LSD RIP

You may not have heard of Albert Hoffmann, but without him Lennon & McCartney would never have written Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Timothy Leary would be unknown, and a lot of bad art and incomprehensible poetry would never have seen the light of day.

Hoffmann was the chemist who first synthesised LSD, in 1943, and died this week at age 102, suggesting acid may not have the life-threatening impact we'd imagined. He didn't just discover the drug, he was also the first to (accidentally) ingest it. The resulting trip led him to believe that acid could help with psychosis and an understanding of how the brain works, all of which echoed Freud's earlier hopes about cocaine. Both got it exactly wrong, but if you've ever read Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception or anything about Synesthesia you wonder about how much the world you and I perceive is anything like the world others see, hear, or smell, and how fluctuating and subjective things are.

Snap on Schmap

My HDR photographs just get worse, but Schmap.com picked one of my pictures from a trip to the Boston Harbor National Park for its guide to Boston.

HDR Photography

I started using Flickr last year and while cruising photographs of my home town Newcastle Upon Tyne came across some startling pictures of the quayside. The detail in the pictures was amazing; rich blue sky with tendrilled vapor clouds, and yet the details in the shadows of buildings was just as rich, giving the impression you could see every individual brick.

It turned out they'd been shot using high dynamic range imaging, something that's been around for a few years but somehow I'd missed. There's a bunch of different groups on Flickr: the main HDR group has over 20,000 members and more than 120,000 pictures. There's many others, and this group has a collection of winning pictures voted on by Flickr members. Some landscapes can we startling, like this picture taken in Germany, others looks entirely unreal.

Pete Carr has a great beginners guide on HDR that uses Photomatix software to create the HDR image and do the tonemapping. Ryan McGinnis has a nice post too. There's other software you can use - Panotools has a nice wiki summary. I downloaded the free trial of Photomatix and have produced a couple of images - terrible, but you can see the potential. I've set my Nikon D50 to bracket at +/-2EV and used the three images to generate the HDR. I also had to lock the ISO rating at 200 (the lowest setting), and now realise I'll have to work in apeture priority mode to get around depth-of-field issues. Even at ISO 200 I can see noise artifacts, and Photomatix can quickly generate its own artifacts as you adjust settings. But even at default settings the resulting image has amazing tonal depth.

If anyone has advice on software, techniques or how to get the best results with HDR let me know.

PR for PR

Just got back from Puerto Rico - it was awesome. We stayed with friends at the Copamarina Resort near Guanica, in the south of the island. You can read my review here, and see pictures at Flickr.

Citizenship

Although I was born in England, I've lived most of my adult life in the US, but never as a citizen: I'm a Legal Permanent Resident with a 'green card', married to a US national. Last week, after a decade of internal debate, I made the decision to start the citizenship process.

Why? You can blame Obama, Clinton, McCain and the rest - the primaries have mostly infuriated me, but they've also made me realize that I can't be a passive critic anymore. And last weekend I found myself outside the local post office encouraging people to vote for a tax override to fund the school system - and I couldn't even vote myself. And my eldest daughter has dual citizenship, but my youngest is just a Yank. And so on...

So I visited the INS website and downloaded the mammoth forms I need to complete. It all reminded me of my original application for permanant resident status over 20 years ago: I was surprised they still asked "if you are, or have ever been, a member of a communist party." Seem a little anachronistic to you?

I also discovered I need to get a move on. I want to vote in the election this year, but I've been told the process can take 6 months to complete. And cost $600. And I have to pass a test.

I'll keep you posted on my progress - and let me know if you've experienced this firsthand.

Heathrow Sucks

I'm traveling in the UK this week and despite my best attempts I'm flying through Heathrow thrice.

I agree with many others - Heathrow pretty much sucks. Too big, too busy, and too disorganized. Even the bits that work well, like the train shuttle to Paddington in central London, doesn't really make traveling easier. Paddington connects with the London Underground, where you quickly grind to a dimly-lit halt somewhere short of Kings Cross.

I'm so glad I don't commute in London anymore.

Murder Plots

Last entry I ranted about the hapless New York Times' reports on the murder rates among Iraq veterans, and about the overall murder rate in the US.

All of which brought me to the NationMaster website, which collects national statistics on everything from population density to levels of happiness. On the murder front, they rank the US at #24, far and away the leader among western democracies. They also show what correlates with the national murder rates of all countries, implying that abortion, oil wealth, and early mortality are all associated with murder. Now pointing out that early mortality is linked to murder might be the same as pointing out that a lack of food is related to starvation, but the rest is worth review.

Correlation is not causation, of course. To say that murder and oil wealth are positively correlated, simply means that they vary together: as overall oil wealth rises, so often does the murder rate. There’s no way to know if either one causes the other to occur, or if there is actually no causal relationship. For example, it’s entirely possible that some underlying third variable is ‘causing’ both these variables to change. And there’s no guarantee that the correlation infers a linear relationship between the two variables – they could easily have a much more complex relationship. Isolating two things and seeing how they work together is interesting but usually artificial, and ignores the complexity of real life.

Then there’s the whole problem of measurement. How do you get a uniform reporting of “murder” across nations as diverse as India, Columbia and France? And Abortion? Looking at these correlations, you begin to wonder how much is masked, and how much measures of abortion, education, life expectancy, and female literacy are surrogates for a measure of oppression, poverty, and division, things far harder to quantify.