“take another tact” — it’s tack, from sailing ships
“baited breath” — nope, it’s bated, meaning roughly “held back”
“must of” — it’s “must have“. And a huge collection of related phonetic spellings of mumbling passed through a spellchecker.
I, of course, find myself making some of these now and then myself; that’s the most annoying thing. I say they’re just typos when I make them, and you can’t prove I’m wrong. Nyaaah.
I’m encountering more and more sites that pull their content from a collection of servers sites with URLs in entirely different domains. I don’t mean just linking, and I don’t mean just ads being pulled in; I mean main pieces of page content on “cnn.com” coming from “turner.com” and such.
This of course triggers warnings in any sane modern browser, and in fact they’re blocked by default for anybody running no-script (which you should be).
Web designers–don’t do this! It’s a danger sign, and it needs to continue to be a danger sign. Right now I’m skipping some of your content, and more nd more people are using this sort of protection software in their browsers.
I’m not going to go into this in any depth, but I wanted to post something acknowledging that the Supreme Court handed down the right decision on something (not that rare even for this court).
No reasonable interpretation of the Second Amendment, based on its history, its language, the debate surrounding its adoption, or the other related measures debated and sometimes adopted for state constitutions, can possibly justify understanding it as anything other than an individual right to “keep and bear arms” for self-defense and any other lawful purpose.
One can sanely think this is a mistake, and thus favor fixing it; but to fix it requires a new constitutional amendment. It’s been done before; slavery was thrown out, and prohibition was brought in and then thrown out, for example.
Justice Scalia’s decision goes into the historical and linguistic scholarship in some detail, and is also remarkably nasty to the dissenting opinions. I haven’t yet read them; the two of them are bigger than the main opinion, and I just haven’t had time.
The decision (in PDF format) can be downloaded here.
There’ll be years of litigation, of course, trying to expand from this beachhead into a real, solid, acceptance of the most basic human right, the right to defend yourself.
Just got this in email from a company I let email me:
It’s our BEST INDOOR CAMERA period! With a powerful 44X Zoom, you can zoom in up to a half mile away and see everything as if you were standing right there.
Plus, it comes equipped with StarLight Mode NightVision, so you can see at night! Use it to watch over your home, business, car and property 24 hours a day! You will be amazed at the NightVision – it makes the dimmest areas look like it’s broad daylight outside!
Yes, that’s right, X-10.com.
An “indoor” camera. So it can see half a mile away. Cool! and StarLight Mode NightVision to boot!
All of their security / surveillance cameras that I’ve checked can’t be used where I live; they say not to be operated below 32° F.
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.)
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.