doesn't recognize any international treaty that could see their soldiers or operatives charged. Unless it is prosecuting one the US's enemies of course then it is a highly important international apparatus.

pagh seems to me a concise haiku.

The rest of us can ramble a long discussion of wordy-mess-ness. It's a modern writers block?

We/me struggle with what/how?

What we/me writes gets confusing.

No wonder many turn to saki drinks.

They aren't 11 megapixels, many of them are CMOS technology anyway, nobody cools them to take pictures, and they have the dynamic range of their output format, which is JPEG and uses 8 bits. Many of them also have tiny little lenses and folded optics as a front end, as well.

My daughter has an A100 Sony, 10.2 megapixel DSLR for which I have given her my large collection of m42 screwmount prime lenses which I no longer use, including a 1320mm f13 maksutov cassegrain telephoto. All these lenses fit the A100 with a small adapter which costs less than $40. Interestingly enough, the A100 is based on Minolta/Konica cameras and can use any Minolta Maxxum autofocus SLR lens from about the last twenty years. With a image stabilization system that moves the CCD under control of piezo gyros to compensate for camera shake, the A100 will take remarkably sharp pictures in low light conditions.

You are not limited by the jpeg format, you can alway shoot in RAW if you choose, you just have to accept far larger file sizes.

Photographic film is now an obsolete technology that will eventually go the way of the daguerreotype.

Another advantage of digital photography for the amateur is that now they can do what professionals have always done, take many, many photos and discard those that are technically flawed or uninteresting. I once saw a piece in National Geographic about the equipment they took on a remote shoot, the pile of film was gargantuan.

Not to mention that digital photography improves ones skills as a photographer far more rapidly than does film photography. The instant feedback of digital photography is far better suited for learning composition and exposure, you see your results right away while you remember just what it is you did.

My own digital camera is a 2 megapixel Panasonic Lumix with an optically stabilized 12x Leica zoom lens that maintains f2.8 through the entire zoom range. I have managed to get some astounding wildlife photos with it simply because I take literally thousands of exposures. I bought it off craigslist for $50 and have taken well over fifteen thousand photos which would have cost me probably at least a couple of thousand dollars with film. I have about half a terabyte of images on DVDs.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/fz1.html

CMOS sensors don't have to be bad either, Canon's DSLR's have CMOS sensors and they work very well indeed.

In fact people are using Canon (and other) DSLR's for long exposure astrophotography, the Canon 20Da was specifically designed for that use.

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/NIK_CAN.HTM