you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low
I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Unless, of course, my math is wrong, which is possible - but escape velocity with respect to lunar gravity from the surface of the moon is ~2.5km/s, so the number passes the smell test.
Since when is the Kuiper Belt "outside" our solar system? I was under the (erroneous?) impression that the solar system is defined by the sun, such that anything that orbits the sun (or that orbits a body orbiting the sun) is part of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt certainly qualifies by that criterion, doesn't it?
Did the definition change recently? Have I been wrong about the definition the whole time?
You're making an assumption: that the rules which obtain in the observed universe also obtain in the absence of that universe. If we make a different - equally valid - assumption that physical law is a feature of the universe, then there's no reason to think that causality itself, much less conservation of energy, apply "before" the universe existed. In that case, there's no reason to think that it's any less likely for stuff to spontaneously appear than it is for it to not.
Basically, you can't think of the pre-universe (whatever that means) as even a void, since space itself doesn't (necessarily) exist without the universe there to define it. We need a different word for true nothingness: a state of existence such that there are no dimensions (including time), so there is no space, and there is no necessary correlation to the physical laws we observe from within the universe.
This, of course, is all very, very metaphysical - since we're intentionally talking about a place/time/state/what-have-you such that all the knowledge we have about things is no longer applicable, we are unable to make any provable claims about it. Such as, for example, that something sprang from nothing. In the rules that obtain absent a universe, perhaps something springs from nothing all the time.
Or, perhaps, there really was an infinite void in the spatial sense, filled with quantum foam. If that's the case, then perhaps the entire universe sprang into being when there was a local event of virtual particles suddenly outnumbering virtual antiparticles - a probability perhaps thousands of orders of mangitude worse than that of all the snowflakes in a blizzard being identical in structure, but postulating an infinite space demands that everything with a non-zero percent chance of happening happen an infinite number of times.
Of course, that would lead one to conclude that there are an infinite number of other universes out there, separated (on average) by gulfs of void the magnitude of which is proportional to the probability of the event happening in the first place...and we're about to run into Olber's paradox if we take this far enough.
But basically, your choices are very simple:
There was nothing, then there suddenly was something. There has never been nothing, something has existed for an infinite stretch of time.
Really, I don't find the former any more (or less) hard to accept than the latter. Either is an unsatisfactory answer: on the one hand, you've got spontaneous creation. On the other, you've got "it just is." Spontaneous creation doesn't sit well with those of us who live in the causal, conservative, time-directed universe. "It just is" denies that it's worth thinking about, which doesn't sit well with those of us who like to think.
It's easy to blame fast food, because it's obviously not particularly healthy, and it's a reasonable target for change. But it's not the main culprit.
The main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
Mitigating this effect are cultural standards of sexual attractiveness which select against obesity, long-term health effects of obesity (many of which kick in primarily after one's genes are passed on - adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, stroke), and consciousness of those health effects.
While any one person can certainly decide to eat healthier, exercise more, and maintain a lower weight, the fact remains that we are hardwired to pack away calories for reasons which were perfectly valid for almost all our evolutionary history. Looking at society as a whole, this can't help but lead to an obesity problem when food is abundant.
The only things that will take care of this long term are selective pressure for genes that grant a lower proclivity to overeating or (more likely) an end to the period of food abundance.
It is not your theories which make you a troll, it's your lack of substantiation for same. Provide some research and evidence past simple assertions, and I'll pay attention. Until then, you're just another crackpot who's probably trying to get me to invest in his perpetual motion machine.
That would be a Microsoft killer...if it wasn't Microsoft selling it.
It's Sharepoint you're thinking of. At least in '07, you have the option to use Sharepoint (aka MOSS, these days) as document management...which is pretty neat in some respects. Not so much in others, since it turns all your documents into entries in the SQL Server Sharepoint database.
When you're talking about a 2TB filesystem (like ours), even if you assume every file as on average one redundant copy that can be discarded, you're talking about a 1 TB datastore. When your current SQL Server instances taken together contain only ~100 GB of data (like mine), you may cause a couple headaches for your DBA (like me).
