Jonathan Birge

In the interest of giving fair time to all opinions, I’ve decided to step aside and table my regularly scheduled rabid wall-punching right wing diatribe. Instead, today’s post has been guest written by a member of the Green Party in Cambridge, on the topic of how to give a proper media statement.

How to make a left-wing progressive media statement

by Sheila Baldwin-Cooper-Oscar-Meyer

Are you planning to attend a protest against a G7 convention? Going to picket outside of an oil company? Just planning to throw a brick through some deserving corporate window? If there’s any chance that you might be interviewed by a reporter, especially on camera, you should brush up on the following official advice for progressive media statements.

1. Make sure your voice goes up—preferably a dissonant interval like a half-tone or a diminished fifth (”The Maria”)—at the end of every sentence. Otherwise, you’ll sound offensively declarative and patriarchal. Kind of like a Republican.
2. Shrill monotone nasal intonation! I can’t emphasize this enough. A low, calm voice does NOT get the message across. You want to aim for something between a child’s whine and a cat being ingested in a jet engine. You know who have creepy-low, calm voices? Republicans.
3. Use the word “shocked” or “outraged” at least five times. Per sentence. If you’re not shocked, you’re probably a Republican.
4. Use the phrase “the current administration” in a smugly mocking tone in every other sentence. Republicans!!!

Despite this advice, you may find yourself flustered in the heat of the moment. The best of us do (especially with all the great weed that one tends to find at a protest). If all else fails, chant something that rhymes. It will be hard, so fortunately the research and development wing of the progressive movement has discovered that “ho” and “go” rhyme, even if–and this is crucial–you put other words in between them. An example: “Hey hey, ho ho, lateral extraction drilling has got to go.” Does it mean anything? No. But did you actually learn anything about economics or environmental science while you were majoring in gender studies at Swarthmore? Exactly. Stick to the playbook; it’s time tested by a generation who managed to dismantle an entire culture while higher than a roadie at an Allman Brothers concert.

And just remember: when all else fails, call somebody a “fascist”.

Yesterday there was a horrible crash on our commuter rail in Boston. One train drove into another that was stopped at a control light before a station. (Below is a map of the rough crash site.) Both were westbound trains, and the crash happened on a straightaway above ground. In other words, it’s hard to find an excuse for it to have happened. These aren’t freight trains. I ride the Green Line all the time, and they can stop very quickly. While it’s probably unfair to render early speculation on crashes in general, it seems fair to do so in this case. When a two car trolley plows into another on a long straightaway, either the driver wasn’t paying attention (the most probable) or there was a massive mechanical failure that rendered even the backup braking system inoperable. Either way, incompetence is very likely the culprit, the only question is whether or not it’s maintenance- or operator-related.

Update: Preliminary reports show that the driver ran straight through a red light, going four times the proper speed. Eye witnesses on the train have the driver talking on a cell phone at the time of the crash.

This will not be surprising to any regular rider of the MBTA. By and large, the people employed by the T are militantly lazy, uniformly belligerent, and often surprisingly incompetent. I’ve seen operators of the Red Line, supposedly the highest level job in the T, forget which stop they were at and open up the wrong doors at a stop, the ones on the inside of the tunnel where the dreaded third rail is. That could kill a person. As we were watching the Green Line wreckage unfold on local news at a downtown bar (near a Green Line stop, as it happened) the bartender remarked “Given how often those guys come in to get drunk, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.”

The MBTA is a terribly run organization, expensive and inexcusably unreliable given the fact that Boston is a tiny city with very little distance to cover. We probably have a tenth of the mileage of New York’s transit system (if that), and yet a ride on our little four line subway system costs the same as New York’s massive network. Take a look at Manhattan’s subway and bus system map and then look at ours. It’s hard to believe they cost the same to ride. But the cost could probably be forgiven were it not for the poor management. The T has been around for 52,000 rush hours, and yet they still seem completely taken by surprise by each one. It’s not uncommon for 3-5 trains to go by in rapid succession in one direction while you wait 30 minutes for one to go by in yours, and it’s often too packed to get on. Maybe in another 100 years they’ll figure out how to anticipate demand for their services so the trains don’t all get bunched up during rush hour.

