geoff – Page 23 – Geoff Arnold's Blog

Camera test: Panasonic DMC-TZ4 v. JVC Everio GZ-HM200 v. Nikon Coolpix P90

After weighing up the alternatives (literally and figuratively) I’ve picked up a Nikon Coolpix P90. It definitely falls into the “ultrazoom” category, at 12.1MP and 24x zoom. This morning I headed out to Charleston Slough and Shoreside Lake to compare the Nikon with my existing compact camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4. While I was about it, I decided to toss my digicam (the JVC Everio that I blogged about last year) into the bag. It has a “photo” mode, auto-stabilization, and a fairly impressive 20x zoom; the downside is the small (2MP) image size.
The forecast was for sun, but the NWS lied: it was ten-tenths cloud. Nevertheless there were a lot of birds – and bird-watchers! – out this morning.
You can see a collection of more-or-less comparable shots in the MobileMe gallery here. Most were taken at 1x followed by maximum zoom. After taking these, I wandered around the margin of the slough, having fun with the Nikon. There are some pictures of waders, ducks, and a hummingbird in this gallery here. The zoom is simply amazing, although at full stretch you can see that many subjects are less crisp than one would like, even with optical stabilization in effect. I think it’s time to (1) pick up a monopod or tripod, and (2) experiment with camera features like “BSS”, which takes a series of shots, analyzes the results, and keeps only the crispest.
This is the first new camera I’ve got since July 2008, when I blogged about the Panasonic here. Overall, I think I’m going to have fun with the Nikon. I particularly like this pair of shots of exactly the same scene:

TCM: Ball of Fire

I only really watch three channels on TV these days: Fox Soccer Channel, SpeedTV (for Formula 1 racing), and Turner Classic Movies. OK, I guess I spend a little time with PBS, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel,but I’m getting really frustrated with the quality of documentaries these days. (That’s for another post, though.) And I watch streaming video from Netflix on my Roku. But that’s about it.
Turner Classics is my favourite, though. I’m having a blast discovering the great films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, and I’ve been developing a serious crush on several stars of the female persuasion. This evening we watched “Ball of Fire” with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper, and Barbara Stanwyck was simply red hot. She was clearly having an absolute ball in her role as a sexy vaudeville singer dropped into a house full of dusty academics.
Anyway, I think I’ll drop a short entry into the blog whenever I run across a film that really makes me curl my toes with delight. Odds are it will include one of my heart-throbs, like Myrna Loy and Joan Blondell. And of course there’s Jean Simmon‘s brilliant “drunk in Havana” sequence in “Guys and Dolls”, even though it would have been better opposite Gene Kelly.

Priceless. Absolutely priceless.

As Andrew Sullivan said , if this had happened to me, my head would explode. But what a way to go! Here’s the background:

MasterCard has been the proud sponsor of The BRIT Awards for 12 years and to celebrate 30 years of the BRITs and thank music fans across the country for their passion and support, MasterCard devised the ultimate Priceless experience – a once in a life time opportunity for a member of the British public to win a BRIT Award winner playing live in their very own living room.
Lorraine Sands, a Project Manager from Twickenham won the prize. “When I opened the front door and saw Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe standing on my doorstep I thought I must be hallucinating! Iâ€™ve been a massive Pet Shop Boys fan for over twenty years and to have them play a gig right in my front room, for just me and my closest friends, was too good to be true!”

Check out the performance here. Four songs, and a really impressive production in somewhat challenging circumstances. It’s wonderful – I would have been in heaven…

Bird photography on the cheap (?cheep)

Last summer I moved to Palo Alto, where I live in the middle of the urban sprawl that runs from San Francisco down to San Jose. One urgent need was to find a good place to go for walks, away from the traffic and the concrete, even if it meant a short drive. The answer was to return to an old favourite location: the Baylands Nature Preserve and the many trails that wind around Charleston Slough at the edges of San Francisco Bay. “Old favourite”, because during my many years at Sun Microsystems, I would often visit the SunLabs building (MTV29), and the parking lot behind the building backed right on to Shoreline Lake. On many occasions I would wrap up a day’s work in MTV29 and then go for a walk around the Slough (often before heading up to SFO to catch the red-eye home to BOS.)
Which brings me to birds, and photography. The wetlands around Charleston Slough are a mecca for birdwatching. Egrets, pelicans, ducks of many different kinds and colours, waders, insect-eaters… every visit brings something new. New, interesting, and usually several hundred feet away! (Though there are some incredibly ~~tame~~ fearless egrets at Shoreline Lake.) And frankly my current camera – the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4 – doesn’t really hack it. The 10x zoom is fine for day-to-day stuff, but it’s not going to let me distinguish between the various kinds of ducks or waders out in the wetlands.
The obvious answer would be to grit my teeth and spend the money to get a DSLR with a couple of decent lenses. Obvious, but expensive: at least a kilobuck, all in. And I’m intrigued by the recent emergence of ultrazoom point-and-shoots. Things like the Olympus SP-590UZ (26x), the Nikon Coolpix P90 (24x), or the forthcoming Fujifilm FinePix HS10 (30x!). All of these look like much more affordable (and less fiddly) solutions to the problem.
Recommendations, anyone?

