INFOGRAPHIC: Nissan Versa Note (car) vs. NEC Versa Note (ancient laptop)

This past weekend, I received an email from Nissan, informing me of the availability of their “all-new” Versa Note hatchback. The name sounded awfully familiar to me. Just in case you were confused too, maybe this will help.

Choosing Your Versa Note

Debunking Super Moon Photography

You’ve probably seen some stunning photography of the so-called “Super Moon” over the past few days. The Moon has a slightly elliptical orbit, and on June 23, the Moon was just about as close to Earth as it ever gets. As it happens, June 23 was also the date of a full Moon, the time in its roughly 28-day cycle when its entire disc is illuminated.

All told, the Moon appears about 14 percent larger in diameter and 30 percent brighter at this closest pass (or perigee, 222,000 miles away) than it does at its farthest (or apogee, 252,000 miles away). Yet some of the images shared since the weekend give the impression that the Moon is descending upon us in a catastrophic plunge.

Rising Super Moon brushing past the tree tops in Mount Diablo State Park….

Are those tiny people on that hill in the lower right? My goodness, they are! That Moon is gihugeous!

Well, no, it’s not. That photo was taken with a 500mm telephoto lens, making everything in it appear much larger. Those people look tiny, sure, but they’d look even tinier if the photo were zoomed out to a more natural field of view. Imagine you spotted a person just down the block from where you were standing, and picture how big the Moon would look in relation to them. Now picture a person a mile away and how that person looks compared to the Moon. When the mile-away person is enlarged four times, he or she is still a mere speck. The smallish Moon, however, becomes quite large.

To illustrate, here are a couple photos I took of the Moon when it was not full, in July of 2011. I don’t show you these photos because they’re particularly good. (They’re not. Especially the second. Hoo boy, that one’s pretty terrible, in fact.) They do, however, show how magnification works.

The first shot was taken with my lens at 75mm*; the second, at 375mm* – considerably “zoomed in.” In the 52 minutes between shots, the sky grew darker and the Moon moved diagonally toward the horizon.

Moon wide shot Moon zoom

As you can see, both the mountains and the Moon look considerably larger in the second shot. That’s the whole point of using a zoom lens – bringing far away objects apparently closer. But everything is magnified the same amount. If we were to actually walk toward those mountains, they’d appear to get bigger as we approached, but the Moon would stay pretty much the same apparent size.

If you don’t believe me, listen to Neil de Grasse Tyson or Phil Plait, professional astronomers both. They know their stuff.

There’s nothing “fake” about most Super Moon photographs (though there are certainly plenty of celestial pictures that have been heavily manipulated). It’s just important to realize that the effect of a telephoto lens is much, much greater than the slightly smaller distance between our two spheres.

*These figures are the “35mm equivalent” focal lengths of my lens, which is the standard by which most cameras are measured. My Nikon D60 camera, like many on the market, uses a different sensor size, so the actual focal lengths were 50mm and 250mm, respectively.

You’re Obscure So You Suck

I saw this on Twitter yesterday, and it got to me:

If your site/book/whatever is any damn good, I will hear about it anyway.

In context, it was the end of a short rant about strangers butting into conversations to plug their own creations – in this case, an alternative to a Web site the tweeter was talking about. Being annoyed at the specific case certainly isn’t unreasonable.

Out of context, it says that if this person doesn’t know about your stuff, it’s shit.

Now, I don’t know this poster in the slightest; it was a retweet by someone I do follow. And they certainly weren’t talking to me, just ranting to the Internet at large. But the attitude is so wrong-headed that I had to contemplate my own, hopefully more cogent, rant. Read more of this post

REJECTED: Julian the Mouse

Every now and then, I slam out something unsolicited with a particular publication in mind. More often than not, they don’t want it, so it goes here. In this case, it was NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction competition, Round 11: “A character finds something he or she has no intention of returning.

Julian the MouseIf he hadn’t been dawdling over lunch, Eric might never have heard the soft scratching noise from the next room. As it was, he still clutched his beverage as he stood to investigate.

He entered the living room just in time to see a mouse pop out of the opposite wall, seemingly by magic, and scurry in his direction. They both halted in their tracks at the exact same moment, eyes glued to each other. Eric brought the milk to his lips, downing the last of it in one gulp and turning the glass upside down in his hand. He inched forward, his socks sliding nearly silently across the laminate flooring.

He was able to slowly crouch down without scaring the tiny animal off, until their faces were just a foot or two apart. He hadn’t been certain at first, but at this distance the two black dots above the mouse’s nose were unmistakable.

Julian.

“I need my critters,” Tammy had said when she moved in. Besides Julian, there were twin guinea pigs Leonard and Christine, hamster Beverly, and rat Alyssa. Lenny and Chris shared an aquarium, but everyone else lived in separate plastic cages with tubes extending above and around them for exercise and exploration.

“Why do you need both a rat and a mouse?” Eric asked her. “Isn’t a rat just a big mouse?” They didn’t have sex for a week.

The smallest of the plastic cages, stripped of all excess tubing so Bev and Alyssa could have more, had remained behind when Tammy left. That was the only reason she would ever see him again, she said – only for a reunion if Julian ever reemerged.

For the first few weeks, Eric left bits of cheddar in humane traps scattered around the house. None was ever eaten. When the decaying cheese began smelling up the place, he chucked the traps entirely and hung sachets of potpourri in every room. The odor was gone within 24 hours.

And so, Eric noticed only then, was the scent of befouled woodchips. Tammy had been decent enough about cleaning her pets’ habitats, but always did it on the day after garbage collection. The stink never failed to waft its way back inside, as if there were a miniature jet stream straight past the trash barrels and into the stove hood vent.

Eric glanced away from Julian’s spotted face to the corner where the rodent’s erstwhile residence was installed, its only accessory a hanging water bottle. It sat upon a small table with a single drawer, picked up for seven dollars at the last tag sale he and Tammy had attended together. Two more romance novels and yet another rabbit figurine rounded the total out to ten bucks.

He really could use a table on the other side of his bed, he thought.

“Boo!” he shouted, whipping his head back to face Julian. The little mouse unfroze, scampering away from the noise and into an impossibly tiny hole just above the moulding in the living room’s south wall. Eric grabbed a book and slapped it in front of the breach, pressing it as flush as it would go.

Julian’s cage fit easily in the largest outside trash barrel. Eric was pretty sure he had a tub of spackle in the garage.