Nokia 808 Macro

Outdated Smartphone TRIGGER WARNING

Steve Litchfield, who ran one of the biggest Symbian fan sites, decided to compare the Samsung S7 and Nokia 808 cameras. His photographic shootouts are mostly a waste of time because he conducts them haphazardly with arbitrary scoring that typically favors the latest hyped "imaging" phone.

One of his tests shows the S7 with superior macro capabilities. Not a surprise as the 808 is somewhat known to be weak in that area. But one of the responses by Bigley Ling showed a much better macro result for the 808 and so I decided to take a *cough* closer look.

The following image shows a number of the latest smartphones at their closest focusing distance. These images are not mine but are from a review from androidcentral.com. I've added in a shot I took with an 808 at closest focusing distance. It's not as nice but you get the idea.

You can see that the 808 doesn't get nearly as close which caused many reviewers, including GSMArena, to assume it had mediocre macro capabilities. But that's only half the story.

The 808 is capable of much higher resolution than the others, so the question is whether that resolution advantage can offset its rather large minimum focus distance. To find out, I've cropped, rotated, and resized the original files to make comparison as equal as possible. However, the author of the original piece states that focus was difficult with the Apple, Huawei, and Microsoft smartphones which probably disadvantages them.

I used a tripod and digital zoom to ensure proper focus for the 808.

Normalized Close Focus Roundup

  

 Apple iPhone 6s Plus

Microsoft Lumia 950

Samsung Galaxy S7

Nokia 808

The S7 and 808 are definitely ahead of the Microsoft and Apple smartphones. The Huawei wasn't included because it was obviously the worst. Between the S7 and 808, I'd have to say the 808 produces a superior result. However, it might just be that my coin has less wear.

And although the S7 does have infinitely better autofocus than the 808, the 808 has much greater working distance* and field of view! 

Finally, I decided to digiscope the 808 to the Pentax Papillio IIs which increases the working distance to 60cm. However, it is hard to align optically and the image is generally inferior to the stock 808. Field of view is also reduced on account of vignetting.

At closer view, however, it can resolve a bit more detail which you can see if you compare George Washington's sideburns. None of the images gain from zooming in the images, but even higher magnification is available if you open the images in new tabs.

Nokia 808 with Papillio II

* The minimum focus distance is 20cm compared to around 7cm for the others. If a system is able to take similarly detailed close up shots as the 808 clearly is, then the 20cm is actually an advantage. You can be about three times further away and capture more background. It's a clear win-win.

Why, all our ranks are broke.

First they came for Tic-Tac-Toe. Then they came for checkers. And they even took down chess. But exhausting the search space for those games was inevitable. More than a googol but apparently not more than a Google.

Go was always the game the computers were never meant to win. Too many moves to brute force or create massive move databases for. But it looks like Google's DeepMind is going to beat one of very best human players.

The initial skeptic in me found it hard to see DeepMind as anything but a kind of savant in the same vein as Deep Blue. At least with Watson's victory over Ken Jennings, the AI applications were more generalizable. But DeepMind, if the writing on the tin is correct, uses neural networks to learn; it is able to play video games by looking at the screen.

So it does seem to be a real breakthrough in the field of AI. But with so many of the means that become available to us, the ends we seek disappoint.

Okay OpTics, you win

Not OpTic gaming, but "optics" as a shorthand for public perception. I've been seeing it more frequently but can't think of an already existing alternative from my limited vocabulary. So that automatically makes it better than meme, problematic, and methodology. 

Are there any better candidates for expressing "public perception" than "optics"?

Impression, reaction, or response don't capture the public part of public perception. There are a million or so words in the English language so I'm sure there is a word that does work. Omote might be a good loanword candidate. I'm not really sure why "optics" got me worked up but the whole "how is this going to look to the public?" mentality reeks of the personality ethic Steven Covey taught against. But maybe it's a good shibboleth for PR and PR wannabe types.

My guess is that "optics" will quickly cycle through corporate-speak land and maybe end up dying off in hacky West Wing type smart political dramas.

