If desperate-for-a-conspiracy folks can see malice in a USA Today photo of Condi Rice, I wonder what they’ll make of this photo that ran in The Roanoke Times of Angela Lansbury:

(If you’re wondering, I propped up the paper, shot the image with my camera, and cropped it — no Photoshopping of any sort beyond that.)

Reality: Newspapers, especially big ones like USA Today, batch-process hundreds of wire photos a day, using standard Photoshop settings that they find work well for 99 percent of shots.

Occasionally one slips through that doesn’t respond well to the treatment. (In USA Today’s case, that treatment included the rather typical Unsharp Mask filter.)

I get a kick out of people professing an expertise (”I have 10 years experience in video editing”) that they think somehow extends to a newspaper’s production process.

Unless they think that Angela Lansbury is also being demonized for some reason.

Note: I write a weekly technology column for USAToday.com.

There’s a growing controversy about an AP photo of Condi Rice in USA Today that’s being called “doctored.”

It’s obvious why. On the left, the original. On the right, what ran:

So I decided to play with Photoshop to see what it took to make that happen. Did it require several subtle manipulations, or was it a simple thing (and thus more likely the result of a assembly line photo mentality — remember, this isn’t a USA Today photo; they got it from the AP wire).

The answer took about 10 seconds to find. The change is likely the result of using the Unsharp Mask filter, which is the standard way of sharpening a photo.

Here’s the process in action. You can see the original, and in the Unsharp Mask box is the result using fairly standard settings. (Click to enlarge it.)

Was it malice? Probably not. There are hundreds of AP photos coming on the wire every day, and chances are someone simply applied the standard filters and popped it into the publishing system.

(You might comment that my unsharp-masked photo isn’t as striking as the one USA Today ran. I simply used my default Unsharp Mask settings; their’s is probably different.)

Of course, it’s always fun to pick on the media, and someone should have noticed this, but when you’re talking one shot out of thousands, I’m not surprised that it got through.

When we talk about spending a billion dollars here or $200 million there, the numbers don’t mean anything. We have no perspective, or we’ve simply become dull to it all.

Congress and the President have spend like madmen in the last five years, pouring millions and billions of tax dollars around the world. We don’t think about it because it’s not real money to us.

But let’s make it real. Let’s put those numbers into a format that’s a little more recognizable: Textbooks.

According to the North Carolina State Board of Education, the average price of a high-school textbook is a shade over $52.00.

So the $223 million spent on that bridge in Alaska bought by Rep. Don Young (R) to service 50 constituents could instead have bought 4,288,000 textbooks.

But we think the bridge is more important.

$350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland? That could have been 6,700 textbooks for Ohio schools.

How about $2.3 million for the beautification of California’s Ronald Reagan Freeway in California? That’s more than 44,000 textbooks.

But let’s not think small.

The Iraq War, according to the http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/54504.pdf”>Congressional Research Service, costs an average of $5.9 billion per month.

That’s the equivalent of 113,461,538 high-school textbooks, every month. (Elementary school books cost less — an average of about $35 — so it’s equivalent to even more of those.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2003 there were 33 million kids in elementary school in the U.S. and 17 million in high school.

In other words, for what we spend in Iraq in one month, we could just about buy every student in America, from kindergarden through 12th grade, three brand-new text books.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had plenty of school kids knocking on my door, selling gifts and candy and whatnot to raise money for their schools.

Perspective: use it or lose it.

From the Fincastle (Va.) Herald’s October 19 edition comes this public service announcement:

When I told people there really was a conference called “Is Islam a True Religion?” they didn’t believe me. So there you go.

When installing software, most of us click “Accept” when presented with the End-User License Agreement (EULA).

But Aaron McKenna over at TG Daily started reading them and found some interesting clauses.

For example, if you use Apple’s iTunes, you have to not only agree to the EULA, but also any changes Apple makes from here to eternity:

Apple reserves the right, at any time and from time to time, to update, revise, supplement, and otherwise modify this Agreement and to impose new or additional rules, policies, terms, or conditions on your use of the Service. Such updates, revisions, supplements, modifications, and additional rules, policies, terms, and conditions (collectively referred to in this Agreement as “Additional Terms”) will be effective immediately and incorporated into this Agreement. Your continued use of the iTunes Music Store following will be deemed to constitute your acceptance of any and all such Additional Terms. All Additional Terms are hereby incorporated into this Agreement by this reference.

So Apple can change the agreement to read, “You must send $100 to Apple every month or we can wipe your hard drive” and — guess what? — you’ve already agreed to it!

And if you use Pinnacle Studio 9 (one of the more popular consumer-level video-editing packages, you agree to let Pinnacle “and it’s licensors” (!) install other “security-related” software on your computer. Of course, we all know that you can do just about anything in the name of “security.”