Why is the T so bad? I think one big reason is the corrupt Boston version of union labor. Only in a public union do you get 60k a year to make change and the promise of a fat pension when the company you work for is $14 Billion in the red. And being overpaid is just one benefit. The one that hurts the public even more is the fact that in a really “good” union, doing your job badly isn’t an acceptable basis for termination.

I’m not inherently anti-union. It’s all fine when we’re talking about guys screwing interior panels into Fords. In principle, I think it’s ludicrous they get paid more than college professors, but the fact that we can choose to buy Japanese cars puts a little accountability into the system. (Which the autoworkers unions are finding out as they get laid off by the hundreds of thousands because their cupidity priced the American automotive industry out of existence.) But some situations are ripe for union abuse, and public transportation monopolies are a union organizers dream come true: a captive customer base who have to buy the product, no matter how expensive, for an essential service that renders the threat of a strike hugely effective.

Poor working class folks in Boston who aren’t members of extortionist unions have no alternative to the T. And so when union abuse renders a system so unreliable and yet so expensive that it charges people $2 to ride a Disneyland version of a real subway, ironically it is the working poor who disproportionately suffer the consequences of this experiment in “fair labor.” Are they not just as much deserving of protection as the guys sitting in air conditioned boxes doing nothing because their union contract precludes them from being fired? Who is representing their collective interests from having to pay too much to get to work?

When a union becomes just as much problem for the underclass as anything corporations are doing, let’s just call it what it is: another concentration of power that’s being abused. While unions have historically been forces for fairness, they have now largely grown into legal organized crime, a protection racket run under the threat of strike. How bad will the T have to get before we point the finger at the unions and call them out on their abuses? How bad will public schools have to get before we force accountability on teacher’s unions? How many American industries will have to be priced out of existence? An honest society has to object to any unfair abuse of power, whether it comes from a guy wearing a tie or a blue shirt.

If you are inclined to object, the next time you are sitting on an airplane waiting to take off, think about the fact that the person in charge of your life was promoted to that position for possessing no merit whatsoever other than having stuck around long enough.*

*This doesn’t apply to JetBlue, Southwest, or SkyWest, which are among the few non-union airlines in existence and are also, not coincidentally, just about the only airlines not in bankruptcy or just coming out of it.

The following is best read in a voice akin to that of Don “The Voice of God” LaFontaine:

IN A WORLD where people have forgotten their manners, made deaf to their fellow citizens by ipods sprouting from their heads, apathetic to those around them: one man stands alone, willing to fight for truth, justice, and the social contract. Impoliteness is his enemy, and his weapon is 24,000 volts of pure blue truth. Mild-mannered electrical engineer by day, by mid to late evenings he roams the streets of Boston, seeking vengeance on those who are unaware of the fact that they are not the only people on the planet. He is… Tazer Man!

A man at the mall stops right at the top of the escalator, deciding that would be a good place to continue his cell phone conversation, clueless to the people piling up behind him. Zap! Man down! He won’t need to charge that cell phone for another week. Thanks, Tazer Man!

It’s rush hour. A group of three teenage girls are gossiping cluelessly in the doorway of the Red Line subway, oblivious to the passengers trying to push by them before the door closes. Zap, zap, zap! No, he does not dial down the voltage for the young! “The younger they are, the more they gotta learn,” is Tazer Man’s motto.

A stock broker in a BMW sees the “left lane closed” sign, but does he merge? No, he drives past half a mile of people who don’t think they’re above everybody else, and cuts somebody off right at the last minute. He thought he got away with it. Maybe the last hundred other times, but not this time. Not today. Today he cut off the wrong guy. BMW guy doesn’t know that there is a complete electrical circuit between the metal interior door handle of a 2002 BMW 330Ci coupe and the chassis ground. But you know who does? Tazer Man does! ZZZZZap! Now two people know. Good thing leather cleans up well.

