Foreign Dispatches

Direct Democracy is Bad for Individual Rights

Having railed on here repeatedly about my lack of faith in any supposed "wisdom of the masses",  or the alleged merits of ever more participatory and responsive political systems, I'd like to provide some actual social science reseach to back me up.

The Possibilities of DSLR Video

Having recently made my case at such length for passing over the Nikon D800, I can see how anyone reading my little essay would have been left with the impression that I have no interest whatsoever in the new developments being made possible by the addition of video capability to higher end digital cameras. Such is not the case: while I personally have no interest in being a filmmaker, I'm still able to appreciate the incredible things that can be done with these new tools when in the right hands. Take the video below, for example, shot entirely with Canon's 5D Mark II.

Why Not Pardon Alan Turing?

It is now 60 years since Alan Turing - war hero and intellectual father of the theory of computing - was convicted on the charge of "gross indecency", which in 1950s terms simply meant that his sexual orientation was other than what was thought permissible by society at large at the time. As 2012 also marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth, it seemed a particularly apposite time to make a request for his posthumous pardon, a request the Conservative justice minister has now rejected.

The Nikon D800

As those of us who follow the rumor blogs have known for several months by now, Nikon was planning to introduce the successor to it's widely used (and much loved) D700: the rumor had it that the new camera was to have been introduced in the autumnn of 2011, but the combination of a tsunami in Japan and the floods in Thailand put paid to said plans, at least for a while. Now, at long last, the rumored D800 is finally here, and my feelings about the new camera are ... ambiguous, to put it mildly.