Don't take my Kodachrome away

This NPR story on saving the American brand starts with Kodak, which "basically invented digital photography"**, but still didn't survive the transition to digital cameras.  



The answer to that is pretty simple, I think.  Even in Paul Simon's song, he had a Nikon camera -- "Kodak" is synonymous with "film", and not "camera" (except for gimmicks like the Kodak Disc), so that when film became obsolete, Kodak went with it.  Next, because of smartphones, the point-and-shoot camera market is dead, so unless a camera company has invested in making SLR's, they're SOL, too.

** Wikipedia summarizes where the research was.  Kodak had the tech, but not the branding. Looking at the market share section, we're in a Canon and Nikon world with a few fringe players.

Adventures in editing

A couple of items from the hard drive's vault.  There are lots of editorial mistakes in printed books.  I can't help but see them.  I don't hold it against professional editors for missing them; I myself am terrible at finding these sorts of things when I purposefully set out to find them.  It's just that every once in a while, I have to write down a particularly awkward passage.

Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable, standing alone as if in some version of the Indian rope trick, thin and black and straight as a plumb line dropping down from heaven - visible for only a few tall skyscrapers' worth of height, at most - and, given the wreckage they stood in, and the immensity of the volcano's bare rocky peak, as fragile-looking as if it were a single carbon nanotube filament, rather than a bundle of billions of them, and the strongest structure ever made.  "This is weird," Art said, feeling hollow and unsettled.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 99 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Not only does this have a horrible run-on sentence of simile and metaphor, Robinson appears to be asserting the reflexive property of space elevator cables, just in case we weren't sure.

She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Subarashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance - trying to function, as Art had put it, "as a sort of world court."

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 556-557 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Again with the reflexive comparisons, this time applied to world courts.  I suppose the World Court could have been trying to function like a kangaroo, or perhaps Margaret, Court.

Agora (2009)

Mercy asphyxiations for everyone!


Agora feels like a weird title for this film, maybe because the attention of the film itself is divided.  It's set in Alexandria during Hypatia's lifetime, and Hypatia is nominally our central character (); certainly, she's the only one I really care for.  But Hypatia's life is centered around the Library of Alexandria, not the Agora (if "agora" is even the right word for that space in a Roman Egyptian, if historically Hellenistic, city -- given that the filmmakers seem to have done their best to pass at least the Wikipedia test of the armchair factcheckers at home, like me), so I wonder why they didn't simply call the film "Hypatia".  Maybe "Agora" sounded cooler, or they deliberately wanted to draw our active attention to the religious and political conflict between pagans, jews, and christians. I'm voting for the latter, and Ashraf Barhom does a great job as the christian rabble-rouser, stealing every scene he's in.

Everyone wants to sell you Greek yogurt...

... presumably because it has a higher protein content than regular yogurt, and high protein is hot in American nutrition right now.  Cabot now sells a "Greek-style" yogurt.  Our store had the whole milk and lowfat vanilla bean varieties, so I tried the vanilla bean.  It's perfectly tasty, though they went heavy on the sugar (triple the amount in the regular lowfat) and vanilla flavor, but it has the taste and texture of vanilla pudding.  This-- this is not Greek yogurt.  So is this because they don't know how to make actual Greek yogurt, or because they want to differentiate themselves in a burgeoning "Greek-style" yogurt market, or...?

Hard Landing; Algis Budrys; 1993

This short novel / long novella (it doesn't quite reach 200 pages with big type and a relatively small page) has promise, but doesn't quite work.  The frame is that someone has learned of a government organization that investigates and covers up evidence of aliens, and we're reading their research... except for the parts that are from the perspective of the aliens and couldn't possibly be recorded by anyone.  By including chapters from the 3rd person present POV of the aliens, they end up not being very alien, and because their characters are rather flat (this is not Budrys's strength), these sections don't add much.  I think he needed to present the entire work as a collection of the researcher's notes and acquired evidence of the existence of aliens; those chapters, like "Transcribed Conversation; Albert Camus; William Henshaw:" work well and kept me reading.