A twentysomething rides by on a skateboard. He stops at the front door of a bank, and quickly slaps a sticker on the side of the building, advertising his band “Shades of Moon.” Tazey has a special setting on his ‘gun’ for people like this. It’s called “Nobody cares about your stupid emo band so quit defacing public property with your infantile self-promotion.” Just kidding. That would never fit. It’s just called “High.”

When a broken social code has seemingly left us with no consequences for asocial behavior, Tazer Man is here to show us that there is a price to pay, and that price is 45 seconds of pain and possibly momentary incontinence. So the next time you are in public, remember your manners. And if you ever forget them, you may hear the faint whining hum of an electrolytic capacitor charging. That’s the sound of justice brewing, and it’s the last thing you’ll remember for about two and a half minutes.

(Click for a larger view.)

It’s nice to find out that there are still mysteries left in this world, let alone ones that are visible from space. On the southeast corner of Hudson Bay, the coast line traces a near perfect arc, roughly concentric on another ring of islands in the bay. So, what caused it? The obvious answer, proposed in the 1950s, is that it’s the remnants of a large impact crater. Apparently, however, there is none of the usual geologic evidence for this, and over the past 50 years, there has been debate on its origins. From other sites I’ve read, many geologists seem to have concluded that it is a depression caused by glacial load during the ice age, though a recent conference paper (2006) argues that it may indeed be a crater. The current thinking is summarized nicely on this web page:

There is fairly extensive information on this in Meteorite Craters by Kathleen Mark, University Press, isbn 0-8165-1568-9 (paperback). The feature is known as the Nastapoka Arc, and has been compared to Mare Crisium on the Moon. There is “missing evidence,” which suggests that it isn’t an impact structure, however: “Negative results were . . . reached by R. S. Dietz and J. P. Barringer in 1973 in a search for evidence of impact in the region of the Hudson Bay arc. They found no shatter cones, no suevite or unusual melt rocks, no radial faults or fractures, and no metamorphic effects. They pointed out that these negative results did not disprove an impact origin for the arc, but they felt that such an origin appeared unlikely.” (p. 228)

I know next to nothing about geology, but in the spirit of rank amateur naturalists that came before me, I won’t let that stop me from forming an opinion. In physics, whenever you see something that is symmetric about a point, you have to wonder about what is so special about the center of that circle. Could it really be chance that roughly 800 miles of coast line are all aiming at the same point? If not, what defined that point? One explanation for how large circular formations are created is that they start as very small, point-like features that get expanded over eons by erosion; in other words, the original sink-hole that started to erode is what defines the center of the improbable circle. There are also lots of physical phenomena that makes circles, such as deposition and flow of viscous materials from a starting point, assuming isotropic (spatially uniform) physical conditions everywhere. However, the planet is not isotropic. In fact, you can see plenty of arc-like features on coastlines and basins visible from satellite photos, and I can’t find a single one that is even close to as geometrically perfect as the Hudson Bay arc. If you overlay a perfect circle on Hudson Bay, as I’ve done in the picture, you see that it is nearly a perfect circle. How would erosion, or a glacial depression, manage to yield such a perfect geometry? Is it really possible for the earth to be that homogeneous over such a large distance, and over the geologic span of time required to create it? To my untrained eye, at least, it screams single localized event.

If so, it would seem that it would’ve been a major event, on par (at least based on size) with the impact site that is credited with putting a cap on the Cretaceous Period and offing the dinosaurs. On the other hand, this fact only serves to heighten the mystery, as you’d think there would be global sedimentary evidence for it. Whether the arc is the result of one of the biggest catastrophic events in earth’s history, or an example of nature somehow managing to create a near perfect circle the size of New York State by processes acting over unimaginably long spans of time, its existence is fascinating.

