As some of you know, I finally bought a DSLR camera this past year. I ended up taking advantage of a Christmas deal at Amazon and picked up a Canon T1i kit w/ an extra lens (a 55-200mm zoom) at a nice bundle price. So far, I love the camera. It’s been fun learning how to actually take photographs again.

One of the random extras I bought when I got the camera was the Canon EOS Rebel T1i/500D Guide by David Busch. I’m basically going through the book cover-to-cover, it’s been that interesting and helpful. While he covers the basics like explaining the various features of the camera, I’ve found that his explanations of a lot of basic photography technique has been a good refresher for me. While I didn’t necessarily need the reminder of what an f-stop is or whatever, getting everything in context with sample photographs helped me gain some insights and make connections I don’t think I understood before.

The book does dive into some depth and provides a lot of good background about the body itself. For example, the T1i has a cropped sensor (otherwise known as APS-C sensor), something I only understood at the very basic level (i.e. the sensor is “smaller” than a full 35mm frame). The guide explains the differences, but then takes the next step and explains the design choice by Canon (and other manufacturers), along with how it might impact your lens choices, your photography, etc. It’s good stuff.

There’s also a good chapter that explains Canon’s lens naming system, along with explanations of why different features are better or worse than others. So now, when I see a lens named “EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM,” I know it’s one of their full-frame professional (luxury) zoom lenses that’s image stabilized and has an ultrasonic motor to drive the autofocus. The book also explains what each of those things mean, why you might or might not want/need each feature, etc.

Overall, I really recommend this book if you have a T1i. Lots of good little tips and hints in the guide that you’ll be happy to read even if you’ve got some experience with the camera already.

When I see/hear/discover things like this video, there’s no doubt in my mind that remix culture has a lot to offer society. Watch this thing, listen to albums from artists like Girl Talk, and tell me there isn’t something of value here for society. We’re too far into a copyright driven culture these days. Wish we could pull back a bit to somewhere in the middle. Things like this video really ought to be permissible in a broadly legal way.

This is also a reminder for me to finally read Free Culture, which puts some legal brainpower behind these ideas.

The clip is explained a bit on its YouTube Page, or you can go to the creator’s site for this project, thru-you.com. It’s a great idea. He includes credits for all the clips used. Good stuff.

(found via @jasoncalacanis)

I suspected we’d be seeing distribution of the Tales at some point because, let’s be honest, there’s demand for more from the Harry Potter universe. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if a new series started out within that continuum, because she did such a wonderful job creating a believable world.

So, I wasn’t too surprised when I saw that Amazon announced today that the Tales of Beedle the Bard will be available on December 4th, 2008. Tales, if you remember, was a hand-crafted book written and illustrated by J.K. Rowling in her own hand, it seems. Only a handful of copies were made and sold at auction or given to friends. They look spectacular. The books contain the fairy tales described in the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

There are two editions available for pre-order. There’s a standard edition, that contains the five fairy tales, reproductions of the illustrations in the hand-crafted originals, and commentary by Dumbledore. There’s also a collector’s edition, which comes in a fancy package and has additional illustrations and a cover very similar to the one on the original run (inlaid metal, replica gems, etc.).

I think I might have to get one for myself… (would make a nice Christmas gift, hint hint).

So, I whined about iTunes not having Season 2 of The Wire and 5 days later, it was available. I complained about the price of the DVDs being outrageous at $59.99, suggesting to friends that I’d pay up to $40. What do I see at Best Buy yesterday? All seasons of The Wire on DVD for $39.99. Amazon made the same price reduction.

So, I’m going to flex the awesome power of FatMixx once again. Amazon folks, I would’ve bought a Kindle if you just had either True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society or He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know available on the Kindle.

Seriously, 2 books. Small publishers. Come on now.

You can check out the celebrities that own the Kindle over at Coolspotters.

I’ve found the perfect baby shower present. I’m trying to decide if pairing it with this would be too obnoxious. Just need to be careful and make sure the baby doesn’t grow up to be a construction worker.

