Author: philg

Canon RF800/11 lens for eclipse totality

by philg

The Canon mirrorless 800/11 lens is light enough to pack for Eclipse 2026 in Spain (or Iceland if you feel extremely lucky with the weather).

How well does it work for photographing totality? The magnification seems about right for photographing the full corona. Here is the entire JPEG out of the camera at 1/250th of a second and ISO 400 (no need to spec the aperture because it is always f/11):

With an exposure of 1/13 of a second, the corona gets quite a bit larger:

The camera was set to autofocus and fixed at ISO 400. It was mounted on a cheap light Slik ballhead tripod that I happened to have available in Boston (we flew from KBED to KHUL (Houlton, Maine, the last stop in the U.S. for Eclipse 2024) and these pictures were taken from the ramp at KHUL).

It’s tough enough to aim at 800mm and I certainly wouldn’t want any higher magnification without a star-tracker camera mount.

I’m generally negative on trying to photograph the eclipse. The great images are nearly all stitched together laboriously in Photoshop based on multiple exposures, e.g., one long enough to capture some details in the moon itself and the farthest reaches of the corona and some short enough to show detail in the corona right near the surface of the sun. It’s better to leave the documenting to the nerds with infinite Photoshop patience and bulky equipment and park yourself with a great pair of binoculars to simply enjoy the show.

Here’s a Photoshop special from NASA in 2017 that looks great but bears almost no resemblance to what you can see with your eyes or with a camera in a single image:

Here’s the ultimate example of the “f/8 and be there” principle of photography (an experienced photographer’s technical-sounding advice to a beginner):

Kendall Rust (Facebook post) says she took it in Jonesboro, Arkansas and that this is straight out of the Canon camera, though it looks like a Photoshop wizard created it! CNN shows a remarkably similar image and credits it to Bobby Goddin:

Here’s yet another:

Unless you’re Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin, though, I’m going to stick with the “just enjoy totality” advice and take some images of things that happen around you just before and after totality. (What if you are Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin? My advice is that you abandon your hatred of government-created inequality and load up on Powerball tickets the next time the jackpot reaches $1 billion!) Here’s a quick iPhone picture of the pseudo sunset:

But if you’re going to ignore my advice, the Canon 800/11 seems like a great choice! It’s cheap, light, and does the job pretty well.

Related:

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Why isn’t ChatGPT inside our refrigerators?

by philg

Some years ago people envisioned a refrigerator that would track contents via RFID and alert a consumer to being low on milk or whatever. Making this a reality would have required cooperation among all of the companies that make packaged food (to add the RFID tags) so of course it never happened.

A human can inventory a fridge. Anything a human can do ChatGPT can do better, or so we’re told. If a fridge costs $15,000 (see Sub-Zero refrigerator with R600a owner’s review) why can’t it use a handful of inexpensive video cameras to look at everything going in and out in detail? It can make some good guesses about quantities, e.g., every time the eggs are removed there will be three fewer eggs remaining in the carton (refine this guess after some experience in a household as to when the carton stops being returned to the fridge (assume this means the egg count is zero)). The in-the-fridge AI could email with a list of expired stuff to throw out and a list of stuff to buy. It could email at 3 pm every day with a suggestion for what to cook for dinner given the ingredients present in the fridge, adding critical items via an Instacart order if approved.

“New AI-powered fridge technology generates recipes based on diet, food on its shelves” (Deplorable Fox) describes a Samsung fridge introduced at CES 2024, but it turns out to be not that smart:

The fridge’s technology also reportedly enables users to add expiration dates for items purchased, and the refrigerator will alert them once that expiration date is near.

Why is it the human’s job to read expiration dates off the packages? Why can’t the brilliant AI do that? Let’s give some credit to Samsung, though, for including an epic 32-inch TV on the $4500 fridge:

So the Samsung fridge is missing the Instacart ordering support, I think, as well as the automation of ferreting out expired food.