* Omote does have deeper and complex cultural meanings which aren't reflected in "optics" in the same way that proper etiquette and saving face differ from avoiding gaffes and avoiding scandal.

The Big Short aka Falling Short

Got around to watching The Big Short and vaguely recall having the same reservations I had towards the book.  On my old blog, I'm sure I'd done some commentary on the book or maybe that was back in business school, but the movie/book completely whiffed with regard to the role of ratings agencies in the 2008 crash.

There's a scene where Steve Carrell goes to Standard and Poors asking whether the agency actually examined the risk profile of the mortgages that made up the various instruments they were rating and the representative for S&P confesses that if they don't give the big banks the AAA ratings they ask for, the banks will just head down to Moody's (their chief competitor). Oh, it's just those evil Wall Street profiteers again! More regulations would solve things!*

But this explanation as to why S&P gave garbage assets AAA ratings was grossly incomplete. Imagine you started a business that gave safety ratings for food and you sold your findings to interested parties. Dining guides would be a prime market.

Dining guides would only buy your ratings if they were accurate. Now it is certainly possible and in many instances likely that an unhygienic restaurant would try to buy a higher rating than deserved. And you might even accept their bribe. But once people found out, your business would be ruined. The general incentive is to try to provide accurate ratings even if you were a super greedy unscrupulous businessman. It's the best way to stay profitable.

The overall goals of the company, of course, are not always shared by every employee. That is, commissions might entice reviewer employees to do a superficial inspection and accept bribes. Defects in compensation and management structure all impair the ability of a company to accomplish its goals and companies that have the best systems in place for eliminating those defects are the ones that will enjoy higher profits.

In the short term, it's possible to boost profits by giving dirty restaurants A+ hygiene ratings. If your company had given Chipotle or Jack in the Box an A+ during the food poisoning scandal time, not only would dining guides no longer purchase your ratings services but restaurants would have little incentive to pay for a discredited rating.

It would not be long before a competitor ratings service captured your marketshare.

So why did S&P and Moody's give top ratings to junk securities?

Because government regulations specifically mandated the use of ratings from those two companies.

Imagine if the government made a law saying that all food safety ratings must come from your company. Guidebooks are required to pay for your service and at that point, it doesn't matter if your ratings are bought and paid for; the fact that your business is relatively insulated from failure means that taking bribes is be more profitable even in the long term.

* And the movie more or less closes with the theme that regulations would have prevented the crisis. More outrageous is the quick glossing over the fact that the government, nominally the representative of the people, forced us to bail out and protect the big banks and ratings agencies. It's one thing to be scammed by a company, but to have a party come in and force you to continue to support that company claiming it is "for your own and the greater good" is lunacy. But that's what happened.

How it should have ended: the shorts get their money, all the companies that placed the bad bets would have lost enormous value and gone under, we would have eliminated the NRSRO regulations that let the ratings agencies get away with fraud, the companies that were prudent in lending and securitization and performed due diligence in risk assessment would be thriving today instead of being suffocated by the zaibatsu that we were constantly told "needed to be saved".

Donald Trump has to destroy the Republican Party in order to save it

In 2012 I campaigned for Ron Paul. Cold calling hundreds of people, donating, volunteering/running to be the GOP precinct committee officer for my area, going to the county convention etc.

Although the Ron Paul campaign strategy left much to be desired, what people like me experienced at Republican Party meetings was much worse. The GOP insiders did everything they could to prevent Paul from getting the nomination: locking Paul delegates out, throwing Paul votes out, every technicality Robert's Rules of Order could muster (as well as downright cheating) ... it was ridiculous. We were the enemy as far as they were concerned. He was the only one with a plan to balance the budget without raising taxes. It sounds innocuous, but when it involves closing US bases in foreign countries, cutting budgets across the spectra of government programs, and limiting the power of the government to spy on us keep us safe, he was actually worse than most Democrats in the GOP's eyes.