And that's a problem that's independent of Sharepoint and SQL Server. Most of the places I've worked had filesystems that oustripped the size of their managed data stores by orders of magnitude. It's a big jump to go from 2 TB of filesystem storage on a SAN to 2 TB of database storage, and you're going to need something very similar to database storage to make an enterprise-wide all-information CMS functional.
The steady state universe, by definition, has been around forever. This means that you can't make the "it hasn't happened yet" argument against gravitational collapse; there's clearly been enough time in forever for it to happen if it were going to. If you postulate a steady state universe that hasn't been around forever, you need to explain how it sprang into being, fully formed, exhibiting the expansionistic characteristics we see, and your explanation has to better address our current observations than big bang theory does.
The big bang, however, avoids the problem of "if it could have happened, it would have" by postulating a starting point. It is easier to imagine gravity being overcome by a sufficiently large explosion (since we see this in everyday life) for a brief period of time than it is to imagine that gravity just sort of stops working at large distances (which is in contravention to much observed data).
Moreover, the most obvious approach to explain the universe is to look at the fact that all visible galaxies are moving away from each other, assume that there are no unknown forces acting upon them, and plot their paths backwards through time. Doing this, one finds that they all arrive at the same place at the same time.
Is it possible that there are other forces that caused all the galaxies to reverse or change direction sometime a few billion years ago? Of course it is, but it's not the simplest explanation. It's possible that the universe sprang into existence exactly the way we see it today exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, and it just happens to exhibit all the characteristics of a universe that fourteen billion years old, but it's not the simplest explanation.
Now: the universe does appear to be expanding at an accelerating rate, which implies that there is, in fact, a force we can't explain (yet?), hence dark energy. Is this a remnant of the force that "caused" (insofar as one can have cause before time exists...insofar as "before time exists" means anything) the big bang, weakened as it's spread over the entire universe? Is it a separate phenomenon that only comes into play at extremely long distances? Is it a feature of expanding spacetime, a result of the quantum foam, or something else entirely?
I certainly don't know.
Which is, as you point out, a perfectly reasonable answer. The problem is that, while it's true to say no one knows how the universe began, that doesn't mean we can't evaluate different propositions for more or less reasonability and thereby determine which have more or less likelihood of approaching the truth. The big bang is a more reasonable model than "it just is, and we don't know why." It provides more explanatory and predictive power (it predicted the CMBR long before it was detected, for example) than "it just is, and we don't know why."
"It just is" is bad science, since it concedes that not only is it unknown, but it is unknowable, which is anathema to science. Is it possible that it's correct, that the origins of the universe are both unknown and unknowable? Yes, it is, but mankind has achieved so much through scientific endeavor that it seems more prudent to behave as though it's not and leave debating it up to the metaphysicians.
All that said, I have no problem accepting that the big bang does not accurately describe the beginning of the universe. Just like I have no problem accepting that evolution does not lead to speciation. But in both cases, I'll run with those theories until someone else provides a theory that does a better job of explaining what we see, either because it has the same explanatory and predictive power but is simpler, or because it is no simpler but provides more explanatory and predictive power.
Which, oddly enough, is how science in general proceeds.
Unfortunately, the steady state universe that just is for no discernible reason theory, though simpler than the big bang, does not provide the same explanatory or predictive power. Since the big bang best explains the universe we see (among theories we've got that I've been exposed to), I'll stick with it.
I guess I'm not sure what we're talking about when we say "space science fiction," then. I was thinking in terms of SF which involved space travel/exploration as an integral part of the setting and story (as opposed, say, to Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, where space travel is very much involved, but not central to the novels).
Since I haven't read Bova or Resnick (Bova's on my to-do list, and thanks for bringing Resnick to my attention; I'll check him out), could you give me a working definition of space science fiction?
