goatee
highlanders
°2018.08.09.Thu | Recounting my cameras
I look at my old photos often; it’s why a take them. I was recently wondering how many cameras I’ve had over the years (see Twitter).
After a Canon Rebel film DSLR in the mid-1990s, my first digital camera was the Fujifilm MX-1700. It was great to have a camera where I could see immediate results. It had 1.5 megapixels and was okay in bright light, but it struggled hard with indoor shots: lots of noise and slow shutter speeds, resulting in lots of blur. But I still have some favorite photos from then (1999). The Fujifilm MX-1700 was an odd looking camera, with a vertical design, but with the move to digital, why retain a film-based design?
In 2002, I moved to the FujiFilm F601ZOOM. At 3MP, its photos have twice as many pixels. Low light was still a struggle, and dynamic range was limited with plenty of blown out highlights.
Still, I have hundreds of photos from the F601ZOOM, some of which were in very difficult circumstances, like this concert photo of Matisyahu.
In 2007, I upgraded to the FujiFilm F40f. It had a horizontal point-and-shoot form factor. Digital SLRs were a thing now, but I prefer easy to carry compact cameras. Your best camera is the one you have on you.
The F40f was a modern camera, with a respectable 8M pixels, decent dynamic range, and facial detection auto-focus. I’d often hop on my restored muscle bicycle with the banana seat and ride around Red Hook Brooklyn.
I really miss those evening rides.
In 2011 features beyond megapixels started making a difference. I wanted to return to some of the manual control from film days but also go even smaller. I erred on the side of super compact: the Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS. It was so tiny it was awesome. 2011 was also the year a certain fuzzy critter makes an appearance in the albums.
The ELPH was also so tiny it was also only useful as a point-and-shoot. I returned to FujiFilm via the XF1 in 2012. The XF1 was my first camera to have a fake background blur that is now common on smartphones. Neat for photos of ginger beer bottles, but not for anything with a fuzzy edge.
I began 2013 with the Sony RX100. A tiny camera with a 1-inch sensor and viewfinder. The inch sensor meant excellent dynamic range, good low light performance, and some control over background blur (e.g., Casper taking a bath). Five years later, I still find its images beautiful.
In 2014 the perfect compact camera arrived, the Lumix LX100. It had a M4/3 sensor, fast zoom (f1.7 at wide) and manual controls! For years I dismissed complaints about dust getting inside to others’ carelessness. But it happened to me in 2017. I paid to have it serviced, took it to Prague this year, and the sensor dust was back.
I still use it when shooting with an open aperture (where the dust isn’t visible), and hope the rumors of a better sealed LX100ii are true.
This incident prompted me to get my first interchangeable lens camera in twenty years, the GX85. I can blow any dust off the sensor myself. I also enjoy using a telephoto lens.
That’s nine cameras (mostly inexpensive digital compacts) over twenty-three years. Not too bad in a hobby beset by GAS (gear acquisition syndrome).
°2018.05.31.Thu | Vegan in Prague
We haven’t been to Prague for seventeen years and much has changed in that time. Notably, there are now dozens of veg* restaurants. Every neighborhood has a few.
Nora and I use the “Vegan Guide to Prague” as our basis and collected a few notes along the way. These are roughly ordered in ascending preference.
- Loving Hut: they are okay in a pinch, but I quickly tired of Asian-style buffets.
- Maitrya: Buddhist themed, lackluster food. We asked for tap water and got expensive “vitalized water.”
- Pure Bistro: a tiny bistro and store near our place, for which I was grateful.
- Mlsná kavka: had an excellent veggie burger.
- Herbivore: upscale bistro and store on the river with a buffet of good food – though the bread was stale.
- Happy Bean: a bistro at which I got a great quesadilla with vegan cheese. The proprietor is very charming. Sidewalk seating is available.
- The Donut Shop: next door to the Happy Bean, this shop offers three vegan donuts options, including one of the best donuts I’ve ever had. (Things aren’t so sweet in Prague, so you don’t end up feeling queasy when finishing a donut.)
- Incruenti: I think our risotto and soup was the best food we had during our trip. Its menu and hours are limited though. Nice patio seating in the back.
°2018.05.08.Tue | Flowering tree
°2017.09.01.Fri | Bee on a flower
°2017.08.15.Tue | The paradox and pragmatics of intolerance
In What White Supremacists Don’t Want You to Know, Valerie Aurora highlights Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and argues it is relevant to our response to neo-Nazis of today.
For his part, Popper was writing during the end World War II and was likely thinking about the tepid response to the original Nazis. Although they forced him to flee his home in Vienna, the Nazis are not mentioned in Open Society. Nonetheless, in a very long footnote, Popper consider the various “paradoxes” associated with open societies, including the paradox of tolerance.
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. (Popper1966?, fn. 4, p.581)
Aurora applies this to the white-supremacy of today:
a tolerant society should tolerate protest marches in general, but it shouldn’t tolerate a white supremacist march advocating for the oppression and killing of people of color – like the march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 that ended with white supremacists beating and killing people who were opposed to their message of intolerance.
I think I first came across this notion by way of Aurora some time ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I had hoped it would help me resolve my dueling values of being tolerant but also defending tolerance. Unfortunately, when I think about particular cases, I fear its resolution is dependent on who gets to define what is intolerant. I can imagine both sides of a debate making claims of intolerance about the other side. For example, those wanting to suppress Muslim immigration can claim Islam is a religion of intolerance and should not be welcomed/tolerated. Those in support of immigration will claim that this position is intolerant itself.
This then sent me in search of a rubric for judging intolerant defenses of tolerance. For example, how should we judge the punching of a neo-Nazi? My thinking has been aided by Yonatan Zunger’s “Tolerance is not a moral precept”; he characterizes tolerance as a type of peace contract with worthwhile ends, not a moral precept.
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
Even so, Zunger acknowledges that conflicts might be unresolvable.
If everything you have ever learned tells you that this is a real and present danger, and that certain members of the community — members of another religion, perhaps, or people of the wrong sexual orientation — are jeopardizing everyone’s safety, then a fundamental, existential conflict is inevitable. In a situation like this, there can be no peace treaty; only war or separation.
This is a useful framework, but I’m still in search of a rubric.
Perhaps the following questions about the initial act of intolerance and subsequent defense could serve as a start.
The initial intolerance (i.e., some exclusionary/hateful behavior)
- Is it born of a deep or long-lasting culture? Germans feel differently about neo-Nazis than Americans, for obvious reasons.
- Is it a significant or growing threat? A lone kook is less of a concern than an organized militia.
- What is the balance of genuine vs possible harm? Advocating for white culture is less of a concern (even if a “dog whistle”) than calls for genocide and violence.
The intolerant defense of tolerance (i.e., suppression of above)
- Is the response proportional?
- Is it likely to be effective?
- Is it applied fairly/equitably?
- Is it narrow in scope?
- Will it set precedent?
- What other values (e.g., speech and religion) are implicated?
°2017.08.11.Fri | Colorful carousel
°2017.08.11.Fri | Monday morning Casper
°2017.07.31.Mon | Mount William Pond, Weare NH
