Time Magazine has an interesting article about James Dobson’s recent attacks on Obama. I missed Dobson’s actual remarks, but the article essentially suggests that Dobson’s attempts at tearing Obama down have backfired, resulting in even conservative Republicans being bothered by his attempts to suggest that he has the ‘only’ right interpretation of Christianity.

The article links to JamesDobsonDoesntSpeakForMe.com, a website founded by a Christian group. The site begins:

James Dobson doesn’t speak for me. He doesn’t speak for me when he uses religion as a wedge to divide; He doesn’t speak for me when he speaks as the final arbiter on the meaning of the Bible; James Dobson doesn’t speak for me when he uses the beliefs of others as a line of attack;

It’s interesting that it so closely matches what Obama’s been saying. It also contains some of the more interesting quotes from Obama speaking on religion: really not at all the atheist, “don’t even say the word ‘religion'” view that Republicans love to paint of the Democrats.

So then I went to look up James Dobson on Wikipedia, and came across this sentence that really strikes me as strange: “[F]rom his earliest childhood, religion was a central part of his life. He once told a reporter that he learned to pray before he learned to talk. In fact, he says he gave his life to Jesus at the age of three, in response to an altar call by his father.”

Can a three-year-old grasp the concepts necessary for religion? It seems to me as if the typical three-year-old would have no idea what “eternal life” or “salvation” was, so it seems pretty odd to think that one could commit their life to Jesus at age three. Or at least, do so and understand it.

It gives me a lot of hope, actually, for Christianity. Increasingly, it seems like the people who speak out as Christians do so in hateful manners. They’re never seen calling for an end to torture or world genocide, or helping the homeless. (Of course, they do all of that, but you never see vocal religious leaders speaking about those things.) Instead, they get painted as just lambasting people over absurd things. The reaction to Dobson’s rant is making me think that maybe Christianity can be restored to preaching love, not hate.

I don’t have a picture handy to accompany this, but the ‘slogan’ on the DC license plates is “Taxation without Representation,” which any astute history scholar—or anyone who was awake in history class—will recognize is the complaint of the American colonies leading to, among other things, the Boston Tea Party. It also perfectly reflects the status of Washington, D.C., which pays the same taxes we do but has only non-voting members in Congress.

It really amuses me, because it’s sort of thumbing the city’s nose (that metaphor doesn’t work so well here?) at the very government that it houses. That they actually put it on the license plates amused me. But what amused me even more was discovering that one of Clinton’s last acts as President was to put the new “Taxation without Representation” plates on the Presidential limos, which thus led to one of the first things Bush did in office being to remove them and replace them with the more conservative ones that don’t bear that slogan.

Today we toured the White House. I have no photos, since cameras aren’t allowed. It’s quite a posh place, but it seemed smaller than I’d imagined. It is in excellent condition for something so rich with history (200-year-old artifacts line the White House walls, looking as good as new). I did conclude that I’d like to be President. I’d have the lawn aerated, among other things. (That might not be the platform on which I run, however.) I also started thinking that I’d periodically ditch the security and just take a walk outside the White House, down to one of the many restaurants. The odds of a terrorist happening to be waiting outside the White House for me seems relatively slim. It also seems like it’s kind of important in terms of being viewed as “one of the people,” versus someone holed up separated by hundreds of guards.

Towards the beginning were some photos of the Presidents throughout the past, including some contemporary ones. All sorts of historic events were chronicled. Maybe it’s just that it’s hard to see things in full historical perspective, but all the contemporary ones appeared goofy and out of place. George W. Bush was out front of the White House with a Nascar car and various racers, and the photo was in between various interesting historical shots, something like JFK addressing a crowd and Hoover at the Hoover Dam. (Okay, I made the latter one up entirely since I couldn’t remember what else was there, but it’s the sort of thing that might have been there.)

I also found it strange that Bush had allowed several paintings of the Clintons to stay up: Bill and Hillary both had photos on the lower level. Everything I had heard suggested that there may have been some rather childish pranks played between the two, so I figured they’d have been the first things to get taken down.