Donald Trump isn't going to do any of these things. It's likely he will do just the opposite.* But he does have the resources to take on the GOP establishment and hold it hostage via a threat to run as an independent. Whether a greedy businessman can't be bought is questionable, but his claim that SuperPACs and donors won't influence him because he won't take their money is plausible. This refusal to accept money from Wall Street and lobbyists is also what makes Bernie Sanders a much more authentic and principled candidate than Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders would do greater damage to the United States than Hillary from a theoretical standpoint, between a principled "villain" and a political opportunist, it's hard not to root for the former.

Who knows where Trump lies. On one hand, he's a caricature of the successful American businessman: a loudmouth New Yorker, decadent and bigoted, flying around in a gold plated jet. It's hard to ignore that background and assume he's running out of a sense of civic duty rather than making the ultimate status play.

Even then, he's not really any worse than other candidates despite a remarkably consistent hysterical media narrative all the way from Fox News through the Huffington Post suggesting otherwise. They, along with pundits like Nate "Trump's got a 2% chance" Silver and party elites refuse to accept the reality of his popular support. Even though Trump is the frontrunner with the support of over a third of Republican voters, he had no Congressional endorsements until today. Now he has one or two compared to around fifty for Marco Rubio. The situation is even worse on the Democrat side with Hillary garnering around 99% Congressional support - a number that would make even North Korean election officials wince - despite being about even with Sanders in national polling.

"Disconnect" "Out of sync" "lost touch with reality" "in a completely different world"

I'm not sure of the best way to describe the disparity between the establishment and the rest of us, so that should cover it.  Savvy politicians might bend with the wind, but the establishment is too entrenched, too invested in the narrative they created to do that.  The GOP is crumbling, with the Democratic Party soon to follow, and all Goldman Sach's money and all the media men can't put the party together again. And good riddance.

* In that respect, he's like every other candidate running - though Rand Paul did have a balanced budget plan. Unlike his father, it is questionable whether Rand would have been uncompromising in his follow-through.

Reasons not to pre-order an Oculus Rift

Joel Hruska, one of my favorite tech commentators, wrote an article on why you shouldn't order a Vive which is something of a follow-up to his earlier article on why you shouldn't pre-order an Oculus Rift. There are many good reasons to avoid pre-ordering, but the ones he gave were bad. But there are good reasons to avoid it:

1. The Early Adopter premium. The official story is that even the $600+ price on Rift is subsidized. Maybe, but it's basically made up of smartphone components and low-cost HMDs should be rolling out in a couple years just as we saw with smartphones.
   
   Is the build of materials for Rift really over $600? The Samsung Galaxy S6 has a BOM totalling $290. Throw in another $85 panel and the cost is still under $400. I don't see a way, even with custom lenses, that the other parts make up $200. Then again, the recently announced Vive is $800+ although the Vive also comes with wireless tracking and custom controllers.
   
2. Lots of tinkering required. At launch there will be many VR experiences that will work out of the box. After all, there have been years of development on the DK1 and DK2 which make it a proven platform. However, VR support in current games is going to be uneven.
   
   For instance, Oculus had support for Unreal Engine 3 and then dropped it. So the chance VR will come to Killing Floor 2, a game I've been playing lately, is slim. It's possible to use VR with many games but in a mode that basically simulates a 360 degree monitor, i.e., no depth perception. It's still neat, but in a TrackIR plus multiple monitors way.
   
3. Steep hardware requirements. This depends on application, of course. Minecraft for Windows 10 should be a great experience on the recommended hardware. But being able to maintain a 90fps minimum is more important since lower framerates can lead to motion sickness.
   
   There is no system in the world that can run ARK: Survival Evolved at 2160x1200 @ 90fps minimum at moderate quality settings. So even though the title has nominal VR support, it will be at settings that make the game look primitive.
   
   2160x1200 is even somewhat of a lowball figure as Rift renders in even higher resolution to account for necessary distortion calculations. A Valve developer figures 378 Million pixels/sec is the required rate ~ analogous to 1920x1080 @ 182fps minimum. This is absolutely doable on the Rift recommended minimum specs in somewhat older titles but difficult with newer ones. That said, VR is a prime candidate for SLI setups and 1920x1080 @ 91fps is much more attainable with today's graphics cards.
   
