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DxoMark has tested the new Nikon D810 and it has even better dynamic range than the D800. The ability to hold detail simultaneously in highlights and shadows is the main limitation of digital cameras (compared to film) and Canon continues to stagnate while Nikon and Sony pull ahead. Check out this comparison on DxOMark of Nikon, Sony, and Canon.

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I’m at the Mark Hopkins here in San Francisco cheerfully billing $15 per day in Internet fees to a consulting client (on top of $600/night for the room by the time California taxes are added in?). At 9 pm yesterday the Speakeasy Speed Test measured the connection at between 0.3 and 0.5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. This morning it is a symmetrical 25 Mbps. From this can we conclude that nearly every guest is trying to stream Netflix and similar? Or maybe that the hotel just has a single 25/25 line?

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Folks:

Back in 2013, I wrote a post with an end-of-year charity idea of donating to Kids on Computers (the Gittes Family Lab is now up in running in Oaxaca as a result of my own donation (at least one person follows the advice in my blog!)). The most important thing that happened as a result of that posting was that a reader, Javier Henderson, stepped up to contribute his decades of network engineering experience as well as considerable organizational talents.

This posting is to remind readers that Kids on Computers is a useful resource when you’re trying to find a use for an unneeded laptop (e.g., if Windows 8 has inspired you to buy a MacBook). Also that the group is heading to Morocco in October and you might want to take your computer (and Arabic language?) skills there with them.

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A friend in the healthcare biz told me that insurers have found a way around the Obamacare requirement that customers be welcomed despite preexisting conditions. The government left insurance companies and doctors the freedom of association. For conditions that are expensive to treat the insurance company will limit reimbursement to a handful of specialists with inconvenient locations, hours, and availability.

If it takes more than a year in Massachusetts to see a primary care doctor for a regular exam (see the end of my Bad Pharma review), just imagine how long it will take expensive-to-treat patients who choose one of these carefully crafted plans to see the specialist who can prescribe them a $100,000 per year medication!

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If you share a love of Garry Winogrand’s work (see this blog posting and this photo.net book review), you’ll probably enjoy seeing the work of his Chicago-based doppelganger: Vivian Maier (1926-2009). See her online portfolios, for example, and this three-minute BBC video.

[Separately, it seems odd that the folks trying to make money out of this woman’s work by selling prints are doing them in a 16×20-inch size (link). A lot of street photography seems to work better if printed smaller, especially if originated with a 35mm film camera.]

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A friend’s daughter is doing some research on divorce, custody, and child support litigation. Today I took her over to the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court in East Cambridge so that she could see what was happening. It turned out that we were there on “Department of Revenue (DOR) Day” where the Commonwealth itself sues deadbeat dads on behalf of mothers who had previously been successful custody and child support plaintiffs but hadn’t received the amounts ordered. This saves the moms from having to retain and pay attorneys; the lawsuits are handled by taxpayer-funded attorneys.

The first guy to appear was, not to put too fine a point on it, a genuine bum. He appeared to be in his 50s, with graying hair, shabby clothing, and a physically disabled posture that might have been due to the fact that he was in handcuffs and ankle chains. He had last worked at a biotech company in Massachusetts back in 2010, but it wasn’t clear in what role. He paid child support to a trim, well-dressed plaintiff while he was working and continued to pay child support while collecting unemployment. When that ran out and he still hadn’t found a job he fled to Idaho and worked as a caretaker in exchange for a free place to sleep. “How did you eat?” asked the judge. “Food stamps,” he replied. During this period he called the three children (current ages: 17, 20, and 22 (in Massachusetts it is possible to collect child support for children until they turn 23)) but didn’t send any money to their mother. “Where are you living now?” With his mom in Billerica, it turned out. The DOR attorney railed against this loser who had “abandoned his responsibilities” and “refused to work” and asked that he be imprisoned for 60 days and fined $5000 on top of the $41,000 that he owed his former plaintiff and the money that he continued to owe for the two adults and one minor child. Throughout the proceeding the chained deadbeat was surrounded by five armed sheriffs, each of whom was probably costing the taxpayer $250,000 per year (salary, benefits, pension, etc.). The judge asked him a few questions about the efforts he was making to get a job, e.g., “How many resumes have you sent out?” then lectured him on how it was obvious that he could and should get a job. She ordered that he be imprisoned for 30 days and fined $2000. The deadbeat did not seem surprised by or object to this. The five sheriffs added some additional shackles to his wrists and ankles, then escorted him out.

