Everybody has an Avatar review. Indeed, Avatar is a monument of moviemaking in terms of the quality of its animation and 3-D. Its most interesting message for Hollywood may be “soon actors will no longer need to look pretty.” Once the generation of human forms passes through the famous uncanny valley there will be many movies made with human characters where you never see their real faces. That means the actors can be hired based strictly on their ability to act, and their bankability, not necessarily their looks, or more to the point their age. Old actors will be able to play their young selves before too long, and be romantic leading men and women again. Fat actors will play thin, supernaturally beautiful leads.

And our images of what a good looking person looks like will get even more bizarre. We’ll probably get past the age thing, with software to make old star look like young star, before we break through the rest of the uncanny valley. If old star keeps him or herself in shape, the skin, hair and shapes of things like the nose and earlobes can be fixed, perhaps even today.

But this is not what I want to speak about. What I do want to speak about involves Avatar spoilers.  read more »

Tonight I watched the debut of FlashForward, which is based on the novel of the same name by Rob Sawyer, an SF writer from my hometown whom I have known for many years. However, “based on” is the correct phrase because the TV show features Hollywood’s standard inability to write a decent time travel story. Oddly, just last week I watched the fairly old movie “Deja Vu” with Denzel Washington, which is also a time travel story.

Hollywood absolutely loves time travel. It’s hard to find a Hollywood F/SF TV show that hasn’t fallen to the temptation to have a time travel episode. Battlestar Galactica’s producer avowed he would never have time travel, and he didn’t, but he did have a god who delivered prophecies of the future which is a very close cousin of that. Time travel stories seem easy, and they are fun. They are often used to explore alternate possibilities for characters, which writers and viewers love to see.

But it’s very hard to do it consistently. In fact, it’s almost never done consistently, except perhaps in shows devoted to time travel (where it gets more thought) and not often even then. Time travel stories must deal with the question of whether a trip to the past (by people or information) changes the future, how it changes it, who it changes it for, and how “fast” it changes it. I have an article in the works on a taxonomy of time travel fiction, but some rough categories from it are:

• Calvinist: Everything is cast, nothing changes. When you go back into the past it turns out you always did, and it results in the same present you came from.
• Alternate world: Going into the past creates a new reality, and the old reality vanishes (at varying speeds) or becomes a different, co-existing fork. Sometimes only the TT (time traveler) is aware of this, sometimes not even she is.
• Be careful not to change the past: If you change it, you might erase yourself. If you break it, you may get a chance to fix it in some limited amount of time.
• Go ahead and change the past: You won’t get erased, but your world might be erased when you return to it.
• Try to change the past and you can’t: Some magic force keeps pushing things back the way they are meant to be. You kill Hitler and somebody else rises to do the same thing.

Inherent in several of these is the idea of a second time dimension, in which there is a “before” the past was changed and an “after” the past was changed. In this second time dimension, it takes time (or rather time-2) for the changes to propagate. This is mainly there to give protagonists a chance to undo changes. We see Marty Mcfly slowly fade away until he gets his parents back together, and then instantly he’s OK again.

In a time travel story, it is likely we will see cause follow effect, reversing normal causality. However, many writers take this as an excuse to throw all logic out the window. And almost all Hollywood SF inconsistently mixes up the various modes I describe above in one way or another.

Spoilers below for the first episode of FlashForward, and later for Deja Vu.

Update note: The fine folks at io9 asked FlashForward’s producers about the flaw I raise but they are not as bothered by it.  read more »

Last month I released a parody video for the film “Downfall” (known as Der Untergang in German.) Having purchased the movie, I also watched it of course, and here is my review. At least in my case, the existence of the parody brought some new sales for the film. There are “spoilers” of a sort in this review, but of course you already know how it ends, indeed as history you may know almost everything that happens in it, though unless you are a detailed student of these events you won’t know all of it.

