Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

In order to impress the ladies I’ve decided it is time to get a flashy new car.  My friends at MIT tell me that minivans are the height of fashion these days.  So I want to get a 2004 Toyota Sienna.  I’ll either trade in my 1998 Sienna (LE, 42,000 miles, leather, sunroof, fresh from $2400 of service) or give it away to an interesting charity (like the last one).  I paid $500 over invoice for the last minivan but the Boston dealers want nearly list price for the new ones, which leads to abusive $40,000 price tags

Anyone know a good Toyota dealer or a region of the country where you don’t have to donate a kidney in order to get a Sienna?  Or must one wait for the big interest rate rise?

Alternatively, does anyone know whether or not the new 2005 Honda Odyssey will have openable windows in the middle like the Sienna?  If so, and Siennas remain hard to get, I might simply wait for the new Odyssey which will presumably be a slightly better vehicle.

[My specs:  XLE Limited, either 2WD or AWD is okay, Package #6 (HO; navigation system), glass breakage sensor on alarm, Arctic Frost Pearl exterior, stone leather interior, no financing required.]

[Update:  Honda has released a new minivan in Japan called the Elysion.  It seems to be based on the Accord and has a V6 engine.  Honda says “The sliding doors feature power windows that can open fully”.  It sure looks as though this could be the new Odyssey.  The old Odyssey just barely beat the new Sienna in the latest Car and Driver magazine.  So the redesigned one should be noticeably better and just as dog-friendly with its additional openable windows.]

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Back in Cambridge now with 1500 photos from Ecuador and Peru.  All of the photos are in Olympus Raw Format, which Adobe PhotoShop CS supposedly understands.  Thus a few questions for those readers who are PhotoShop experts….

What I really like to do with my images is

1) make several sizes of JPEG from each original

2) wrap each JPEG in a black border

3) write a “copyright philg@mit.edu” note into the bottom right corner of each photo (within the black border but not at a constant x-y pixel location due to some pictures being horizonals and some being verticals)

4) maybe build a Web page showing thumbnails linked to other sizes (though I would be willing to do this myself afterwards with a Perl script)

Can this be done with PhotoShop CS batch processing or must I stick with ImageMagick and the almost-10-years-old Perl script that I’ve been using on Unix?

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It is often reported that many Africans believe that AIDS was intentionally created by the CIA or some other American government agency with an animus toward black people.  My week in the Amazon jungle among the macaws has raised the idea that perhaps these folks are partially right.

The fundamental problem facing wildlife worldwide is habitat destruction due to the growth of human population.  Ecologists have figured out that creating a handful of tiny reserves doesn’t actually do much to prevent extinction but merely delays the inevitable.  Each tiny reserve functions like a land-bridge island and eventually most of the species go extinct.

Scientists claim that humans contracted HIV from monkeys.  Monkeys in Africa are endangered by a human population that was/is breeding out of control.  Fundamentally the only way for monkeys to save their habitat and therefore themselves is to kill as many humans as possible and prevent the remainder from breeding.  It would be evolutionarily adaptive for a wild animal in Africa to create a deadly virus and pass it to the humans who are destroying his habitat.

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The most powerful tools for conservationists in the Galapagos turn out to be Viagra and helicopter gunships.  Introduced goats consume all of the vegetation that formerly fed the giant tortoises.  Efforts at eradication were unsuccessful until the authorities brought dogs over from Switzerland to herd the goats into headlands whereupon they were shot from helicopters.  Island after island is being declared free of goats and the tortoises are coming back.

Sea cucumbers are highly sought after in traditional Chinese medicine because they supposedly help us older guys, uh, “perform”.  With Viagra as close as one’s inbox, however, perhaps the illegal harvesting of these animals will stop.

(Off the boat now, in Guayaquil and headed for Peru…)

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I have uploaded a few snapshots from Miami (South Beach), Ecuador, and the Galapagos to http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/pictures/.  Enjoy!

[Note:  all were taken with the Olympus E-1 digital camera system.]

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I borrowed an Olympus E-1 system for this trip.  This is an interesting camera idea in which new lenses have been designed specifically to fit the typically smallish digicam sensor area.  Here’s an example photo from this morning:  Otavalo Animal Market.

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Reflections from Hacienda Pensaqui, where Simon Bolivar was a guest several times…  El Libertador described democracy as “a government so sublime that it might more nearly benefit a republic of saints.”  He simultaneously wrote to a friend that “our [Latin] America can only be ruled through a well-managed shrewed despotism.”  Bolivar addded “Do not adopt the best system of government but the one that is most likely to succeed.”

 

Charles Darwin was in some measure of agreement with Bolivar.  In 1833 while in Argentina he wrote “[Paraguay] will have to learn, like every other South American state, that a republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honor.”

 

One wonders what Bolivar and Darwin would have done in Iraq.

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Greetings from beautiful Quito, Ecuador at an elevation of 9000′.  Quito has its advantages over the U.S., notably the ease of connecting to the Internet (cybercafe on every block) and the low prices (haircut and lunch in the nicest part of downtown for less than $10 total).  After a stopover in Miami, however, I’m not sure that one needs to leave the U.S. in order to visit Latin America.

In 24 hours in Miami, most of which was spent with my cousin Jennifer, I met people from Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, and probably a few more countries.  A trip onto the highways reveals the driving style of every Latin American country on display as every driver tends to follow the rules of whatever country he or she is from (sadly this results in an average of more than 10 serious accidents every day and a lot of snarled traffic).

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Due to the unavailability of a more qualified/desirable moderator I have been drafted to lead a session at Saturday’s BloggerCon.  Supposedly there will be nearly 100 people in a single room at Harvard Law School from 1:30-2:45 pm and we’re supposed to talk about the concentration of readership among a tiny handful of blogs.

An article by Clay Shirky is the original source for the session.

This assignment frightens me for a number of reasons.  First the original proposition does not seem sufficiently surprising.  We are all familiar with the fact that NBC has more viewers than the local public access channel.  Second I’m not sure what issue is amenable to a free-form unanchored discussion among 100 people but this one doesn’t seem like it.  That’s one of my stock refrains in the online community world, actually, is that the publisher needs to frame the discussion with articles or the whole site loses focus because nobody can figure out what the purpose is.

Anyone have an idea for breaking the participants up into groups of 10, having them do something for 10 minutes, and then report the results to the whole crowd?  I think many people there will have laptops and Harvard Law School has wireless access (MIT does too but visitors have to donate a kidney to the I/S department before they are authorized to use it).

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Thoughts for Tax Day:  A friend sent this article on various rules that restrict the U.S. government from investigating terrorists.  The implication of the article is that we’d all be better off if the CIA and the FBI could work unfettered.  Certainly the widows and orphans of September 11th would be better off.  Yet our government has a history of pouring tremendous amounts of effort in the wrong areas, often resulting in months or years of misery for innocent people.  One of the more humorous recent examples is Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s detainment at the Vancouver airport.  We want the Federales to be strong enough to hunt down Saudi terrorists in flight schools but sufficiently weak that we can throw them off our own backs when necessary.

[As noted on Prairie Home Companion on Saturday, if you’re sending a check to the IRS this year put a couple of extra stamps on the envelope because it’s going all the way to Iraq.]

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