Sorrow

It has been a while since my last post, and if anyone is still reading, please click through to read the following article on the plight of copy editors.

I am a copy editor. I do not work in journalism, exactly, though perhaps I work on its academic fringe. I am a copy editor of financial research; I prepare research for global distribution, online and in dead-tree journals. My job is to take what you have written, what you have spent hours, days, or perhaps even years to create, and to turn it into prose that reflects your intelligence and hard work. I eliminate redundancies, correct logical errors, and, overall, make your work look good and be easily understood. Yes, the factual problems are yours, and the general concept of the paper will not benefit from my efforts, but when I'm done, you'll know.

Copy editors are under-appreciated. They always have been and they always will be. It is unfortunate that the world of the Internet, where news is posted ad infinitum, seems less willing to embrace the perfectionism once requisite for news sources.

For me, when I read news online and find large numbers and types of mistakes, I am less willing to accept the article at its word. For me, these mistakes signify a lack of caring, which in turn make me suspicious of any claims made within. For instance, if you can't figure out which type of dash to use, en or em, why should I believe that 365 peopled died in an airline accident. Maybe it was 36.5. It could have been 3.65 people who died in a hang-gliding accident.

Just know: A copy editor is your last line of defense against mistakes and embarrassment. We are full of knowledge--useful and useless--because we read all day, every day, for a living. Appreciate your copy editor, help him or her do their job, and appreciate it when they point out your mistakes. After all, that's why you need them.

Blinky's Camera?

From China (Where else?). I want one, but in theory, I can't use it because I only have two eyes and would be incapable of viewing anything in three dimensions. Via Neatorama.

Landscapes

From today's New York Times, I got a look at the otherworldly landscapes of photographer Sze Tsung Leong, a Chinese American.


Of note in his works is that in each photograph the horizon line falls at the same point, allowing his photos to be lined up end-to-end, and viewed as a constant panorama, despite the fact that each photograph is of a far-off destination. Some examples of locations include Germany, Egypt, and Inner Mongolia (Chinese). Many of his photos are slightly overexposed, giving a ghostly feel to some thriving metropolitan areas, but by taking such wide photographs and maintaining the ratio of earth to sky, Sze Tsung Leong has compiled a body of work that will be fascinating to any and all interested in travel and/or photography. I look forward to applying the horizon line technique to some of my photographs. You can check out the article and the interactive presentation at the New York Times' Website.

The Internet is for Porn

This music video explicates my entire outlook on life and the many uses of the Internet.



Via Youtube via rbcp.

Greatest. Thing. Ever.

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. E V E R. It's called Cooking with Coolio and you can find it on MyDamnChannel.com.



Things to love about Cooking with Coolio:
1. Shaka Zulu!
2. The Sauce Girls
3. Autographed bell peppers
4. Coolio waving a knife around carelessly
5. Cooking + Profanity
6. Teasing white people

I know what I'm doing at work tomorrow.

"Sex Infections"?

I bring this article from the New York Times to your attention for two reasons:

1) The headline
2) The implications of the content

First, the headline. I thought the term was "STD", not "Sex Infection". I too have a sex infection, an infection to have sex. Sex, according to the New York Times, is a disease with which one can actually be infected, and Baby... I've got it and I want to share it with you! Now on to more serious matters, you buxom, writhing, bipedal petri dish.

Second, the content. As a student of public universities the world over, I know the statistics. There were posters affixed to health center, dormitory, and dining hall walls informing the hot, sweaty (and sex-infected) student body about the chances of waking with fleas should one lay with dogs.

According the the new study brought to our attention today, the chances of waking with fleas if you go black and don't go back are much higher than if you are ragin' for caucasians. In their test for four major flea species (HPV, herpes, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis [some sort of parasite, eww...]), 50% of fine, mocha-hued women tested positive for one of the four. For those suffering from a debilitating melanin imbalance, the results are a filthy 20%.

For you guys who can't do math? This means that the sorority girl you picked up at the sports bar in a Bud Lite-induced stupor and whom you schtupped with reckless abandon without a condom had a 1-in-5 chance of infecting you, and not with sex disease - with itchy, burns-when-I-pee syndrome. When you're considering an evening with a young Nubian princess, just flip a coin; your chances will be the same.

But this may be the best part! These are teenagers! Just imagine the numbers AFTER a five-year program at a state university. When they graduate and get their first jobs, they should just give out cards listing what diseases they have so that you can match them with yours and not catch anything new!

Finally, don't be so down on your prospects for disease-free carnal knowledge! They say that for two of the diseases, condoms are relatively INEFFECTIVE! Do yourself a favor: spank it.

Happy snapper season!

Flickr in Seoul

There's a fantastic photography group in Seoul called, appropriately, Flickr in Seoul. We meet every two weeks on Sunday and take photographs at locations around Seoul. If anyone is interested, you can join the group (which is free, of course) or just check out our collective photos online at Flickr.com. Also, feel free to click through to see my pictures by clicking the one below or on the slide show in the upper-right-hand corner.