The movie, which deals with Hitler’s last days in the bunker, is dark and depressing. And there is the challenge of making some of the nastiest villains of the 20th century be the protagonists. This caused controversy, because people don’t like seeing Hitler and his ilk humanized evenin the slightest. Hitler in this film is in some ways as you might expect him. Crazy, brutal and nasty. He’s also shown being kind to some friends, to Eva, to his dog, his secretaries and a few others. He has to be human or the film becomes just caricature, and not much as a drama. Goebbels gets little humanity, and his wife, who has the most disturbing scene in the film, has a very twisted sort of humanity.

While we have only a limited idea of what Hitler was like at this time, I feel the movie actually still made him a madman caricature. The real Hitler must have been highly charismatic and charming. He inspired people to tremendous loyalty, and got them to do horrible things for him, including taking their own lives at the end as we’re shown several times. The Nazis who were recruited by Hitler in his early days all spoke warmly of his charm, but none of this comes through in the film. We don’t like to think of him that way.

The movie is told in large part from the viewpoint of Frau Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, who escaped the bunker and died recently. The real Junge appears in the film, apologizing for how she just got caught up in the excitement of being Hitler’s secretary, and how she wished she never went down that road. Like all the people who were there, she says she was unaware of what was really going on. Considering she typed Hitler’s last testament, where he blames the Jews for the war, and other statements he dictated to her, it’s not something she could have been totally unaware of. Junge asks Eva Braun about Hitler’s brutality as a contrast to his nicer times and she explains, “that’s when he’s being the Führer!” suggesting she compartmentalized the two men, lover and dictator, in two different ways.

During the movie the Soviets are bombing Berlin, and Hitler refuses surrender, in spite of urging from his generals and pleas for the civilians. Even Himmler, whose dastardly evil side is not shown in this film, is the “smart one” encouraging Hitler to leave Berlin, and who “betrays” Hitler in trying to negotiate a surrender. As in any war movie, when you see people being blown up by bombs and shot from their point of view, your instinct is to sympathise, and it’s easy to forget it is the allies who are doing the bombing, and the people dying are the ones who stuck with Hitler to the end. Some of them are “innocent” including many of the citizens of Berlin, but many are not. Their loyalty may seem redeeming but they are giving that loyalty (and have reached a level of trust from Hitler) in a world where many in Germany wanted him out, where a number had been executed for plots to be rid of him.

A few Nazis get favourable treatment. Speer, for example. A scene from his memoirs, which is probably false, has Speer telling Hitler that he has disobeyed his “Nero” scorched Earth orders. This scene appears in Speer’s later memoirs but is denied in earlier ones, making it likely to be an invented memory. To give Speer credit of course he did disobey the orders, and he was the only top Nazi to own up, even partially, for what he did. Junge herself comes off as perfectly innocent and loyal. General Mohnke and SS Doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck (both of whom died moderately recently) get positive treatments.

The most disturbing scene involves Frau Goebbels executing her own children. There are conflicting stories on this, though the one piece of documentation, her last letter, makes it somewhat credible. Movie directors “like” such scenes, as they are incredibly chilling and nightmare-inducing. While Hitler was losing his grip on reality, the others were not, and these horrors are all a result of how much they embraced their bizarre ideology. Frau Goebbels could have sent her children to safety, she felt there was no point in them living in the world that was to come. Still, this scene will give you nightmares, along with a number of other gruesome suicides, even if you know in your mind that the people suiciding have done such incredibly nasty things.

But this is a part of history worth understanding. And it is worth trying to understand — though we may never do so — how human beings not as different from us as we would like to believe —could have been such monsters. The movie is well made, and powerful, if depressing and disturbing at the same time.

This is an unfair review of the “Gigapan” motorized panoramic mount. It’s unfair because the unit I received did not work properly, and I returned it. But I learned enough to know I did not want it so I did not ask for an exchange. The other thing that’s unfair is that this unit is still listed as a “beta” model by the vendor.

