Swirling Miasma

Lurking somewhere behind my previous post on Flickr and what I’m choosing to call “statistical aesthetics” is the subject of my distaste for self-promotion.

I’m hopelessly introverted, and though for many other people introversion doesn’t extend into the online world, for me it does. I’m just as content to sit in the back and take everything in online as I am offline, and calling attention to myself just doesn’t come naturally, whatever the context. In fact, it makes me feel icky — embarrassed and self-conscious.

For example, Colter broadcast an email to his photographer friends about the post-processing technique used in his post of multiplicity photos. I replied with thoughts on how the technique compared and contrasted to the one used to make my Sprague Lake photos, with a link to my Flickr set. But I knew I was mostly doing this to flog photos that I was proud of, and I really regretted pressing that send button.

I work hard on my writing and photographs, and I want to share them with people. At the same time, I want to avoid feeling like a whore because I’m being a shill for myself. I know I’m not making these things simply to amuse myself, because the evidence says so. I also think I’m a narcissistic ass for acting like anybody cares.

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It’s better when I don’t feel like the unwilling spokesman for a product I don’t particularly like. Concrete suggestions are good — things I can do almost automatically, without drawing my attention to the fact that I’m promoting myself. I found several good suggestions in Thomas Hawk’s “Top Ten Tips for Getting Attention at Flickr.”

Here’s hoping I can implement some of them without hating myself (much).

Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti fame remarks on misleading use of the word “hoax:”

“Hoax’s reign as the scapegoat du jour dates back to the Boston ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ debacle in February of this year. ‘Two plead not guilty to Boston hoax charges’ the CNN headline read, and the Boston authorities used the word ‘hoax’ to describe the incident as often as they could. And the advantages of labeling something like this a hoax are obvious: you didn’t massively overreact to a situation that the average person recognized as harmless, you were tricked into doing so!”

I’m sure that misuse of “hoax” with the intent to vilify the person who makes you look foolish considerably predates the ATHF freakout, but Baldwin’s main point basically stands. Not every joke, stunt, or misunderstanding is a hoax.

I took hundreds of photographs over the summer, many of which were taken outdoors, which means coping with the difference in brightness between the sky and the foreground. The human perceptual system is able to handle the difference, and so we can discern details in clouds in the sky while still being able to pick out detail in the grass near at hand. Cameras don’t see this way. If the sky is much brighter than the foreground, you have to pick which one will be properly exposed. If you decide to expose for the sky, the foreground will be underexposed and dark. If you expose for the foreground, you will overexpose the sky, rendering it white and almost without detail.

This problem can be solved several ways: by using a filter, by “bracketing” the exposure, by developing the two parts of the image differently, or by using various post-processing tricks. The method I’m using replicates the effect of using a graduated neutral density filter by making two exposures from the camera’s RAW output and blending them together using a layer mask. Done correctly, this technique yields a pretty good simulacrum of what my eyes saw. Done incorrectly, the effect is decidedly weird-looking.

The frustrating thing for me is that the poorly blended photos I post to Flickr actually turn out to be more popular than the ones I’m pleased with.

For example, I was particularly satisfied with how the following photograph turned out:

But a picture I never got quite right has been viewed nearly three times as often:

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Sure, people enjoy the surreal look of HDR photographs. On occasion, even I’ll enjoy an HDR. Generally though, I dislike the plastic-y, fake look they have, and I never aim for the look. Hence my frustration.

I’d probably be happier if all my photos failed to be viewed due to lack of artistic merit. As things stand, when images I don’t like are viewed more than ones I do, I worry that my judgment might be bad.

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One obvious question here is whether it makes sense to measure the success of one’s photographs by the number of times they’ve been viewed. People will want to look at good photographs; logically, this should increase the number of times the photo is viewed. But how many eyes have to pass over your photostream before you know the sample is representative? Even if you get a representative sample of the population viewing flickr, how do you know that the photos viewed most often are good, rather than just popular (assuming there’s a difference)?

There’s also the question of what I’m trying to achieve by posting photos to Flickr. I’m not trying to get a photo to #1 on Explore — I’d be happy if one of my photos diverted someone from what they were looking at. But how do you measure that? How will you ever know?

Given the miniscule number of people viewing my photos, I’m never going to know whether the photos I like best are popular, let alone good. And given my flair for self-promotion[1], I should probably just forget the whole thing.

1) That’s sarcasm, for those of you keeping score at home.