David Feintuch (the Hope series), David Weber (Honor Harrington), Alastair Reynolds (the Revelation Space universe), Stephen R. Donaldson (the Gap series), Robert L. Forward (various), Vernor Vinge, Walter Jon Williams (Dread Empire's Fall trilogy)
Are all (relatively) recent authors you should check out if you haven't. It's not a scratch on the golden age of SF, of course, but there are still decent space SF books being written. I've also heard good things about Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton, but haven't read them yet, so I can't endorse them.
Of course, it's possible you're already familiar with all of those, but you may be in for a treat if you haven't seen a couple of them.
(And if you've got other recommendations to make that I missed, feel free to mention them; I'm always looking for good SF)
I have the sneaking suspicion that the number of professionals - by which I mean people making their primary or only income on their photographic work - using cameras in the less than $5,000 range outnumber professionals using cameras that cost anything like $15,000 by a hefty margin. I'd guess at 10:1 or higher.
Medium format digital backs just aren't all that common compared to the number of people who need the portability of 35mm bodies.
Now, you may be factoring the lenses into that $15,000, but that's not quite fair. Glass is a lifetime (or at least, a decades-long) investment, so dropping tens of thousands of dollars on it makes perfect sense. The camera gets replaced pretty frequently, especially in the new digital era. That is, there's a huge difference between the amount of cash flow one has to have to justify a $15,000 camera that needs to be replaced in a couple years and the cash flow needed to justify $15,000 in buy-once lenses.
Point taken. I haven't used CS3; I'm still working with CS2. I'm glad you pointed this out, too, since it will factor into my decisions regarding buying Lightroom and CS3.
I almost bought the 30D when I finally pulled the trigger on a DSLR, but I ended up saving a few hundred and getting the XTi (400D). The control layout isn't quite as good, it doesn't have the top LCD display, and its max ISO is 1600 rather than 3200. It's got an extra two megapixels, but truth be told, the difference between 10 MP and 8 MP isn't all that significant. Aside from those, though, they're basically the same camera.
The real deciding factor was cost; ~$900 vs ~$1200. I figured I'd get the cheaper/lighter body now, and plan on picking up a 1D (or similarly placed model) in a couple years. It's worked out great for me so far, and the noise levels at = ISO 400 are virtually nonexistent to my eye at prints up to 8"x10". Even ISO 800 is workable with some post processing noise reduction.
But I've still got and use my old SLRs for B&W work. The problem is I wanted to buy into the Canon line of digital bodies and lenses, but my film SLRs are Minoltas - so I'll never have the lens collection for the Minoltas that I do/will for the Canons. But since my B&W shooting is always more thoughtfully composed, I can get by with a few prime lenses for the Minoltas.
It was a hell of a day, though, when I finally moved to digital for color photography. On the whole, I'm glad I did, but I can't say I don't miss the old days some.
Lightroom does not perform the same functions as Photoshop. Some Photoshop functionality exists in Lightroom, but if you want to do per-picture editing, you need Photoshop. Lightroom is a workflow app, which is focused on handling large numbers of photographs.
Look at it this way: if you've got a CF card full of a 100 shots taken at one event, Lightroom is where you can take care of the fact that your camera's fluorescent setting left you with a white balance that isn't what you want. You fix all the shots at once. It's also where you catalog, tag, organize, and select the photos you want to take to final processing.
On the other hand, if one of those selected pictures from the event has a tree growing out of someone's head, you fix it in Photoshop.
They're two different functions, so they're two different software packages.
Your last point really sums it up. In the 35mm space, I can't see any objective* reason to use chemical darkroom techniques for color printing - or, frankly, for developing. Having done both, I've switched entirely to digital for all my color photography (I am, at best, a 'prosumer'; I haven't made the jump into medium- or large-format photography, where digital still can't keep up). The advantages of digital - varying film speeds from shot to shot; no worries over screwing up the film in the tank; the essentially infinite and perfect reproducibility of digital "negatives"; the flexibility and undo-ability of film processing analogs; lack of bulk to carry (I do a lot of hiking); even the cost of film, insofar as it means I'm far more willing to bracket exposures, shoot in bursts, etc. - are so significant that I can't deny them.
