Below are the most recent 3 friends' journal entries.

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
timmyson	1:27p	Quick Thought There is an idea that in order to understand something, an entity must be as complicated as the object being understood. This idea is frequently used in intelligent design theory (I use the term loosely), and was most recently brought to mind by this comic that Bogdan shared on Google Reader (I interpreted this as "As a product of my code, I cannot understand it). However, I would suggest that understanding may be simplified through abstraction, whereas designing requires access to all the details, and thus, it is not impossible that the sum of parts may come to understand why it is. Complexity may be handled piecemeal, and is thus resolvable. The only problem which remains is storage of the knowledge, a problem which can be helped with the compression that comes with abstraction (i.e. the details can be reconstructed from a more limited knowledge set) or archived outside the entity in references (including other entities). (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
twodoor	8:50p	We've got yer pixels right here Emily and I went down to Toronto on Friday to learn how to inject some glamour into our photography. Apparently, not making people look like fucking monsters is key. The ride to Toronto is endless, so we had a chance to talk shop. Emily's been working for a bunch of wedding photographers already -- the kind that ask $5000 for a wedding, charge for everything else on top of it, and then run off without paying their assistants. Jerks. I've always envisioned running my photo business with a different set of principles, which go something like this: 1. Don't suck. 2. Images should be free. I take photos to share experiences, stories, excitement. The moments captured don't belong to me -- they belong to us. Thus, most of the stuff I shoot I release under Creative Commons. Take it, use it, modify it, do awesome things with it: that's how culture evolves. 3. Treat your clients awesome. The people I photograph are my friends. They share with me some of the most important moments of their lives. The least I can do is give them the freedom to share their stories with friends, lovers, strangers on the internet. My goal is to make sharing easier, not to charge through the nose for prints, DVD's, etc. Charging for prints is so 1800's. 4. Wide angles are key. Yes they can make people look like monsters, but look at the excitement on their faces! I'm OK with sacrificing a bit of aesthetic perfection to capture a bit of awesome. 5. Fuck fashion shoots. A wedding is not America's next top model. Most things in life aren't. Let's see people happy and laughing and making out on the streets. 6. Let's see each other in new ways. We already have a thousand cliched ways of seeing the stuff around us. Repetition is deadly. Let's find all sorts of crazy new ways to be, let's take off our clothes and dance. 7. Watermarks and borders can die a slow, awful death. I told Emily these things and I joked that my goal is to make absolutely no money from my photography. We laughed, but then I went home and punched some numbers into a spreadsheet and as it turns out it's all true. All revenue I made this year has been eaten up by equipment depreciation and other losses -- I haven't even begun to cover the cost of the cameras and lenses I own. So let's find out how long I can hold on to my principles. The moment I start watermarking my images you can come over and punch me in the face. Original Entry | Leave comment
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
timmyson	4:00p	Turn-It-In May Be Used For Good? I'm going back through some notes that I've kept of stuff that I may want to blog about. I haven't been terribly motivated lately, so I figure I need to do something to get the juices flowing. How Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play To me, this is a fascinating example of positive technological subversion. I consider Plagiarism-detection software mildly odious. It is a capitulation to the fact that teachers are insufficiently smarter than their students to be able to catch them cheating, or engineer their curricula in such a way that cheating is more difficult or impossible. I also believe it is an ultimately futile battle. At best, only the low-hanging fruit will be caught (chool becomes an education in cheating well?). However research (and the money for it) being poured into it, and is opening up new ways for scholars to characterize work. It is important to note that while the title is "How Plagiarism Software Found...", the guy is also a Shakespeare scholar and also used "his own expertise". Stuff like this opens up our understanding of how we perceive and use language. I suspect anti-plagiarism stuff, and other anti-cheating work (like Captchas) will contribute heavily to the field of cognitive science. The obvious question which was not addressed in the article though, is this: How do they know that it isn't a Shakespeare plagiarist? They're relying on occurance of signature phrases, which seems like an intuitive thing to copy pay homage to. (Comment on this)