I’ve been wanting something like the Gigapan for a long time. It’s got computerized servos, and thus is able to shoot a panorama, in particular a multi-row panorama, automatically. You specify the corners of the panorama and it moves the camera through all the needed shots, clicking the shutter, in this case with a manual servo that mounts over the shutter release and physically presses it.

I shoot a lot of panos, as readers know, and so I seek a motorized mount for these reasons:  read more »

• I want to shoot panos faster. Press a button and have it do the work as quickly as possible
• I want to shoot them more reliably. With manual shooting, I may miss a shot or overshoot the angle, ruining a whole pano
• For multi-row, there’s a lot of shooting and it can be tiresome.
• With the right shutter release, there can be lower vibration. You can also raise the mirror just once for the whole pano, with no need to see through the viewfinder.

The latest tome — and at 900 pages, I mean tome — from Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, the Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon) is Anathem. I’m going to start with a more general review, then delve into deep spoilers after the jump.

This book is highly recommended, with the caveat that you must have an interest in philosophy and metaphysics to avoid being turned off by a few fairly large sections which involve complex debate on these topics. On the other hand, if you enjoy such exploration, this is the book for you.

Anathem is set on a planet which is not Earth, but is full of parallels to Earth. The culture is much older than ours, but not vastly more advanced because on this world scientists, mathematicians and philosophers live a cloistered life. They live in walled-off communities called Concents, with divisions within which only have contact with the outside world, and with each other, for one 10 day period out of each year, decade, century or millennium.

As such the Avout, as they are called, lead a simple life, mostly free of technology, devoted to higher learning. It’s a non-religious parallel to monastic life. In the outside “saeclular” world, people live in a crass, consumer-oriented society both like and unlike ours.

I give the recommendation because he pulls this off really well. Anathem is a masterwork of world-building. You really get to identify with these mathematical monks and understand their life and worldview. He really builds a world that is different but understandable.

One way he does this, which does frustrate the reader at first, is through the creation of a lot of new coined terms. Some terms are used without introduction, some get a dictionary entry to help you into them. The terms are of course in a non-Earth language, but they are constructed from Latin and English roots, so they make sense to your brain. Soon you will find yourself using them.

So, if you like clever, complex worldbuilding and the worlds of science and philosophy, this book, long as it is, is worth it for you. However, I will shortly talk about the ending. Stephenson has a curse — his world building is superb, and his skill at satisfying endings is not up to it. Anathem actually has a decently satisfying ending in many ways — better than he has done before. There is both an ending to the plot, and some revelations at the very end which make you rethink all you have read before in the book. This time, I find fault with the consistency of the metaphysics, and mainly because I have explored the same topic myself and found it very difficult to make it work.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that after we are shown this remarkable monastic world, events transpire to turn it all upside-down. You won’t be disappointed, but I can’t go further without getting into spoilers. You will also find spoilers in my contributions to the Anathem Wiki. That Wiki may be handy to you after you read the book to understand some of the complex components.  read more »

I decided to digitize a lot of my old video tapes. Since I have many video capture cards in my MythTV system, I started by plugging my old VCR into that and recording. Turned out that there’s not really good standalone capture software for Linux, so I ended up using MythTV itself, which is not very well designed for this. But it worked OK. However, I then foolishly decided to clean the VCR heads, pulled out my old head cleaner, put methanol in it and — destroyed the heads. It was time for a replacement VCR, something that’s pretty rare in the stores.

What is popular now are combo VHS/DVD players and for not much more (on eBay at least) VHS/DVD-recorder combos. These combos all feature the ability to copy from a VHS tape to a DVD. Of course, with just a remote control you can’t get nearly the flexibility that a computerized capture system can give you, but you do get a big convenience feature — the same system is controlling the VCR and the DVD burning, and can start and stop the VCR, detect index marks on the tape, detect end of tape, tape speed and many other things. They all try to give you a “one touch copy” or almost that, so you can just insert the tape, a disk and have it do the work.  read more »

For the fun of it, we joined a line at a local independent bookstore last Friday night to get a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here I will first review the series without reference to the final book, and then make some remarks about things that are missing from the series that could be viewed as very minor spoilers, because they refer to things that might have taken place in the final book, but did not — but for which knowing they did not will not spoil the book in any meaningful way. However, if you want absolutely no knowledge of this sort, stop reading.

