J C & S Enterprises

Sometimes I find myself wondering…what lens should I go for next? It can be tough to decide, since, while I know in general what general focal lengths I want based on what I want to shoot, the lenses good for those purposes might be beyond my price range. Or I might wonder what comparable Tokina, Sigma, or Tamron lenses I could get instead of a Canon.

Even if I decided that I have money to spend for a lens, finding one to get could be a hassle. I’d have to look them all up individually, at every place I know that sells lenses, if I wanted to get a good deal. Some sort of price aggregator might be nice.

Well, someone appears to have read my mind, and created exactly the site to do that. Lens Hero (http://www.lenshero.com) is a nifty site which can tell you, based on your camera, your price limit, and what type of photos you want to take, what lenses might fit your desires!

And if that weren’t enough, each page about each lens also comes with community feedback on the lens, information about the angle of view, and even a link to buy one! All of this, combined with the intuitive interface, the useful comments, and the option to even have the site itself suggest a lens makes Lens Hero a definite go-to place for finding my next DSLR lens.

Me and Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize-winning Chemist and host of the 1988 "The World Of Chemistry" video series.

..when your boss sends you a note mentioning a mistake on your poster which has never been fixed for the last 3 version of the poster, and the first thought through your head is to say "that mistake was HIGHLY CONSERVED!" and laugh maniacally.

SHEER AMAZINGNESS.

I am deficit spending my time, and this is not going to end well at all.
3 physics labs is definitely too much. Along with String Theory, which is essentially All Fields of Modern Physics 101 + String Theory.

I just hope I can finish enough up to get a paper out before Adam and Rommie (BOTH advisors of mine) leave to take their faculty positions at Hamilton and UCI respectively, or else next year I will have to contend not only with my own scheduling difficulties, but the multiple timezones and conference calls. But obviously research is going to take secondary status compared to school, so..sigh.

And then there are those damn orgs to whom I donate far more time than I should. Circle K, Relay, and ACSSA. Why do I feel so compelled to give them all my time? 2/3 of them don't appreciate me at all, and the other one is the one that's quickly becoming my greatest timesink. And there's not much more I can cut..I've cut Circle K and Relay tabling, which were some of my greatest timesinks earlier...but I can't cut on ACSSA, because I now have presidential responsibility...lame. I suspect Relay will be up on the cutting board next, seeing as this past year has been even worse than the year before...but even so...that may not be enough.

Argh. If only our universe had a second time dimension we could travel through. (Ha. Too much physics on the brain.)

I recently stumbled across a link to The Story of Stuff on a friend's AIM profile. So I watched it.

(Please watch it yourself now. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you're done.)

I am liberal, but only moderately so. I do already know about sustainability, what it entails, our lifestyle right now and sustainability, and even why the new UCSD Sustainability Center being built with partly from the retarded-ass latest student fee increase is not going to be very helpful.

However, after watching this video, I got into a heated debate with my friend about its merits. Her argument was that not enough people know about sustainability and that this video is there to get the word out to people.

In my opinion, however, this video is not quite like that. It seems to me that this video oversimplifies much of the description in such a way as to create scientific innacuracies in ways that evoke the maximum amount of fear. And call me idealistic, but I don't think scare tactics are a good way to try to get the word out about something good...it doesn't seem very honest to me, particularly because of the innacuracies that are brought up.

For example, they mention the existence of Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) sprayed on pillows. BRFs are apparently extremely carcinogenic. "Why do we put them on something we lay our heads on?!" asks Annie Leonard, with righteous fury and indignation. Well, since I'm an internet nerd, my immediate answer was, of course "SO WE WON'T BE ON FIRE!!111" But then I thought about it, and realized, "OH WAIT, THAT'S THE RIGHT ANSWER." I can imagine some scenarios where this is helpful. For example, people who smoke while lying in bed. There's always signs in hotels and stuff saying not to do this, it can cause a fire, etc. So we can have two alternatives - 1. BFRs are on the pillow. The person falls asleep, the cigarette falls on the pillow, the pillow does not catch fire. The person dies of lung cancer 20 years later. Or something. (2.) BFRs are not on the pillow. No more toxins being put in our products! (Cause, you know, that's the only thing factories do, right? Take natural resources and put toxic chemicals in them. Nothing else. And for no good reason.) The person falls asleep, the cigarette falls on the pillow, the pillow catches fire (in general, fabrics and stuff, being large polymers, will burn, if the activation energy barrier is overcome). The fire spreads all over the place, the person is injured, possibly dies now as opposed to 20 years later, the place burns down, releasing MORE toxins, since plastics and other materials our society uses release toxins when burning - hell, even wood releases greenhouse gasses when burning. Which is the better alternative? Somehow, it seems to me that the first one is.

Obviously this is a very specialized example, so I can undoubtedly be attacked very soundly from many sides, but it seems to me that this same sort of logical flaw could be generalized to most of her other arguments, which, to me, seem to be optimized to generate maximum fear with minimal technical expertise.

So, I said I thought it was dishonest to try to convince people with scare tactics. So someone's probably thinking, "Really, Jeff? You're more worried about 'honestly' spreading the fact that we're living an unsustainable lifestyle?" Well, no, it's not just that. It's the fact that this strategy has a very fatal flaw: people hate being manipulated. If a person viewing this video starts to get the impression that Annie Leonard is trying to scare them, they will start to doubt the message. In fact, they will take the message less seriously, and even possibly think of the people trying to spread the message as extremist or something, and this sort of impression will bias the person against the message. So in fact, it could dilute the message and hurt the credibility of people who support sustainability! This is especially worrisome to me because the people who need to hear this message most are young people - people who were born into this already-existing unsustainable lifestyle, and thus have known nothing else. The weakest arguments she make, are, in my opinion, the computer-related one. I will not go into it here, because this is already too long, but her computer-related arguments are those which are the most likely to be caught by younger generations, each more tech-savvy than the last.

So in conclusion (for those who didn't want to read the previous 772 words), I watched Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff, and while I sympathize with her cause - spreading the word about sustainability and how our lifestyles are unsustainable - I cannot agree with her method of doing so, (which, in my opinion, consists of oversimplifying various facts about our lifestyles so as to scare people into believing in the importance of sustainability) because I feel it is dishonest and because I believe that people hate being manipulated, and thus will react very negatively if they see the inaccuracies generated by the oversimplifications.

I was writing an email in Gmail, when suddenly, I realized that Google did not approve of what I was doing:
( picture in lj cut to not stretch the page )

There are a lot of problems with Chemistry. For example, the way it is taught seems very flawed. General chemistry is a general mishmash of chemistry which seems highly biased towards physical chemistry concepts, and much of what is taught in general chemistry is never used ever again..even by physical chemists.

But at the end of the day, Chemists are amazing. Here is a video (quicktime plugin probably required to watch) of a speaker made from a carbon nanotube...playing the numa numa song: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/nl802750z/suppl_file/nl802750z_si_004.qt