I’ve been reading too much non-fiction lately, so in an effort to add some fiction to my list, I picked up a couple of new books this week. One twist, all of them are graphic novels. First up is the first volume of Y: The Last Man, a series by Brian K. Vaughan. Vaughan worked for a while for DC and Marvel, but most recently he joined the writing staff for Lost. Yes, another Shah/Hojnicki obsession, but I promise you, a healthy one. Honestly, I didn’t know this when I picked up the book. I was intrigued by another Vaughan title, Pride of Baghdad, which follows four lions who escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s based on a real episode, but the idea of using the lions to explore the concept of liberation sounded pretty interesting. More on that book later.

Y is set in a world where an unknown pathogen or agent wipes out all the male mammals in the world. All the males except for two, actually: our protagonist and his pet monkey. Somehow, he becomes the last human Y chromosome in the world.

The first volume runs through the opening of the story. We meet what look to be the major characters in the series, all women except for Yorick, the last man on earth. The men all die at once, suddenly leaving chaos and turmoil behind. Imagine what it might be like if suddenly every man in the world disappeared. Imagine the knowledge lost, even at a practical level. So many professions are still dominated by men. How many women know how to run the garbage collection system? Heck, my office would be down to maybe 10% or less of the staff remaining, especially among the technical staff. In the U.S., women account for about 45% of the workforce, which isn’t that bad. I suspect you might get a different breakdown by industry.

Vaughan’s imagination creates an interesting world. The Secretary of Agriculture becomes President (Nancy Pelosi would be the first female president if this happened today), gangs of women band together as Amazons, and the Washington Monument becomes an impromptu shrine to the dead men of the country. Don’t know what it is about dystopian futures, but between this and Transmetropolitan, clearly something is getting my attention. This one seems to be a bit more optimistic than Transmet (well, except for the whole all-the-men-are-dead thing). Both series are also published by Vertigo.

So far, I’m curious about what happens next. Best thing a first volume can do, I guess, so I’ll be picking up the next few.

The March of Folly looks like an interesting book. From Richard Clarke’s article in TNR’s “Iraq: What Next?” issue:

Still, President Bush insists on staying in Iraq, and it is easy to understand why. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman documented repeated instances when leaders persisted in disastrous policies well after they knew that success was no longer an available outcome. They did so because the personal consequences of admitting failure would be very high. So they postponed the disastrous end to their policy adventures, hoping for a deus ex machina or to eventually shift the blame. There is no need to do that now. Everyone already knows who is to blame. It is time to stop the adventure, lower our sights, and focus on America’s core interests. And that means withdrawal of major combat units.

People really haven’t changed much over the years, and our leaders are, after all, people. Seems like it might be an interesting read. You can read more in the comments over at the Washington Monthly post where I found the links to the TNR article.

Last week, I heard an interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation talking about a new graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report. At first, I thought that this was an odd idea. Why would anyone want the 9/11 Report as a graphic novel? Are you ready for the words BLAMM! to be shown next to an image of a burning Pentagon? As I listened to the authors explain their motivation, I was convinced that this might be a unique way of communicating the 585 page 9/11 Commission Final Report.

It didn’t hurt that these authors were excellent comic writers and artists in their own right. Sid Jacobson created Richie Rich and was the editor-in-chief at Harvey Comics. Ernie Colón worked at Harvey, Marvel and DC Comics and oversaw “production of the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, … and The Flash.” Both sounded very serious about why they were doing this and what this project meant to them.

I also began to see this as a piece of art that, while completely based on fact and striving to be true to the Final Report, offered a new way to view the tragic events of that day. Even before the authors brought it up, I remembered the power of reading Maus for the first time. I wrote then that a graphic novel about the Holocaust seemed “wrong” at first blush, but after reading it, I really appreciated having and reading Maus.

This graphic adaption also rises to the occasion. There are fold out timelines of all four planes. There are actually two timelines, one focusing on the events on board the aircraft and the other focusing on when each agency knew about the various events. While you can read much of this in the Executive Summary, this representation makes it easy to understand how the events fit together.