Then I will link at the bottom to a section of the review that is full of spoilers of the final book.

I want to address two issues that play a major and minor role. The lesser one is slavery. While Hermione regularly complains about it, and Harry arranges to manumit one slave elf, the truth of it is that pretty much all the other “good guys” embrace slavery on a deep level. In a way, Hermione’s protest group only makes it worse. The good guys can’t claim they are ignorant of the situation. Dumbledore may be sympathetic to Hermione, but his school still owns many slaves.

It is not just the elves that are enslaved. It is rarely examined, but most classical magic requires the enslavement of intelligent spirits of various kinds. The creatures that live in the portraits seem to be fragments of intelligent minds. But nobody cares.

The big issue is that of nature and nurture. Voldemort’s agenda demands wizards be purebloods, a classic racist/fascist theme. The “good guys” oppose him, but at times only with lip service, for most of them remain highly prejudiced against Muggles. They are never seen to socialize with them, and there are no redeeming Muggle characters in the book. Hermione’s parents are never seen, and while the senior Weasley is fascinated by Muggles, this is considered a strange quirk, and he doesn’t seem to have them around to tea. Muggle acceptance consists largely of not killing or abusing them, and being tolerant of magical people who are born to them. We see references to Muggle studies, but it seems that most of the students learn nothing but magic at Hogwarts. There is no talk of science, human history, literature or the arts. Wizards seem to never be employed in anything but jobs relating to magic — thanks to the slaves and spells that manage most of the work. One wonders if the wizards and witches, out of the context of magic, would be remarkably dull people.

Voldemort’s own Muggle father never makes a lot of sense. Yes, we are told he hates that father and hates Muggles because of him, but why does his band of racist followers find this acceptable? It is suggested they don’t know it, but if so, why was this never released? Certainly Hitler’s Jewish roots were publicized after the war.

But most disturbing is Harry himself. Harry’s foster family — the ones who truly raised him — are shallow, mean and selfish. Remarkably so. And yet Harry’s strongest trait is being the opposite of these things. Harry is kind, giving, brave and true. Why? Clearly not because of his adoptive parents. And not because of upbringing by his genetic parents. There can be only one reason — blood will out. His genetic parents were good people, so he must be too, just as he inherited magical abilities from them. But this is not how it is for people who grow up raised by and abused by people like the Dursleys. Hermione is the only good present day character with Muggle parents. The rest of the major characters, as far as we can tell, except Voldemort, have magical parents.

So the book says one thing about race but does another. For Harry, breeding is what matters. Non-humans are generally hated, and while Hagrid is tolerated by our good guys, he’s an exception, not a rule.

Now, if you’ve read the book you can read on for the review of Harry Potter with spoilers.

This section of the review contains spoilers.

The first comment is that the 760 page Deathly Hallows is overlong. People have been amazed that Rowling has kids reading books of this length, and it is good, but she may have come upon the curse of the top-ranked writer — becoming more powerful than your editor. Rowling is way more powerful than any editor, and while I am sure she has good intentions and tries to listen to her editors, you can’t escape this.

The novel spends way too long with Harry and friends on the run, camping out. Her plan for the novel precluded any time at Hogwarts before the end, and the book has to suffer for it. This book has to be too much about Harry, and Harry on his own. It also results, I think, in the poor treatment of Snape.

I found Snape’s fate highly disappointing. Snape was the most conflicted character of the series. Yes, we had six books of Harry convinced that Snape was evil, and him not being so at the end, and we could tell that Snape killing Dumbledore was all part of a plan, but I had hoped this all pointed to a dramatic redemption for Snape.