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How’s your eclipse viewing?

by philg

I had some worked planned in Austin, Texas over the weekend, which dovetailed nicely with the predicted eclipse and the generally clear skies in this dry part of the country.

(Another way to get into prime eclipse-viewing position is to be convicted of a crime and sent to prison. “New York inmates who claimed lockdown was religious violation will be able to see eclipse” (USA Today):

Inmates at a New York prison who sued the state corrections department over a planned lockdown during the Monday total solar eclipse will be able to see the celestial event after all.

The lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in upstate New York claimed that the lockdown, which would have prevented many statewide inmates from witnessing Monday’s solar eclipse, constituted a violation of religious rights.

“For many, this eclipse is a moment of monumental religious significance that cannot be overlooked or dismissed out of hand,” according to the lawsuit, which listed six plaintiffs of various religious faiths.

Corrections officials agreed Thursday to permit the plaintiffs – a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist, two practitioners of Santeria and an atheist – to view the eclipse in exchange for the lawsuit’s dismissal, department spokesman Thomas Mailey told USA TODAY.

Practitioners of Santeria also trace historical ties to chanting rituals performed during a solar eclipse. For atheists, an eclipse may not be a time for worship, but it’s still a time to marvel about the natural wonders of the universe, the lawsuit contended.

)

Nervous nail-biting began on Wednesday, April 3 based on the cloud forecast at https://eclipseweather.info/eclipse/. It appears that God loves Bernie Sanders and fellow progressives in and around Burlington, Vermont. God also loves folks in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Why does God hate Texans?

I’m testifying as a software expert witness in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday. Getting to EWR from Austin on Tuesday was $2,000 in economy. Flights to JFK were about $1200, with no difference in cost between economy and first class. But it would have been well worth it (to the client!) if the weather had been clear.

https://www.pivotalweather.com/eclipse2024/ is also an interesting site. The “NWS Blend” cloud cover forecast as of the evening of April 4 wasn’t promising for just west of Austin:

Pivotal displayed a tempting map of Vermont and Maine:

Based on these forecasts, I canceled the Austin flights and booked a trip into Boston. From there we departed to Houlton, Maine on the Canadian border (passport and blackface kit packed just in case). The terminal forecast from 8 pm Sunday:

KHUL 072340Z 0800/0824 35008KT P6SM SKC
FM081100 VRB03KT P6SM FEW150
FM081500 30007KT P6SM FEW250

The relevant part is that from 15Z (GMT; subtract 4 hours to get 11:00 am EDT) on the 8th the wind would be from magnetic 300 (NW) at 7 knots, better than 6 statute miles of visibility, and a few clouds at 25,000′ above the airport.

Who has plans for North Dakota or Greenland in 2044? Don’t want to wait that long? Looks like Spain is the smartest place to be (the weather in western Iceland is not reliable!) on August 12, 2026. Has inflation gotten so severe that hotels won’t let people book more than a few months in advance?

Readers: let’s hear your heroic eclipse-viewing tales!

Post-trip update: The weather was just as forecast. We had severe clear weather and a great view of totality as well as all phases of partial. The town organized a warm welcome for thousands of visitors.

All Labs Matter:

And a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon(ey):

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Florida asset protection for homestead, insurance, and annuities (why Democrats can’t sue Donald Trump into poverty)

by philg

On recent trips to the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, friends who are Democrats spoke gleefully about the prospect of Donald Trump being reduced to poverty via lawsuits. While this might be straightforward in California or Maskachusetts, stripping a Floridian of all of his/her/zir/their wealth is more challenging.

Florida law shields insurance policies and annuity contracts from creditors. Statute 222.13, for example:

Whenever any person residing in the state shall die leaving insurance on his or her life, the said insurance shall inure exclusively to the benefit of the person for whose use and benefit such insurance is designated in the policy, and the proceeds thereof shall be exempt from the claims of creditors of the insured unless the insurance policy or a valid assignment thereof provides otherwise. Notwithstanding the foregoing, whenever the insurance, by designation or otherwise, is payable to the insured or to the insured’s estate or to his or her executors, administrators, or assigns, the insurance proceeds shall become a part of the insured’s estate for all purposes and shall be administered by the personal representative of the estate of the insured in accordance with the probate laws of the state in like manner as other assets of the insured’s estate.