But that's only true for color photography. B&W film printed on B&W paper just can't be touched by any digital B&W process I've seen (much less been able to replicate). I'm not even certain where the difference is (though my guess is that it's a contrast issue having to do with the color masks sitting over the sensor in the camera), but it's an obvious one when looking at final prints. Desaturating a color shot just isn't as good as taking an honest-to-bob silver halide shot, even if you do the desaturation in Photoshop after engaging in a bunch of color tweaks.
Y'all can have my B&W darkroom when you pry it from cold, dead, stop-bath-smelling hands.
*There are, of course, subjective reasons. For example, noise is not equivalent to film grain: for my money, traditional graininess detracts less from the image than does noise, particularly chroma noise. But that's a matter of taste.
Windows vs. OSX isn't anywhere near the issue your monitor is, and neither is your printer selection. I'm only aware of one monitor series (Eizo's ColorEdge) that can present the full gamut of Adobe RGB. There may be more I don't know about, but the majority of monitors can't even cover all of CMYK, much less Adobe RGB. And if your monitor can't cover Adobe RGB, then you're not going to get end-to-end consistency from camera to printer unless you limit your work to sRGB.
Moreover, you can select software tools for Windows (Photoshop being the obvious example) that will utilize your color calibrated monitor correctly - while you can't be as sure in the Windows world that color management will work, you can be sure once you've selected the correct tools. And once you've designed your workflow around the tools, it doesn't matter if other tools aren't reliable. In my mind, it's roughly analogous to your lenses. You have to do the work up front to buy into a lens line that will do what you want, but once you're invested and working with the glass, the state of the lens marketplace means almost nothing to you.
None of this, of course, invalidates your initial point, that not being available for PCs isn't a major hindrance for professional photography software, just that you certainly can design a professional workflow around Windows software.
Pretty much, yes. The idea of Maxwell's Demon was to violate the second law of thermodynamics - once you include an external power source, its entropy increase has to be included in the system, and now you've just got a heat pump. Doing it on the nanoscale is Really Neat(tm), but it's not Maxwell's Demon.
But then, TFA doesn't have Leigh saying that it is Maxwell's Demon, just that he credits Maxwell with furthering science.
Because the demon isn't increasing the energy of the system, it's simply sorting it. The total heat of the system doesn't change, it just goes from equilibrium to a gradient. The demon isn't conceptually picking out molecules and throwing them, it's deciding which molecules to let pass based on velocity. The energy is all in the molecules already.
Maxwell's Demon was a thought experiment about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics, not a thought experiment about sorting molecules. The idea was that the entropy of the system could be decreased by the demon selectively moving fast molecules from one side of the box to the other, thereby concentrating heat.
This tech is certainly a mechanism for such sorting, but it's powered by external light, so the entropy of the system has not decreased and the second law isn't violated. So, while it's mechanically similar to Maxwell's Demon, it's dissimilar in concept (or should I say, "in spirit" - we're talking about demons, after all).
Of course, TFA doesn't have Leigh claiming that they've come up with Maxwell's Demon, just that he "credits Maxwell for establishing the fundamentals for understanding how light, heat and molecules behave."
None of this is to say that this isn't an impressive feat, and of obvious value in terms of furthering the science/technology of nanomachines, but calling it Maxwell's Demon is missing the whole point of the original thought experiment.
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Slashdot Mirror
In point of fact, I agree with you - but I just couldn't resist the temptation to do a bit of orbital math. And, of course, I'm a pedantic jackass.
you could probably throw a hammer and put it into orbit, because the speed of a dropped hammer is actually pretty low
I kind of doubt it. For a circular orbit at a distance of 1km above the lunar surface, the velocity of the hammer would have to be ~1500m/s. That's more than 3,000 mph/5,400 kph. That'd be a hell of a toss.
Unless, of course, my math is wrong, which is possible - but escape velocity with respect to lunar gravity from the surface of the moon is ~2.5km/s, so the number passes the smell test.