Further, the software Pinnacle installs might prevent the software you originally purchased from running:

You acknowledge and agree that in order to protect the integrity of certain third party content, Pinnacle and/or its licensors may provide for Software security related updates that will be automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Such security related updates may impair the Software (and any other software on your computer which specifically depends on the Software) including disabling your ability to copy and/or play ’secure’ content, i.e. content protected by digital rights management.

It turns out that courts often rule against companies that try to enforce the, um, unusal parts of their EULA’s. But still — the idea that they would even try to sneak these things by you….

sweet hom alabama

A couple of people have written to me about EasyCleaner requiring a $19.95 registration. This is new, and the product is still listed as freeware.

First, apologies for the problem. I should have verified that the download link worked.

Luckily, you can get EasyCleaner (free) from several places:

One place. (Should start downloading immediately.)

Another place. (Should start downloading immediately.)

Another place. (You need to click the appropriate link.)

Another place. (You need to click the appropriate link.)

Added 10/23: David Benedict pointed me to another free PDF creator: PrimoPDF. It seems a bit faster than PDFCreator and offers some additional features, so it’s worth checking out.

Have you heard about this new phenomenon called “blogging”? Don’t worry — neither had ABC News in L.A. But as soon as the station discovered it (this week, in fact), it aired a story by Ric Romero.

Anyone with a computer can become their [sic] own publisher on the internet [sic].
You can create your very own diary online and share personal thoughts or political opinions on anything.

Its [sic] known as blogging, and it’s simple to use and you can do it for free.

Tomorrow: Some e-mail users are getting mail they don’t want!

Added 10/25: here’s a PDF in case ABC takes down the article.

Sometimes it’s fun to watch university public relations. Having worked in one such department, I understand the constraints of needing to A) be politically correct, B) seem open to new ideas and dissenting views, and C) maintain your reputation.

It’s often a juggling act. You don’t want to offend anyone or challenge someone’s right to express a different view, but sometimes that “different view” can hurt your attaining goal C.

So here we have Lehigh University. It was already distancing itself from biology professor Michael Behe, who is testifying in the “Scopes II” trial that intelligent design is actually a scientific theory.

Earlier this week, a note appeared on the Department of Biological Sciences’ Web site entitled “Department’s Position on Evolution and ‘Intelligent Design’.” It read in part:

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

Obviously, Lehigh wants to save the reputation of its biology department; the last thing bio grads need is to have their education questioned because “Lehigh” becomes associated with “creationism.” It doesn’t want to seem closed-minded, but it doesn’t want its science department to be associated with a non-scientific idea.

So it opted for the “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” approach seen in that note.

Unfortunately, Behe is making it tougher. Today comes this chuckler from New Scientist:

Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.

Later in the story:

[Plaintiffs’ attorney Eric] Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.

The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.

You have to wonder what’s going on at Lehigh. “We can’t censor him — we’re a university!” “Yes, but he’s destroying our reputation!”

Juggling’s tough.

I think doctors can work miracles; we’ve all seen it done. But I’m also a huge skeptic — I think there are a large number of them who are clueless or sloppy or both.

For example, my wife’s physicians in Cincinnati — Drs. William Buckley and Dennis Reed — would have, we are sure, killed our unborn son if we had stayed there. I can’t blame them for their office refusing her treatment on at least one occasion, but I can blame them for ignoring her incredibly high blood pressure despite her repeated pleas for better treatment. (With BP of something like 140/120, they told her to lay on her left side. Period.)

They treated her like she was just a whiny patient, rather than someone who knew what was going on. When we moved to Columbus, her new doctor was shocked — he admitted her to the hospital immediately and began to actually treat her hypertension.

(Our son was born growth restricted and premature — but alive and well. Our doctor there was Dr. Samuels; our son’s name is Sam.)

Mercy Hospital in Cinci was another font of medical messups. They gave Karen the wrong indicator drug for a test, making it useless, and they gave her an overdose of meds. Luckily she knew what she was supposed to take and pointed it out to the nurse rather than popping the pills. I gotta wonder how many people don’t know and simply take what’s handed them.

We filed the legal paperwork to reserve our son the right to sue them.

So I’m not one of those folks who believes doctors know what they’re doing. I think anyone who doesn’t do their own research and know about the drugs they’re taking is asking for trouble.

So it was without surprise that I read a story on the Google blog about someone confronting some clueless doctors. “Google literally saved our newborn son from having to endure an extremely dangerous, and totally unnecessary, blood transfusion,” wrote the father.

Be careful out there.

Note: First names of doctors added 10/20, once I confirmed them.

Here’s a shot of a column by the Oregonian’s editor, Mike Arrieta-Walden, about misspelled names in the paper.

Maybe it’s me; maybe I’m picky. I would think that a column about misspellings is one that should be double-checked, especially, oh, the very first word.

Back in January, 2004, I wrote a column called “Memory technology promises a whole new kind of PC” about the potential for magnetoresistive random-access memory to revolutionize data storage on a computer.

