Evil

I listen to a number of Slate podcasts -- sports, culture, politics, money....  It's good quality general-interest discussion. And, when they get into political docs, it's a good exposure to center-left thinking.

Recently, it struck me that across several different podcasts, I'd hear a lot of references to "evil":
-- Walmart
-- Amazon
-- Uber
-- for-profit colleges
-- the SAE guys from Oklahoma singing racist songs

I'm certainly not defending the SAE racists, and the for-profit colleges seem to have engaged in at least some very bad practices. I can even see the case against the other businesses, even if I don't agree with it.

But here's the thing. I'm about 85% sure all the people saying these things would have been mocking George Bush for using the word "evil" to refer to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. What does that say?

Photos that give a truly different vew of reality

This is some of the coolest photography I've ever seen. It's interesting, and the writer spends a lot of time explaining what's behind it, but focusing on that is like focusing on the chemical processes behind a film photo or the signal processing in a digital camera. It's interesting, but that's secondary.

Instead, these are cool just because they draw me in. I've spend a lot of time with them, mostly with the waves. I haven't spent much of it thinking about what the scenes would look like 'normally'. They just look familiar, yet not, like a glimpse into a different reality

My first reaction was to want one of these cameras. Setting aside the $85,000 price tag, I probably couldn't produce anything like this anyway. I have plenty of photographic power now, but my skills, my vision... still a work in progress. And this is some serious vision, not just a piece of equipment.

Mars landing

We've all seen a lot from Curiosity, still photos and video. This video is being offered up by Slate as the "[b]est Mars landing video ever." They might be right.