The second guy was apparently at an earlier stage of the process because he was not in chains. His plaintiff did not appear because, she had written to say, driving made her “anxious”. The subject of the child support obligation was an adult (over 18 but younger than 23). This child lived full time with the father, but the plaintiff mother still had a child support order in place from when the child lived with her at least part-time. It seemed that a second woman had been unwise enough to select this man as the father of her children and he had two preteen girls living at home with him and, due to his lack of employment, there was not enough money to pay the mother of the adult child as well as put food on the table for the adult child (living with him) and the two minor girls. He did not ask for the “adult-child” support to be eliminated going forward, on the grounds that the adult lived with him, but only for it to be reduced and for the judge to order a gradual payment plan for the arrears (more than $10,000). He received a stern lecture on how it should be straightforward for him to find a job and then was allowed to leave without handcuffs.

Based on what we heard and saw, for these guys to get a job, America’s employers would have to

1. hire all 9.5 million currently unemployed people
2. entice another 6 percent of the population back into the workforce so that the labor force participation rate was up towards a historic high
3. fund $1 trillion in unsuccessful robotics research
4. be under the influence of both drugs and alcohol on the day that these two prize specimens came in for their interviews

The human tragedy aspect of the cases was first and foremost in my mind but after we were out of the courthouse, I thought “Hey, wait a minute. If you are a long-term unemployed person one government agency will tell you that this situation could not have been avoided, it is not your fault in any way, and here are some tax dollars so that you can make ends meet. But if the same long-term unemployed person owes child support, even he is at the extreme end of the spectrum of demonstrably unemployable, employees of the same government but at a different agency will tell him that he could easily get off his ass and earn enough money to support himself plus have enough left over to pay $41,000, after taxes, to the person who sued him two decades ago.”

[Separately, we went to the records department and sampled some cases. Here are two parents in the midst of a divorce lawsuit coordinating the exchange of a three-year-old via text message:

(background: Ivy League graduate wife sued husband after four years of marriage, ultimately winning a free house, roughly half of her attorney’s fees (despite a prenuptial agreement that said each side would pay his or her own), 100% of the child’s expenses, including a full-time nanny, paid by husband, $50,000 per year in taxable alimony, and nearly $94,000 per year in tax-free child support through the toddler’s 23rd birthday (the plaintiff would take care of said child, with the assistance of the nanny, for slightly more than half time))]

Related: Divorce in Denmark (the scenes that played out in front of us in Middlesex County probably would not have happened in Denmark because when a parent cannot pay the $2200/year minimum child support the government steps in to pay it without expecting to be paid back, a source of irritation to middle-class taxpayers; the text message exchange also might not have happened due to the fact that the maximum child support obtainable is about $8000 per year)

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Check out www.limitless-horizons.org and (FlightAware) to track Matt Guthmiller in his single-engine Bonanza on his final leg home (16 hours from Kona to San Diego). [See my earlier posting on this project for more background.]

Separately, it looks as though my idea (in that original posting) of a record-breaking around-the-world trip in an airplane that can do the job effortlessly has been adopted. A 31-year-old woman named “Amelia Rose Earhart” took a Pilatus PC-12 NG and a co-pilot and, on July 11, 2014 became the “youngest female ever to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engine airplane.” (And perhaps the only one to do yoga in the back while on the trip.) Keep in mind that the “single engine” is a $1 million Canadian-built Pratt and Whitney turbine and that this pressurized airplane, fully equipped with autopilot and lavatory, can climb up to 30,000′, crack any ice off its wings, melt ice off the prop and windshields, etc. It is also a single-pilot aircraft and Earhart’s Web site says that her co-pilot had more than 4,500 hours of experience in the PC-12. I.e., the trip could have been done with her relaxing in the back for the entire time. See Wikipedia for more about the modern-day Amelia Earhart and the Pilatus factory site to learn more about the Swiss-made PC-12. Also check out the Wikipedia entry on Richarda Morrow-Tait, who flew around the world at age 25 in 1948 and had a little more fun with her navigator, apparently, than we typically have with our Garmins. It is unclear how to square Earhart’s claim about youngest female circumnavigator with Morrow-Tait’s documented achievement, especially when Morrow-Tait did the trip without another pilot on board.

