Cottleston Pie

My friend M has a plea, in the interest of safety, that he be repeatedly selected for extended screening at airport security. If you read the comments on his post, I'm going to have to agree with Gopi on this one. I've the impression that M's post is more about the emotion of feeling secure than about minimizing the risk of terrorism given intentional trade-offs.

We can disagree about what trade-offs are "worth it" as that is a very much a personal value judgment.

But say, given that (by some miracle) everyone can agree that a forty-five minute screening delay for 25% of airline travelers is acceptable, how can that time and associated monetary penalty be best applied to achieve the goal of minimizing risk that a terrorist person get control of a plane?

The follow-up question I pose is not as subjective. It can be evaluated to some degree by scientific methods (obviously, as with many theories, double-blind clinical testing is not an option). And some highly respected researchers have concluded that race-based profiling is not most effective.

If, despite hearing that and without countervailing evidence, M wants race-based profiling because it feels better, then that's a request for security theater where we all suffer the trade-off without maximizing the benefit (time and money spent repeatedly intensely screening M is time and money repeatedly spent without any increase in safety).

The researcher in particular that has my ear is Bruce Schneier. I've been reading his Crypto-Gram for a few years now. I've recommended it. Here's his latest on the topic of Counterterrorism in Airports (May 2004) and it is directly relevant to this discussion. I think that M is reacting to the idea that over-sensitivity to charges of racism (thus the heavy reliance on machines making random choices) leads to less-than-maximally-effective security. Bruce agrees with him. But the best answer isn't necessarily the race-based profiling that M suggests.

I recently finished James Michener's Hawaii while on vacation with family in Maine. It's a long book, so I've been thinking about Hawaii for a while now. From Michener and the images and pictures on television and in magazines, Hawaii appears to be quite the island paradise. I got the impression from Michener that while Hawaii was partially made that way by the industry of humans over the long course of history, the paradise of Tahiti might be even more dramatic, and Bora Bora the finest jewel of them all.

This has certainly piqued my interest in visiting the Hawaiian islands. I imagine that I'll get there before too long.

With that all in my mind, what I realized in Maine, was that it is really quite the paradise of its own.

Where the mountains meet the sea. There are over three thousand islands off the rugged granite coast, with a couple beautiful beaches. This summer I finally rode a schooner on a two hour tour of Penobscot Bay. A number of years ago my parents took a amazing camping trip where they joined a group that rowed dories to different islands off the coast and camped on them.

The Maine summer grass on lawns is naturally lush and full, with a lot of clover, and one could spend whole summers barefoot. In fact, I have. Summer proceeds like this: Strawberries and black raspberries. Maine blueberries. Blackberries. All except the strawberries grow wild and plentifully.

The plant life is vibrant and includes in abundance such standouts as sugar maples, tiger lilies, and dandelions. The summer air is fragrant with the smell of the modest milkweed.

Tall trees cover the hills that grow into mountains and ponds, lakes, and other wetlands are present in abundance over the land. (Mosquitoes find Maine to be a paradise as well.)

I can't say enough about the joys of abundant Lobster but to say that it's amazingly tasty and healthy and I could enjoy it every day for weeks on end. In fact, I have (every day of a two week vacation in 2003).

I'm focusing on the spring and summer here, but fall and winter have their own charms.

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a wedding invitation. It was returned to her with "Undeliverable" stamped across the top. I cannot imagine why. The only thing slightly unusual: the address was written in cursive and Boulevard and Apartment were not abbreviated. Such is the custom for formal letters. The numbers and cursive writing were all very clear and readable.

So I sent a letter to the Postmaster of Bluebonnet Station (78758) two weeks ago. The letter included a scan of the addressed envelope so he or she could properly evaluate the situation without relying on my description. It's been two weeks. No word yet.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a couple of pictures of the Austin skyline above the trees along the edge of Town Lake. My two best images had different strengths. One had a better contrast of the buildings against the sky, but the details of the tree foliage were lost in darkness. The other had better exposed the shadowy details of the trees but the skyline was not as well defined, being a bit over-exposed.