Instead of hard drives, we’d use a variation on flash memory, which is much, much faster. I suggested that a PC could boot up almost instantly because the hard drive A) is slow, and B) takes time to boot up.

Many thanks to one Jason Hatter who pointed me to an article “Intel cuts PC boot time” about an Intel technology called Robson that uses a flash memory card to store the operating system, and thus enable a wicked-fast boot up.

There are other possibilities for the technology not mentioned in the News.com piece. Imagine offices and hotels with PCs that have slots for your flash-memory card. The machines could be simple processors; you’d carry your computer with your — not just your data, but the OS and applications as well.

Instead of lugging a laptop around, you’d pocket a 100+ gigabyte drive that would pop into your hotel-room PC and — presto! — you’d have your computer. No matter where you went, there you’d be.

I’ve got what I think is a neat story about the latest fun-filled scam being perpetrated by the good people of Nigeria. It’s at Roanoke.com.

There’s a fun backstory to this piece, but I’ll get to that a little later.

New entry under USA Today Follow-ups on metadata.

I spoke of the virtues of metadata for images, and of one particular program: PixVue. But using metadata isn’t just about having notes in your files. There’s plenty of software that can take advantage of it — for example, to make a Web-based photo album.

There are a lot of photo-album packages out there — programs that will take your images and made HTML albums. What you like will depend on your needs. Many are free.

I wasn’t looking for something with nested albums, or one that would allow user comments. I just wanted to get my pictures online in a format that fit my site.

I use JAlbum, an excellent piece of free software. It has its quirks, but it wasn’t hard to fit it into the look and feel of my site.

What I like about it is that JAlbum works with the IPTC/XMP and EXIF metadata I wrote about. It can pull that info out of your images and make it part of the album.

Check out the two sample galleries I made. One features pictures of my son, the other has shots of Roanoke.

All the images have IPTC names and descriptions, as well as technical EXIF data. JAlbum pulls that information out, and I designed the Web page — where that info is placed.

For example, on the thumbnails page I put the XMP title underneath in a small font. On the image page, I put the title up top, and the caption (XMP) and shooting date (EXIF) below. Below that is technical data about the image (EXIF).

All automated. And if I switch from JAlbum, that information remains with the image. Cool.

I misplaced the key to my car the other day, and had to switch to my emergency backup key.

My car has one of those fancy security systems, where there’s a transponder in the key that allows the car to start. I can’t just go to Lowe’s and get 10 copies made.

My backup key is a valet key, which means I can’t open the truck with it. That annoyance, coupled with the fact that I didn’t have a second backup key, made me think I should get another one made up.

I called Toyota and asked about getting one. He wanted to know — odd, I thought — if I had a master key. Nope, just the valet key.

It turns out that, without the master key, they have to reprogam the car’s security system — “flash the ECU” — and then give me a new key that’s coded to that updated security system.

Cost: $78 to reprogram, plus $46.58 for the key. That’s almost $125 for a new key. Holy moly.

I posted a note to SolaraGuy, a great site for Solara and Camry owners, detailing my plight. I got one offer to sell me a blank transponder key for $20. That was better than Toyota’s $46.58, but what the heck was I supposed to do with it?

Web sites offering these keys had similar prices for blanks. If you didn’t have a master, you could mail in your car’s computer and they would reprogram it for less than Toyota, but I’d be carless for a week.

And that didn’t answer my question: I did have a master, but what good would a blank do me?

Then I got my answer from a SolaraGuy poster. Get this:

“[G]o to homedepot or somewhere to get it cut cheap (my home depot did it for free). Then follow these instructions…

While pushing in both the ACCELERATOR and BRAKE PEDAL:
Insert already-registered key in the cylinder
Depress and release the accelerator pedal 5 times
Depress and release the brake pedal 6 times, and remove the master key
Insert the key to be registered in key cylinder
Depress and release the accelerator pedal 1 time (Security indicator blinks)
After 60 seconds, master key is registered (Security indicator is OFF)
Each step must be done with 10 seconds

At first I thought this was a joke, but a quick Google search showed me it isn’t. It’s like having an easter egg in your car, but one that’s actually useful instead of just cute. I’m going to order a blank from someone and give it a try. But I’ll be chuckling as I do the little song and dance routine.

Update: I just bought a blank for $20 from MyKeyless on eBay. It appears to have keys for lots of Toyotas, plus keyless remotes for a bunch of brands.

The slogan for the Grand Challenge is “Harnessing American Ingenuity.”

Perhaps it should read, “Harnessing German Ingenuity.” See Stanford, which won the event, has a team with a large contingent — perhaps a majority — of German-speaking Volkswagen engineers.

Deutschland über CMU, perhaps?

132 miles in about seven and a half hours.

A-mazing. [applause]

Oh, I can say that Stanford wins because it’s clear that no other team will be able to beat its time. (Well, barring a miracle.) So it’s not about being first over the line, although Stanford did that, too.