Flying, Body Scanners and TSA Groping
I’m sure by now you’re probably aware of the new security regulations at airports that subject you to very intimate searches if you opt out of the body scanner that photographs you naked in the security line. The scanners and new search procedures are going into every airport in the country now.
For me personally, this is a deal breaker when it comes to flying. I won’t do either – the scan or the TSA sexual assault. I’d rather take the train or drive on vacation. I’m not sure what that means when it comes to flying for business trips, however. I feel a conscientious objector status coming on.
links for 2010-11-12
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The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand.
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The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned.
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A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior.
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A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.
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About Proust's Magic Lantern
links for 2010-11-11
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Photos with written captions from the depression and other eras.
Rosie Calls Re: GOP-Voting Gays to Michelangelo Signorile Show
Why it’s important to support equal marriage rights for gay people, even if you don’t want to get married yourself.
links for 2010-11-09
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An awesome comic that lead to the exact sort of misogynist fallout that the comic itself depicted. Point – you're proving it now!
Journalists vs. Pundits
I disagree with about 90% of what Meghan McCain believes in, but in general I think she’s a likable girl. I think part of that is because in the back of my head, I think she’s really a closeted liberal just waiting for the light bulb to go on so she can come out of the conservative closet. Today she’s pretty far off base, though.
Today on the Daily Beast she’s commenting on Keith Olbermann’s temporary suspension from MSNBC for making campaign donations. Her point there is that he shouldn’t have been suspended, because she doesn’t think he’s a journalist.
Olbermann needs to determine if he is a commentator or a journalist. It never really crossed my mind that he was considered a journalist by anyone, just like I never assumed that anyone considers Glenn Beck a journalist. And, for the record, neither does he. Both Beck and Bill O’Reilly (as recently as his appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher) said they fall on the commentary side of the network. This is the state of the media.
I’d like to call bullshit on this one. It is indeed true that Beck and O’Reilly ARE actually “commentators” or rather pundits, and that they are not journalists. Journalists tend to have a much better relationship with the facts than either of these guys. The professional goal for journalists is to uncover the truth – Beck and O’Reilly, on the other hand, are interested in pushing their point of view and have only a vague notion of what the truth might be, because they aren’t really interested in it.
But 90% of the viewing public doesn’t realize that Beck and O’Reilly are pundits rather than journalists. Most of them think that what they see on Fux “News” is actually news, provided to them by actual journalists. They don’t make any sort of distinction between journalists and “commentators.” In fact, that’s exactly what Beck and O’Reilly are counting on – that their “commentary” be mistaken for real, investigated, researched journalism.
So that line of “I never assumed that anyone considers Glenn Beck a journalist” is all kinds of bull. The vast majority of the viewing audience considers that to be so, Meghan, because they don’t know any better. And I’ll bet Beck and O’Reilly aren’t going to be thrilled that you’re musing about those sorts of distinctions publicly.
So Olbermann – journalist or pundit? Journalist, in my view. He sure does have an opinion, but it’s always in service to uncovering the truth. When he’s wrong, he corrects himself. He reports actual, factual news.
Made in America
One of the ways we can all help our economy is to look for products made in America, especially in the upcoming Christmas season. Here are some directories to get you started finding products made here in the United States by American workers.
a Directory of products made in the United States
links for 2010-11-05
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Rameau's Nephew, or the Second Satire (French: Le Neveu de Rameau ou La Satire seconde) is an imaginary philosophical conversation written by Denis Diderot, probably between 1761 and 1772.