In this month’s Popular Science, Steve Casimiro wrestles with the implications of widespread photoshoppery on our culture. Fakes abound. I’ve been known to swap a head or two in my day. I would estimate that roughly 50% of Americans know it’s possible, 20% know how they’re around and can recognize an obvious fake, and 1-2% can pull one off themselves and spot the sneaky ones. My ‘Fishing with George’ shot, took about 20 minutes. It’s crude but you get the point. (View the source images here, here and here.) As the original image (also altered) demonstrates, it’s a powerful vehicle for Swiftian satire, whether we propose eating Irish babies, wish to imply guilt by association, or imagine the future. The article reviews some technologies designed to spot frauds, but all the solutions mentioned require some sort of tagging of the original image or high resolutions, neither of which is likely in cases in which controversy arises. All in all, no convincing solutions, raising the specter of some day watching courts refuse to allow digital photographs as evidence for fear of not being able to identify modifications.
I was innocently browsing Coolhomepages.com looking for things to steal, um inspiration, when whoa, wait a minute, I know that girl. Every once in a great while an Emerson alum actually does something with themselves. What a great site. When your site gets props right next to Radiohead’s, you done good.
So if you missed it, I spent an extended weekend with some friends fleeing hurricane Rita which was ominously bearing down on Houston early last week. It didn’t do a whole lot of damage in Houston, but we got some interesting stories out of it and a few good pix.
I remember getting into a pretty heated argument with a girl in one of my classes at U of H over the question of diversity in education today in the context of Brown v. Board. She felt that segregation remained a problem because of enduring racism and that the most expedient solution was further desegregation, something akin to the busing enforced in Boston and Baltimore in the 80’s.
I countered that the real failure of Brown was to use race as the criteria at all. You couldn’t really criticize the court for this, of course; that was the question posed, but at the same time, we shouldn’t expect it to work either, since the solutions (busing mostly) posed inherent logistical challenges and issues of community involvment and support that doomed whatever apparatus was involved.
Race, I proposed, was a correlation, not a causation. Poverty was the real differentiator. I failed to convice, but I did find some small consolation in reading this article in the NY Times today.
I’m back in Houston; back at work. Since I’m in a reflective, work-avoiding mood, here’s a list of 10 things it would have been nice to have this past week.
A power inverter to plug in my laptop from the cigarette lighter of the car. They run about $30. There is no reason on God’s green earth I didn’t have one. I’m ordering one right now.
GPS receiver for maps, directions, distance, etc. Luckily Kris had one of these. We got a couple of good back-road routes out of this one, plus I’m always getting lost in general.
A way of knowing the average speed and/or travel time between any two points on texas highways. There was a local info number, but something like the signs on Houston’s freeways for rush hour would have been helpful. Hopefully some über-geek at TxDot will whip up a Google Map API for this one.
Cruise control that would keep me inching forward but would also stop the car automatically to keep from running into the guy in front of me.
A way of going to the bathroom in mixed company without getting out of the car. OK, so I don’t think this will ever be invented, but it would have been damn useful.
even moderately healthy food at any gas station
A Treo cellphone to use as a modem for my laptop and get online from anywhere. Oh wait I’ve got one of those, sure wish I had figured out how to use it as a modem before this all went down.
Tivo for the radio. Wait, what did they just say? The road’s washed out where? Don’t take which highway? Every radio needs a rewind button.
Call forwarding for my cellphone. This would be useful for life in general. If I’m at home, send my calls to my home phone, out of town, send it to my hotel. You get the idea. I realize Cingular has their Fast Forward services, but it seems like this kind of thing should be universal like voice mail.
Speaking of which, how about a transcription service for that voicemail to send them to me as text-messages. This is also something that would be useful for life in general, but especially so when the networks are under a lot of strain.
None of this is going to happen on account of this measly little blog post, unless of course any of you reading this happen to be inventors, in which case you can make out a check for the royalties semi-annually if you please. On the upside my mom figured out text-messaging on her cellphone. I’m tempted to call this an evolutionary event on level with dinosaurs growing feathers, but I’m pretty sure my aunt Sylvia just showed her how.