We also hit up the Smithsonians today… My dad and I did the Air and Space Museum. (Which, fittingly, is across the street from the FAA.) The Smithsonian is exactly what I think a museum should be: free, open to the public, and a place that practically encourages photography. While some museums seem to be for-profit, this one is all about the public domain. Woot!

title=”mIMG_4711 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

That’s not at all a great photo, but one of the better ones. I was going to try to pretend it was the real thing rather than a scale model, but the giants in the background, and the fact that the ship is sailing on top of a wooden plank in the ocean ruin that. It was quite dark inside many of the exhibits, which meant that even at ISO1600, I was getting 1/8-second shutter speeds. (Incidentally, I noticed a lot of people with very fast lenses… I was quite jealous of the people taking the same touristy shots I was, but doing so through thousand-dollar L-series lenses.)

title=”mIMG_4627 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

I believe that’s a recreation of the Wright Brothers’ original plane. The real artifact they had from the Wright Brothers was a bicycle they manufactured. (Perhaps they weren’t initially sure what form of transit they wanted to get into?)

title=”mIMG_4618 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

That’s the flight deck from… The Apollo? I think? Showing how pathetic my frame of reference is, the first thing I thought is, “Wow, they’ve got to let Apple design the next one.”

title=”hdr-IMG_4764_5_6 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

There were easily a dozen of these around the Smithsonian museums, all with the same signs. They begged for a very saturated HDR shot, and I gave into the temptation.

title=”hdr-IMG_4780_1_2 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

Here’s the FAA building, also showing the crazy weather… It seems as if a bigger storm is coming in an hour or three. If weather and time permit, I’d like to go back to the White House tonight to grab some pictures…

Thought I’d post some photographic highlights from my trip so far….

Thanks to Garrett for suggesting that we take a trip to the monuments at night. We talked about HDR a bit, and I got some great shots.

title=”Jefferson Memorial at Night by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

That was as the sun was setting, so the sky is still a bit light. It’s definitely worth checking out the inside, too:

title=”Jefferson Memorial by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

It’s right on what I keep calling a pond or lake, but is properly called the Tidal Basin. On the other side is the Washington Monument:

title=”Washington Monument at Night by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

We actually haven’t (and probably won’t) visit[ed] it yet, as it’s apparently a ludicrously popular destination. I had to abandon (well, put away) the tripod after a while when the security guards informed me that tripods weren’t permitted, so I switched to ISO1600… It’s surprisingly useful in the dark:

title=”Washington Monument by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

That’s the Monument framed by two pillars of the Jefferson Memorial. The Tidal Basin in the middle smells awful, BTW.

Garrett and I talked about HDR a bit, and I began by taking what might be one of the most tacky HDR photos ever:

title=”Tacky HDR 101 by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

It’s a gorgeous photo really small, but it bothers me if I look at it much, mostly because it looks really unnatural.

title=”Capitol by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

Today we toured the Capitol, which is an intriguing place. I took an equally-tacky HDR shot of that. I think the problem there is just that the dome and the building don’t match at all. I took a shot of the rotunda (think “the underside of that big dome”):

title=”Capitol Rotunda by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

We also hit up the National Cathedral today… This shot burns my retinas a bit, but that insanely bright, insanely vibrant color on the church was actually pretty accurate… The sun was setting, leaving a nice, warm, golden glow.

title=”National Cathedral by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

title=”The Globe by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

I honestly have no idea what that thing is (besides “a globe”), but between that and the stellar sky behind it, I like this shot.

We hit up the White House (among other attractions) tomorrow, though they don’t allow anything to be brought in, so don’t count on any shots of that. (Unless we go back and photograph the outside separately.)

Today was one of those days where we “almost” had a storm about three times. I was desparately trying to get the lawn cut before it’d start… And then the dark storm clouds loomed, and I’d frantically pull the tractor into the garage and admit defeat, only to have four raindrops fall and it become sunny again.

After a while of this flip-flopping weather, it started to rain for real. And then I kept hearing loud clicks on my air conditioner, when I realized it was hailing. I went onto our (covered) front porch for a while to watch the storm, and grabbed some pictures.