Instead, he barely appears in the book, and his last brief appearance has him killed pointlessly. Voldemort is convinced that killing Snape will give him control of the wand, but it won’t, so Snape is eaten for nothing. It is only by tremendous luck that Harry is hiding nearby and can come collect his memories so that Snape can carry out the last part of the plan — convincing Harry he must let Voldemort kill him. Short of that he would have been just snake food, and the plan would have quite possibly failed.

Yes, many expected Snape’s redemption to involve learning to love Harry, and perhaps dying for that love in a repeat of Harry’s childhood tragedy. It’s OK that we didn’t get that, but we got little else in exchange. Snape’s real appearance is in his memories, where Dumbledore’s long term plan is revealed, with no real shockers other than Dumbledore telling Snape that Harry is to die, and he’s OK with that. It’s all for love of Lily, we learn, but sure shown in a strange way.

Voldemort also remained one dimensional, a caricature of evil. We’re given the excuse that his soul has been torn apart, but could he not have been given some better motives, a little more depth? Could we not have believed for a second he might have listened to Harry’s plea that he have some remorse?

Draco Malfoy’s fate is also confusing and disappointing. As a child, he had a serious opportunity for redemption, especially after Harry saves him. He does not appear to go to prison (because he is a child) though his parents surely will. They also gain no redemption, stopping their aid to Voldemort only to protect their son.

So the only character who really changes, from our view, is Dumbledore, and he’s dead. He becomes more 3 dimensional, has a little evil in his past. Hermione remains smart and Harry pure. Ron gets a bit smarter but remains Ron. Hagrid and all the rest remain the same.

There is some resolution of the points I speak of in the non-spoiler part of the review of course. The slavery of the elves is given a little more treatment, and Ron wakes up about it, but there is not much more. We also finally learn a little bit about the Goblins, and their history and mistreatment. In an interesting side note, we are warned of the dangers of trying to cheat a Goblin, and yet after Harry deals the Sword to the Goblin, Longbottom is able to pull it out of the sorting hat to kill the snake, which presumably means the Goblins have lost it again, and should come back angry.

The entire “It could be Longbottom or Potter” in the prophecy gun-on-mantelpiece is never fired. It’s Potter. And we see that the prophecy is one of those causal-loop types. Voldemort comes to kill baby Harry because of the prophecy, and it is this mission which sticks a bit of his soul into Harry, causing his eventual defeat in a battle with Harry and other fulfillments of the prophecy.

As other critics have suggested, the Deathly Hallows, and the Elder wand are something seemingly invented entirely for this book. Usually in a planned 7 book series you hope the crucial plot points were introduced in earlier books.

As I noted in my non-spoiler section, I was always disappointed with the Dursleys, the only real Muggle characters in the book. They are quickly disposed of in the first few pages, and not seen again except for an appearance in memories by Petunia. Curiously, we are told she applied to Hogwarts, and was apparently accepted, and then backed out. Were they willing to take a Muggle? Or is this a hint she had some sort of magical powers that never were revealed, which might show up in a future non-Harry book?

Now I may sound a bit down here, but there were many positive elements. The final battle is dramatic and satisfying, and it’s good to see Harry actually standing up to Voldemort and telling him he knows magic that Voldemort doesn’t. But there is much that could have been improved.

In 2005, John Scalzi burst on the scene with a remarkable first novel, Old Man’s War. It got nominated for a Hugo and won him the Campbell award for best new writer. Many felt it was the sort of novel Heinlein might be writing today. That might be too high a praise, but it’s close. The third book in this trilogy has just come out, so it was time to review the set.

It’s hard to review the book without some spoilers, and impossible for me to review the latter two books without spoiling the first, but I’ll warn you when that’s going to happen.

OMW tells the story of John Perry, a 75 year old man living on an Earth only a bit more advanced than our own, but it’s hundreds of years in the future. Earth people know they’re part of a collection of human colonies which does battle with nasty aliens, but they are kept in the dark about the realities. People in the third world are offered o ne way trips to join colonies. People in the 1st world can, when they turn 75, sign up for the colonial military, again a one-way trip. It’s not a hard choice to make since everybody presumes the military will make them young again, and the alternative is ordinary death by old age.