   The situation only gets better if we downgrade our expectations to the DK2's 75Hz refresh rate.
   
4. Insufficient headset specs. Maybe 90fps is enough to eliminate motion sickness for most, but I can imagine that might not be enough for some people. This isn't new. Back when CRTs were the typical monitor technology 60Hz, caused headaches for some. I remember feeling motion sickness when I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for the first time.
   
   Even though my first experience with DK1 was positive, there were many things I wished it had. Resolution and field of view will have plenty of room for improvement over the coming years but even when they are high enough, a lack of haptic feedback and things like eye focusing on objects will prevent full immersion.

Intelligence Squared - Longevity

Intelligence Squared US held a debate on whether human lifespans are long enough. The side in favor put out some philosophical points that looked promising.

1. Human identity is tied to a narrative: a beginning, middle, and end. This cycle is what it means to be human; to eliminate death is to eliminate what it means to be human. Further refined, humans are essentially hard wired to go through a biological life cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, and death and life/health extension radically alters that natural cycle.
2. Intention is an important aspect in this discussion. A moral person should operate with only good intentions and wanting to live longer for the sake of living longer is not a good intention. It's narcissism.

But they also brought out some pretty bad arguments. One of them was along the lines of "we have bigger problems to worry about like poverty and ebola". This is a very bad argument because it is human ingenuity that has largely eliminated poverty and epidemics. People with more experience are better able to implement ideas across a broader range of situations than people with less. Is the world really a richer place with the loss of Norman Borlaug, Jonas Salk, Albert Einstein, and thousands of other innovators?

What insights would Goethe or Aquinas have for us today having experienced centuries of the human condition? An older, healthier population is generally going to be a wiser population.

Another bad argument was that only rich people will have access to longevity treatments. This will be true, but only for the first few years of availability. The demand for life extension once it is feasible is going to be unprecedented. Just as only the very wealthy had access to refrigerators, cars, air travel, and computers, competition will eventually bring life extension to those with less money. Ironically, one of the proponents of the motion cited Moore's Law in support of his wealth-inequality argument. If anything, Moore's Law, which is a microcosm for the exponential productivity gains exhibited by market competition, has been the key driver in bringing computing power to the masses. It's why access to smartphones is common even in impoverished countries.

Similar zero-sum thinking supplied the thinking behind the finite resources argument. "Won't people living indefinitely long mean we'll run out of resources?" And despite the repeated predictive failures among Malthusians, this question can never really die because resources are indeed finite. But available technologies can easily push the carrying capacity of the Earth well past the ten billion figure held in common wisdom.* 

One fact that both sides used had to do with opportunity costs. The side in favor suggested that our limited choice is part of what makes us human and that life extension eliminates those opportunity costs. But that is categorically false. Even if you were immortal, you cannot be in all places, acting in every possible way, at the same time. The side against provided a more compelling argument that our refusal to fight aging today will eventually mean that some cohort of human society will never even have the chance to make the choice of whether they should live longer or not.

Genesis 6:3

One audience member brought up an interesting point that Genesis 6:3 has God setting a limit of 120 years for human lifespan. Its a remarkably accurate figure. But it is not a metaphysical constant. And for many Christians, at least, the precepts of the Old Testament are not necessarily binding. Given the fact that the Edenic state as well as the lifespans until Genesis 6:3 had humans living for hundreds of years (nearly a thousand for Methuselah), a life span over 120 years is not per se proscribed.

* Breeder reactors, vertical farms, continuous production through LED lighting, desalination, increased urbanization and higher density development make the 10 billion figure a joke. These sorts of innovations are never factored into the carrying capacity models which is why those models invariably fail. And all of these developments actually reduce the environmental footprint of humans which means that more areas can be left as pristine wilderness. The key is in developing cheaper, cleaner, and more plentiful sources of energy.