Links

A brief interlude to note down a couple of things.

I follow only one podcast, and that’s On Taking Pictures. As the name says, it’s about photography, and in one recent Q&A episode they kindly answered a question I have made; what’s cool however is their comment on my name which I’d like to remember for the future – skip to the 1h18'28" mark:

The second thing is about Flickr: they have recently published a collection of baobab’s photographs and have included one of my photos from my Madagascar honeymoon trip¹.

Richard Koci Hernandez made this video asking if “mobile photography has made us more reliant on tools than on our eyes”:

Sometimes you can find smart youtube comments. For example this guy wrote:

Hernandez makes a valid point - the image shouldn’t be defined by the camera it’s captured with. It’s a shame he had to spend five minutes saying what he could easily have said in five seconds. I turned off after that - couldn’t take the pretentiousness of his language any more.

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I have always liked Craig Mod, since I read years ago his travelogue/review of the Panasonic GF1. He traveled to Himalaya, captured some great shot with this little camera, and wrote extensive and very well written thoughts about ‘gear’ – linking tech talk to excellent photography and interesting, deep commentary about how it feels to use a camera to capture your emotions. So far, this has been the best review of a camera that I’ve ever read. And it has been that review that inspired me to abandon (although only temporarily) DSLRs and got myself that little micro 4/3 jewel that was the GF1¹.

It might be quirky and it might be cool but I would argue this is something which should not appeal to anybody apart from facebook photographers.

I’m talking about the 15mm Olympus body c(r)ap lens.

The reasons are two:

1. judging from the shots which you can see here the quality is abysmal. But you have to look at 100%, and while I’m against pixel peeping, when it comes to a technical choice, there is no other way to judge objectively the quality of a lens. This is why I think it may only appeal to facebook photographer, because reduced to web size all photos are sharp and correctly focused (there is a law waiting to be expressed: the lower the resolution of your final output, the less you can spend on equipment, or something like that).
2. the price is ridiculous ($110). I would then happily recommend buying a Pinwide which sells for forty dollars and makes a completely different kind of photo (real quirky here!, not crappy-quirky) or the wonderful Panasonic 14mm f/2.5 which can be found used for $100 and is tiny (I recently bought this lens to replace the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 which was starting to get on my nerves with its plasticky silver color).

Lately I’ve been reading quite a lof of articles about parenting. Most of them are book reviews but I did not read any of these books though¹, which could mean: (A) I’m a bit shallow, (B) stressed out New Yorkers, overproductive Chinese immigrants, rich Californians are not people that I feel entitled to give me directions on how to raise my kid (even though I acknowledge their superior education and intelligence and that their sons and daughters will surely rule the world).

There are still pearls to be found on the internet, after all.

In these days I have found three photography blogs which are full of interesting and well written articles; stimulating, instructive, much better of the crap that Popular Photography publishes (and I’m not even mentioning the countless websites and blogs of pixel-peepers and technology feticists).

Worth bookmarking them for when you have time to sit down and read something that will help renew your passion for this art:

If you have love of photography and are a dreamy nerd enamored of Asimov’s books, you really need to read this; it’s an account by a NASA astronaut about the daily experiences of shooting photographs in space:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/locations/photography_in_space.shtml

So true:

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Ann Patchett, from yesterday’s New York Times.

From “Secrets of a Mind-Gamer”, a fascinating article on a normal guy who becomes a memory champion:

In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, the best we can do is simply the best we can do. But Ericsson and his colleagues have found over and over again that with the right kind of effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. They’ve found that top achievers typically follow the same general pattern. They develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous stage by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting immediate feedback on their performance […] To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail.

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Making a really good coffee

Interesting post on Scientific American, however this barista needs a reality check: a refractometer to make coffee ? I’d recommend a couple of place in my hometown (Bari) where baristas have no PhD but make the best coffee ever.

A great article on Slate.com: taking inspiration from “King’s speech”, a stutterer writes about stuttering.

Some great insights, worth reading if you are vaguely interested in the subject (or if you have a friend who stammers and want to know what on earth does he think when he’s stuck on a word).

150 friends (Dunbar’s number)

I have deleted my Facebook account a long time ago and I can confirm that I can live very happily with no Facebook around.

This article by Robin Dunbar (did you know about “Dunbar’s number” ?) is very interesting however. It does say that Facebook can be a positive thing. But it also says:

Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.

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This is the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html

And this is one very nice and informed comment from a PhD student that puts things into the right perspective:

1. The major difference between enhanced geothermal and standard oil and gas extraction is the high pressures used to create geothermal reservoirs. Oil and gas are normally extracted from porous sedimentary rocks (10-30% void space), but the heat fluxes required for geothermal are found in volcanic rocks with less than 1% void space. The rock must be fractured to allow water to flow through it, and it is this process that causes earthquakes. The earthquakes can continue for months after the pressure has been released because the Earth is a dynamic place and not all of the stress transfer is instantaneous; in fact, the later-occurring quakes are usually governed by stress changes caused by diffusion (slow filtering through the limited porosity due to pressure gradients) rather than advection (the injection velocity/pressure, which causes the immediate earthquakes.

2. There is no danger of creating “new tectonic plates”; the tectonic plates are on a completely different scale than a single geothermal reservoir (1000s vs 1s of kilometers). The absolute worst case scenario would be changing the stress regime enough to reactivate an existing tectonic-scale fault like the San Andreas/San Jacinto etc., which is very unlikely due to the scale difference.

3. For risk assessment purposes, risk is the product of hazard (the event that might be triggered) and vulnerability. A project like this ends up going forward because when the hazard is large (i.e. it is very likely that you will trigger small earthquakes), the vulnerability is also low since it will only affect a relatively sparsely populated area immediately nearby. Obviously, if you happen to live in that area, that is not a reassuring argument. In the other extreme case, if the vulnerability is high (eg. a Landers earthquake-type rupture across most of SoCal), the hazard is low (the chance of re-activating the San Andreas is slim). In both cases, the product of the two works out to a small number, so the risk is deemed acceptable. The soft underbelly of risk assessment is that seismic hazard is fiendishly difficult to quantify given present methodology and observational capabilities.

4. Regional seismic hazard and geothermal energy will continue to be coupled since the areas with the highest geothermal gradients (rate of temperature increase with depth) tend to be tectonically active (young or recently deformed) crust. However, the potential benefits to figuring out geothermal energy are myriad - clean, reliable, domestic supplies - and I think it’s worth pursuing. An exciting tangential scientific opportunity also exists: if we can figure out the processes that control microseismicity in reservoirs, we will be much closer to predicting and someday mitigating the types of earthquakes that make headlines on a more regular basis.

5. This may come as a surprise, but the largest geothermal producer in the world is the oil giant Chevron; they have several enormous traditional geothermal projects in Indonesia.

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