Epson 11880

Need a bigger printer to handle the pictures from your new Hasselblad? This one comes recommended, but is probably overkill if your camera can fit in your pocket.

More detailed article. This article says that there are also less gargantuan printers coming with these new technologies, including anti-clogging measures, something which has been needed in the otherwise excellent Epson printers.

Angel

This is one of those photos which prove that photography can be a real creative outlet.
Photo by Frank Somma.

How an airplane flies

Pascal just posted this in comments to a post which is not even on the main page anymore! I think the guy is even more compulsive than I am, but you may as well profit.
It's about how an airplane wing forms the pressure difference which gives it lift.
[More here.]

"How this pressure differential is formed is quite frankly a very complex topic"

Not really, honestly. It's related to the physics of fluids flow, and even though the equations (Bernouilli theorem) are a little complicated (high school level), the principle is very simple: "the faster a fluid moves in a circuit, the lower the pressure". When a given circuit has varying sections, in the narrowest ones the linear speed of the fluid increases, and hence its pressure drops. Just take my word for it and the rest becomes very simple.

Air is the fluid that is in relative motion to the plane. Actually it is the plane that's moving, but it makes no difference in the local interactions. The wing profile, in birds as well as airplanes, is more convex on the top side, meaning that the air sliding OVER it has a longer way to travel from the front of the wing to the back in the same amount of time, compared to the air passing UNDER the wing, on the flatter side. A curve between two points is longer than a straight line.
As a result, the air right above the wing travels faster, its pressure decreases relatively to that under the wing, and that difference in pressure is the force which pushes the plane upward and durably lifts it in the air.
The other specificities of the typical wing profile are just for minimizing parasitic turbulences, which would disrupt the regularity of that pressure ratio.

When a plane drops inside a turbulence zone, it's because sudden winds from behind decrease the relative speed of the air flow against the wings. It's just as if the air flow was trying to catch up with the plane. This decreases the pressure differencial, and the airplane drops. If it is too close to the ground, or doesn't reach a zone where this reverse wind ends, sometimes the plane may crash, and you hear about it in the TV news. Or, more often, "airports were closed for safety reasons due to strong winds". Strong enough to compromise the sustentation of the heavier-than-air craft.

One main problem with this pressure difference, is the wing tip. The one place where the two areas of different pressure come in free contact, causing the air to escape laterally toward the top side. Because the wing tip is moving, that imbalance of the system is maintained, and the turbulences are constantly left behind the plane. Their vortex shape is a universal physical curve in nature, you'll find it in the shape of galaxies and solar flares as well as in the microscopic motions of molecules. This tells us that the Universe is fractal in shape.

Every time you notice a wing tip with an odd shape, it's probably a system designed to decrease this loss in sustentation, which can significantly increase fuel consumption. A small, double vertical wing, for instance, becomes an obstacle to top and bottom air simply meeting. In many military jet planes, the delta-shaped wings reduce the actual tip to little more than a point. Eagles, vultures and other ace glider birds have those separated feathers at the end of their wings, resembling fingers: these result in the tip becoming like a group of much smaller wings, aerodynamically speaking, and it not only divides the "parasitic vortex" phenomenon, it also greatly decreases its global scale. Making the glider bird that much more efficient at saving energy in flight. It helps owls be near-totally silent in their night hunts, not even a faint "woosh" to warn the rodents.

Bert replied:

When I wrote that this was a very complex topic, I really meant it!

Although Pascal's explanation is seldom true (not enough lift is created in that manner for most aircraft to fly), I do give him a "A" for effort. :-)

Entire books have been written on this topic, and I can't even remember enough of the mathematics of fluid dynamics to read those. One (and maybe the most important) reason for all this complexity being that not all wings operate on the same principles. Never compare a fighter wing to an airliner wing, and much less to a glider wing. They are all different in form, function and operation.

Beware of too much knowledge. :)

Paper catalogs fighting for life

Paper catalogs fighting for life.

Tilting screen

I'm interested in the new Sony cameras with improved Live View and a tiltable screen.

I'm a fan of those features because to limit your camera viewpoint to eye hight is just silly, and a tiltable screen makes other options far easier.

For example, I could not have taken these humorous pictures of street signs here in town (it's not temporary or a mistake, every single sign is supposed to be there, while the bridge is closed) without the tiltable screen on my old Nikon 2400 (which they sadly have not updated), because to get the perspective I had to hold the camera far above my head.



By the way, which one do you think is best?

Sigma lens

A 16-kilo telezoom lens. Don't try to use it hand-held.

Abba hits collections

Abba is my favorite band after Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Neo Punk Death Metal, and Kill The Baby. So I was looking for a couple of my old favorites from my early records from the seventies. But I found most of the early Abba is not available on iTunes. Except in hits collections. Fortunately there were a bounty of those:

ABBA: Greatest Hits
ABBA: the Definite Collection
ABBA: Gold
ABBA: Number Ones
ABBA: Thank you for the music (box set)
ABBA: Classic Abba
ABBA: 18 hits

I'm not kidding. D'ya think somebody is trying to milk it? :-)

... Anyway, I was sort of kidding about the "favorite band" part, they were slightly too poppy for me, though I liked when I was a kid and I still respect them. But you have to admit: after Lennon/McCartney, Andersson/Ulvaeus was one of the greatest hit-machine teams in pop/rock ever. My gawd, there's barely one song in their numerous albums which does not just slide right in under your skin and stick to your brain, it's amazing. Talk about making it look easy. Think about the number of hard working bands and composers all over the world who would kill to write just a single hit as big as any one of Abba's thirty most popular songs, but it can't seem to happen. Talent is a mystery.

It's funny, I find that the songs I still like the most were those I really love when I was probably not even a teen yet. Like Honey Honey, So Long, and Ring, Ring. I am guessing it is not so much that they are better, but just that my youthful joy is still triggered when they are played now, over thirty years later. It's interesting that you just can't shake that early evaluation of something, and most of the time the bias is not even visible to you.

Tony Blair investigated for war crimes

"We have killed at least 30,000 and possibly 300,000 children. [...] not one of these people have harmed or attacked Britain."

Video of press conference announcing a Scotland Yard investigation of Tony Blair breaking international war laws.

Personally I find it pretty interesting that you need to have a law telling people that invading other countries and killing innocent people is a bad idea.

Quality digital cameras

The long-expected High-Quality-Compact-digicam Sigma DP1 is finally coming, in spring.

UPDATE: Thanks for Bert for pointing to these sample pictures. I have to admit, they do look really excellent.

It will be interesting to see how it fares. If it really makes significantly better pictures than pocket cameras, and if so, are the compromises worth it? For instance, it has a fixed-focal length lens, and a modest largest aperture of 4.0. Compare with a classic high-quality compact (film) camera, the Konica Hexar, which had the very strong feature of a lens as sharp as any Leica lens, and the high speed of 2.0. All that in a compact camera with autofocus and built-in winder, which cost less than the Leica lens cost alone.

Also, I am made less than optimistic by previous attempts in the genre, to wit the Leica M8 and the Ricoh GR Digital. The former costs $5,000, but in many respects compares poorly to entry level DSLR cameras costing $500. The latter I bought for twice what I paid for the Fujifilm F10, but it did not have a better image quality, and unlike the Fuji it does not even have a zoom lens. It's all quite weird.

Color collections

Sony buzzwords

Nicely tongue-in-cheek article covering a Sony camera press conference.

"09:30: There's a lady on stage now who appears to be talking about cameras but there are so many buzzwords ('leveraging user experience') that I'm not sure."

Trees/sky