Tag: Article

Parliamentary vs. Presidential Systems

Apparently our system with the head of the executive branch directly elected is called the “presidential” system.

No clear conclusions, of course. But some fairly clear tradeoffs. How it works in particular countries includes a lot of local tradition and cultural influences.

Elections

Pro Con
Parliamentary Short cycle. Come somewhat by surprise. Politicians can’t afford to have the populace pissed off.
Presidential Long cycle. Schedule known years in advance.

Recall

Pro Con
Parliamentary Whole government can be brought down if needed. Whole government can fall at an inconvenient time.
Presidential Government can accomplish things that are unpopular. No way to throw the rascals out short of impeachment or sufficient threat of it to force a resignation (Nixon).

Parties

Pro Con
Parliamentary Party owns the seats, not candidates, so there’s party discipline. Party can’t stand for different things in different regions.
Presidential Compromise happens within the party. Parties can’t become idealogical purists and ever win. Parties can’t really mean anything.

Ability to Act

Separation of Powers

Pro Con
Parliamentary One party controls the government. They can get something done. One party controls the government. Damage can be essentially unlimited.
Presidential Control of the legislative and executive branches can be split. Damage can be limited. Control of the legislative and executive branches can be split. This can prevent anything from getting done.
Pro Con
Parliamentary Less, since executive is headed by someone of party controlling the legislature. A very non-politicized civil service can help some.
Presidential More, since head of executive is chosen by the voters independently of the legislature.

Cleaning the Glass on a Microtek Scanmaker 4

This will be of rather limited interest; but I failed to find the information on the web when I needed it, and when I figured it out myself (which turned out not to be hard) I made a note to perpetuate the information, as it were.

Continue reading Cleaning the Glass on a Microtek Scanmaker 4

Lensman Series Reading Order

This article contains major spoilers for the Lensman books. If you haven’t read them yet and are looking for advice on reading order, I’ll say here that I’m currently mostly, and cautiously, recommending that one start with Galactic Patrol, and then loop around to pick up the “first two” if you want to when you get to the end. This is reading in roughly but not precisely publication order. The reasons why are themselves spoilers.

There are some considerable difficulties in recommending a suitable reading order for Edward E. “Doc” Smith’s famous Lensman series. These are caused partly by the content of the books themselves, and partly by their somewhat convoluted publication history. Continue reading Lensman Series Reading Order

Using Curves

These aren’t any sort of organized presentation of the curves tool, but sometimes I feel like it might be useful to document how I work with it, and what I can accomplish. So here’s another example of “photo prep” (an annoying term, but “printing” as we used to call it is all wrong today, and “Photoshop” is of course just one product).

The exposure on this was good to begin with. Raw conversion (in ACR) didn’t do that much, just took the exposure down about 3/4 of a stop, moved the black point up, and increased brightness. That’s what the “original” of this pair is. (Mouse-over the photo to switch to the edited version; that uses Javascript, sorry.)

Breaking Wave, after RAW conversion

Curves applied

This was all one curves adjustment. The two points circled in blue expanded the range of the white water in the wave crest. The point circled in green prevented the lower tones from being pulled strongly downwards. And the point circled in violet increased the drama by darkening the shaded inside of the wave.

This photo was inspired by one by guppiecat.

Don’t Forget the Highlights!

As a source of neutral midtones to set color balance from, I mean.

Black leather jackets. Asphalt pavement. Black t-shirts. All of these, if they have highlights going on, can easily get tones up into the midrange (which I think of as 90-180, roughly) suitable for use with the gray eyedropper for setting color balance.

If it’s dark mixed with specular highlights, though, it’s usually not useful; specular highlights are by definition not a useful source of color balance, since the ability of the sensor to capture the light falling on it has been exceeded. The ratio of colors in a specular highlight pixel doesn’t tell you anything about the actual color of the light falling on it there.