It’s these thousand word pictures that allow a reader to choose whether they want to skim the text or to dive into the details and the touches in the panels. The artwork is beautiful and rich in detail. The writing is clear, simple, and expertly crafted to capture the essential points of each section of the Final Report. Ultimately, it is a serious testament to both the quality and potential of this medium as well as the convictions and vision of the authors. I’m sure they got some incredulous looks when they proposed this project, but the final product says they made the right choice.

I was googling something else and ran across this New Yorker review of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport. The book looks interesting. From the review:

In “The Wages of Wins” (Stanford; $29.95), the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they’ve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. The algorithm yields what they call a Win Score, because it expresses a player’s worth as the number of wins that his contributions bring to his team. According to their analysis, Iverson’s finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made him the thirty-sixth-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award, he was the ninety-first-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the two-hundred-and-twenty-seventh-best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked a hundred and sixteenth. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team. Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts—coaches, managers, sportswriters—know about basketball.

I wish I had taken statistics in college and some higher level economics. The mathematical tools that one gets in those classes would be really valuable when building fantasy tools for lay people, not just for professional sports teams or settling bar bets.

I wonder how you can measure the effectiveness of this algorithm, though. At least sabermetrics has proponents involved in Major League Baseball teams, so we can see the efficacy of those strategies at actually building teams. I’m curious about what teams, if any, in the NBA or other professional leagues will start taking a more rigorous mathematical approach to measuring talent. There’s risk obviously if it doesn’t work.

Kareem’s girlfriend (dude, are you two ever going to get married?) recently started her very own food blog called, appropriately, Geneve’s Kitchen. If the photos don’t make you hungry, the recipes and ideas will.

I love the use of photos on her site, by the way. There’s a professional quality to them, and it just makes the whole look of the blog a lot better. Good luck, Geneve and great work so far.

And, a random note… I found Kareem’s post about her blog on Technorati, of all things, as I clicked through the “food” tag on the restaurant review below. Kind of random, and a demonstration of why I always try to tag my posts. Never know what you’ll find.

PS. Those of you who just read and don’t write at a blog, set one up! It’s such a good way to keep in touch and share things you’re passionate about. If you do it for yourself, and not for the audience, it’ll be worth it. If you’re always writing around a particular topic and a decent writer, you might even be able to build a significant audience.

Sarah over at RMTJ suggested New York Hack as one of her favorite blogs. I read through it for a while, longer than expected, and it is really pretty damn funny. The WaPo did a story on her a few months back, which gives a lot more background into Melissa Plaut, the cabbie, and her road to being a good writer driving a cab. It reminds me a bit of True Porn Clerk Stories, also hilarious. I still can’t listen to Aqua’s Happy Boys and Girls without thinking of that blog (you’ll have to read it to get it).

The most controversial discussion in the Levitt’s best-selling book Freakonomics had to be the discussion of his paper on the impact of legalized abortion on crime. Even though I really enjoyed the book, I knew that I’d be reading about that particular section of the book and the research that was the foundation of it again.

The Economist last week reported on a study conducted by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that purports to find an “embarrasing hole” in the Levitt/Donohue study. You can read the Economist’s reporting on this new study to get an idea of what they found. Then go ahead and read Levitt’s response on his blog. I love it when authors have blogs.

I didn’t only watch movies on my trip out to California. I was also able to finish Freakonomics on the flight back. After hearing a number of coworkers and friends absolutely rave about this book, I picked it up a few months back. Because of a little thing called football, I wasn’t able to read the book until last week. The book was a very quick read. I was able to finish it without reading that fast on the trip from CA to CT.

The subtitle of the book is “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” which pretty well sums up the premise of the book. He approaches common social problems from an economist’s perspective, using statistical analysis and large data sets to challenge conventional wisdom. The book really is a more accessible version of some of the research papers Levitt has produced over his academic career. Pop economics blended with typical current affairs stuff, if you will.

If you’re easily offended by hard questions, this book probably isn’t for you. The most controversial segment of the book, which recently got Bill Bennett in trouble, was a study by Levitt that suggested that the legalization of abortion seems to have helped the reduction of crime in the 90s, more so than the reasons commonly cited, including the strong economy and alternative policing tactics. This is a tricky subject to broach, but an interesting analysis.