This is actually as the storm retreated, but the clouds look pretty fierce…

You know that point where it seems like it’s raining as hard as it possibly can, when it’s absolutely pouring out? There seems to be an upper limit to just how hard it rains, and we spent several minutes there.

And then, in the blink of an eye, the volume of… stuff… coming out of the sky must have tripled. In addition to the torrential downpour, it started hailing again, this time with great intensity.

You can see the accumulated hail on the walkway.

The temperature dropped quite drastically, too, going from close to 80 to close to 60 in a matter of minutes.

Here was an HDR capture of the hail falling, which seems to lose some of the intensity:

title=”Hail by n1zyy, on Flickr”>

The hail was pea-sized, but boy was there a lot of it. This is after the rain had subsided… Also note that massive distortion on my hand caused by taking such a close shot with an 18mm lens.

Of course, now it’s gone from pouring to boring. :'(

I’ve seen a few references to the concept of citizen’s arrests lately, which motivated me to post some of the things I’ve discovered. The short answer is this: you should never, ever attempt a citizen’s arrest.

It’s first worth mentioning that merchants get additional protection under the shopkeeper’s privilege. I’d give the same advice, though: except for large department stores which have excellent lawyers and are surely much more intricately familiar with the law than I am, you should never, ever attempt a citizen’s arrest.

The police have explained the issue as a matter of safety: if some crazy guy goes around shooting people and you try to detain him, it will most assuredly end badly for you. However, removing the element of personal safety, I’d argue that even if you have been personally wronged, a detainment is a bad idea.

While the Shopkeeper’s Privilege seems to suggest you just have to go by reasonable suspicion, my understanding of the law regarding citizen arrests (really a detainment) are that the crime must have been “in fact committed.” So enter nightmare scenario #1: you suspect someone has just robbed the bank and detain them. It turns out that they were simply wearing their hamburgler mask and had withdrawn their cash from the bank, and then went for a job. What do you get for your valiant attempt at stopping crime? Arrested, of course, for unlawful imprisonment, kidnapping, or a related charge.

In most places, it is only permitted in regard to felonies and/or crimes you personally witnessed. Scenario #2, you see a person unloading lots of merchandise into their car that was tucked under their shirt, and you detain them. Not a felony (kind of), and you didn’t witness the shoplifting occurring. You’re probably getting arrested.

And these are all criminal wrongs. You’re also just asking to get sued in civil court, too. (I wonder… If someone attempts to effect a citizen’s arrest which you believe to be improper, can you then place them under a citizen’s arrest, on the grounds that they’re committing kidnapping / etc.?)

And as something totally off-topic, the police don’t have to “read you your rights” (the Miranda warning) unless you are (1) in their custody and (2) being questioned about the crime. In the citizen’s police academy, one of the officers mentioned that it was pretty amusing how often people would act all smug, thinking their case would be dismissed because they weren’t read their Miranda rights at the time of their arrest.

Lately I’ve come to the realization that most any photo will look much better after being processed in Photoshop.

Here’s a post-processed image from my trip to Ghana:

It has some technical flaws (it was taken through a window and is crooked), but it’s a pretty good shot technically…

There it is straight out of the camera. Notice how everything looks a little hazy, the colors are washed out, and everything is blue/green?

It’s kind of like becoming a nut about cleaning your wheels or watching HDTV: you suddenly realize that what you’ve been used to is really pretty bad, and can’t help but notice problems where you hadn’t seen them before.

I’ve recently begun processing a lot of the pictures I took in Ghana… And I’ll probably be putting some more up in the coming days.

Since Windows keeps hinting that I could use my CompactFlash card as a ReadyBoost drive, I was just thinking… My Thinkpad has an ExpressCard slot…

….and an 8GB Lexar solid-state drive* is only $90 at NewEgg.

In theory, I could pluck it in and use it for ReadyBoost and as a paging file, and still have a bit of room for Photoshop’s scratch disk and/or random file storage.

