climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
Is there anything anybody wants to know about camera equipment, taking photos, or the way in which any particular photo was made?
I probably don’t know the answers to many of the questions you may have, but it would be useful to know what people are curious about, and perfectly possible to discuss or look up the answers.
It occurred to me the other day that people would be incredibly helpless in a large, zero-gravity environment. If you managed to become stationary, out of reach from any walls or objects, you would effectively be stranded, screaming for someone to come collect you.
Unless you have some kind of rocket motor with you, you are dependent on being able to push off of things to control your movement. Also, zero gravity could involve other unpleasant elements. For instance, if you push off from one surface too aggressively, all you can do it wait until you crunch into the far wall. There would be no particularly effective way to reduce your rate of movement, though you could try splaying yourself out like a sky-diver trying to descend slowly.
This somewhat alters my sense of how much fun a huge recreational space station would be.
Expressing dates in the ‘Common Era‘ system is familiar, but perhaps not overly rational or useful. To be sure, there were things of historical significance happening around 1 CE. Tiberius quelled revolts in Germania; the Kingdom of Aksum was founded; and Ovid wrote ‘Metamorphoses’.
At the same time, it can hardly be considered a watershed point in human history. While it would be less precise to do so, I think a case can be made that we could be better off measuring the date using the start of human civilization as the zero point, with years before expressed in terms of how far they are ‘pre-civilization’ or ‘pre-civ’ and those after expressed in years ‘post-civilization’ or ‘post-civ’.
One risk is that we may discover that our present understanding of when civilization emerged is wrong. The general sense at the moment is that we are around the year 10,000 post-civ. It’s possible that archaeological evidence will reveal older civilizations, which would raise the question of either moving the zero point or accepting one that is no longer seen as accurate.
An alternative, which would be more precise, would be to choose a date to represent the start of the Industrial Revolution – say, 1750 CE. We could then measure dates both forward and backward from that point. This would be year 261 of the industrial era. The former year 0 would be 1750 years before the industrial era.
Either the civilization or the industrial approach could be helpful in making us think accurately about human history. We have been living in civilizations for about 10,000 years now – a fact that has importance for what we know about human beings, and how we can try to achieve our aims in the world. The same is true of the fact that we have lived in an industrialized world for about 250 years (though it obviously didn’t arrive all at once).
The camera in the iPhone 4 doesn’t compare with a dedicated point and shoot camera, when it comes to image quality or creative flexibility. At the same time, it is a camera that is easy to carry around everywhere, so it is a way to document things that would otherwise go unrecorded.
I have added an iPhone set to my Flickr page, and I will keep adding to it bit by bit.
The EXIF data for the photos includes geolocation information, which should be useful for anyone who wants to stalk or murder me (hint: I am often around Bank Street in Ottawa).
The weather is starting to get nice, but I am wary of breaking out my bicycle.
9 months and 22 days ago, I hit a pothole on my bicycle, flew forward over the handlebars, crashed into the pavement, and broke my collarbone. If I had landed differently, I might have broken my neck. As it was, the recovery was long and difficult and I am still not quite at 100%. This is my third serious bicycle accident in Ottawa. Back in November 2007, a turning car forced me to brake urgently on Rideau Street and made me fly over my handlebars. Another time, a turning black pickup truck actually hit me, as I was headed up Somerset Street.
Cyclists like to pretend otherwise, but cycling in the city is dangerous. Even without the menace of cars, you can kill yourself by hitting a pothole, going over a railing, or getting your wheel caught and being thrown into traffic.
Friends and family members who cycle, please be careful! Wear lights and reflective clothes at night. Avoid the temptation to talk on the phone or listen to music while cycling. Even with a headset on, holding a conversation is as poor an influence on your reaction time as being drunk.
One nice thing about Ottawa is that – as long as you avoid homes in distant suburbs or jobs in distant industrial parks – commutes are manageable. As long as you live and work in the general area of Centretown, walking to work will probably take less than half an hour.
That isn’t true of larger and more interesting places like Vancouver or Toronto. It’s a significant consideration, given that commuting time is basically dead time that gets wasted five days a week. It may be possible to make some use of the time, like by listening to podcasts or trying to read, but there is certainly a frequent sacrifice of sleep or interesting activities that accompanies any lengthy commute.
A friend took me to a concert yesterday, with Wilderness of Manitoba opening for Bastia Bulat. I am always nervous about asserting what musical genre something is, but both had distinctly folky elements.
I would recommend giving both a listen, if you get the opportunity.
For most people who put content on the internet, the deal provided by one company or another is this: you provide the content, we will put ads beside it, and we will pay for the servers and bandwidth necessary for hosting a website. More sneakily, sites like Facebook make their money by selling the personal information of users, in addition to selling targeted advertising (which is increasingly the same thing).
Some sites do all this earning and paying indirectly, with the people running the site outside the advertising/hosting cost loop. Alternatively, it is possible to do both yourself: sell ads and pay for hosting.
Lately, this site has followed the latter model. I pay for hosting and I have revenue from automatically-generated Google AdSense ads. The costs largely balance out. Between 1 January 2010 and 1 January 2011, this site and BuryCoal.com collectively received C$296.38 in advertising revenue. During the same span, I paid US$249.70 collectively to DreamHost and Flickr.
Would people feel more comfortable if this site was hosted by a third party that kept the advertising revenue, rather than self-funding in this way? One consideration is scaling hosting to demand. With a third party they would handle it, but I couldn’t choose to pay for performance improvements. For instance, moving to a private VPS account on DreamHost would cost US$15 per month, but would probably make the site quicker and more reliable.
[Update: 11:36pm] I have always encouraged readers who disliked the ads to use Firefox with the AdBlock Plus plugin.
sindark.com might seem like a rather random URL for this site, which consists of a mixture of posts on climate change, photography, Ottawa, and other general subjects of interest to me. The genesis of the name is a long one. Back when I was an undergraduate at UBC, a friend of mine exposed me to the James Joyce poem “Nightpiece” which contains the sonorous line: “Night’s sindark nave.” I chose that as the title for my blog at the time, which was still produced and hosted using Google’s Blogger service.
The site underwent several evolutions – moving to a private hosting company and eventually to being managed through WordPress. It also got a major update after I finished at UBC. Along with that update came the new name: “a sibilant intake of breath”. As such, the current name has nothing to do with the current URL, except insofar as both are taken from literature.
The address of the site is potentially problematic, insofar as it contains misleading theological overtones. It may communicate something a bit useful, in that this site is pretty anti-religious, but that is hardly the most important thing to highlight. As such, it is probably a good idea to eventually migrate to a new address, probably leaving all the old content where it is now.
The new address should ideally be something short and memorable, which is certainly challenging in a crowded internet landscape. I would strongly prefer for it to be .com, rather than .org or .net or anything like that. That preference isn’t driven by the view that .com sites are commercial. Rather, I just see .com as the default and easier for users to remember and use than any of the alternatives. It also offers the most flexibility, since the content of the site is not partly linked to the name.
Something like milanilnyckyj.com or ilnyckyj.com would be possible, but both are impossible to spell and less memorable than a more common word or combination of words. Perhaps I should dig back through some of my favourite pieces of writing to find a snippet of text that passes the tests of being concise, sticking in the mind of the reader, and being available with a ‘.com’ appended to the end.
I know bold plans to read and discuss The Moral Landscape did not go as smoothly as one might have hoped, interrupted by more urgent undertakings.
That said, there are a trio of books I am planning to read that may be of interest to readers of this site:
If anybody feels inclined to read and discuss one of them, I can make it a priority reading task for myself.