That Jeff Wall. He’s so hot right now.
Few photographers get two articles in the Times in as many days. On Saturday, the obligatory biographical sketch and introduction to the MOMA exhibit. Yesterday’s Times Magazine cover story is long, and I haven’t read it yet. But I share these articles with you […]

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On Monday — just before staffing The MathWorks’ booth — I attended Maria Petrou’s plenary session: “Reverse-Engineering the Human Visual System.” I found it rather interesting, though it tried to cover too much ground for one hour.* Nevertheless, it was quite interesting to ponder how we can use our understanding of the human […]

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At the recent medical imaging symposium I bought myself a copy of Daniel Malacara’s Color Vision and Colorimetry: Theory and Applications from the SPIE Press. I managed to read the short monograph on the five hours of flights from sunny, warm San Diego to freezing New England.
It’s not exactly an elementary book, but it […]

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Mobile phone photographs from my recent trip to Saint Doug.

Back on the ranch, things were getting testy . . .

. . . better go to California.

Near the hotel, a very fashionable mall.

Inside the hotel, smokers.

Salvation Mountain (near Niland, CA)

Our best view of the Salton Sea

Sunday AM: Homework by the pool

Sunday PM: Hang out at Pacific […]

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I know that some of you had expressed concern about my (now recently completed) trip to the San Diego outback. But the good news is that coworker Alex and I returned unscathed and sand-free from today’s excursion to the Salton Sea.
What was the purpose of going to said inland sea, you might ask? […]

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I’m fascinated by the images of New York-based photographer Sze Tsung Leong. Most photographs from his History Images series concern development, change, and decay (forced or otherwise). The arty Guernica magazine recently published an interview with him. (via BLDGBLOG)
(That reminds me: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the current trend […]

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With apologies to Aperture for the title.
David Segal in Slate asks “Can Photographers Be Plagiarists?” and then provides a slideshow with some famous (and infamous) “borrowing” from the last hundred years. (Thanks to Conscientious for reading Slate so I don’t have to.)
But “plagiarism” is such an ugly word. “Good artists borrow, great artists […]

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It’s been forever since I posted some of my own photography here. I took a quick look to see if I had anything new handy, but with classes I really haven’t had any time to scan anything much less make new photographs. There isn’t even enough time to print something new for the […]

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Some who have read my recent rambling thoughts after my software methodologies class may have the impression that I don’t like it. I can see that. And while it’s true that I would be very happy to be less bored, sometimes I can be . . . um . . . overly critical and exacting. (I […]

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A while back Joel Spolsky wrote an article with the basics of Unicode and internationalizing software applications. For many software developers, this was probably the first widely read introduction to a topic that we need to integrate into our design thinking. (I wrote about it a couple weeks ago.)
Another design issue every developer […]

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Here in the Great White North we’re slowly coming to terms with the fact that slavery in America was a pervasive phenomenon. In the wake of industrialization — largely built on the labor of unmarried women from the countryside and waves of European immigrants — we have crafted a long-enduring myth that slavery was […]

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There are two things you should know about me: I am not a good person, and I hate being bored or having my time wasted. Those two things combined pretty much say everything you might need to know about me, not unlike Dostoevsky’s underground notetaker:

I am a sick man. . . . I am […]

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Dear Martin Amis:
As a “modern, Western, relativistic, multicultural, poltically correct . . . whatever” person I say this, “You are not a good person, and you aren’t getting a Christmas / Hannukah / Eid / Kwanza / Holiday card from me this year (or ever).” And I’m not sure why NPR’s On Point would […]

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