I’ve been, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of pictures of the baby recently. My dad visited a few weeks before the baby was born, and showed me how to adjust the white balance on my camera, and a little of what changing that can do. Pictures of the baby have made it even more clear to me how important correct white balance is to good pictures.

Here’s a striking example:

Here is a photo I took with the default white balance setting:	Here’s that same photo, corrected using Aperture’s white balance “shade” preset:	And here’s the photo I took immediately afterward, with the D5000’s “shade” white balance preset:

What a difference! Adjusting the white balance in post-processing is cool, but good techniques (and good tools) still really matter.

I am getting seriously irritated with "news" reports on the Presidential Primaries talking about the $color $gender vote.

I was irritated when, before the South Carolina primary, pundits were talking about how black women had a difficult decision to make—between voting for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman or Barack Obama because he’s black. I am even more irritated by the chatter now about how white males don’t have a (Democratic) candidate to vote for since John Edwards suspended his campaign.

(As I think about this, I realize that race and gender have only been an issue in the Democratic primary, presumably because all the Republican candidates considered serious contenders are white males, and therefore race and gender are not issues about which the media machine can make hay. We will put the "who’s a serious contender?" rant in the box for another day.)

Why in the world would I vote for Hillary Clinton because she happens to have two X chromosomes? Why would I vote (or not vote) for Barack Obama because he has more melanin than me? This is madness. It seems to be a damned common madness—this same "us and them" mentality seems to be behind the violence in Kenya, the "sectarian" violence in Iraq, and a number of other conflicts throughout history.

Who does it help to divide otherwise rational, modern people into tribes of mindless sheep? I just don’t get it.

I’ve heard only one serious ray of hope that all sanity has not been lost: There was a commentator on NPR this evening who sounded about as disgusted and irritated as I am about the expectations pundits have for the outcomes of the race (in his case, among the "Latino vote"). He said something lovely, that I will try to quote as best as my memory allows: that is if there is anything one can say about Latino voters, it is that they are fiercely independent. He said that this race will not be decided by outdated stereotypes, but by individuals.

His statement applies to a lot more than Latinos—we are all individuals, not groups. No matter what group you claim membership in, or are assigned to by demographers, it’s just you (and maybe Diebold, but we’ll delay that issue too) in the voting booth.

And, on that note, if you’re in MA, CA, CO or any of the other states voting Tuesday, make sure you take the opportunity to tell the parties what you really think. If you’re unenrolled in Massachusetts, you can vote in either primary and (supposedly) you will not be enrolled in that party for doing so. (You used to have to fill out a card available at the polling station to re-register as unenrolled, but I have been assured that this isn’t necessary anymore because it caused the state a stupid amount of paperwork.)

I was scraping the wet snow off my car this morning, there was a bright white flash in the sky, like a spark. The boom a few seconds later confirmed that it was not a malfunctioning power line, as I’d feared, but thundersnow. There were a couple more booms as I scraped off the car, but once I was en route I couldn’t hear it anymore and was too preoccupied with plows trying to run me off the road to watch for sparks.

How cool is that? Almost cool enough to warrant being up before 6 AM.

The biggest disadvantage of a film SLR is the time it takes to get my pictures back. Nonetheless, here are some from Thanksgiving.

It was very cold, but very pretty at the Bronx Zoo on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

This shot of the leaves in Stony Brook, NY is one of my best in a long time.

It is with much relief, I’m sure, that you hear that I did not [die in a knitting accident][]. I don’t knit, I crochet. It’s much safer. (And I’ll have a recently-finished project to show you as soon as I remember to take a picture)

Nor, yet, did I die in a blogging accident, although I suppose this could be it. I’d say that if you don’t hear from me, you’ll know, but given my totally random posting schedule, you won’t really.

That is all.

not very good at pictures taken indoors. However, this one turned out great:

My dad sent me a much higher-res version of this this morning. This is the house I grew up in, taken a couple days ago:

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society explains that today is the day when the north pole of Uranus sees the sun for the first time in 42 years. That’s a long winter. I’ll stay in New England, thanks.

I’ve been doing a bunch of grungy work, and I set up a playlist with lots of holiday and Christmas music, including a recording from WCRB of the Holiday Pops concert I sang in a couple years ago. This is great—it’s fun music that I know and enjoyed singing, and is generally associated with good memories—with one exception.

I’m loud, and a high soprano, so in a couple places I can hear myself as part of the choir. My gut reaction to this is horror—I’m spoiling the choir!

A little more thought has me questioning that: is it bad that I can hear me, if I sound okay? Is it always bad to hear one voice out of a choir?

What about if I hear "me", but it’s actually 3-4 people who were matching my usual tone? Or who have a similar one?

What about on the super-high, super-loud end-of-song notes where I’m one of only a couple people singing that note?

I’m probably overreacting to this—the concert is generally awesome, and they wouldn’t have let me in the choir if I’d sucked that badly—but I do worry about these things.

The was a [story on All Things Considered][] as I was driving home last night about Facebook, from the host of "Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me". He started out by playing up his self-imposed lonership, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he "doesn’t get" social networking, but I am anyway. He just joined Facebook, found and "friended" some people he knew who were already there. He sort of glossed over the step where a friending miracle occurred, but claims to now have 900 "virtual friends"—which is the crux of my objection to his piece.

He was very careful to dismiss them as virtual, not actual friends and to explain that, even though they "aren’t really there", he’s glad that they "won’t really be there tomorrow, either". Unfortunately, he’s wrong about that. A huge proportion of my friends on Facebook (and Livejournal, and Orkut, and MySpace, and insert-other-social-networking-site-here) are real friends, whom I see in person frequently. A much larger proportion are old friends, whom I would otherwise not keep in touch with—high school friends, college friends, former coworkers and the like. The third group—whom I assume were most of this guy’s virtual friends, since he appeared to acquire a lot of friends very fast—are those people whom I’ve never met in person. Many of these, however, are just as close as many of the people I have met. There’s no magic friendship virus transmitted by an in-person meeting that makes someone suddenly more compatible, better to play Scrabble or trivia games with, or that makes their life more interesting for me to voyeuristically follow along with. They’re just as real as my "real" friends, and I don’t really understand why they wouldn’t be for this guy, unless he keeps them distant. Maybe that’s part of the generation gap that I can’t really see—my friends, regardless of whether I’ve met them in the flesh, do much of their correspondence online. I probably talk to my close friends more over email and instant messaging programs than I do in person, simply because there’s so much more time to talk. (I’d feel unprofessional taking a personal call at work, and I’d feel rude being on my cell phone while waiting in line at the supermarket, but I could IM that friend while waiting for a model to open, or text-message them while in line.)

This leads me to wonder how my generation will feel about truly virtual friends—bots, AIs, and the like. I’ve already seen one online community raise their own pet ‘bot, who can now participate in conversations just as well as any troll. Will we draw a line between friendly AIs and the fleshy friends we’ve never met? If the AIs can play Scrabble and talk about each other, I suspect the line will be thin.

(1) I can’t argue with him that "friended" is an annoying new word. I don’t see what was wrong with "befriended", but I know my predeliction for archaic words isn’t shared by most Facebook users or even most English speakers. I’m kind of surprised that he didn’t seem to realize that "friend"(2) had a verb form before social networking websites re-verbed it in a new, short, hipper(3) form.

(2) Also, "friend" is a really weird looking word. That ie does not belong, and is part of why friended looks weird. Weird is a weird word, too, for exactly the opposite reason.

(3) I bet the kids don’t say "hip" anymore. See note (1) above on my love for archaic words.

[story on All Things Considered]:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16703138