[Separately, note that Pilatus is the company whose engineering and production prowess, combined with the superior efficiency of Swiss aviation regulators, put Beechcraft, founded in Kansas in 1932, into bankruptcy in 2012. The Beechcraft King Air could not compete with the PC-12. The Beechcraft military trainers could not compete with the Pilatus PC-7 , PC-9, and PC-21 (though Beech licensed the Swiss design and produced a plane called the “Texan II” for the U.S. military to buy at a substantial markup).]

Update: He made it! We need to give him a hero’s welcome when he returns to East Coast Aero Club.

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I’m reading The Silkworm by J.K. Rowling under the pen name of “Robert Galbraith” (I was not a fan of the Harry Potter books and thought that I should give the world’s most successful writer a second try). The plot concerns a private detective who takes a break from his usual work of helping women turn their marriages into cash by searching for a missing writer: “Strike had recently helped several wealthy young women rid themselves of City husbands who had become much less attractive to them since the financial crash. There was something appealing about restoring a husband to a wife, for a change.” The prose style can be peculiar: “And by the same power of will that in the army had enabled him to fall instantly asleep on bare concrete, on rocky ground, on lumpy camp beds that squeaked rusty complaints about his bulk whenever he moved, he slid smoothly into sleep like a warship sliding out on dark water.”

So far the paragraph that has struck me the most is this one, about what it would mean to have a demanding job in England: “Robin was twisting her engagement ring on her finger, torn between her desire to follow Matt and persuade him she had done nothing wrong and anger that any such persuasion should be required. The demands of his job came first, always; she had never known him to apologize for late hours, for jobs that took him to the far side of London and brought him home at eight o’clock at night.” [emphasis added]

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Folks:

We’re hosting a Glastonbury Festival party at our apartment tomorrow evening (music by Kasabian, Dolly Parton, Massive Attack, et al; “hog roast” and Strongbow cider, which the beer expert at the Fresh Pond liquor store said is better than the American brands despite being one third the price). The photos that I want to show are in a Google Plus directory so I thought that it would be simple to show them on a Samsung “Smart TV” (perhaps it is a bad sign when a product includes the word “smart” as part of its name). As soon as I turned the TV on, however, the software updated itself and removed the Picasa app that can grab photos from Google Plus. I thought “no problem; I will use Chromecast from my Android phone.” The Google “Photos” app sort of works except that it doesn’t tie in with the TV remote for going to the next slide and, more distressing, the pictures are terrible quality (low res? oversharpened?). So I’ve reverted to exported JPEGs 1920 pixels wide to a USB stick and plugging that into the back of the TV.

Am I missing something simple? Can it be that Google Chromecast is incapable of doing this with reasonable image quality?

Thanks in advance.

[Update: pork roasting photo gallery; the 14.4 lbs. was all consumed by 9 pm so I think we can declare victory on the roasting front.]

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Back in March I wrote a post with some details about former Obama Administration official Peter Orszag, whose ex-wife had hoped to tap him for $264,000 per year in tax-free child support revenue. Backstory: following a brief marriage, about 10 years ago, Cameron Kennedy got a luxurious house and a few million dollars in cash by suing Orszag for divorce and, as part of settling that lawsuit, signed an agreement that they would split the children’s expenses going forward (she may have earned more than he did at the time, though now he is cashing in from our revolving door system between government and finance). The judge has ruled and it seems that Cameron Kennedy will get two free kids, with the father paying for all of their private school tuition, summer camps, medical expenses, and extracurricular activities. But she won’t be able to turn a cash profit on the children. In fact she will have to provide them with at least some meals on at least half of the days of the year, paying for the food out of her $350,000 per year income, mostly from working at McKinsey. (She also has to give them a place to sleep, but I am pretty sure that is in a house that got as part of her divorce lawsuit.) She has to pay her own attorney’s fees, according to the Washington Post. And the judge refused to accept the idea that $350,00/year was right at the poverty line:

“Ms. Kennedy is also a high-earning party, capable of providing a more than comfortable lifestyle and many advantages for her children, even in the absence of any assistance from Mr. Orszag,” the court ruled Thursday.

More: Read the Kennedy Decision (64 pages)

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