Your Eyes Suck at Blue...

The fetching lass at right is Traci, whose entire involvement with this post is as a demonstrater model – for an interesting visual phenomenon that has some real-world implications for how we store and display photographs.

The gist of this notion is that our eyes pick up very little detail in blue. More precisely, our spatial resolution in blue is far worse than it is in green (especially) or red. This means that an image's actual quality in blue isn't very important to our perception of it – and that means there's a compression opportunity.

Check out the all the details in this excellent article.

Snow Rollers...

These are a natural phenomenon I'd never heard of before – the rare “snow roller”. In this particular case they were spotted on the Idaho panhandle.

Check it out!

WTF?

First, absorb this statement concerning Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, the sole surviving pirate of the group that hijacked the Maersk Alabama:

"I think in this particular case, there's a grave question as to whether America was in violation of principles of truce in warfare on the high seas. This man seemed to come onto the Bainbridge under a flag of truce to negotiate. He was then captured. There is a question whether he is lawfully in American custody and serious questions as to whether he can be prosecuted because of his age."

What's your reaction to that?

If you said to yourself “Yeah, why are they prosecuting this poor guy?”, then please leave my website and move to somewhere like, say, France.

If you said to yourself “I need more ammunition and less lawyers”, well, then, you're in the right place.

So far as I'm concerned, the only mistake our military made with the surviving pirate is the word “surviving”.

More SEALs, fewer lawyers.

More direct, substantive and effective action, less arrogant and effete blathering.

Oh, I guess those two statements are more or less equivalent, aren't they?