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

I just finished Rebecca Goldsten’s latest work, and I can’t wipe this silly grin off my face. This is the kind of book that makes my toes curl with delight: witty, arch, thought-provoking, funny, familiar, relevant, and deeply satisfying.
As in her previous novels, such as The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein uses the stereotypical figures of academia to explore philosophical questions. A young professor escapes from the mad world of a Harold Bloom-like figure and writes a response to William James and Sigmund Freud entitled “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” (get it?). It includes an appendix listing 36 arguments for the existence of God, together with a crisp rebuttal to each. In this era of the “New Atheists”, this ensures that the book becomes a best-seller, catapulting the bewildered professor into the heights of academe, and culminating in a ferocious debate with a theist that includes all of the arguments that this reader would hope to make in a similar situation! And this narrative, with many fascinating twists and turns, is wrapped up in a novel complete with an appendix(!) on 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. With the addition of the subtitle, “A Work of Fiction”, this becomes the delightfully misleading title for the book as a whole.
Is it wrong of me to hope that some theist will read the title, assume that it’s a response to Dawkins, Dennett et al, buy it sight unseen, and be confused, angry, and – possibly – enlightened?

Mid-point of the trip

We finished our meetings here in Xi’an, and tomorrow morning some of us are flying down to Shenzhen. (The others will stay here with the Xi’an team.) Our last evening here went out with a bang: a team New Year party in anticipation of the Chinese Spring Festival in a couple of weeks. Much ç™½é…’ (bai jiu) was drunk, food was consumed (including excellent duck and lamb – I like the cuisine here in the north-west), competitions were staged, raffles were drawn, songs were sung, and speeches were made. I won a soybean juice extractor in the raffle, an intriguing but bulky item which I decided to give away rather than trying to get back to Palo Alto.
And now I must shake off the effects of the bai jiu and try to pack. We’ll be checking out of here around 6:45am…..

The Terra-Cotta Warriors of Xi'an

So I have seen the Eighth Wonder of the World. And the title was aptly bestowed – it was magnificent, a wonderful experience. You can check out the photographs I took here.

I’m not going to give a detailed account, but there were a couple of interesting moments:

While we were driving out of Xi’an to get to the Museum, there was a M5.0 earthquake not far away. I didn’t notice it, though.
Having seen so many pictures of grey figures, I hadn’t realized that when the army was created the soldiers were all painted in bright colours. The museum had some photographs of fragments which had retained their (mineral) pigments, and gave a vivid impression of what the warriors might have looked like. I was, of course, reminded of early Christian church buildings: today we admire the pure beauty of the marble and stone, even though they would have originally been a riot of colour
I resisted the temptation to buy a replica of one of the figures, and instead bought a coffee-table book about the warriors. After I had done so, a wizened old man behind an adjoining counter offered to sign it for me. He was one of the farmers who discovered the figures back in 1974; he now lives in an apartment near to the museum.
When the army was created in 210 BCE, all of the figures had weapons. Most of them were stolen soon after the death of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang (presumably weapons were more valuable than statues), and wooden pieces like spear shafts rotted away long ago, but many weapons have been discovered. I was surprised to see that some the generals’ swords had been “chrome plated”, and that other pieces were stamped with the manufacturer’s name and batch number.
I hadn’t realized that every figures was designed individually. These were not stamped out in cookie-cutter style. The detailed work – the patterns on the soles of the shoes, or the way that the fabric of a tunic folded and hung, or the facial expression – was simply amazing.
And finally, the museum structures themselves are wonderfully laid out. Yes, the big (“Pit 1”) building was bitterly cold, but the environmental controls seem perfectly suited to the preservation of these extraordinary pieces. Of course we saw it all at the best time: mid-winter, with no crowds. In the summer the place must be a zoo.

Xi'an old city at night

Here are a few pictures from this evening’s expedition to Xi’an’s old (walled) city.

The full set is here in my MobileMe Gallery.
It was bitterly cold, and I used the opportunity to educate overseas colleagues on the old English(?) expression “monkey weather” (as in, “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”). We took two taxis to the highly-decorated South Gate(?), then braved the traffic to cross into the old city, and went looking for a bar. The first one had cute kittens, but no cocktails. The second had decent drinks (the strongest Long Island Iced Tea I’ve ever had) and great music. From the “Bar Street” we headed up to the Muslim Street, which was a crowded riot of colour, smells (food, incense, spices) and music. Resisting the tourist trinkets, we found a restaurant that offered more and varied ways to serve lamb, beef and goat than I had imagined. (And the fish, mushrooms, and dumplings were good too.) It was halal, of course, and when pressed for an alternative to tea they came up with a couple of bottles of warm, sweet Sprite. (Sweet, because of course it was made from sugar rather than corn syrup.) And finally we flagged down a “cargo taxi” who agreed to take us all back to the hotel for 40 yuan, which was a great deal even if it did mean treating Roman as self-loading freight!
Tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll get to see the Terracotta Army. (I say “hopefully” because there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll have to head back in to the office.)

This is democracy?

Route map for the next trip

As so often before, I’m posting a map of my route, as calculated by Karl L. Swartz’s excellent Great Circle Mapper. 19 days, 14,313 miles:
Xi'an and Shenzhen