Our Kids in Washington

OK, that’s it.  I’m fed up.  And so are many millions of other Americans.  It’s time the Senate and the Congressional folks grew up.

Grew up?  Yep.  Let’s look at a few imaginary, but very realistic bits of political dialogue.  The first one applies to the Republican blocking of key administrative appointments by the White House, but could also apply to health care reform. 

Harry:  Dad says we need to pick up all these toys and get ‘em put away by 3:00.

Mitch.  I’m busy.

Harry:  Come on, Mitch.  We gotta do it.

Mitch:  Nope.  Ain’t gonna.

Harry:  Dad says you gotta.  And I say you gotta.

Mitch:  I say I don’t, and to prove it I’ll hold my breath til I’m blue in the face*

Harry:  Look, we’re going to Grandma’s this weekend.  If Dad has to put all those toys in the boxes while we’re gone, he’s gonna tan our hides when we get back.

Mitch:  Last time you were the one who wouldn’t pick ‘em up.  So don’t blame me.

Harry:  Mitch, that was last time.  This time Dad means it, and so do I.  Now move your little butt and do it.

Mitch.  I don’t care.  I ain’t gonna, and you can’t make me!

* “Blue in the face” = filibuster

Sounds familiar, no?  Now, ask yourself how old these speakers are.  If you came up with 10 and 7, you’d be right …the point is that this is the way little kids, especially boys, deal with each other.  Power plays (filibusters, blocking appointments),  walking out on meetings, being "spoilers"  and exhibiting general mulishness are the way the Republicans are playing today --- but don’t worry, the Democrats have their share.

Here's another one:

Nancy:  Oh, boy, oh boy!  We’re gonna have a party!  We’ve waited and waited, and now it’s time to get the music playing and roll out the declarations, I mean decorations.  And presents!  We’ll have presents for everybody!  Good health care is finally going to happen.

Beaner:  You have no right to throw a party.  My pals and me  just can’t put up with you and your presents.  I’m here to tell you that no way will we approve.  Besides, we have the best health care in the world. No need to do anything different.

Nancy:  You can help pick them out.  Come on, Beaner, everybody but you and your friends knows it’s the right thing to do. What about the studies showing that we pay twice as much as all the other countries do, and still die sooner and have millions of people who can’t come to the party.

Beaner: Don't care. No.

Nancy:  Please?

Beaner:  No.

Nancy:  Pretty please?   With sugar on it?

Beaner:  No.  My pals and me, we’re all part of the same gang, and we don’t care what we have to do to stop you, but it’s NO NO NO!  Stopping you is more important than what’s right or wrong. Truth or lies, doesn’t matter.  Stopping you is a really, really big deal for us.  NO.  We ain’t gonna !

______

What we have in Washington is a blood feud between the Crips and Bloods (or Sharks and Jets, if you’re old enough to remember West Side Story.)  When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette til your last dyin’ day.

The current attitude in both the House and Senate appears to be that party loyalty matters more than anything else.  And the way to make your party right isn’t to have the great ideas or even to cooperate:  it’s to make the other party wrong!

Making people wrong is a guaranteed way to tie up the system and prevent discussion and collaborative decision making.  The Palestinians make the Israelis wrong (and vice-versa), the North Koreans do it to the US, we do it to the Iranians, and to the Taliban.  The Islamic extremists would literally rather die than even consider talking to us.  And it seems to me most of the talk radio people are on the same wavelength as the Jihadists. only the content differs; the tone is the same.

Holding your breath til you’re blue, stonewalling, filibustering (or even threatening one –  how strange is that?), blocking the other party’s nominees because you just want to show you’re stubborn and “you can’t make me” --- these are all behaviors we can associate with emotionally immature people.

Our politicians are acting like children.  They squall, sulk, pout, threaten, whine, call each other names, and attempt to beat up on their siblings.

Nowhere, it seems, are they actually ready to govern themselves or anybody else.  No one really wants to address issues that are critically important to the nation (and Obama has identified most of them) particularly if addressing these issues might annoy their party base.

I’m so disgusted, I just wanna take my ball and go home!

What's red and black and out of focus?

This entry is an expanded version of a response to a query from a photographer made in the discussion forum of the Ohio Valley Camera Club.  The shooter wanted to know why she couldn't get good results using autofocus shooting a red object on a black background.

Most of the answers had to do with distance from the object, but there's more to it than that.  Part of the problem is the way autofocus works (passive autofocus, at least, which is the kind you get on good digital cameras).  And part of it is the mysterious kinship between red and black.

Autofocus works by detecting an object in the frame and measuring the degree of contrast between it and something next to it.  It now makes a small change and sees if the contrast has become greater.  When it's at its greatest, the autofocus says "voila!" and stops adjusting.  If it can't find sufficient contrast, it keeps hunting or gives up in disgust.

The more contrast, the easier it is for the autofocus to do its job.  In scenes of low light, there's very little contrast.  In scenes with a monotone subject, such as snow on the ground or clear blue sky, it's also hard for autofocus to find enough contrast to grab a target. Same reason; not enough contrast for the autofocus sensor to gab hold of.

You can read a basic explanation of the autofocus process in How Stuff Works and a better one here (Cambridge Colour.com)

Now remember that we were talking about a red object on a black background, such as this one:

This image consists of pure red, exactly half way between full light and full dark (128 on a scale of 0-256). That's represented by the thin red line on the histogram show upper right in this screen shot. No problem for autofocus, right?  Well, it IS a problem, and here's why.  Autofocus sensors do not see color.  They only see black and white.  And when you desaturate this image, you get this:

When you take the color out of red, leaving only its gray value, it is nowhere near "middle gray."  In fact, as the histogram shows, it's barely half way between pure black and middle gray.  So your autofocus sensor actually has much less contrast to work with than our eyes think it should!

Now both these illustrations are for crisply defined edges.  What happens if the red object was, say, a soft fuzzy pillow?  Here's the same red-on-black image with the edges blurred:

Now there's even less contrast to work with.  Your autofocus would have a tough time with this image!

Sometimes autofocus can't handle things because they are too close together, or because the high-contrast region picked up by the sensor blocks out the subject you DO want to have in focus. No autofocus system could handle the image below.

At 100% crop (of a downsized jpg, so it looks lousy) you can see that the girl is actually in focus while the bamboo screen is not.  This HAD to be done manually, because autofocus would grab the screen and not the model.  I know; I tried it!

A couple of additional comments and we're done.  First a lot of red in any image tends to make a very poor black-and-white conversion.  Because red is actually such a dark color, red tones tend to convert as dark grey or near black.

That's a digression from talking about autofocus, but it's something worth remembering the next time you try to render a very red sunset as a black and white image!  (Yellow, on the other hand, converts splendidly, as you can see in the two sample pix below. The histogram shows you that the ONLY change made from the color version to black-and-white is desaturation.  Autofocus had no problem with this one.   Enjoy!)