I saw the sign on the back of the van and I understood that I was to "Stay Back." I just didn't understand why. Not that I was tempted to disobey. I wondered, "Did they forget to lock the back door? Will a prisoner throw the door open and scratch my car's bumper?" I suppose the sign means that drivers should give the sheriff lots of room to get the prisoners in and out of the van. Perhaps the warning could be better phrased, though.
At Barack Obama's inauguration, David Bergman kept busy with his robotic camera mount used in tandem with his Canon G10 camera. After the inauguration, he used his Macbook Pro to stitch together the resulting 220 images into one gigantic 2gb tiff file. The resulting 1,474 megapixel image is dramatic and fun to explore. Equally impressive is that the Gigapan camera mount and the G10 camera he used are not expensive--they can both be purchased for less than $1,000 (less than $500 each).
Change Congress? Didn’t we just change control of Congress? Well, we did change the party that controls Congress, but we haven’t yet changed the money that controls the politicians who control Congress. Barack Obama will have an uphill claim, guaranteed, because politicians are not going to judge his proposals based on their merits. There is always the money, which feeds their cravings for reelection. What if all federal politicians learned that potential donors took this pledge: “I'm pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.” This link will take you to a speech by Lawrence Lessig, who explains the urgent need to “Change Congress.” As long as members of Congress keep themselves in a position where they can be influenced by large contributions of money, we shouldn’t trust them.
How can you download a youtube video and then play that flv file on your desktop? I've been wondering how to do this, because I sometimes find compelling videos where I wonder whether they will be available in the future. Here's one answer. It's a site by "applian technologies" (not affiliated with youtube) that advises you to insert "pwn" after "www." and before "youtube . . . " It's all free and it does give you an option to NOT download applian's propriety browser toolbar. The site also offers a stand-alone .flv player for youtube videos that you download. I tried the downloader and the player and they both worked perfectly. These might come in handy someday soon.
The Onion writes about the Machiavellian use of music to achieve rapid bonding.