climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic
After a 20-year mission, and to avoid any risk of contaminating Saturnian moons with microorganisms from Earth, the Cassini space probe was deliberately crashed into Saturn’s atmosphere today.
The science it has returned has been stimulating and the imagery spectacular. The watery moon Enceladus now joins Europa among the solar system’s most intriguing life-compatible bodies.
I got a handful of photos at this year’s welcome BBQ at Massey College – one surprise guest, former astronaut and new Governor General Julie Payette.
More photos of her (scroll to IMG_9925.jpg)
In Argentina and the European Union, people can assert a “right to be forgotten“, in which internet companies are obligated to delete content which those complaining are unhappy to have online.
There is also a Canadian connection:
In June Canada’s Supreme Court ordered Google to stop its search engine returning a result advertising a product that infringed on a firm’s intellectual property… The Canadian ruling against Google, which applies worldwide, could be just the start. Later this year the European Court of Justice will decide whether the EU’s much-contested “right to be forgotten” applies not just to Google’s European sites, but to all of them. This would mean that links to information about people that is deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” in the EU will no longer be returned in response to any Google search anywhere. If the firm does not comply, it may face stiff fines.
The Economist raises the risk that allowing such censorship by governments could “create a ‘splinternet’, with national borders reproduced in cyberspace”.
I am fairly skeptical about rights-based approaches to ethics to start with, in part because they aren’t very useful as soon as one person is asserting Right A against someone else’s Right B. In this case, the other relevant rights are freedom of speech and what might be termed the freedom to record history.
I think all this is particularly risky when it comes to photography. In many places, the fact that a statement is true is a defence against allegations of slander or libel. Unedited photographs are in some sense always truthful historical records, but there are nonetheless many reasons why people aside from the photographer or the media source using them might want to see them purged. Letting people use a supposed extension of their right to privacy as a mechanism for censorship risks stifling artistic and creative expression, as well as depriving the world of information about what really happened in various times and places.
It’s not surprising that people want unflattering things about themselves removed from the internet, from criminal records and critical news stories to photos they dislike and things they wrote themselves but came to regret. At the same time, the people who post media online have an interest in keeping it up, and the world as a whole has an interest in knowing what has happened in the past. Granting people the power to use the courts to manipulate the historical record seems worrisome to me, as well as a substantial burden for all the platforms where such records are stored.
One downside to electronic media of all forms is the possibility of after-the-fact censorship, which would be impractical for things like printed books and newspapers.
A recent Economist article describes a novel camera design with the promise to be far thinner than those that exist now, with some novel features:
Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.
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To mimic the image-making role of the optics in conventional cameras, the OPA manipulates incoming light using electrons. Dr Hajimiri compares the technique to peering through a straw while moving the far end swiftly across what is in front of you and recording how much light is in each strawful. In the OPA this scanning effect is created by manipulating the light collected by the grating couplers electronically, using devices called photodiodes. These place varying densities of electrons into the amplified light’s path through the OPA, either slowing it down or speeding it up as it travels. That shifts the arrival times of the peaks and troughs of the lightwaves. This “phase shifting” results in constructive interference between waves arriving from the desired direction, which amplifies them. Light coming from other directions, by contrast, is cancelled through destructive interference. Change the pattern of electrons and you change the part of the image field the OPA is looking at. Scanning the entire field in this way takes about ten nanoseconds (billionths of a second).
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To zoom in for a close-up, the device selects a specific part of the image and scans it more thoroughly. To zoom out for a fish-eye, it scans the entire optical field, including light from the edges of that field. To change from zoom to fish-eye takes nanoseconds.
Doubtless, such cameras will have some interesting applications. Unfortunately, that will certainly include further entrenching the surveillance state — increasingly using devices too small to see.
In part to bring family members together for Father’s Day, I invited my cousins for some family portraits and a picnic in High Park.
My cousin Katrusia showed up with some of the clothing she has recently sewn, along with my cousin Tamara, her husband, and their children Mykyta (who I photographed before, including being baptized) and Adrian.
I had a marvellous time in Ottawa, getting spoiled by my friends Andrea and Mehrzad, getting to know their newborn son, and getting some portraits for the growing family.
A few things are happening in the next week or so, but job #1 is to persist with my recruitment campaign for a new supervisor. A friend recently suggested that I should downplay the conventional metrics (similarity of research interests and methodological approach) in favour of looking into who has the best record of getting people through their dissertation quickly and reliably.
I had a good wander around Toronto today. All these photos were taken with my Fuji X100s — perhaps the best camera smaller than a hardback book.
The most exciting thing going on is planning several possible trips: one to Ottawa in a couple of days, a possible trip to Algonquin Park, and a very exciting possible trip to B.C. and the Haida Gwaii.
In one of my most boneheaded moves ever, I lost my wonderful Fuji X100s camera at the Canadian Political Science Association conference.
I was at a morning panel on “Natural Resources, Energy, and Climate” and because the desks were small I put it on the one behind me. At the end of the session, I walked to my next event, sat down, realized I didn’t have the camera, and rushed immediately back to find it gone.
I checked both the Ryerson and Congress lost and found locations and asked all the nearby staff members. I also emailed everyone on the panel, in case one of them picked it up.
The camera’s serial number is 33A04584 and it is clearly labeled in two places with my name and email address. Perhaps someone picked it up and has yet to contact me.
It’s an extremely painful thing to lose: worth about four months of my rent or well over a quarter of a year’s tuition. Over 4,000 photos I’ve taken with it since I got it in November 2013 are on Flickr.
[Update: 7:30pm] In a hugely relieving development, one of my fellow audience members — recently appointed to a tenure-track job at uVic — saw the abandoned camera, picked it up, and has now restored it to me.