That would seem to protect only the family of an insured after his/her/zir/their death. But then there is 222.14:

Exemption of cash surrender value of life insurance policies and annuity contracts from legal process.—The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued upon the lives of citizens or residents of the state and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, upon whatever form, shall not in any case be liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is so insured or of any creditor of the person who is the beneficiary of such annuity contract, unless the insurance policy or annuity contract was effected for the benefit of such creditor.

Donald Trump could take an unlimited percentage of his wealth and stuff it into a whole life policy and then Florida state law might protect him from, for example, Democrats in New York.

How about 20-acre Mar-a-Lago, worth either $18 million or “hundreds of millions” depending on when you tuned into CNN. It looks like the house and central 1/2 acre of land (maybe this isn’t even the entire house?) can be protected from creditors as long as it it Donald Trump’s primary residence. This is based on the Florida Constitution:

Separately, for those who want to remember the good old Trump days… the U.S. Mint’s Donald Trump medal:

It looks as though they’ve captured the godlike powers that Democrats ascribe to Mr. Trump, e.g., immortality. Age might tarnish this medal, but never the Donald himself!

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The $27,321 MRI

by philg

How do Americans go bankrupt after seeking health care?

A friend’s child had some back pain after a fall. A hospital billed $27,321.50 for an MRI (it says “4 services” below, but it was really just one encounter with the MRI machine; some different body parts and contrast). That’s what an uninsured person (“a mark”) would have been chased for, eventually into bankruptcy if necessary. What’s the real price of this service? I.e., what does the hospital actually expect to get paid from a typical patient (insured either privately, via Medicaid, or via Medicare)? About $1,287:

(And, of course, the results were inconclusive, so the value of the $27,321 MRI was $0.)

Related:

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Progressives hate Jews more than Europeans did in the 1930s and 1940s?

by philg

Europeans, especially Germans, are famous for their Jew-hatred in the 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in the death camp system run by the Nazis and their collaborators. (Remember that the original German goal was a Jew-free Europe to be achieved via expulsion and expropriation, similar to what the Muslim/Arab nations achieved after 1948, and the death camp idea was conceived after expulsion proved impractical due to other countries’ refusal to accept Jews (to keep the Arabs happy, the British wouldn’t allow Jews expelled by the Germans to move to Mandatory Palestine, for example).)

Could it be that today’s progressives in the U.S. and Europe have outdone the 1930s/40s Europeans in Jew-hatred?

Let’s consider a German circa 1933 who was among the 44 percent who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its 25-point program (not too different from what today’s politicians promise). Getting 500,000 Jews out of Germany, whose population was 65 million at the time, would deliver a potential personal benefit to the non-Jewish German. The German who supported the Nazi plan to expel Jews might have felt that social cohesion in German society would be improved without a group whose value system was different or at least perceived as different. Such a German would not need to feel any personal animosity towards Jews in order to prefer having Christian Germans as neighbors rather than Jewish Germans. (Similar to today’s Americans who are opposed to low-skill immigration, especially from non-European nations; they might not hate Somalis or wish them any harm, but they don’t want to live in a neighborhood whose culture is imported from Somalia.)

Although only some of the progressives marching in London, New York, San Francisco, etc. will openly say that they want to “end Israel” or that they support the general Palestinian goal of destroying Israel (2021 poll, for example), support for the “Palestinian cause” inevitably is helpful to the majority of Palestinians who have a long-term goal of destroying the Zionist entity and establishing a river-to-the-sea Palestinian nation. In theory, some of the Jews in Israel could return to places where their ancestors lived, e.g., Russia, Poland, etc. But the largest group of Jews in Israel are from Arab/Muslim countries and there is no evidence that the ancestors of their former neighbors in Iran, Iraq, etc. want them back. So the progressives are where the Nazis were in the 1930s. They want to rid the former Ottoman-then-British-ruled areas of the Levant (present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt) of Jews, but aren’t particular about how the ridding is accomplished.