Unfortunately, booting from SSD isn’t the wonderful experience everyone raves about. SSD is slower in terms of throughput; it’s only in random-access that it shines. I’ve seen some videos of booting otherwise-identical machines from SSD and not using SSD, and the difference is really not all that great. It is faster, but it’s maybe 25 seconds instead of 30 seconds. Really not worth it in my mind. (I do think that SSD will eventually come to exceed conventional disk drives in throughput eventually, though…)

I’d posted before about how my ‘dream computer setup’ would have a big fileserver with a bunch of disks… Something like 4-8 SATA drives, 7200 RPM, running RAID 5. The net result is several terabytes of storage, and, since RAID 5 provides striping, excellent performance.

It would have to be delivered over Gigabit Ethernet, since 100 Mbps caps out at 12.5 MB/sec (100 Mbps / 8 bits to a byte).

Running something like OpenFiler, it would “speak” most all protocols, allowing me to have shares for Windows, Linux, and Mac machines merrily get along… (I’d also like to make it, for once, highly organized! Have a “share” for music, and another for photos I’ve taken, etc.)

I just had another idea, though…The main advantage of this setup was to keep everything in one place, so I can get to my music or photos from any PC. But I soon realized that a stripe set over GigE could exceed the performance of an internal hard drive, where 20-30 MB/sec maximum throughput is considered good.

The hard bottleneck is GigE at 125MB/sec. (Although, unless you’re someone like my dad and start doing interrupt- and driver-level optimization, you might not get more than 85% of so of the rated line, with overhead and all.) A couple of SATA drives striped won’t hit that. But why not try to make GigE your bottleneck?

There are tons of used servers and related equipment on eBay these days. So pick up a couple of smaller (18-36?) GB SCSI disks. 15K RPM. Quite a few claim to exceed 100MB/sec, with some closer to 200MB/sec. You could be really conservative since you’re buying used hard drives and use RAID 1 (mirroring), but let’s live on the edge and say we get three of them and use RAID5. (Or get 2 and use RAID 0…. Or 4 and RAID 1+0.) And while we’re on eBay, let’s pick up a used SCSI RAID controller to keep things fast.

So we now have a fileserver with terabytes of space that’s probably faster than your hard drive, and we now have, depending on how crazy you felt, a partition of between 18 and 72GB that’s capable of at least 100MB/sec speeds. What do we use it for?

Well, first of all, anything that you think of that you want to be really fast. If you’re net-booting machines, put ’em in there. (That would be an interesting experiment, actually: speed is normally not thought of as a reason to do network boots.) If you have some essential file that you work with, keep it in there.

But I envision this more as a spot of short-term storage. The first thing that comes to mind is Photoshop’s scratch disk. You get better performance (when you’re using it) if it’s on a separate hard drive. Set it up there.

But then I got an even neater idea… Your paging file performs much better if it’s on a separate disk. I’m fairly certain that Windows won’t let you use a network share as your paging file. (It won’t let you use a USB drive, although they merrily let you set up the paging file there, it just never actually creates it.) However, Openfiler and Vista Business (at least) seem to support iSCSI with no problem… Are you seeing what I’m thinking? Tell Windows it can keep a 4GB page file on your S: drive, which is actually a SCSI stripe set on another machine… I wonder if, though iSCSI, Windows would allow this. (There is a decent reason not to allow it: it would be somewhat bad if your paging file, located on a remote machine, went away. However, I maintain that, especially if you used RAID, the odds aren’t that much greater than of your hard disk crapping out on you.)

I’ve got to get a job so I can afford to try this out! 😉

Someone ought to make an application that will allow you to download files from sites, but submit the URLs to a central service that’s a BitTorrent tracker, and see if anyone else using the service is also downloading those files, or has recently downloaded them, to try to accelerate the download a bit.

I’m currently downloading a file from a mirror that seems capable of about 100KB/sec, whereas I’m capable of something like 1MB/sec… And it’s a big file, which means I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs. In my case, the only benefit would be a speedup.

But then consider something like yesterday, when the Mozilla servers were presumably getting slammed. (Or anyone who uses sites like Digg/Slashdot, that result in a sudden flood of traffic to particular sites.) They could ease a lot of traffic on those sites, and also give users a bit of redundancy: sometimes the main site will die under the load, but there could potentially be hundreds of clients with the information.