September 1st is Diabetes Art Day, a fabulous idea by Lee Ann Thill at The Butter Compartment. Below are photographs of my contribution, Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin, a temporary mixed-media installation. I always knew that I would use those fifty or so insulin vials for an art project, but I needed a little nudge to translate the raw materials into a finished project. (Thanks, Lee Ann!)
I collected the vials over 26 months of “hormone replacement therapy.” The insulin they contained influences so many choices in my life, not the least of which is picking which food to eat. Low carb. Sugar-free. Sugar substitute. Simple sugar. High fiber. Original, decadent, carb-heavy. Whatever it may be, insulin supports the choice.
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #1 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #2 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #3 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #4 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #5 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #6 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #7 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #8 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #9 (2010)
Basal Insulin, Bolus Insulin #10 (2010)
Humalog® and the Lilly logo are trademarks of Eli Lilly. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
File formats come, and file formats go. Strike that last part. File formats never really go away. People just stop storing data in them, and vendors stop supporting the formats in their products. Eventually the data is just a bunch of bits that nobody really cares about. (At least that’s how I feel about most of the papers that I wrote in college.)
While formats never really retire*, there’s a steady stream of rookies. Sometimes a format totally destroys the competition: PDF, JPEG, GIF, etc. (Being first helps, as does being in the right place at the right time.) Other times a new file format results from an actual deficiency for one community in an existing family of widely-used formats. Those formats — such as DNG, JPEG 2000, etc. — have rather more difficulty overcoming the inertia of the majority of data users’ workflows despite their superior qualities.
For example, DNG never really took off the way I had hoped. My Nikon D300’s RAW file is still NEF. As are all Nikon RAW files. And I’m not convinced that there are enough applications that support DNG in my workflow (beyond the obvious Adobe applications) for me to consider converting my .nef files to DNG on import. It’s a funny chicken and egg problem.
Add to this menagerie two new video file formats.
I don’t have a lot of video experience. Still photography was always more accessible and interesting to me, though I have to confess that I’ve been greatly enjoying editing the video from our trip to Australia. iMovie is surprisingly good at what it does, and the video coming out of my point-and-shoot camera is acceptable for reminiscing. I still like the story that a still photograph can tell, but video fits that niche that I always used to fill with babbling during my slide shows.
Anyway, I digress.
I don’t have a lot of video file format experience. Undoubtedly it’s more complicated than I know, but the sense I got was that there are a few widely used file formats — AVI, MPEG, Quicktime — with a variety of audio and video compression codecs, chroma subsampling settings, and bit depths thrown in to complicate what would otherwise be a very simple landscape.
Enter the consumer HD video revolution — partly thanks to a new generation of dSLR cameras — and it seems like we’re on the cusp of another explosion of proprietary file formats. Add in the demands of professional workflows, and you get two new file formats.
Just as it did with DNG for still cameras, Adobe is proposing CinemaDNG as an open file format for storing RAW files from digital video cameras.
Storing, retrieving, and manipulating the RAW pixels in a video frame only goes so far. Eventually those frames are edited, cut and combined with audio tracks. Those frames and audio are mixed with other assets, such as subtitles, alternate audio tracks, time codes, and other metadata. Finally all of these assets are combined with a desired output intent to create a digital or film copy for cinema projection, a television broadcast, a DVD, streaming video, etc.
The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (ETC) has worked with industry players to develop an interoperable master format (IMF) that encapsulates audio, video, and effects assets together with metadata and output profiles into a package. Basically IMF is the file-level portion of a digital asset management (DAM) solution.
The details of this encapsulating master format are quite numerous, but the following might be of interest to people who need to contemplate support for reading and writing the imagery portions of IMF. The format is evolving, but as of version 0.82a these were true.
IMF is pretty permissive with respect to image dimensions, audio sampling frequencies, bit depths, and so on. There are a lot of “shoulds” in the spec.
“Essence files” contain the video and audio assets.
Essence files must use ISO or SMPTE standard formats. That’s good news. I hate the reinvention of the wheel.
Frame rates must be constant.
There are some required standard and nonstandard resolutions and frame rates.
Non-1:1 pixel aspect ratios are OK.
8- and 10-bit samples must be supported, and I/O drivers should support 12- and 16-bit imagery, too.