Another interesting chapter, titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms,” uses a unique set of data acquired from a Chicago gang to draw interesting conclusions that show that the local crack dealers are more like the burger flippers at McDonalds than the image we have of wealthy drug dealers. The story about how they got the data is as interesting and as central as the conclusions they were able to draw. Not that the conclusions are anything to sneeze at:

By the 1980s, virtually every facet of life was improving for black Americans, and the progress showed no signs of stopping.

Then came crack.

While crack use was hardly a black-only phenomenon, it hit black neighborhoods much harder than most. The evidence can be seen by measuring the same indicators of societal progress cited above. After decades of decline, black infant mortality began to soar in the 1980s, as did the rate of low-birthweight babies and parent abandonment. The gap between black and white schoolchildren widened. The number of blacks sent to prison tripled. Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for all black Americans, not just crack users and their families, you will see that the group’s postwar progress was not only stopped cold but was often knocked as much as ten years backward. Black Americans were hurt more by crack cocaine than by any other single cause since Jim Crow.

That’s a pretty powerful statement.

My main complaint with the book is that it is pop economics. I would’ve liked a bit more detail into the numbers. Or, perhaps, a clear footnote (not endnote) for each section that indicated where the study was published. That way, someone like me who is actually interested in how the numbers work out and some extra detail is encouraged to look up the data. While the book begins with a warning against believing conventional wisdom, and not trusting experts blindly, the book does little in a practical sense to encourage readers to take that next step: challenge the data, the assumptions, and try to understand it. It’s a little nitpick in an otherwise very entertaining and informative book.

BTW, the authors have a web site and a blog, too.

Via Boing Boing, I’ve learned that this is Banned Books Week. The ALA has a great kit for teachers and libraries. Exploring these books is a great way to remember the history of our country and the progression of social mores and taboos through time. I suspect there are valuable lessons for our modern times in some of those books, as well.

They’re also offering, via Audible, a free chapter of 2004’s most challenged book, The Chocolate War.

Here’s the poster. Love the quotes:

I finished the latest Harry Potter book this morning and have to say, wow. The book was worth waiting around B&N for, even worth the loss of sleep to finish it in about 12 hours (I slept for about 5.5 hours in there). If you’re a Harry Potter fan, I think you’ll be happy.

I won’t give away anything much about the plot, so this is safe to read if you haven’t read it yet. I will say that the ending was a shocker and I’m still running through the ramifications of it 8 hours later. Without giving away much, a central recurring character is killed at the end of this book. The way it’s set up is stunning, so I doubt you will expect it coming. I think that was it… it was so sudden that I had no preparation.

Fans of the series won’t be disappointed, though. The book moves quickly and there’s little of the brooding downtime that characterized the last two books. Those expecting any sort of conclusion, even a limited one like the second book, will be disappointed. This book is made, like the previous two, to make you want the next book. It’s not forced, but beyond the death of that character, not much progress is made in this book toward the end goal of defeating Voldemort. In fact, the entire book is about two things: Harry growing another year older (which Rowling is very good at writing), and finding out what Harry will need to do in the next book to finally defeat Voldemort. We learn the mechanism without actually learning the details of how he will actually execute it.

Rating: 8/10

I’m planning on picking up my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at Barnes and Noble’s Midnight Magic event tonight. I figured it might be fun to check the thing out to see how crazy people get about Harry Potter.

Of course, I just stopped in to the store to pick up my numbered bracelet and was stunned at the preparations underway. The staff there informed me that they expect around a thousand people at least tonight and that during the last Potter book release, all the surrounding parking lots were full with people parking at the mall a half mile away and walking over to the store. That’s just nuts!

I’m still going to go, but I’m already concerned at what I’m going to see when I get there. I might take my camera and get some photographs for all of you.