One of the nicest things about being a student in Boston is the $25 “BSO Student Card,” which lets you attend certain Thursday night performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for free. Of course, Thursday night is not the big night for the Boston intelligentsia to attend the symphony, and tickets for the cheap seats are actually cheap, even if you’re not a student. Thus, it’s fair to conjecture that you get a different crowd at the Thursday night performances, to put it politely, and it’s clear that many of us “far in the back” are not taking the experience as seriously as those paying $150 for the privilege. I fear that the musicians probably think of Thursday night as riff-raff night, and regard it as a rehearsal for the weekend’s benefactor show. If they don’t, they probably will from now on.

This week the orchestra played Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius,” which is a huge piece for full chorus and orchestra with pipe organ. It is a setting of a poem of the same name, which deals with the death of a man and his transport beside his guardian angel to His final Judgement and on to Purgatory. (Too much capitalization there? Well, better safe than sorry, I say. The grammarian version of Pascal’s wager.)

The beginning of “The Dream…” is a somber orchestral prelude, setting the mood using perhaps the quietest tone in which I’ve ever heard an orchestra play. (For the first time I’ve seen, the concert notes are printed with the admonition “Please turn the page quietly.”) The hall is hushed, and this beautiful string adagio begins to wax quietly, creating a hallowed, church-like atmosphere. But it does not last long, this being Bingo night at Symphony Hall. An older gentleman in the balcony starts to go into a comical, high-pitched coughing fit that sounds like an asthmatic cat being repeatedly gut punched. They are probably looking frantically for this guy in whatever ICU he wandered out of. Going out in public was probably a poor call, but he clearly has a health problem and can surely be forgiven, if not lauded for his thematic complement to the subject matter. Jesu, Maria–I am near to death, And Thou art calling me; I know it now, sings the tenor. But there are others for whom Judgement will not be so kind…

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Every day I walk by Gehry’s Stata center, which overall I have to admit is one of the more interesting and visually appealing modern buildings. The “centerpiece” of the building, however, is this bit of architectural self-abuse:

The building cost almost half a billion dollars to make, and over 15 million dollars went to the architect, Frank Gehry. It was intended to be a masterpiece on the vanguard of modern architecture, representing MIT’s engineering audacity. Upon its completion the head of MIT’s campus development proudly boasted of the genius of the building, breathlessly noting the way the snorkel of the central section playfully echoes and mocks the radar dish at the top of the neighboring Green building. The head of the computer science department waxed poetic about the way the light interacts with the angles and the “spaces.” This kind of guileless, sychophantic adoration by intellectuals in the academic community is revealing of the culture in which contemporary art manages to flourish despite its near general popular rejection (in NYC, the attendance at the Met is five times that of MOMA). [Update: As pointed out by a commenter, this may be a specious argument to use.] What’s most telling is the self-conscious way the praise must always be justified in (pseudo) intellectual terms, as they try to hitch their ego to the train of the artist.

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Last week my digital camera (Canon A610) died, after only two years of light service. (It turns out that a large batch of cameras made by Canon late 2005 had a bad CCD connector which tends to die after a year or two.) While I was obviously frustrated, part of me was also secretly happy since it meant I could have the fun of shopping for another camera.

After a fair amount of research (but not enough, as it turns out) I ended up buying an 8 million pixel Olympus camera (SP-560UZ) to replace the 5 million dead ones on my old camera. Progress, right? Not really. I was surprised to find that the 8 MP camera, made over two years after my dead camera, produced images of lesser quality. Sure, they were higher resolution, but that was about it. How is that possible?

I looked a little more into the sensor elements used (called CCDs, for charge coupled devices) and it seems that the digital camera companies generally increase pixel counts without actually making the sensors any bigger. In fact, the CCD on the Olympus is actually about half the area of the Canon! [Note: as pointed out by Leonid, below, they don't have to much leeway to do otherwise in the megazoom cameras.] So the pixels get much smaller, and since each pixel requires a certain amount of circuitry (that can’t shrink any further) the sensor actually becomes even less sensitive as a whole. Furthermore, the amount of noise experienced by each pixel doesn’t shrink as quickly as the pixel size (for reasons that are a bit complicated), so an 8 MP sensor experiences significantly more noise than a 5 MP sensor. They make up for this with somewhat better CCD technology and clever image processing, but there is only so much that can be done.