4:4:4 and 4:2:2 chroma sampling is allowed.
RGB-709, YCbCr-709, YCbCr-601, and CIE XYZ are supported color spaces.
3-D/stereoscopic imagery must be supported.
Compression is recommended, especially visually/perceptually lossless methods (but not necessarily mathematically reversible).
Compression must be industry standard and open. In fact, it probably should look a lot like JPEG-2000.
Uncompressed data will look a lot like DPX or SMPTE 384M.
Once again this is just the tip of the iceberg of the details are in the draft document. If you like these or don’t agree with them or if you have other suggestions — such as specifying a particular set of options and metadata settings as a “baseline” — do download the spec yourself and comment.
* — For an example of a moribund format, consider PICT from Apple.
We’ve been back for a while, and I’m occasionally reminded that I haven’t posted all of the photographs from our trip. Here they are! Ironically, I got sidetracked by the process of selecting and printing photographs, some of them you can see here. Almost all of those photos are in a Flickr collection.
Short on time? View the abridged set of 130+ photographs.
As an overview, here’s a day-by-day view of our trip:
Tomorrow I’m going out to northwestern Mass. to restart my photography project. I’m heading NW so that I can take in an exhibit on Picasso and Degas at the Clark in Williamstown, but it seemed like a perfect time to restart a long dormant photo-project. First up: Rowe, a town with a population of 351 in the 2000 census. That seems auspicious for a project that involves photographing all 351 towns and cities in the Commonwealth.
And I’m thinking about rejoining my former camera club when it starts up in a few weeks.
In honor of the company meeting earlier this morning, here are some of the things I’ve learned and thoughts I’ve had this morning . . . bullet point style:
I can’t decide whether Arcade Fire’s new album, “Suburbs,” is completely, utterly pretentious and lacking in fun, or if that’s me I’m thinking about.
The second week of August may be the second best commuting week of the year. It has felt like the week between Christmas and New Years.
The reception areas of Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) are under construction, and the architects created a display of the materials they’re using. I like that a lot.
Phlebotomists, who specialize in doing something inherently painful with a minimum amount of discomfort, aren’t paid well enough. I’ve been poked many times, and the ones who do it well really are amazing.
The NWH lab dedicated to drawing blood is extremely quick. It’s where I prefer to go. It opens at 8:30.
At 7:00 the main hospital lab claimed a 30 minute wait, but it was really an hour-long wait for 60 seconds of actual medical procedures.
Some days I’m really eager to get to work and finish up what I was working on the day before. Today was one of those days.
In early April, Sports Illustrated predicted the Chicago Cubs would finish second in the NL Central, with a record of 81-81. To make that happen, the Cubs will have to go 33-15 for the rest of the season. The Cubs also have an estimated payroll of $137M for the season, which is $100M more than the team one behind them, the Pittsburgh Pirates. (The Pirates!)
I should have brought a book with me to the lab. I just finished reading about platypuses and have started reading about Romantic science.
I just recently upgraded from Adobe Photoshop CS to Photoshop CS5. As you might imagine, a lot has changed in four major releases over the last seven years. I know I should have upgraded sooner . . . blah blah blah.
After installing CS5 over the weekend, I gave it a quick go and was immediately pleased. Tonight I used it a bit more, and now I’m even happier. Who knows how many of these are new to CS5? Not me. Anyway, here are ten things I really like:
The “Adjustments” panel — I can work on multiple layers without being locked into editing one layer at a time. This makes me sooooo happy.
Photo filters — Yeah, so they’re not real photo filters, since they don’t work on color spectra. But who cares? It’s 2010, not 2020. At least now I can easily make a warming filter.
Adjustment presets — A lot of the curve shapes and levels adjustments are now precooked. Just select the right one from the drop-down list.
Nicer panels — The way to move around and resize panels/palettes is just like I’d expect.
More adjustments shiz — Okay, I guess I really like the adjustment layer improvements, because I honestly can’t remember what I was going to say here. I think it might have had something to do with being able to browse the precooked adjustments. Maybe? I don’t know.
New adjustment layers — Easy to get to, right there next to the adjustments I want to make.
Tabs — Tabs for files . . . Up there on the top, right where they belong.
Action menus — The context menus appear on each panel, and the Photoshop engineers have located most of the common actions in the action menus, making them easier to find.