A March 29, 2024 example, “Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt Berkeley City Council meeting, Holocaust remembrance vote: ‘End Israel'” (deplorable Fox News):

Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted the City Council in Berkeley, California, on Tuesday, shouting “Zionist pigs!” and “End Israel!” during a meeting that included a vote on marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, video of the event shared by the Jewish Community Relations Council showed.

A sticker that a group was handing out on the Berkeley campus, March 14, 2024:

If progressives have the same goal as the Nazis how can they hate Jews more than the Nazis did? The progressives demonstrating in Washington, D.C. and Toronto don’t live in or near Israel and they have no plans to visit the new Palestinian state whose establishment they support (the new Hamas-ruled nation might not be as friendly to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community as the Queers for Palestine might want for a vacation destination). In other words, the progressive works for the destruction of Israel but would receive no personal benefit via the destruction of Israel. It’s an entirely unselfish Jew-hatred, unlike the Europeans of 90 years ago who had selfish reasons for wanting to live in a less diverse society. One could argue that this selfish desire was irrational (diversity is our strength, after all), but that isn’t relevant to the question of whether the Europeans were doing something that would have an effect on their own lives.

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Schools and Science intersect to form absenteeism

by philg

In order to protect 8-year-olds from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82, Science said that it made sense to close public schools for between 3 and 18 months, depending on the degree to which Democrats controlled a city/state. (Adults continued to mix freely at alcohol and marijuana stores, on Tinder, in quickly-reopened restaurants, etc.) This was almost certain to result in premature deaths many decades from now due to the correlation between years of education and life expectancy. However, it looks like the loss of years of education has continued beyond the 18 months that schools were closed in the Cities of the Righteous. From the New York Times, March 29, 2024:

The article is primarily based on “Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic” (American Enterprise Institute, January 31, 2024).

Lengthy school closures were primarily perpetrated by politicians and bureaucrats who claim that racial equity is their first priority, but it turns out that the school systems that suffered the worst long-term consequences were “majority nonwhite”:

Florida isn’t mentioned in the article, but if we dig into the underlying PDF report, it turns out that Governor DeSantis forcing teachers to return to work in the fall of 2020 was minimally helpful. Chronic absenteeism went from about 20 percent to about 31 percent in Deplorably Open Florida, very similar to Virtuously Closed New York’s numbers.

Maybe the answer is that even a few months of school closure communicates to about 10 percent of American families that school isn’t important?

Could we use Science to solve this created-by-Science problem? If half a year off school (Florida) was just as pernicious for attitudes toward attendance as 1.5 years off school (New York) maybe we should eliminate the summer break from school for at least two years to re-instill the habit of going to school every day. If unionized teachers refuse to work more than 185 days per year, we could either hire some summer-only teachers or distribute the summer days off more evenly around the calendar so that teachers worked the same number of days. We could have multiple three-week breaks during the year, for example.

Who else doesn’t bother showing up to school since coronapanic introduced them to the joys of being home M-F with the Xbox? Teachers! NYT:

Teachers typically receive paid sick days and a small number of personal days. Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly one in five public schoolteachers was absent 11 days or more, an increase from the previous year and from before the pandemic. In Michigan, roughly 15 percent of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10 percent in 2019, researchers found.

Related… from Science itself (the CDC), which said “yes” to booze and “no” to schools (and maybe the CDC itself was imbibing when it told everyone to wear cloth masks as PPE against an aerosol virus):

In the case the tweet gets memory-holed:

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New Maskachusetts program to make income inequality look more extreme than it is

by philg

I’m not sure how anyone comes up with a Gini coefficient of income inequality in the U.S. given that we have so many means-tested taxpayer-funded “not welfare” welfare programs. A person with zero income making the U.S. look extremely unequal may yet have the spending power to occupy a $60,000/year apartment, consume $30,000/year in health insurance, buy groceries, own a smartphone with service, and enjoy high-speed Internet at home via the new “free broadband” program.

