Monthly status report: I'm not dead yet

[pyesetz]

Once again I am motivated to post by the thought that Pharyngula will unfriend me if I stay silent for an entire month.  He just got back from a trip to the Galápagos Islands.  He whines that he had to stand in line for two hours to get permission to leave Ecuador.  Well, um, it took me over 20,000 times as long as that to get permission to leave the USA—and I'm a citizen!

Earlier this month I drove to Massachusetts to attend my brother-in-law's wedding.  It was not a fun trip.  I lived in Mass. for 26 years and left with many unpleasant memories (but not all bad: I did meet Wifey there).  The state's mood is terrible these days.  How does the most left-wing state in the Union deal with being the evil aggressor in a pointless war?  They try not to think about it.  Just "support the troops" (because it's not their fault that the CinC is a thrall of Satan) and rename bridges and squares after the newly-fallen.  I suppose I'll do a trip report at some point, after kid#1 finishes expurgating her diary so I can remember what happened. Near the end of the trip, I saw a baby frog sitting on the siding of the hotel.  It was a very placid frog, just sitting there while I repeatedly tried to get my El Cheapo digital camera to take a decent photo of it.  For this second shot, the camera is maybe three inches away from the frog, who is looking directly at the lens!  The second picture might be "actual size" on your computer screen. While in the States, I redeemed my children's US Savings bonds, because the thought of owning anything denominated in greenbacks makes me sick (I don't claim to have any rational basis for this).  Because there were so many bonds, I had to go to two different banks on two different days to redeem them.  Bizarre US banking regulations required me to receive the proceeds as cash, not cheques; I presume that a report was made to FinCEN about my unpatriotic behaviour.  Thankfully the amount of currency involved was not enough to require a report to FINTRAC upon my return to Canada—one of the US banks gave me receipts, but the other insisted on completely untraceable cash!  I'm not really a money-launderer, I'm just drawn that way...  Anyway the money is now invested in Canadian government bonds under the children's names. On the way home, we had planned to stop by the Yankee Candle factory in South Deerfield MA.  The Mass Pike was backed up for miles, so I didn't feel like paying to use it.  I took the back roads, which led me through Ware MA.  Of course I thought of shun_ri, who recently unfriended me.  Again.  And it's probably permanent this time.  Shun Ri was the first LJer to spontaneously friend me.  I didn't know then how rare that would turn out to be.  I expect rabbitswift will be the next to go.

My dog "Walnut" is clearly having a better time in Canada than he did in the States, because he's getting more walkies now!

Back in June, I started to hear strange noises while sitting in my basement.  One day, a vole poked his head out from behind the washing machine.  He actually sat there staring at me for several seconds, before realizing that I am (A) a much bigger animal and (B) an enemy.  I live a block from a horse-feed factory (now in the process of shutting down) and there are farms only 1 km away from me in several directions, so this area has many voles (and feral cats to eat them).  I bought a mousetrap and baited it with peanut butter.  The next morning, I was the proud owner of a dead rodent.  Ain't modern technology grand?

Dead vole photo 1, Dead vole photo 2.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

he had to stand in line for two hours [...] it took me over 20,000 times as long as that to get permission to leave the USA

I doubt you had to stand in line the entire time. If I were dictator, that would make an entertaining refinement to the process.

*****

How does the most left-wing state in the Union deal with being the evil aggressor in a pointless war?

Being on the aggressor's side didn't dampen their enthusiasm for the War between the States, I have to note.

[pyesetz]

It is true that many have had it worse than I.  There are some at Camp X-Ray (now Camp Delta) who have been forced to stand in "stress positions" for days on end, just for the Bushies' jollies.

It is also true that many or most people of Massachusetts continue to believe that the War of Northern Aggression had a useful point.  Unfortunately, the point has turned out to be that all the power in the USA is in the unitary government, with the states permitted to do things only at federal discretion.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

The second picture looks like maybe someone 100 years ago had photographed an insect at the edge of a piece of paper on a black table, printed it in B&W in that old-fashioned style back in the days when vignetting was all the rage, cut it into four and threw away everything except the bottom-right quarter, illuminated the remaining part of the print by a pale greenish light, and then had someone with a nosebleed sneeze on it? ... Oh wait! I can see the frog now. Yes, there it is! Maybe if I...


All your other pictures are better than that. What happened? :-o

[xolo.livejournal.com]

There are some at Camp X-Ray (now Camp Delta) who have been forced to stand in "stress positions" for days on end

They've earned it. They can be glad I'm not in charge.

[pyesetz]

Well, they're not *much* better.  I am not a skilled photographer.  My digital camera does a remarkably good job of covering for my inadequacies, but lipstick on a pig is still lipstick on a pig.  The "nosebleed" effect is random pixel noise due to the extremely low ambient light (the camera's flash is useless; I never get any contrast when I turn it on).  Also, I think there might be a film of oil on the camera's lens.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

How do you know they've earned it? You're not allowed to see any evidence, you don't know who's in there, it's all under wraps. How do you feel about the Omar Khadr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr) case for instance? I also agree that all war criminals and sadists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_incident) deserve the harshest of punishments but tossing out due process and such fun things as the Magna Carta means that you lose and they win.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

Yoiks! Permission to leave the US?? How the hell does that work??

[pyesetz]

A free country is one where any non-criminal may leave.  In order to receive Permanent Resident rights in Canada, an immigrant must provide a police certificate from the previous country stating that he is not a criminal, unless the previous country is on a short list of tinpot dictatorships that refuse to play along (and it is politically infeasible for Canada to put the USA on that list).