Rita is expected to make landfall east of Houston, sparing the city most of the extreme winds that would do the most damage. Houston west of I-45 is expected to fare pretty well. (Good for us, since we’re on the western edge of Houston) The most immediate danger at this point appears to be debris being picked up by the wind and becoming projectiles. However rainwater flooding may be a big problem as projections for rain are up to 24″ according to some, conjuring up memories of Tropical Storm Allison from 2001
The latest computer models are tightly clustered around a landfall point just west of the Texas/Louisiana border. Confidence is high in this forecast. Houston and Galveston should escape major wind and storm surge damage, and only experience maximum sustained winds of 60 mph with gusts to 85 mph. It is still too early to tell what will happen after landfall, as the models all take Rita different ways. A major rainwater flooding problem will ensue after Rita’s landfall, with 10 - 30 inches of rain falling over a large area of Texas and Louisiana.
Couldn’t quite manage to get that Bob Marley tune out of my head the last 24 hours. According to news reports there were over a million Houstonians fleeing from Hurricane Rita today. It sure felt like it on 59 heading north to Daingerfield. Kris, Lisa, Jason, Christie and I left Houston at 10pm last night in two cars. By 7am this morning, driving through the night, we had made it as far as Livingston, about 70 miles. The speed gradually picked up as we made it further north. We rolled into Daingerfield around 7pm. I’ve never been so happy to roll up to Outlaw’s BBQ.
The Verizon network seems a bit overloaded. None of my calls are getting out, so for those looking for updates, here’s the plan - we’re heading out of Houston in two cars - Kris, Lisa & Jason in one; Christie and I in the other at about 10pm. We’ll mosey on up 59 to Nacogdoches and meander up to the Hohn lake house in Daingerfield to wait out the hurricane. God willing and traffic permitting, we’ll hit Daingerfield some time around 4 am. Hopefully cell service will be a little better up there.
Ole Lukey’s not liking the looks of this one. Galveston has been under mandatory evacuation since this morning or last night. Mayor White has called for a voluntary evacuation of Houston, and mandatory evacuation of southern outliers such as Clearlake, Pearland and Friendswood. Rita is expected to hit Houston some time on friday, at which point, God willing, I’ll be kicking back with a cerveza somewhere warm and dry, most likely the Hohn compound in Daingerfield. Not expecting massive flooding on the scale of Katrina, but it’s a hundred freakin’ degrees and there’s a 99% chance this thing will knock our AC out, so away we go. If anything exciting happens like I get hit by flying debris, I’ll be sure to update.
I’m definitely in the wrong business. Looks like Mitchell forgot to tell his legs this was an action shot though. Watch your back, buddy, I’m working on my “le tigre.”
Reality is a bit overwhelming these days with Houston awash in the hurricane refugees, gas prices over $3 a gallon, and my Cougars losing ugly to a team with a freaking duck for a mascot. Time for something escapist, at least for a lit geek. I curled up in the courtyard with John Hollander’sRhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse this morning. As a guide to English Verse, it’s more specifically a manual of poetic form, which I think tends to be one of those subjects, like grammar, that in American universities is seldom taught (and almost never taught well) but of which you are assumed to have an intimate working knowledge. Hollander’s guide is remarkably bearable, even fun, at least if a deeper understanding of anapests and iambs happens to turn you on. Hollander, an accomplished poet in his own right, mixes explication with poems that themselves demonstrate their inner workings:
In couplets, one line often makes a point
Which hinges on its bending, like a joint;
The sentence makes that line break into two.
Here’s a caesura: see what it can do.
(And here’s a gentler one, whose pause, more slight,
Waves its two hands, makes what’s left sound right.)
I picked up Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis at Half Price Books the other day. Quite good. A lot of people are familiar with Lewis from The Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s books. Others know his popular books on Christianity such as Mere Christianity and if they haven’t actually read it themselves they may think they have from hearing it quoted so often.
Lewis, however, was first and foremost a scholar of medieval literature, which he taught at Cambridge and Oxford, something he had in common with his close friend and fellow Inkling, Tolkien (you know, hobbitses, Lord of the Ring, &tc &tc.). In college I promptly gave up any idea of writing a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost after reading Lewis’ epic preface simply because I couldn’t think of anything I could possibly add to his analysis and was fairly stunned by how much of the poem I had missed.
In particular, Maria Kuteeva’s chapter on Myth was fascinating. Lewis had a lifelong fascination with mythology which, far from being relegated by his conversion to Christianity, became an integral part of Lewis’ understanding of the role of imagination and the creative impulse of humanity. For Lewis using one’s imagination was a divinely inspired impulse and an emulation of God’s ultimate creative power.