Workspace browser — I like very much that Adobe is customizing the Photoshop experience for various communities via workspace. Click a button and you’ve changed your Photoshop experience. The panels move around, and (perhaps controversially) the menus change. I’ve saved my panel configuration as my own workspace.
Mini Bridge — Do I like this or don’t I? I’ve never used Bridge effectively before. I used the Mini Bridge tonight to find and load a file; it seemed alright.
And of course there’s stuff you can’t see here, stuff buried in the menus. Some of them are brand new features to CS5, and some — like many of the items listed above — are only new to me.
I can’t wait to see what else is new and how it will continue to improve my retouching and editing workflow.
* — A couple years ago I was part of the Photoshop CS4 beta. As part of that, I used the Photomerge feature to create some panoramas from multiple photographs. I loved it then, and I’m excited to try it out with some photos from Australia. Stay tuned.
I have much more to say about the first of them — “Contact” tells about the most recent (and probably last) “first encounter” between an Indigenous Australian group and white Australians in 1964 — but I need to mull it over some more. While I do, you can get the backstory from the London Sunday Times.
“Salt,” another Australian documentary from 2009, shows the creative process of photographer Murray Fredericks. Briefly: He bikes to the center of Lake Eyre, a vast, flat, (mostly) dry lake in South Australia; he sets up camp and a couple of cameras; he waits for the light to be just right; and then he makes a few 8×10″ film exposures. “Just right” depends on the weather and — it would seem — Fredericks’ mood. Sometimes the horizon is a crisp cut between sky and land, other times a mirror. Occasionally the horizon dissolves into nothing more than just another subtle tone between land and sky.
The photographs from his years of trips to the desert lake end the documentary, and they are truly spectacular landscapes. Many of them are on his website, which is definitely worth a look. For even more of his work, see the article at Mecha Fushigi. Here are a couple you can enjoy now:
“Whole tribes of plants which first seem familiar prove on a nearer examination, total strangers . . and not only the species that present themselves are new, but most of the genera, and even natural orders.” — Botanist Sir James Smith (1759-1828) quoted in Ann Moyal’s Platypus (2001, Allen & Unwin)
Indeed, that pretty much sums up Australia . . and not only the plants.
Lisa and I are not birders. We like birds — mostly the pretty or unusual ones — and we frequently take snapshots of the birds we see while traveling. But we don’t have “life lists” of birds that we’ve seen. Nor do we make trips to places to see or photograph birds. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; it’s just not our thing.
So it was a little surprising that sometime during the first week we found ourselves keeping a list of the birds that we saw. And we photographed as many of the varieties that we could see, too. (Though that was mostly so we could identify the bird once we got back to our field guide.) We’re still not birders, but I think we both know a whole lot more about birds than we did a couple months ago.
We identified close to 60 different species of birds in the wild, and there are a few that we photographed which we still haven’t been able to identify. We also visited a few zoos where we saw many more birds, beautiful and strange with voices that didn’t seem to fit the body making them.
You can see a whole bunch of these birds on Flickr. Some of them will never make National Geographic or Audubon, but we hope you’ll take a gander anyway.
“Hey, Diabetes. Imma let you finish in a minute, but I just wanna say that Jeff has the most epic afterwork ride planned for tonight. So If you could just keep up, that would be the right thing to do. Peace.”
As we were preparing for our trip, we kept reading about all of the ways that we could die in Australia. Little did we know how many things could kill us there. Fortunately for us and the other foreign tourists, Australia is full of helpful warning signs.
I’ve had some more time to contemplate yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France. We had some conversations about it at work, Facebook and Twitter; and I had a bit of a think on my ride this afternoon. (There were no “penalty laps” for me today, by the way.) Some of those people are probably reading this, and I invite them (and everyone else) to leave a comment.
Former carpool buddy Steve noted that if an auto racer has a mechanical problem, they don’t stop the race. True indeed. I do think the comparison falls apart when you consider that the car really is the thing that does all the work. Sure, it has to be driven well; but the car is the thing that’s tuned, and it’s the sine qua none of auto racing. Bikes matter in the Tour de France, of course; but the UCI tries to keep everything fair-ish between riders.