There’s a new challenge in Maskachusetts… “Making Transit More Affordable: MBTA Board Approves Low-Income Fare Program to Benefit Riders in 170+ Communities” (MBTA.com):

… the MBTA today announced that the MBTA Board of Directors has unanimously approved the MBTA’s plan to implement a reduced fares program for riders with low-income. This program, which has been a topic of research and planning by the MBTA and many partners for the last decade, is an exciting improvement for fare equity.

The new program will provide riders who are aged 26-64, non-disabled, and have low income with reduced fares of approximately 50% off on all MBTA modes. Program participants will demonstrate eligibility via existing enrollment in programs with a cutoff of 200% of the federal poverty level (or lower).

The MBTA estimates the cost of the program to be approximately $52-62 million (including administrative costs, operating costs to meet induced demand, and fare revenue loss).

Without this program, a resident of Lockdown Land with 201% of the federal poverty level in income would be considered better off than someone with 200%. But with this program, the higher income person actually will have less spending power, assuming that he/she/ze/they ever uses public transit.

On net, any program likes this makes the quoted numbers on income inequality in the U.S. misleadingly extreme, which is good news, I suppose, for any political party that thrives by stoking envy.

Apropos of transportation, a friend of a friend’s hangar here in South Florida, complete with C1 Corvette and Nissan Fairlady Z (“Datsun” for Americans at the time):

And a photo of an almost-finished house that I snapped after departing from this airport:

(Jupiter Island, not to be confused with Jupiter; Intracoastal Waterway in the foreground and Atlantic Ocean in the background.)

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The skeptical journalists at NPR and the New York Times

by philg

A tweet that senior New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof deleted is vaguely viewable via The Google:

State-sponsored NPR and Kristof did not question the idea that 30,000 trucks were trying to get into Gaza right now. At a standard load of 80,000 lbs. per truck, this works out to 2.4 billion lbs. of aid in the backup or roughly 1,000 lbs. per resident of Gaza (2.3 million on October 7 and perhaps slightly larger now due to 65,000+ births per year).

These are the same folks whom we rely on to enlighten us regarding the crimes of Donald J. Trump, the best cloth masks for preventing infection by an aerosol virus, the merits of higher tax rates and larger government, etc.

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Could Elon Musk be right about reusing the truss steel that fell into Baltimore Harbor?

by philg

Elon speaks on a topic for which he has few apparent qualifications, the classic mark of a fool, April and otherwise:

An example of idiocy, as the “trust the experts” crowd says? The experts themselves disagree with Musk. A Florida-based bridge engineer:

(My comment on the above: Sell the old truss on eBay? “Dropped once. Never snapped.” (see also, re: World War II, “French Rifle for Sale: dropped once, never fired”.))

I wonder if both Elon Musk and the Florida engineer could be correct.

If you want to build something to last 50 years and have a big safety margin and you don’t care how long it takes to build, the civil engineer is right. What if it needs to last only 10 years (while an adjacent replacement is built using conventional techniques) and you’re willing to compromise on aesthetics? Maybe Elon is also right. Pick up and reuse as much of the old bridge as possible. Do a new structural analysis of the old design to see where doublers and other structural enhancements are needed given possible weakness of some of the elements. Instrument it with strain gauges everywhere. Then patch it up and let all of the self-driving truck companies pull heavy trailers onto it. Check the strain gauges. If everything is consistent with the analysis under a real-world load, open it to cars, but not heavy trucks. In the #AbundanceOfCaution department, maybe close the bridge if there are exceptional winds (1 or 2 days per year).

Given the fact that it is possible to drive around this bridge and the American hunger for perfect safety and security and the construction industry’s reluctance to do anything unconventional, my suspicion is that the Florida engineer is correct and Musk’s idea could never work in practice. But Musk’s idea might be a good one if there were more urgency regarding the rebuild, for example.

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