Since when is the Kuiper Belt "outside" our solar system? I was under the (erroneous?) impression that the solar system is defined by the sun, such that anything that orbits the sun (or that orbits a body orbiting the sun) is part of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt certainly qualifies by that criterion, doesn't it?
Did the definition change recently? Have I been wrong about the definition the whole time?
You're making an assumption: that the rules which obtain in the observed universe also obtain in the absence of that universe. If we make a different - equally valid - assumption that physical law is a feature of the universe, then there's no reason to think that causality itself, much less conservation of energy, apply "before" the universe existed. In that case, there's no reason to think that it's any less likely for stuff to spontaneously appear than it is for it to not.
Basically, you can't think of the pre-universe (whatever that means) as even a void, since space itself doesn't (necessarily) exist without the universe there to define it. We need a different word for true nothingness: a state of existence such that there are no dimensions (including time), so there is no space, and there is no necessary correlation to the physical laws we observe from within the universe.
This, of course, is all very, very metaphysical - since we're intentionally talking about a place/time/state/what-have-you such that all the knowledge we have about things is no longer applicable, we are unable to make any provable claims about it. Such as, for example, that something sprang from nothing. In the rules that obtain absent a universe, perhaps something springs from nothing all the time.
Or, perhaps, there really was an infinite void in the spatial sense, filled with quantum foam. If that's the case, then perhaps the entire universe sprang into being when there was a local event of virtual particles suddenly outnumbering virtual antiparticles - a probability perhaps thousands of orders of mangitude worse than that of all the snowflakes in a blizzard being identical in structure, but postulating an infinite space demands that everything with a non-zero percent chance of happening happen an infinite number of times.
Of course, that would lead one to conclude that there are an infinite number of other universes out there, separated (on average) by gulfs of void the magnitude of which is proportional to the probability of the event happening in the first place...and we're about to run into Olber's paradox if we take this far enough.
But basically, your choices are very simple:
There was nothing, then there suddenly was something.
There has never been nothing, something has existed for an infinite stretch of time.
Really, I don't find the former any more (or less) hard to accept than the latter. Either is an unsatisfactory answer: on the one hand, you've got spontaneous creation. On the other, you've got "it just is." Spontaneous creation doesn't sit well with those of us who live in the causal, conservative, time-directed universe. "It just is" denies that it's worth thinking about, which doesn't sit well with those of us who like to think.
*shrug*
Life's a bitch, you know?
It's easy to blame fast food, because it's obviously not particularly healthy, and it's a reasonable target for change. But it's not the main culprit.
The main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
Mitigating this effect are cultural standards of sexual attractiveness which select against obesity, long-term health effects of obesity (many of which kick in primarily after one's genes are passed on - adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, stroke), and consciousness of those health effects.
While any one person can certainly decide to eat healthier, exercise more, and maintain a lower weight, the fact remains that we are hardwired to pack away calories for reasons which were perfectly valid for almost all our evolutionary history. Looking at society as a whole, this can't help but lead to an obesity problem when food is abundant.
The only things that will take care of this long term are selective pressure for genes that grant a lower proclivity to overeating or (more likely) an end to the period of food abundance.
It is not your theories which make you a troll, it's your lack of substantiation for same. Provide some research and evidence past simple assertions, and I'll pay attention. Until then, you're just another crackpot who's probably trying to get me to invest in his perpetual motion machine.
The beautiful...?
Your post would be more comprehensible if there was a word between "beautiful" and the excalamtion point.
That would be a Microsoft killer...if it wasn't Microsoft selling it.
It's Sharepoint you're thinking of. At least in '07, you have the option to use Sharepoint (aka MOSS, these days) as document management...which is pretty neat in some respects. Not so much in others, since it turns all your documents into entries in the SQL Server Sharepoint database.
When you're talking about a 2TB filesystem (like ours), even if you assume every file as on average one redundant copy that can be discarded, you're talking about a 1 TB datastore. When your current SQL Server instances taken together contain only ~100 GB of data (like mine), you may cause a couple headaches for your DBA (like me).