The protagonist and his wife sign up, but she dies before the enlistment date, so he goes on his own. The first half of the book depicts his learning the reality of the colonial union, and boot camp, and the latter half outlines his experiences fighting against various nasty aliens.

It’s a highly recommended read. If you loved Starship Troopers or The Forever War this is your kind of book. Now I’ll go into some minor spoilers.  read more »

I’ve been participating in online discussions about my favourite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, so I have collected a number of my selected postings about the show, along with some new ones, into a sub-blog on this web site.

If you are a fan of the site I invite you to subscribe to my Battlestar Galactica Analysis Blog.

It has its own RSS feed as well. You can also find it in the menu for this site. The show is now on a 9 month break before Season 4, so postings should become scarce after a while, but I still have a number in my queue to add. Theories will range from the well-grounded to the invented, but I hope it will help you enjoy the show.

I’ve decided to stop watching Studio 60. (You probably didn’t even know I was watching it, but I thought it was worthwhile outlining the reasons for not watching it.)

Studio 60 was hailed as the most likely great show of this season, with good reason, since it’s from Aaron Sorkin, creator of one truly great show (the West Wing) and one near-great (Sportsnight.) Sorkin is deservedly hailed for producing TV that’s smart and either amusing or meaningful, and that’s what I seek. But I’m not caring about the characters on Studio 60.

I think Sorkin’s error was a fundamental conceit — that the workings of TV production will be as interesting to the audience as they are to the creators. Now I’m actually more interested than most in this, having come from a TV producing family, and with a particular interest in the world of comedy and Saturday Night Live. It’s not simply that this was a “Mary Sue” where Sorkin tries to tell us how he would do SNL if he were in charge, since I’m not sure that’s what it is.

I fear that he went into the network and said, “Hey! The heroine is the principled network president! The heroes are the show’s executive producers!” and the network drank their own kool-aid. How could they resist?

The West Wing tried to really deal with DC issues we actually care about. We went from seeing Bradley Whitford battle to save the education system to battling to avoid ticking off sponsors. How can that not be a letdown? The only way would be if it were a pure comedy.

It’s possible to do an entertaining show about TV. Sorkin’s own Sportsnight was one, after all. However, you didn’t have to care a whit about sports, or sports TV, or TV production to enjoy that show. Those things were the background, not the foreground of Sportsnight. There have been many great comedies about TV and Radio — Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, SCTV, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, WKRP etc. However, dramas about TV have rarely worked. The only good one I can think of was Max Headroom, and it was more about a future vision of media than about the TV industry.

Studio 60 is sometimes amusing (though not even as amusing as the West Wing) but surprisingly unfunny. Indeed, the show-within-the-show is also surprisingly unfunny. You would think they could write and present one truly funny sketch a week. SNL has to write over an hour’s worth, and while it often does not succeed, there’s usually one good sketch. Had he wanted a Mary-Sue story, he would have done this.

So let that be a lesson. TV should stick to making fun of itself, not trying to make itself appear heroic. We’re not buying it.

I’m enjoying the new version of Battlestar Galactica. Unlike the original, which was cheezy space opera, this show is the best SF show on TV. Yes, I watched the original when I was 18. I knew it was terrible (and full of bad science) but in the 70s TV SF was extremely rare, and often even worse.

The original show began with Pactrick Macnee narrating an opening “There are those who believe that life here, began out there, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians…” They sought the lost tribe of Earth, and in a truly abyssmal sequel finally came to 1980 Earth, which was of course technologically backward compared to them and unable to help in their fight.

This idea was a common one in science fiction of the 20th century. It was frequent in written SF, and Star Trek twice took it up. In one 60s episode, the Enterprise met Sargon, who claimed to have sewn most of the humanoid races. Spock states this meshes with Vulcan history, but another character says that Humans appear to have evolved on Earth. A later episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation reverses this, and Picard follows clues left in DNA to discover the common ancestry of all the humanoids.