Another, perhaps even worse, result of smaller pixel size is that the maximum number of photoelectrons that can be stored in each pixel is lowered. A pixel on a CCD acts like a bucket for electrons. (It’s sometimes incorrectly stated that CCD pixels store photons.) A photon of light hitting the CCD pixel has a certain probability of causing an electron to be “freed” from the silicon and dropped in the bucket. While this is just a metaphor, electrons do actually follow a lot of the same rules as water filling a bucket do. Once the bucket is full, the electrons spill out, often into a neighboring pixel that isn’t yet full. Furthermore, if the bucket (pixel) is shrunk, it can’t hold as many electrons.

The increased noise plus the smaller capacity to hold electrons means that each pixel can’t handle a very large difference between light and dark in a scene. In other words, as you increase the exposure, the pixels “fill up” much quicker than if the pixels were larger. The ability to measure large variatation between light and dark in a scene is called dynamic range. A lack of dynamic range shows up as washed out highlights and lack of detail in shadows. An example of this is shown in the following zoom from a picture taken with the Olympus:

It looks like a cloudy day, but this picture was actually taken at 3 pm on a nice, sunny day. The blue sky was not bright at all to the eye, but it was enough to cause the pixels which saw the sky to all max out and overflow. The fact that they maxed out is indicated by the pure white that resulted, and the overflow of photoelectrons into neighboring pixels is evidenced by the “bleeding” of the white into the tree branches. Admittedly, this is not strictly proof of anything, as I would have to provide a picture of the same scene taken with a better camera for you to be able to truly verify my claims, so you’re just going to have to trust me that this day wasn’t. Here is the full picture, to show that the rest of the picture was not overexposed:

The Olympus is a great camera in most every way, but it appears that they have pushed the pixel count so high that picture quality has suffered. All manufacturers of cameras in this class appear to do the same thing, and not one of them seems to have the guts to say “enough.” From an engineering standpoint, this pixel race makes absolutely no sense. At some point, adding pixels is counterproductive and actually lowers the effective resolution for most situations, due to the effects of increased noise and loss of detail due to dynamic range reduction. In my opinion, this point was reached on the small sensors used in compact point-and-shoot cameras at about 4-5 MP. Unfortunately, engineers don’t run companies, marketing types do. And the marketing lemmings invariably decide that putting a sticker that says “8 MP” on the side of the camera is more important that the quality of the images it produces. Most likely, they don’t even understand the trade-offs involved in doing so, and only hear the first three words when the engineering manager says “Yes, we can do that, but…”

People buy into this because they, understandably, assume that companies couldn’t possibly be so crass and cynical as to intentially fool people into paying more for an inferior product. There was probably a time when that was a fair assumption, but those days are long gone in the Persian bazaar that is the consumer electronics industry.

The counterintuitive upshot is that you can actually get a better quality image from a $200 low-end camera than from the higher-end $400 model from the same brand. If you’re buying a digital camera, consider intentionally buying a 5 or 6 MP model (if you can still find them) even if you can afford the 8 or 10 MP version. Check the specifications and buy the one with the largest CCD you can find. This means avoiding the cute pocket cameras, if you care at all about image quality. If you need to print poster-sized enlargments that require more than 5 MP, you just need to bite the bullet and splurge for a digital SLR; they use much larger sensors that operate on a fundamentally different read-out principle, and as a result they can produce 10 MP images with incredibly low noise. The idea of a small consumer level point-and-shoot camera with 8 MP is a bit crazy, if you ask me, and a terrible engineering choice.

The net result of all my research is the realization that I had a great thing in that little Canon A610, which makes its loss even worse. It was one of the last models where Canon used a relatively large 1/1.8 inch CCD, and to my eye it struck the right balance between resolution and image quality. After all this, I’m just going to try to find a used A610.