Update: Mission accomplished. I did have to park down the road but I think they had fewer people than they expected. Something like 400 wristbands were handed out and since most people brought 2 or more people, they had something like 800 or so folks around. It was hot and loud but not very chaotic. Lot of high school children there. I’ve never been quite so aware of my age as I was surrounded by the parents and their kids… I’m likely more than twice as old as most of the kids there and perhaps 3 times as old as the kids this book is targetted at.

Within this review of What is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 is this little tidbit:

More significantly, he agreed to meet individually with anyone applying for compensation. As he recounts in the book, these meetings–he personally attended 900; VCF staffers attended another 600–allowed survivors to testify to their loss. That testimony became an unexpected memorial: Feinberg had all the meetings transcribed, and encouraged the participants to pass the transcripts on to their descendants.

One day, once we’re collectively far enough away from September 11th, 2001, someone will put together a book on the human toll September 11th took on the people most directly affected, the friends and family of those that died on that Tuesday. These transcripts will be a part of that book and these stories will hopefully become part of our collective experience of this event.

I often wonder what 9/11 was like to the people in, say, Des Moines or Helena or Lincoln. When you live in a place that is so far away from where you are, but when you’re a part of the event (the attack was on us all, not just New York or Boston or D.C. or PA), how does that work? My point is that it affects us all differently, I think. Maybe it’s just me, but I know what the national grief was like. I know what the national mood was like, but I know little of the grief of those that had family die. We’ve rightly given them their space, but at some point I think it would be instructive to know the story. Like Holocaust survivors or Pearl Harbor survivors or veterans of WWII, these people have a unique perspective on the events of that day. Hopefully we’ll learn from their experience someday too.

I got this box set from my mother when I last visited her. I had never heard of this comic book, Maus, and was a little wary of the big swastika and mice in camp uniforms on the cover. I remember thinking that a comic book about the Holocaust just seemed wrong.

Heidi told me that these books were well known and critically acclaimed. After finishing the second volume tonight, I can see why. The books relate the author’s process of writing a comic book about his parents and World War II. The Spiegelmans were Holocaust survivors, Polish Jews who through luck, skill, and shrewdness survived. The depth of the story is incredible, conveying the difficult relationship between the author and his father, telling the father’s story during the Holocaust, and exploring the author’s own emotional struggles with writing this story, his father, his mother’s suicide, and describing the horror’s of the Holocaust itself.

I found a couple of sites that go into the scholarship that has come up around these books. One seems to be an abandoned Geocities page listing a number of papers and studies analyzing the text, along with interviews with the author. The other site is an interesting paper examining how the author and people work through personal traumas. One other site that seemed interesting was this analysis of the books for a class on illustrated books.

Great article in the New York Times. All about how to get back in really passive aggressive ways at people /things that drive you nuts.

When Seth Shepsle goes to Starbucks, he orders a “medium” because “grande” – as the coffee company calls the size, the one between big and small – annoys him.

Meg Daniel presses zero whenever she hears a computerized operator on the telephone so that she can talk to a real person. “Just because they want a computer to handle me doesn’t mean I have to play along,” she said.

When subscription cards fall from magazines Andrew Kirk is reading, he stacks them in a pile at the corner of his desk. At the end of each month, he puts them in the mail but leaves them blank so that the advertiser is forced to pay the business reply postage without gaining a new subscriber.

Life can involve big hardships, like being fired or smashing up your car. There is only so much you can do about them. But far more prevalent – and perhaps in the long run just as insidious – are life’s many little annoyances.

These, you can do something about.
…

Reminds me of that book I am listening to right now, The Devil Wears Prada… a very humorous book indeed.

Ok, so I know some of you (cough cough Sujal, cough cough Heidi) are avid subscribers to audible books. Do you guys or anyone else out there have any recommendations? So far I have heard a bunch,
What I liked:
Lies and the Lying liars (have anyone read Jon Steward’s America? any good?)
The DaVinci code (and angles and demons)
A short History of Nearly Everything
a bunch of the patricia Cornwell books
a bunch of the Margret Maron books…

I did not care for Life of Pi too much ( i could not get through the first half ).

Any thoughts?
Thanks!!!