Back in the 60s and 70s, when Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek were written, you could get away with this plot. It had a romantic appeal. While there was tons of evidence, as even Star Trek of the 60s knew, that humans were from Earth, we had not come to the 90s and the DNA sequencer. Today we know we share 25% of our DNA with cabbages. We’re descended from a long line in the fossil record that goes back a billion years. If life on this planet was seeded from other planets, it was over a billion years ago. It certainly wasn’t during the lifetime of Humanity, and nor were all the animals also seeded here at the same time as we were unless the aliens who did it deliberately created a fake fossil record.

(Of course creationists try very hard to make the case that this could be true, but they don’t even remotely succeed. If you think they do have a point, you may want to stop reading. You can read on for more SF theory though.)  read more »

Yesterday I received a Dell 3007WFP panel display. The price hurt ($1600 on eBay, $2200 from Dell but sometimes there are coupons) and you need a new video card (and to top it off, 90% of the capable video cards are PCI-e and may mean a new motherboard) but there is quite a jump by moving to this 2560 x 1600 (4.1 megapixel) display if you are a digital photographer. This is a very similar panel to Apple's Cinema, but a fair bit cheaper.

It's great for ordinary windowing and text of course, which is most of what I do, but it's a great deal cheaper just to get multiple displays. In fact, up to now I've been using CRTs since I have a desk designed to hold 21" CRTs and they are cheaper and blacker to boot. You can have two 1600x1200 21" CRTs for probably $400 today and get the same screen real estate as this Dell.

But that really doesn't do for photos. If you are serious about photography, you almost surely have a digital camera with more than 4MP, and probably way more. If it's a cheap-ass camera it may not be sharp if viewed at 1:1 zoom, but if it's a good one, with good lenses, it will be.

If you're also like me you probably never see 99% of your digital photos except on screen, which means you never truly see them. I print a few, mostly my panoramics and finally see all their resolution, but not their vibrance. A monitor shows the photos with backlight, which provides a contrast ratio paper can't deliver.

At 4MP, this monitor is only showing half the resolution of my 8MP 20D photos. And when I move to a 12MP camera it will only be a third, but it's still a dramatic step up from a 2MP display. It's a touch more than twice as good because the widescreen aspect ratio is a little closer to the 3:2 of my photos than the 4:3 of 1600x1200. Of course if you shoot with a 4:3 camera, here you'll be wasting pixels. In both cases, of course, you can crop a little so you are using all the pixels. (In fact, a slideshow mode that zoom/crops to fully use the display would be a handy mode. Most slideshows offer 1:1 and zoom to fit based on no cropping.)

There are many reasons for having lots of pixels aside from printing and cropping. Manipulations are easier and look better. But let's face it, actually seeing those pixels is still the biggest reason for having them. So I came to the conclusion that I just haven't been seeing my photos, and now I am seeing them much better with a screen like this. Truth is, looking at pictures on it is better than any 35mm print, though not quite at a 35mm slide of quality.

Dell should give me a cut for saying this.

Long ago I told people not to shoot on 1MP and 2MP digital cameras instead of film, because in the future, displays would get so good the photos will look obviously old and flawed. That day is now well here. Even my 3MP D30 pictures don't fill the screen. I wonder when I'll get a display that makes my 8MP pictures small.

Got to preview a powerful and interesting movie last night, The War Tapes. The producers, one of whom I met, gave quality video cameras to various members of a National Guard company doing a tour of duty in Iraq. The goal was to show the war from the soldier’s POV. It’s graphic at times, and puts forward a variety of views (though I doubt it will make many people decide to favour the war more) and well worth a watch. It opens in San Francisco and Oakland this weekend, later in other places.

Through the SV100 I was given an interesting product called the Trafficgauge to review. It’s a small thick-PDA sized live map of the highways of your area, with indicators as to where there are traffic slowdowns. They cover about a half dozen cities.

