PetaPixel:
An Ohio newspaper photojournalist was shot by a police officer last night after the cop mistook the camera and tripod the photographer was holding for a rifle.
Wait—that tripod isn’t loaded, is it?
I wouldn’t exactly call this a part of the never-ending war on photography, but I do think that this shows that ANYTHING—literally fucking anything—can be “mistaken” by the police for a “weapon.”
Dave Pell nails it at NextDraft:
President Trump doesn’t get to be graded on a curve. The Texas visit was a complete failure. No mention of the victims. No empathy for the survivors. More silly asides about crowd size and cable-TV fame. Once again, Trump proved that he will always be the “I” of the storm. Houston and Texas (and NextDraft readers in the path of the storm) deserved better remarks from their president. So I wrote them myself: A Real President Addresses Texas.
David Axlerod at CNN.com also nails it, “It’s Not Always About You Mr. President”:
Startlingly, he did not utter one syllable about those who have lost their lives, their homes or businesses in the floods that are still swelling over southeast Texas, overwhelming the heroic first responders and volunteers who are straining to meet its demands. He had no solace for the tens of thousands of evacuees, some of whom were separated from their families in the storm and are now warehoused in arenas, left to wonder what comes next.
Donald Trump swept into Corpus Christi on Air Force One. Never missing an opportunity to sell, he alighted with his trademarked USA cap atop his thatched dome. It was clear he had come to take a bow, not to offer sympathy for the victims or hope to the dispossessed.
Trump is such a fucking narcissist: “Well, enough about me—let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”
Twitter also had this to say, and this.
And, if that weren’t enough, an avalanche of conservatives attempting to engage in their go-to move, moral equivalence, apparently just forgot that Obama wasn’t President during Katrina, like this and this.
Are we “great” again yet?
ARS Technica:
This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant?
Previously, lower courts have said that such practices are compatible with current law. But the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case suggests that at least four justices feel that perhaps the law should be changed.
[…]
This is not a trivial distinction. A so-called “d-order” can be circumspect with how information is obtained by authorities. It does not, as the Fourth Amendment demands, require as much particularity. A warrant, unlike a d-order application, also mandates a signed and sworn affidavit (“on oath or affirmation”), as the Constitution requires, which describes the “places to be searched and the things to be seized.”
Wired:
WHILE MILLIONS OF astronomy enthusiasts chase the moon’s shadow on the ground during the August 21 total solar eclipse, four NASA personnel are going to have front row seats. Two pilots and two technicians will race the big black spot at 50,000 feet, well above any cloud cover. And at 400 mph, they’ll be able to stretch their time in the shadow to three minutes, compared to two on the ground.
They’re not just up there for the view. The aircraft, two 1960s vintage WB-57F jets that NASA frequently dispatches for high-altitude research, will carry instruments to help scientists study the solar atmosphere. At cruising altitude, the sky will be 20 to 30 times darker than on the ground, enhancing the details in the sun’s atmosphere—and allowing for pictures in the greatest detail yet.
Annalee Newitz, writing at ARSTechnica:
The Canaanites are famous as the bad guys of the Book of Joshua in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. First, God orders the Hebrews to destroy the Canaanites along with several other groups, and later we hear that the Canaanites have actually been wiped out. Among archaeologists, however, the Canaanites are a cultural group whose rise and fall has remained a mystery. Now, a group of archaeologists and geneticists has discovered strong evidence that the Canaanites were not wiped out. They are, in fact, the ancestors of modern Lebanese people.
Eric Berger, writing at Wired:
The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just one flight, an uncrewed mission in 1988. The Soviet Union’s collapsing economy doomed the program.
The Buran orbiter that made the initial three-hour flight was destroyed in 2002, when the roof of the hangar where it was stored in Kazakhstan collapsed. Like the United States, the Soviet Union didn’t make just one Buran, they made several with the intention of eventually having a fleet of orbital vehicles. When the program was canceled, those vehicles, from mock-ups to nearly flight ready articles, were mothballed.
If you’re anything like me, you heard about the 2017 eclipse over a year ago and thought “cool,” but haven’t really thought about it since.
This week, some of the photography podcasts I listen to started talking about the eclipse and man, I’m really starting to get excited!
Photographer Brian Matiash, writing at Digital Photo Pro:
You may be asking what all this talk about camera sensors and RAW file formats has to do with faithfully representing your image. The bottom line is that making even some mild tonal, white balance and color adjustments to the straight-out-of-camera image can pay back with massive dividends, and it’s as applicable to portrait photos as it is to landscape, nature and urban ones. The trick is to know when to say “when.”
Nice reminder that often, “less is more.”
Ashwin Seshagiri, New York Times’ Tech Roundup:
The victims have a choice […] Pay the hackers a ransom of one bitcoin, a digital currency worth roughly $2,365, in exchange for regaining access to the computer, or try to infect two new people on behalf of the attackers.
That sucks.
Donald Trump Jr., Sub-Master of the Universe
Matt Bai, writing at Yahoo News:
I’ve said this from the beginning: The Trump kids were privileged to have been born on third base, and yet have spent the entirety of their lives acting as though they had earned a triple.
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