Meanwhile, all-around badass Alex simply says, “Cry me a river.” He has some interesting points. As an oh-so-close-to-elite runner — seriously, he ran a 2:27 Boston Marathon — I take what he says seriously from an athlete’s perspective, and he likes to think about the social aspects of sport. He professes great respect for the Tour and its riders, and I believe he’s sincere. His main points are thus:
If a runner trips, no one waits. Why should cycling be any different?
Europeans like to inject unnecessary ambiguity and drama into sporting events. Every World Cup or European championship has some event that lets the losing team argue that it should have won, that they lost because of bad officiating or bad luck. And these “unwritten rules” of cycling are just another way of perpetuating an inter-European or “us vs. them” rivalry and means never having to acknowledge someone else is better.
The structure of Grand Tour cycling teams is very 19th century, with expectations of deferring to your superiors and having some competitors there to serve team leaders.
All I can do is agree with Alex on these observations, but I don’t really think that some of them apply very much to cycling, which is a different kind of animal than running or footie. Running is all and only about pure talent: Anyone can do it; you don’t need much more than innate ability, a bit of tactics and self-awareness, and the time to train; and you can pretty easily rank people objectively on time over a given distance. These are some of the reasons that I love running almost as much as cycling.
But you also can’t really have a running race like the Tour de France, where you compete for 4-6 hours every day for three weeks. (I guess that means cycling is easier than running. :^) And if you’re going to have such a race, you need helpers for the people who can actually win it. And some of them have to be riders without a chance of winning the Tour. Alright, you could just have the 20 strongest cyclists in the world go out and ride every man for himself for 23 days, but it would be a very, very boring race. No amazing sprinters would show up. No mountain specialists either. It would be everybody getting their asses handed to them by two or three guys over and over again. Yawn.
What does all this have to do with Alberto Contador attacking Andy Schleck? Well, I can definitely see where people are coming from when they say, as Ryder Hesjdal did yesterday, “Hey, that’s bicycle racing.” If that’s how you want to race, it’s true that there are no actual rules against it. And I can see how if you’re inclined to see all sports events as a battle of wills and skills between completely autonomous actors that’s also seasoned by both good and bad luck, it would make sense that you’d see no problem whatsoever in what Contador did yesterday. I get that.
But cycling is a team sport that mixes contenders and helpers, however elitist or class-suffused that strikes you. And if that’s the way it’s going to be, there are consequences to crossing certain lines, even if they’re fuzzy, unwritten, nonbinding, “gentlemanly,” quaint lines. Crossing those lines — like attacking in the feed zone or trying take the lead on the final day — will alienate you from the public and your fellow riders, the people who you might need to help you control the pace someday or chase down a shared rival.
So was it wrong? Not in any kind of absolute right and wrong. It’s not in the same class as doping or cheating or knocking over a rival. Was it a smart move for Contador in the stage? We’ll see. Everyone says he’s a better time-trialist than Schleck and could certainly have taken the lead on the second to last day; but that’s cutting it a little close, to be sure. Frankly, I’m not sure that Schleck could have taken all that much time yesterday. Given the time Contador gained on the downhill, he might not have lost any time after the attack at all. Then again, maybe he would have, and they were only 31 seconds apart at the start of the day. We’ll never know the true impact.
(My objection yesterday was that Contador’s attack was a weaker rider taking advantage of a stronger rider’s technical malfunction to get an unfair advantage. I still feel that way, but since we can’t know what would have happened if Schleck’s initial attack would have succeeded, I’m going to just say that it’s more up in the air and debatable than I had suggested.)
But in the long run, it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what Contador and Schleck’s peers think. If there are enough riders who feel like Hesjdal, then maybe Contador hasn’t done anything wrong. But if there are more riders like Armstrong who look at this with some suspicion or hostility, then maybe it was a chump move in the end.
First off, I went for my first ride since before we left for Australia. I know, it’s been a while. I have been running, but I think I was rather not looking forward to how slow I was going to be getting back in the saddle after a six week hiatus. It was a long enough time that I forgot a key turn on my new training route and had to take an extra penalty lap around the center of Upton. I was, as you might suspect, rather slower than before. But it wasn’t a total debacle, and my core muscles are still in pretty good shape. So yay for that! Tomorrow is another day, and the season isn’t even half over yet — well, maybe it’s about half over.