What interested me about the product was its user interface. It doesn’t have one. There’s a button on it which does initial start (which you press only once when you get the item) and which can turn on a backlight and one very minor feature if you hold it down that I doubt any of the owners of the box even know about.

It’s always on, receiving traffic data presumably from some broadcast sideband, since it works indoors and in cars all around the bay area. By having no user interface, you can almost think of it as something like a smart map rather than a computer. I’m trying to figure out if it’s too simple or just right. When I first proposed in the early 90s that my cell company, since it knows where I am, should phone me if it sees me driving in to heavy traffic, I’ve wanted this sort of service to be aware of my location, and not bother me with data about traffic problems I am unlikely to care about. Radio traffic reports spend most of their time on stuff you don’t need to know either. As GPS chips drop in price (which they are) this box could know where you are but I am not sure it could do much with it other than show you. The indicators are not a bitmap, it’s a custom made LCD with bars for each section of highway which can be on or blinking.

(It also has icons to tell you what sporting events are taking place that day. This part is not well designed, first because I am not going to know what time the events are — could be day or night game — and the icons are in the corner, rather than in the approximate locations of the stadia (which admittedly is a challege as the stadia are all close together.)

It didn’t come with a dashboard mount, so it is a bit distracting to pick it up and look at, but not tremendously so.

On the other hand, the pricing to me, with a monthly fee, is not attractive. The data bandwidth is not so expensive as to demand this, it is largely a marketing decision. $80 plus $7/month seems a tad high. Mind you the eqivalent cell phone services also will get you coming and going. (Somehow I don’t know if the marketing departments would use “We get you coming and going” as a slogan, though it’s a good one!)

Which brings me to an idea of my own in this space, much simpler and cheaper. Namely a tiny radio (or feature in in-car radios) that constantly listens to the station that does traffic every 10 minutes — there’s one or more in every town. The box would know the little tune they always play with traffic reports, so when you pushed the button on it, it would play the latest traffic report. If it could not find the tune, it would just play from the approximate time the report comes with a button to hold down for fast forward or rewind. The standalone box would just retransmit the signal (usually from AM) onto an FM channel. Such a box could be cheap, and need no service fee. Of course the traffic station may not like it since when it works well, you would not hear their ads. And of course, most of the report is about highways you don’t care about.

For people with a computer or full blown PDA, of course, there are some alternatives. And indeed, the other downside of a dedicated box like this is that over time it really makes more sense to have it all in your PDA, not in independent boxes.

At a full browser, [SigAlert]http://www.sigalert.com/map.asp?Region=Bay+Area gives a much more detailed map, with popups on all the incidents and links to full CHP traffic reports. The CHP website itself gives a text summary of all police reports, it’s the same thing the radio stations use, and it can be fetched quickly on a simple browser.

You'll recall an earlier post about the Silicon Valley 100 and getting stuff for free. I promised I had something to say about toilets anyway, so I will describe my experience with the Swash I was given as well as the Daelim Cleanlet which I bought a few years ago.

If you've gone to Japan, you have probably seen these fancy high-tech toilet seats, which try for a bit of bidet function in a seat. Their prime function is to have a heated water reservoir and a little wand that comes out to squirt water at what the Daelim manual calls the "personal area" and the "feminine area." They also tend to heat the seat, and make it descend slowly so it doesn't make a noise when you put it down. Both of these also have the optional feature of fan to blow heated air to dry your personal or feminine area.

I've got these two units, and I have tried various others in Japan. None of them can really compete with the water flow and cleaning ability of a real bidet, but most people don't have the space in their bathrooms for one of those. I was going to suggest the slogan "Every asshole needs one" but I don't think they are likely to use it.

These bidet-seats are about the only high-tech toilet invention to get a decent market, which is surprising because if you ask the patent office, toilet inventions are among the most common patent applications. I guess people spend a lot of time on toilets with nothing else to think about.  read more »