State of the art pop in the seventies

[Thanks to Signalroom]

"Oh, you're absolutely fine, your lips are taste of wine, I'd like to think you're mine." 
That must be the finest lyrics ever, after Eddie Grant's "Oh, the feeling is bad, the feeling is bad."






I loooove the keyboardist! How manly can you get?! "Real men have hips on ball bearings."

Duran Duran - Lay, Lady, Lay

Pogue on sensor size (updated)

Update:
David also has a review of the Sony A7. I think it's cool that he is not afraid to talk about pro equipment on his new Yahoo Tech site. (I wish him luck with it. I've been reading him since 1995, and he is tops in popularizing tech.)
It seems reviewers agree that:
The new Sony's are a great step forward in compactness. And the lenses and image quality is amazing, as good as the big, heavy cameras. But: autofocus is slow, and the shutter is very noisy, for some reason.
But that'll get fixed. The important thing is that somebody is actually doing something to take the mirrorless revolution to full frame, and I hope this will put pressure on the pro field. For sports photographers, it will still be a CaNikon world for a while, but for many others, landscape photographers for example, minimal size and weight for maximum image quality is very important, so I have no doubt this will at least grab some market share.

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David Pogue has a big article on something which (and that's a good thing) has been a hobby-horse of his for a while: getting big sensors into small cameras.
The challenge is not physics, Sony says, but cost and difficulty. Nobody puts big sensors into small cameras because the price would be too high for consumers and because it would involve redesigning everything: body, lenses, processor and so on.
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(And the 5D series was even known as the "relatively compact" full-frame cameras! 
This is another big blow for what they can achieve with going mirrorless. 

Of course, nothing is perfect. For example, there's currently no way that Olympus's exemplary 5-axis stabilization system could be built into the Sony A7 body. It requires much more space around the sensor.
Oh, and another thing is that there are hardly any lenses yet for the durn thing. And a good lens system is not trivial, it takes years and years, if not decades to build up.
(That's one of the reasons I like Micro Four Thirds so much: over the past several years, Olympus and Panasonic have built up a delicious stable of excellent lenses, covering basically anything you may want.)

Chivalry ain't dead

FedUp

I need to pay a tiny import tax from a nice portable keyboard I bought from the US.

I look over their various payment options. After I get it sorted, one thing is clear: I can't pay them online! And after I look around a bit on their site, this is confirmed, they even say it directly: "Please note: We currently cannot process payments online, so please choose from one of the options above."

As the kids say: WTF? I had online, automated payments in my one-man business in 1998! And apparently FedEx either can't figure this out, or they choose to let thousands of their customer have to wait til business hours and sit in a phone cue, or other less attractive options. Sigh.

I like UPS better. They just ask for cash when they come with the parcel. Bleep-bup-done.

Macroscope effect

Apart from darkening 2/3 of the picture to make it look more like it does to the eye, I did not make any special effects for this photo. The orange ring is how the Macroscope front lens looks just sitting on a table. Neato. (The colors you sometimes see in lenses are due to the anti-reflex coating letting some colors through more than others.)

Naked story-telling evenings prove a hit

[Thanks to Lou]

Naked story-telling evenings prove a hit in the UK - that's one way to spice up Book Club!, article.

Great idea.

Except their ban on ereader devices. What difference would it make to the story whether it's read from paper or a Kindle? Hmm, maybe they need an open book to hide their boobs; I hope not.     :-)

Ya think??

I just heard this statement in a video about Chinese web addicts:

"Our studies show that people who spend more than six hours a day, outside of work or study, on the web have bigger risk of becoming addicts." 

Ya think?! That's like saying that people who regularly play ball on the highway have a bigger risk of being hit by a car, or that people who smoke more than two joints daily have a higher risk of becoming addicts.
Just for one thing, why would you spend six hours of your personal time on anything if it did not give you some emotional balm, the first thing needed for something to become an addiction.

Yes Sir, I can boogie

I find this ad wonderfully funny. And in such an understated way. There's nothing overtly wild or funny about either the actions or the actor, yet in a certain quiet way it's just dang funny.
Oh: just his seventies-beard. And the very slight smile and his eyes hint of great amusement. Big without being noisy, my favorite style.





(Ach, I hope this is not one of those that are limited to certain countries.)

What is Beauty?

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you foolishly ignore beauty, you'll soon find ourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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I find these great. Especially the last half of the Emerson one, I think those are about as profound as any human has uttered. 

AMC movie theater calls “federal agents” to arrest a Google Glass user

AMC movie theater calls “federal agents” to arrest a Google Glass user, article.

From TidBITS's comments:
An Ohio network engineer wore his Google Glass (turned off) in a movie because he has prescription lenses in them. An hour into the movie, he was pulled from his seat by the FBI at the behest of the “Movie Association” (the MPAA, in all likelihood) and questioned for over three hours. Once the agents downloaded and viewed the contents of the Glass (as he had been asking them to do), they agreed he had done nothing wrong, after which the MPAA guy gave him a pat on the head and four free movie passes.
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From the article (which is has the server buckling under the traffic):
What followed was over an hour of the “feds” telling me I am not under arrest, and that this is a “voluntary interview”, but if I choose not to cooperate bad things may happen to me (is it legal for authorities to threaten people like that?). I kept telling them that Glass has a USB port and not only did I allow them, I actually insist they connect to it and see that there was nothing but personal photos with my wife and my dog on it. I also insisted they look at my phone too and clear things out, but they wanted to talk first. They wanted to know who I am, where I live, where I work, how much I’m making, how many computers I have at home, why am I recording the movie, who am I going to give the recording to, why don’t I just give up the guy up the chain, ’cause they are not interested in me. Over and over and over again.
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Paintings, animated

Here is a video with classical paintings, subtly animated. Note, though it is "only" paintings, there is quite liberal amounts of violence and especially nudity. You have been warned.
(This by the way, if anybody should still believe otherwise, proves that nudity and violence was not invented by television! Humans have always enjoyed a good spoonful of both in their cultural diet.)