What I really want to do is to discuss today’s stage 15 of the Tour de France. Yes, it’s the one where Alberto Contador attacks Andy Schleck, the leader of the Tour, while he has mechanical issues. It was the subject of some “let’s try not to spoil the stage for Jeff, who has TiVo’d it” discussion at the office today, a spirited exchange between the Versus TV commentators, and a whole lot of 140-characters-or-fewer musings and arguments on Twitter.
I’ll give you my view, but first watch this:
Contador passes Schleck to take the yellow jersey. Schleck rides with anger and promises revenge.
The first 45 seconds show all the important events, beginning with Andy Schleck attacking and almost immediately having a bad shift that (all but certainly) jams his chain between the front derailleur and the chainring, forcing him to dismount. While he’s slowing, he’s caught by Alexei Vinoukorov, the Astana rider chasing him down for Alberto Contador, who was in second place overall at the time. (You can debate whether those two actually play that nicely and if Vino was going off on his own.) Vino knew something was up as El Pistolero passed them both and never looked back. Schleck eventually got back into the mix of it — with, I must say, some truly impressive uphill riding — but those 40 seconds he lost to the chain problem turned into an 8-second deficit in the competition.
So what do I think? Well, I hope you watched the rest of the video past the first 45 seconds, because that was some truly possessed climbing by Andy Schleck to be only 12-13 seconds behind at the top of the climb and some really daredevil descending by Contador, et al., to extend that margin to 39 seconds at the end of the day’s stage.
As for the propriety of Contador’s actions — attacking a rider who is in mechanical distress — that’s trickier.
I can’t fault Contador for riding hard and for wanting to win the Tour. After stage 14, when Schleck countered his every move, he clearly knew that it was going to be hard to take time out of the Luxemburger. And the Spaniard was racing to catch up after his rival caught him out. It seems like Contador knew that the only way that he could win was if he got very lucky and pushed on whatever fortuitous breaks came his way. Cycling is a very difficult sport — and this is perhaps the most difficult and prestigious sporting event in the world — so I can see doing what you have to do.
But during the last few stages, Contador has looked like the weaker rider. (Still a very capable rider, perhaps even very nearly the best in the world.) And both he and Contador are equally smart racers. Contador’s Astana team does look to be stronger than Schleck’s Saxo Bank riders, though.
Now, if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a Tour de France won by a weaker rider who got where he did through happenstance.
As for whether Contador should have waited, just as Jan Ullrich did when Lance Armstrong fell in the mountains during the 2003 Tour, that’s open to debate. I certainly would have, had I known that he had fallen and been able to do it without sacrificing my position to challengers. (Of course my racing career only extends as far as two amateur road races in high school when I finished well off the back.)
Armstrong crashes on an attack and then has mechanical problems.
But that was 2003. Today Contador couldn’t match the attack and wasn’t able to keep up with Vino who might have pulled him up to Schleck. (That Astana team is strong, but they certainly have teamwork issues.) When the Kazakh slowed down while marking Schleck, Contador blew past them both. It’s debatable whether Vinokouraov could have told his teammate about the leader’s mechanical issues. As a domestique, maybe it wasn’t even really his place to rein in the putative leader of the team. At any rate, I can’t believe that Contador wouldn’t have sensed something was up when he sailed past the almost stationary yellow jersey. And Menchov or Sanchez surely knew and could have relayed the information to him.
Contador doesn’t seem to be the kind of rider who honors traditions or team dynamics or teammates, so I’m not surprised that he didn’t hold up. And as the defending champion he would have had the clout to keep his rivals Menchov and Sanchez from going on ahead without him and the Tour leader. Now, it all happened very quickly, but I just don’t think Contador is built that way in the sportsmanship/fair-play department.
So was it wrong to counterattack the yellow jersey during a short mechanical crisis of Schleck’s own unfortunate and unintentional making? Maybe, maybe not. But I respect those in the crowd who booed Contador at the podium ceremony when he put on the leader’s jersey — just as I respect those who cheered him. And I’m reminded of Paul Sherwen’s words in the second clip above: “You know, in the sport of professional cycling, there’s always payback time. You can never burn your bridges. Don’t ever make enemies.”
I’m hoping that Tuesday’s stage 16 has a bit of payback time in it.