And that's a problem that's independent of Sharepoint and SQL Server. Most of the places I've worked had filesystems that oustripped the size of their managed data stores by orders of magnitude. It's a big jump to go from 2 TB of filesystem storage on a SAN to 2 TB of database storage, and you're going to need something very similar to database storage to make an enterprise-wide all-information CMS functional.
I beg to differ.
The steady state universe, by definition, has been around forever. This means that you can't make the "it hasn't happened yet" argument against gravitational collapse; there's clearly been enough time in forever for it to happen if it were going to. If you postulate a steady state universe that hasn't been around forever, you need to explain how it sprang into being, fully formed, exhibiting the expansionistic characteristics we see, and your explanation has to better address our current observations than big bang theory does.
The big bang, however, avoids the problem of "if it could have happened, it would have" by postulating a starting point. It is easier to imagine gravity being overcome by a sufficiently large explosion (since we see this in everyday life) for a brief period of time than it is to imagine that gravity just sort of stops working at large distances (which is in contravention to much observed data).
Moreover, the most obvious approach to explain the universe is to look at the fact that all visible galaxies are moving away from each other, assume that there are no unknown forces acting upon them, and plot their paths backwards through time. Doing this, one finds that they all arrive at the same place at the same time.
Is it possible that there are other forces that caused all the galaxies to reverse or change direction sometime a few billion years ago? Of course it is, but it's not the simplest explanation. It's possible that the universe sprang into existence exactly the way we see it today exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, and it just happens to exhibit all the characteristics of a universe that fourteen billion years old, but it's not the simplest explanation.
Now: the universe does appear to be expanding at an accelerating rate, which implies that there is, in fact, a force we can't explain (yet?), hence dark energy. Is this a remnant of the force that "caused" (insofar as one can have cause before time exists...insofar as "before time exists" means anything) the big bang, weakened as it's spread over the entire universe? Is it a separate phenomenon that only comes into play at extremely long distances? Is it a feature of expanding spacetime, a result of the quantum foam, or something else entirely?
I certainly don't know.
Which is, as you point out, a perfectly reasonable answer. The problem is that, while it's true to say no one knows how the universe began, that doesn't mean we can't evaluate different propositions for more or less reasonability and thereby determine which have more or less likelihood of approaching the truth. The big bang is a more reasonable model than "it just is, and we don't know why." It provides more explanatory and predictive power (it predicted the CMBR long before it was detected, for example) than "it just is, and we don't know why."
"It just is" is bad science, since it concedes that not only is it unknown, but it is unknowable, which is anathema to science. Is it possible that it's correct, that the origins of the universe are both unknown and unknowable? Yes, it is, but mankind has achieved so much through scientific endeavor that it seems more prudent to behave as though it's not and leave debating it up to the metaphysicians.
All that said, I have no problem accepting that the big bang does not accurately describe the beginning of the universe. Just like I have no problem accepting that evolution does not lead to speciation. But in both cases, I'll run with those theories until someone else provides a theory that does a better job of explaining what we see, either because it has the same explanatory and predictive power but is simpler, or because it is no simpler but provides more explanatory and predictive power.
Which, oddly enough, is how science in general proceeds.
Unfortunately, the steady state universe that just is for no discernible reason theory, though simpler than the big bang, does not provide the same explanatory or predictive power. Since the big bang best explains the universe we see (among theories we've got that I've been exposed to), I'll stick with it.
I guess I'm not sure what we're talking about when we say "space science fiction," then. I was thinking in terms of SF which involved space travel/exploration as an integral part of the setting and story (as opposed, say, to Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, where space travel is very much involved, but not central to the novels).
Since I haven't read Bova or Resnick (Bova's on my to-do list, and thanks for bringing Resnick to my attention; I'll check him out), could you give me a working definition of space science fiction?