For a time, I wanted to be a web developer. In 1998 I had several interviews for a job as a web developer with a regional telco. I also taught myself Perl and coded a storefront for a college acquaintance’s now-defunct modern furniture business. In 1999, at the behest of a supervisor slightly paranoid of litigation, I put together a repository of year 2000 patches that used seriously annoying JavaScript trickery to force people downloading to agree to a disclaimer. Then I moved to Austin, got a job as a UNIX administrator, and promptly forgot about the whole thing[1].

This last week I was reminded why it was so easy to give up — because programming for the web is a horrific mess. Undeniably, matters are better than they were in 1999, but even still a relatively trivial project can involve juggling five different languages[2], two different event model APIs[3], inconsistent browser implementations of standards, and (if you’re really lucky) deciphering the uncommented source code of a CMS because their API documentation is basically useless.

What’s more, web software with large amounts of browser-side code is becoming more common thanks to the magic of AJAX, thus making it more likely I’ll actually end up doing this for a living whether I want to or not.

At any rate, the consolation provided to frustrated programmers is working code, and I made sure to get that much out of this train wreck. Gentlemen, behold! I give you Flexo Archives Widget for WordPress.

1) Except for a brief flirtation with server-side Java that involved a halfhearted attempt to convince another college acquaintance to open the source of a CMS so I could port it.

2) Counting markup and programming languages: XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript.

3) Namely the W3C DOM level 2 events API and the entirely incompatible bastard Microsoft cooked up for Internet Explorer.

After nearly a week in Portland and two delayed flights yesterday, I’m back in Oklahoma. It was good to get away.

I wasn’t particularly prolific or successful photographically in Oregon. (This is partly due to missing a planned snowshoeing trip, thanks to a combination of oversleeping and lack of communication.) Still, I got a few pictures that I liked well enough, and I posted them as a Flickr set.

Nothing has been color-corrected, cropped, or sharpened yet. I’ll probably be replacing photos for the next couple of weeks as I work on them. Many of the photos will have to be cropped, as my inexperience with wide-angle lenses led to a few images that were slightly off target. But that’s how you learn, I guess.

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this wide-ranging interview with photographer Simon Norfolk at BLDGBLOG covering topics from applications of supercomputing to sartorial tips for war zone photographers. It’s lengthy but well worth the effort. Choice quotes:

“Those supercomputers[1] — big BlueGene, in particular — those are battlegrounds. BlueGene is designing and thinking about a space that is only about 30cm across and exists for about a billionth of a second, and that’s an exploding nuclear warhead. BlueGene is thinking about and modeling that space very intensely, because what happens there is very complicated.

That computer is as much a battlefield as a place in Afghanistan is, full of bullet holes.”

“Part of what I do is I make sure I don’t look very serious — it’s best to look like a harmless dickhead, really, so no one bothers you. You look like a nutter. And, to be honest, I play that up: I’ve got the bald head, and the Hawaiian shirt, and, to look at the image on the back of the camera, you have to put a blanket over your head and go in there with a magnifying glass, and it’s always on a tripod.

So I have two choices: I can either do these images from a speeding car, or I can stand there with a blanket over my head, and look like such a prick that somebody’s going to find me through their rifle scope and think: Oh! What’s that? Let’s go down and have a look… I can’t believe that photographers go into war zones dressed like soldiers! Soldiers are the people they shoot at. If I could wear a clown suit I would do it — if I could wear the big shoes and everything. I would wear the whole fucking thing.

I think there’s a lot to be said for that, actually, because I can either scrape in there on my belly, wearing camo, and sneak around; or I can stand right there in front, wearing a shirt that says, you know, Don’t shoot me. I’m a dick.”

1) See “Rooms of Algebraic Theology” for more about Norfolk’s photos of supercomputers.

Since I didn’t get my new camera until after we moved to Oklahoma, I never got to photograph Oregon with proper equipment. We’re taking a trip back for spring break though, so I decided to rent a sweet wide-angle lens for the trip.

As I understand it, it’s been possible to rent lenses from many camera shops for quite some time, but only in recent years have you been able to rent lenses online. Several sites have filled the gap (including LensRentals.com, Rentglass.com, and ZipLens.com, just to name three), and judging by how often the more popular lenses are out of stock, business is good. I decided weeks ago to rent the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM wide-angle zoom, but I had to try three different sites before I could find it in stock. [1]

The lens arrived from LensRentals.com today, and I have to say that it’s a fine piece of hardware and made me rethink my stance toward EF-S lenses. I used to think that spending hundreds of dollars on short-back lenses might be ill advised, since I might eventually upgrade to a full-frame camera. However, with lenses this nice I could probably use the body for longer, and it might balance out in the end.