Awesome

Catherine Chalmers is my hero. She raises animals and feeds them to each other while photographing the entire process. This is a concept with many facets ranging from intriguing to gross to natural to contrived, and any of her photos can bring out any of these things at any time, sometimes all at once. These pictures are intended to bring about consideration of the food chain, and it works. She also has a series of photographs starring American cockroaches and houseflies, among other creatures.

You can check out her photographs at her CatherineChalmers.com. You can listen to a great interview with Catherine on This American Life from 2005, which you can listen to for free here.

Rachel Papo Photography

Rachel Papo, an fellow Ohioan and Israeli, has created a fascinating photo documentary of life for Israeli girls in the military. The photos document a stark contrast between femininity, adolescence, and militarism. I don't really know that much about being in the military-and I don't want to-but these pictures are eye-opening and yet sad. I can't imagine being ripped away from home during the most free years of my life and forced to run around in the desert with a gun preparing for the inevitable conflict resulting from a centuries-old fight for land. (Oh, and the women are beautiful in a heavily armed way.)

Link: Rachel Papo: Serial No. 3817131

(chuckle) E-Sports

Perhaps you don't know how popular online gaming is in Korea. Perhaps you've been locked up in a third-world prison for the last ten years or have the sensory capabilities of Helen Keller.

From smoky, 24-hour Internet cafes to stadium-style competitions, almost one-quarter of Korea's population, and it's not just for kids anymore, participates in online gaming. There are many magazines, Websites, and other media dedicated to online gaming, and there is one full-time gaming channel, Ongamenet, that has amazing production value and is extremely popular. And they all play StarCraft.

I don't really want to debate the nature of the word "E-Sports" due to the fact that I'd end up throwing things and punching a Korean person, but I'll say this: Two of the most loathsome linguistic trends (sticking an "e" before other words and calling games "sports") have come together to create the semantic Hellspawn that is Korean entertainment.

Monocle (Oh, why must a subscription cost so much?!) produced a great video primer on this aspect of modern Korean culture. Watch the video. Then, cry for Korea.

Welcome to the Suck

So Namdemun, the Republic of Korea's super-best-#1 symbol of national pride and the oldest wooden structure on the peninsula burned down.

Reasons:
1. Arson (this has pretty much been confirmed and someone has been arrested)
2. Electrical fire (possible, but unlikely)
3. "Mystical Forces": Apparently, Namdemun was built, in part, to protect the once-walled city of Seoul from the fire-causing forces of Mt. Gwanaksan. Geomancy was once quite popular and is much like Fung Shui on a much grander scale.

This is Asia and someone is going to get skewered for this. Possible culprits include KT Security and some members of the Interior Ministry. Basically, it's a 600-year-old wooden building and the only form of fire protection was three or four fire extinguishers around the premises. A sprinkler system would have been a great help, but nobody wanted to damage the building to put it in. I guess it's after the fact, but isn't a slightly modernized building better than no building at all?

But wait, there's more! The building was monitored by a closed-circuit television system. DURING THE DAY ONLY!

Sorry, Korea. This was completely preventable and is basically your fault. I feel really sorry for whomever they pin this on.

Some users of Flickr in Seoul were on the scene and have taken some excellent and extremely powerful pictures of the tragedy in progress and after the fact. Check them out here, but please respect their copyrights.
Picture at top courtesy of "sean in japan" under a cc-by-sa license.

Archiving Digital Photography

My day began as it often does, with reading the New York Times. The Times had an excellent article on the lost-and-now-found negatives of Robert Capa. Their long journey from Spain to Mexico and now to New York for archiving led me to consider the future of digital photography and how the images of today will be preserved for the future.

With film, distribution and reproduction could be accomplished without the negatives, though until digital retouching, the quality and perhaps the intricacies of the image would erode, leaving an image diminished and false.

With digital photography, however, a series of 1s and 0s can be reproduced forever with no loss of quality. 1s and 0s do not degrade, do not become brittled and yellowed with passing time. Posting one's photographs to the Internet, either to Flickr or a blog, in some ways archives the images for all eternity. The rights of ownership may transfer, perhaps leading to future
precedent- setting court battles concerning publishing rights and residuals, but the photos will not be lost. It will be interesting, and somewhat disheartening, to see different inheriting factions fighting over advertising revenues from blogs and the rights to post and remove photos from Flickr and other media. But from any Website, we can copy files, strings of 1s and 0s that represent artistic vision, and keep them for ourselves. The rights may have been pulled and the photos dropped onto a portable hard drive and stuck in a safe deposit box by their legal guardian, but the images will still exist and will be available should they ever be needed again.

The rise of digital photography has resulted in a surge of amateur photographers. Perhaps, however, this popularity has lead to a dilution of the power of a single photograph or photographer. Today's world-class photographers must exceed the levels of what has been done before in order to capture our increasingly valuable attention. Is photography obsolete in the era of Photoshop and YouTube? I doubt it, but I think the nature of its importance is changing; in some ways becoming more obscure, but in others bringing it to the forefront of our awareness of the world and global interactions.

Our online presences are forever, for right now, and only time will tell how our stories and our images will be presented henceforth.