In no particular order:
David Feintuch (the Hope series),
David Weber (Honor Harrington),
Alastair Reynolds (the Revelation Space universe),
Stephen R. Donaldson (the Gap series),
Robert L. Forward (various),
Vernor Vinge,
Walter Jon Williams (Dread Empire's Fall trilogy)
Are all (relatively) recent authors you should check out if you haven't. It's not a scratch on the golden age of SF, of course, but there are still decent space SF books being written. I've also heard good things about Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton, but haven't read them yet, so I can't endorse them.
Of course, it's possible you're already familiar with all of those, but you may be in for a treat if you haven't seen a couple of them.
(And if you've got other recommendations to make that I missed, feel free to mention them; I'm always looking for good SF)
I have the sneaking suspicion that the number of professionals - by which I mean people making their primary or only income on their photographic work - using cameras in the less than $5,000 range outnumber professionals using cameras that cost anything like $15,000 by a hefty margin. I'd guess at 10:1 or higher.
Medium format digital backs just aren't all that common compared to the number of people who need the portability of 35mm bodies.
Now, you may be factoring the lenses into that $15,000, but that's not quite fair. Glass is a lifetime (or at least, a decades-long) investment, so dropping tens of thousands of dollars on it makes perfect sense. The camera gets replaced pretty frequently, especially in the new digital era. That is, there's a huge difference between the amount of cash flow one has to have to justify a $15,000 camera that needs to be replaced in a couple years and the cash flow needed to justify $15,000 in buy-once lenses.
Point taken. I haven't used CS3; I'm still working with CS2. I'm glad you pointed this out, too, since it will factor into my decisions regarding buying Lightroom and CS3.
I almost bought the 30D when I finally pulled the trigger on a DSLR, but I ended up saving a few hundred and getting the XTi (400D). The control layout isn't quite as good, it doesn't have the top LCD display, and its max ISO is 1600 rather than 3200. It's got an extra two megapixels, but truth be told, the difference between 10 MP and 8 MP isn't all that significant. Aside from those, though, they're basically the same camera.
The real deciding factor was cost; ~$900 vs ~$1200. I figured I'd get the cheaper/lighter body now, and plan on picking up a 1D (or similarly placed model) in a couple years. It's worked out great for me so far, and the noise levels at = ISO 400 are virtually nonexistent to my eye at prints up to 8"x10". Even ISO 800 is workable with some post processing noise reduction.
But I've still got and use my old SLRs for B&W work. The problem is I wanted to buy into the Canon line of digital bodies and lenses, but my film SLRs are Minoltas - so I'll never have the lens collection for the Minoltas that I do/will for the Canons. But since my B&W shooting is always more thoughtfully composed, I can get by with a few prime lenses for the Minoltas.
It was a hell of a day, though, when I finally moved to digital for color photography. On the whole, I'm glad I did, but I can't say I don't miss the old days some.
Lightroom does not perform the same functions as Photoshop. Some Photoshop functionality exists in Lightroom, but if you want to do per-picture editing, you need Photoshop. Lightroom is a workflow app, which is focused on handling large numbers of photographs.
Look at it this way: if you've got a CF card full of a 100 shots taken at one event, Lightroom is where you can take care of the fact that your camera's fluorescent setting left you with a white balance that isn't what you want. You fix all the shots at once. It's also where you catalog, tag, organize, and select the photos you want to take to final processing.
On the other hand, if one of those selected pictures from the event has a tree growing out of someone's head, you fix it in Photoshop.
They're two different functions, so they're two different software packages.
Your last point really sums it up. In the 35mm space, I can't see any objective* reason to use chemical darkroom techniques for color printing - or, frankly, for developing. Having done both, I've switched entirely to digital for all my color photography (I am, at best, a 'prosumer'; I haven't made the jump into medium- or large-format photography, where digital still can't keep up). The advantages of digital - varying film speeds from shot to shot; no worries over screwing up the film in the tank; the essentially infinite and perfect reproducibility of digital "negatives"; the flexibility and undo-ability of film processing analogs; lack of bulk to carry (I do a lot of hiking); even the cost of film, insofar as it means I'm far more willing to bracket exposures, shoot in bursts, etc. - are so significant that I can't deny them.