Anyway, I’m eager to get to use this thing for something other than taking weird portraits of Mary Beth and the cats. It should be a fun two weeks.

1) I was a bit surprised about this until I noticed the following on the front page at LensRentals.com: “SPRING BREAK CRUNCH: Obviously our stock is very low right now, which is not what we like. A huge number of Spring Break reservations and a surge of orders during the last week have us out of several popular lenses and cameras. We’re buying more as fast as we can, but it will probably be late March before stock is caught up.”

If you have a cat, and you have a camera, you can always kill time. Behold:

Update — See also:

Apparently the engineers at NASA’s Microdevices Laboratory (part of JPL) have confirmed that they did indeed construct the 16-qubit quantum chip used in the proof-of-concept system D-Wave demonstrated back in February:

“D-Wave designed the quantum chip and then contracted with NASA to build it. The request was nothing new for engineers at the Microdevices Laboratory (MDL), a unit of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were accustomed to building superconducting circuits for clients such as Hypres, a company in Elmsford, New York, and for instruments used aboard spacecraft such as the European Space Agency’s Herschel mission.

‘There has been activity in MDL in quantum technology, including quantum computing, for around 10 years,’ Kleinsasser said[1]. ‘Superconducting quantum computing technology requires devices and ultra-low [millikelvin] temperatures that are also required in much of our sensor work. A couple of years ago, D-Wave recognized that JPL is capable of producing the chips it wished to design. There is no [private] industry that can deliver such superconducting devices. So, we worked out a collaboration that produced the chips that D-Wave is currently using.’”

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily confirm that the chip works as advertised, but whatever.

Link via slashdot.

1) Alan Kleinsasser is the principal investigator in MDL’s quantum chip program.

Stories about topics as esoteric as quantum computing are more interesting when given human drama, especially for the lay person. So it wasn’t surprising when, shortly after the purported demonstration of a 16-qubit special-purpose quantum computer by D-Wave Systems, articles began to appear questioning whether the machine actually worked — or was even a quantum computer.

The most thorough article I’ve seen on the D-Wave demonstration, from Jordan Robertson at the AP makes it clear that there were some elements of the demonstration that would naturally lead observers to be suspicious. D-Wave didn’t make the machine available for inspection on the grounds that it was too sensitive to be easily transported. They then showed it solving a variety of problems, including a complex seating arrangement, a Sudoku puzzle, and matching similar molecules. Still, the claims of sensitivity may very well be true given the system’s cooling requirements (the chip needs to be cooled to near absolute zero), and no one would be surprised if you demonstrated an everyday computer’s ability to solve a variety of problems.

The CEO of D-Wave had this to say about the controversy:

“[D-Wave Chief Executive Herb Martin] said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty.”

Ah, physics humor.

In the end, I’m left wondering how much controversy there really is. Does the coverage in the press reflect reality, or is it a product of journalists’ need to fit data into a narrative? Or is it an illusion, an artifact of the selection of media in my RSS reader?[1] All of the above?

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After the D-Wave demonstration, Wired interviewed David Deutsch[2], the physicist who cooked up the idea of a quantum computer. The interview covered a range of subjects, including what applications Deutsch thought general quantum computers might be put to, among other things. This was his opinion as to the controversy over quantum computers:

“I think that when universal quantum computers are finally achieved technologically, and when they are routinely performing computations where there is simply more going on there than a classical computer or even the whole universe acting as a computer could possibly achieve, then people will get very impatient and bored, I think, with attempts to say that those computations don’t really happen, and that the equations of quantum mechanics are merely ways of expressing what the answer would be but not how it was obtained.

The programmers will know perfectly well how it was obtained, and they will have programmed the steps that will have obtained it. The fact that answers are obtained from a quantum computer that couldn’t be obtained any other way will make people take seriously that the process that obtained them was objectively real.”

In other words, in Deutsch’s view the real value of widespread quantum computing will be that it will force people to accept the reality of the quantum mechanical view of things. Practical applications of quantum computing are just a bonus.

1) Since writing the majority of this entry, I have found a Scientific American article over the D-Wave demonstration that doesn’t turn the conflict knob up so high. Also, unlike many of the other articles I’ve seen, it’s not obviously a derivative of the AP story.

2) Here’s a funny quote about Deutsch from a discussion group related to his book: “Well, if David is correct about the [many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics], he will win the Nobel, and also not win it….and he already has, although not in this branch…”