Today, as I jogged over the MoPac bridge today where I'd taken the photos, I wondered if maybe the best of the dynamic ranges could be combined into a single images with details in both the highlights and the shadows. I'd done some work my freshman year at Duke for a researcher where multiple images were combined to create a 3D image and some of that work, with aligning similar but not identically aligned images, seemed to suggest it was possible.

I found it a fascinating technique. The goal was to make a 3D image of a protein from a series of electron microscope images of the protein that had been processed and attached to a lipid bilayer. The alignment was done by processing the images via some variation of a Fourier transform and the result was a rough grid of points that didn't resemble the original image at all. My job was to use some human pattern-matching skill and intuition to correspond points on the grids of the various images on a computer. Using that data, the computer employed some algorithm to create the 3D image.

While the transform was ultimately and usually performed by computer, it could also be done by shining a red laser through a celluloid negative (film) from the electron microscope and then using some refracting device. The result was the strong points of light that define the same grid that the computer would produce. It could be a bit tricky to use the laser device -- I never quite mastered it that year. A good negative would produce a well-defined, regular grid. Using this technique, the best negatives could be identified. They were then scanned (by me using an amazing high-quality negative scanner) and computer processed.

The good researchers, a husband and wife team, had invited me back to work with them the next year, and were pleased enough with my work to suggest that if I wished to continue from year to year, I could probably join in the research effort in time and get my name on a paper or two. Unfortunately, the Univ. of Florida gave them a good offer and they moved their research down to Florida before I returned for my sophomore year.

Getting back to the topic of combining images to maximize well-exposed detail, imagine my surprise a couple of hours later when I saw this on MacInTouch:

Photomatix Pro 2.0 extends the dynamic range of digital photos or scans by combining images taken with different exposures into a single new image. It offers five different methods for computing the optimal combination of aligned images, 16-bit support, an alignment tool for out-of-register images, and more. The new version adds generation of an HDR image from 24-bit photos, an HDR viewer, and a Tone Mapping tool for scenes with a particularly high dynamic range. Photomatix Pro is $99 for Mac OS X and Windows.

Quoted from: MacInTouch

Perfect! Well, almost. I'm not sure that it's worth $99 dollars to me. But I'm glad that the software is readily available.

Today is "Take Our Children to Work Day." There are clowns, balloon animals, face painting and all kinds of cute little one's down in the cafeteria and the children can occasionally be seen in the halls too. It's a fun injection of energy and I'm glad they have it.

Aha, so a Fujitsu sponsorship has helped the PostgreSQL development team come out with such an outstanding list of improvements for the next release! I read Robert Treat's PostgreSQL Weekly News which includes a summary of each week's development progress as seen on the development mailing list and I have been quite amazed at how quickly development of major features was progressing.

Thanks to Jeremy's linkblog for this tip. I imagine that the sponsorship was probably mentioned sometime in the Weekly News but I didn't remember it because I didn't realize how significant it would be.

Yesterday a friend and I had lunch and ran a few errands. We stopped at the Bureau of Vital Statistics to get an extra copy of The Princess's birth certificate. As we waited in line, we saw the sample heirloom "Native Texan" birth certificates displayed on the wall. He and his wife had discussed choosing that when their baby was born, but hadn't. I said he should get her one now. He pointed out, I could get me one. And I can. Because I am. Born in Austin. So I did. Now I have a Texas vanity birth certificate suitable for framing. How crazy is that.

Some who know my political views find it rather ironic that I am a Native Texan and G.W. is not. He was born in Connecticut.

A few weeks ago, I saw the one-woman show Ladee Leroy down at St. Eds, the principal's alma mater wherein she earned (payed for...) her degree in theater.

Her show was brilliantly funny and I recommend it, particularly to us Gen Xers and younger young working adults and those who know us.

During the show, I thought of a few of my friends that would have also probably really enjoyed it but who weren't there with me on Faculty and Staff night. So, let me shout out a big thanks to the Faculty and Staff who invited me to come along that evening. :-)