But that's only true for color photography. B&W film printed on B&W paper just can't be touched by any digital B&W process I've seen (much less been able to replicate). I'm not even certain where the difference is (though my guess is that it's a contrast issue having to do with the color masks sitting over the sensor in the camera), but it's an obvious one when looking at final prints. Desaturating a color shot just isn't as good as taking an honest-to-bob silver halide shot, even if you do the desaturation in Photoshop after engaging in a bunch of color tweaks.
Y'all can have my B&W darkroom when you pry it from cold, dead, stop-bath-smelling hands.
*There are, of course, subjective reasons. For example, noise is not equivalent to film grain: for my money, traditional graininess detracts less from the image than does noise, particularly chroma noise. But that's a matter of taste.
Windows vs. OSX isn't anywhere near the issue your monitor is, and neither is your printer selection. I'm only aware of one monitor series (Eizo's ColorEdge) that can present the full gamut of Adobe RGB. There may be more I don't know about, but the majority of monitors can't even cover all of CMYK, much less Adobe RGB. And if your monitor can't cover Adobe RGB, then you're not going to get end-to-end consistency from camera to printer unless you limit your work to sRGB.
Moreover, you can select software tools for Windows (Photoshop being the obvious example) that will utilize your color calibrated monitor correctly - while you can't be as sure in the Windows world that color management will work, you can be sure once you've selected the correct tools. And once you've designed your workflow around the tools, it doesn't matter if other tools aren't reliable. In my mind, it's roughly analogous to your lenses. You have to do the work up front to buy into a lens line that will do what you want, but once you're invested and working with the glass, the state of the lens marketplace means almost nothing to you.
None of this, of course, invalidates your initial point, that not being available for PCs isn't a major hindrance for professional photography software, just that you certainly can design a professional workflow around Windows software.
Best "dept." ever.
Also, the story is pretty funny.
What prevents the whole mess from collapsing in on itself due to internal gravity?
That was brilliant. It managed to be an actually interesting shaggy dog story (insofar as that's not a contradiction in terms).
Well done, bravo, and all that.
As long as you don't do so on TV... ...we don't need any more violins in the media.
(Actually, there may have been, since the patent on Coke's old formula has long since run out, but nobody is calling their attention to it.)
I was under the impression they never patented it, so the formula isn't public; they've always protected it as a trade secret.
Pretty much, yes. The idea of Maxwell's Demon was to violate the second law of thermodynamics - once you include an external power source, its entropy increase has to be included in the system, and now you've just got a heat pump. Doing it on the nanoscale is Really Neat(tm), but it's not Maxwell's Demon.
But then, TFA doesn't have Leigh saying that it is Maxwell's Demon, just that he credits Maxwell with furthering science.
Because the demon isn't increasing the energy of the system, it's simply sorting it. The total heat of the system doesn't change, it just goes from equilibrium to a gradient. The demon isn't conceptually picking out molecules and throwing them, it's deciding which molecules to let pass based on velocity. The energy is all in the molecules already.
Maxwell's Demon was a thought experiment about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics, not a thought experiment about sorting molecules. The idea was that the entropy of the system could be decreased by the demon selectively moving fast molecules from one side of the box to the other, thereby concentrating heat.
This tech is certainly a mechanism for such sorting, but it's powered by external light, so the entropy of the system has not decreased and the second law isn't violated. So, while it's mechanically similar to Maxwell's Demon, it's dissimilar in concept (or should I say, "in spirit" - we're talking about demons, after all).
Of course, TFA doesn't have Leigh claiming that they've come up with Maxwell's Demon, just that he "credits Maxwell for establishing the fundamentals for understanding how light, heat and molecules behave."
None of this is to say that this isn't an impressive feat, and of obvious value in terms of furthering the science/technology of nanomachines, but calling it Maxwell's Demon is missing the whole point of the original thought experiment.
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