I repeatedly asked the FBI to send me said police certificate, but they repeatedly refused, citing stupid reasons like "request unsigned" (but the request form they returned had my signature on it) or "cheque too old" (but bank cheques do not expire) or "fingerprints too old" (they cut the max age of a fingerprint card by 50% after I got mine).  Eventualy Ashcroft was replaced by Gonzalez as head of the FBI and I got my certificate.  I don't know if these two facts are related, but police certificates are considered "Freedom of Information Act" requests and Ashcroft's offficial position was that FOIA requests were tools of terrorists and should be rejected if at all possible.

As a NAFTA citizen, I *could* have moved to Canada without the certificate, but then I would have had no health insurance and no right to contest any police action against me (theoretically I could be thrown out of the country for failing to see a stop sign).  I *should* have invested in Canadian real estate as a foreigner, but it was just too painful to contemplate.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

Oh Jesus fucking Keeerist! *sigh* WTF indeed!! And what a bunch of two-bit petty fuck-wads! And around and around it goes. The few decide for the many what their money will be spent on, how they should live, what they're allowed to do. I'd puke if I had any bile left.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I think it's a shame that Omar Khadr was taken alive. It should have had a bullet put through its head in the field.

So far as it and its family being Canadian citizens, that seems to have been relationship of convenience that they called upon when things got too hot in Pakistan, or when they wanted the Canadian taxpayers to fund their healthcare.

Khadr has undeniably had the full benefits of due process, as is just and proper. We will lose only if we worry more about protecting terrorists than protecting their victims.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad to hear that you approve of killing children, are you grooming your own for any particular ideological battles? Due process to eh, like denying him access to a lawyer, wrapping all the 'evidence' in the blanket of national security, and lets not forget good old fashioned torture.

Your head must be... just an ugly place to live in really. What does it smell like?

[pyesetz]

Hey, no fighting in my journal!  xolo likes to take unpopular positions for fun.  If he had any children of his own, he'd be doing anything necessary to keep them out of Iraq.  Omar Khadr is just a convenient hate-object; it's nothing personal.

[pyesetz]

If someone throws a rock through a window, and you round up everyone at the keg party next door, you *might* have caught the criminal in your net, but also lots of people who were in the wrong place+time.  If instead you ask the owner of the house who threw the rock, and he lists his personal enemies and you go arrest those and torture them, in all likelihood the actual criminal is *not* in your net—you're just a dupe who's being used for vengeance in old squabbles.

If you think that torturing actual terrorists (assuming we have any) does anything to "protect" their victims, we have already lost.

[pyesetz]

How did you fix up this picture?  I can't seem to get GIMP to do anything useful with these low-light high-noise images.

[frith]

*ahem* Your "vole" looks like a short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda. Insectivora, not rrrrodenta. *aha* Yes, quite.

Now on to scrutinize the commentary...

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

The "humorous troll" label is just a mask to allow him to express ugly shit and then deny he actually thinks that way. Seen it a million times.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

I used Photoshop Elements, but I am sure GIMP could do it too. The magic bullet for this type of noise is to create a duplicate layer of the image, gaussian-blur the top layer, put the top layer into either "hue" or "color" mode (I used "color" in this case because that is stronger), and then merge down. This preserves the structure in the image, but blurs out the colours.

But I first did an auto levels, followed by resize x3. THEN I did the above. After that, I did an unsharp mask, then median filtering. (That combo blurs areas with noise but sharpens edges - works especially well in images that have been resized bigger.) Then I manually selected all areas of the picture excluding the frog and excluding the sharp edge of light and dark, and then feathered that selection, and then did a slight gaussian blurring of that too - reduced the background noise by about 50%. Normally, that last step would not be necessary, but by the time I got to that point, the frog looked better than the background, so I wanted to do something to balance it out.

[pyesetz]

How enlightening!  Is there a better article on the shrew than this one?  There are certainly many snails in my area for a shrew to eat.

[frith]

Not a hell of a lot online on short-tailed shrews. I hoped that Werner's Shrew Shrine would have a write-up on Blarina but no, nada. Guess you'll have to dig or crack open a guide to small animals. I gave it a hearty ten minutes and this is about the best I could scrounge: http://biology.uwsp.edu/facilities/vertebrates/Mammals%20of%20Wisconsin/Blarina%20brevicauda/Blarina%20brevicauda%20page.htm

[avenginglioness.livejournal.com]

your dog is cute! ^_^

[pyesetz]

Thanks!

[pyesetz]

Strange -- these techniques don't seem to work for me in GIMP.  here is another night-image, like the frog.  Lighting is a sodium-vapour streetlamp between camera and object, plus a yellow buglight that is behind and to the right of the object.

gaussian-blur the top layer
I used "selective Gaussian blur" which blurs only the low-contrast areas.

put the top layer into either "hue" or "color" mode
I tried all the modes.  For some reason, the "hue" and "color" modes don't seem to do anything, while the other modes (like "multiply") do too much.

auto levels
No effect.  None of the "auto colour correction" commands has any useful effect on this photo.

unsharp mask
Makes the image blotchy?

median filtering
I can't figure out what the GIMP equivalent is for this.

Then I manually selected all areas of the picture excluding the frog and excluding the sharp edge of light and dark, and then feathered that selection, and then did a slight gaussian blurring of that too
Lots of work!  It sounds similar to the "selective Gaussian blur" thing that actually did work for me.  Also I set the red gamma to 0.8, which I pretty much always have to do with non-daylight photos from this $70 3.1MP camera.