LightZone, RIP

Four years back, I muttered into my beard about the tendency for good tools to be bought up and killed off by the big beasts of the computer software jungle.

I have long ago had to abandon Onfolio Academic, one of the programs I mentioned in that post. With no maintenance, never mind development, by its new owners (Microsoft) it eventually failed to work under updated versions of Windows ... and then Microsoft themselves abandoned their own poor, half sucked version. Nowadays I use LinkCommander which, whilst not at all the same thing, takes over some of Onfolio's functions and can be persuaded to support some others. PaintShop Pro, however, remains well supported by Corel and I'm still happily using it despite the presence of Adobe PhotoShop on the same machines. In fact, as part of the future proofing preparations mentioned below, I just updated to the latest (X4) version, even though I'm happiest with X2.

Still in the image processing department, back then in 2007 I mentioned that I was on the cusp of decisions about LightZone. Shortly thereafter, I took the plunge and committed to it. LightZone was a program designed to work the way a Zone System attuned photographer thinks, and was superb. I developed a two part workflow in which initial development (in darkroom terms, the stage roughly analogous to film processing) to TIFF was done in LightZone while finalisation (the fine printing stage) continued in PaintShop. It was a partnership made in heaven, reflected in the credit at the top right of this blog.

Three months ago, however, the web page of Light Crafts (developer and publisher of LightZone) went off line. And has stayed that way. There had been no development for some time before that. There is prima facie indications that the prime mover behind Light Crafts has abandoned it to work for yet another of those big beasts (actually a big fruit, in this case) of the computing world – but, unlike the progenitors of Onfolio and RawShooter, without providing a migration path or even any warning to the program's user base. When I recently had an industrial scale computer crash and had to reinstall Windows 7, LightZone was distinctly reluctant to coöperate ... which put the writing on the wall.

So ... I'm now phasing in a new image handling régime so that I don't have to do it all in a rush when the sad day comes for LightZone to go. I am trying out numerous RAW conversion tools at present, in search of a preferred replacement, using Adobe's Camera Raw (via Bridge) as a temporary stop gap.

And that is why (to answer several email queries) the "Imaging via LightZone and PaintShop" credit at the top of this blog has become "Imaging via PaintShop Pro.

Difference of opinion

Today, as Ray Girvan notes at JSB, is Charles Babbage's 220th birthday. By a coincidence, I have just built a portal to a set of Babbage and Lovelace diary pages which Ray and I jointly wrote some years ago and with which I am still pleased ... a coincidence which seems like a flimsy enough excuse to shamelessly remind my readers of its existence.

Today

Cars, cows and carbon sinks

An externality, to an economist, is^[1] "a side-effect or consequence ... which affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved". Externalities take all sorts of forms, and can be positive or negative, but over the past half century industrial pollution of the environment has become the primary exemplar.

More recently still, the focus has narrowed down to carbon based compounds whose costs are paid in a number of ways. The crudest direct health effects are usually localised, and become a matter for local legislation or lack of it; the atmospheric greenhouse effect is a global issue with no respect for human jurisdictional boundaries.

Attempts to deal with pollution almost always come down to mechanisms designed to convert an externality into a direct cost paid by the polluter, and carbon is no exception. A number of schemes exist to license carbon emission, with a market in which those who emit least sell permissions to those who emit most, thus exerting a direct proportional cost pressure on producers.

Whether this method is effective, and if so to what degree, is a subject of considerable political argument; but it remains the principle approach. Its use depends on quantification of emissions, which is neither simple nor straightforward. In practice, output is usually simplified from the full gamut of emitted substances (not all of them carbon based) to a single carbon dioxide equivalence figure, the product of mass and a radiative forcing factor which varies from substance to substance. But that still leaves an impractically large data acquisition and monitoring task.

The essence of statistical data analysis, always and everywhere, is generalisation from sample to population with a quantified level of confidence. Sometimes, as with extraterrestrial exploration in the last issue, this is because only tiny amounts of data can be captured and the maximum information must be squeezed from it. In the case of planetary emission levels the opposite is true: the available data volume is huge, and only a small fraction of it can be manageably handled. [more]

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1. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.

The quick'n'dirty approach to puzzles

Ray Girvan, in his JSB blog today, considers a mathematical puzzle which, in essence, involves finding a number which is one less than a given multiple of its own digit sum. (I won't be more detailed or specific; see Ray's original post.)

From here on, things get a bit nerdy ... you have been warned!

My "brute force and ignorance" approach to a solution was considerably less elegant that Ray's (which he provides on a link from the main post). Implementing my method, however, did prompt me to think how tasks which would once have been both tedious and Herculean have been rendered trivial by off the peg computing tools.

Making an assumption that the number (n) has no more than 4 digits, and writing it as dcba, the teaser boils down to the following algebraic statement:

1000d + 100c + 10b + a = 17(d+c+b+a) + 1

If the four digit assumption had proven to be false, then extension to five, six, etc, digits would involve adding e, f, and so on to the equation. In the event, that wasn't necessary as the solution turned out to be a three digit one.

Setting up a spreadsheet containing an array of one hundred numbers (initially 0000 to 0099), which would test each of them against the above condition and then move on to the next array, took slightly under a minute. From there to a solution, through two updates of the array, took perhaps two seconds. (The three versions of the array are shown in the image on the left; click it if you want a larger view. The solution, flagged "YES", can be seen at the bottom of the third frame.)

Like Ray, I then wondered whether this was a unique solution. My spreadsheet couldn't answer that question, but it did (in less that a minute) confirm that there is no other two, three or four digit alternative.

As I say, this is (to put it kindly) not a very cerebral approach ... but it is quick. Writing this description has taken me much longer than the entire design, implementation and use cycle for what was a one time throwaway tool.

Of course, every extra digit would increase the time by an order of magnitude ... but then, I was using visual inspection of the array (watching for the word "YES" to occur on screen). At five digits or more, it would have been worth investing a few minutes in automating that aspect. In fact, having written that, I have just tried a copy, paste and filter approach which took me to the limit of five digits (even without automation) in less time than the original four digit check.

It's very easy to take things for granted and forget how far we've come in a short while. Trying this trick in the days before spreadsheets, even using a calculator, would have taken about twenty to reach the solution (being prepared to go on for over an hour if the solution had been close to a thousand); testing to 9999 would have taken roughly two standard working days. Go to my teens, when calculators hadn't happened yet, and you can multiply those times by a factor of four or five.

The best of times...

How, exactly, publishing is to cope with the tectonic shift which the web has produced in information dissemination is not a new topic; it's been grumbling on for years. It is, however, an ever fresh and ever shifting one.

Steve Wheeler, of Learning with E's, nailed his colours to the mast a couple of months ago by declaring publicly that he would no longer write or review for closed publications: a courageous stance, but not one which addresses the question of how the open access journals which he prefers (a preference, let me be clear, which I firmly share) are to be funded.

Some journals can be run on various combinations of marginal overhead and dispersed good will. They will usually come from within academic institutions or the coöperative intellectual metaspaces between them, though some companies (large and small) are in there as well. Others are subsidised as overhead for some species of commercial payoff – from public relations through to early research access. Then there are those, of course, which run on advertising pure and simple. And there is the public call for donations. One of my regular open access reads, Etudes Photographiques, made the decision earlier this year to fund the economics of research through differential publication calendars (online open access appearing six months after paid for print), which is yet another approach.

Whichever model they adopt (and I operate within most of the above), there is no escaping the difficult balancing act between existence and principle. Nor will there be, when things eventually settle down ... but I really haven't the faintest idea what that day will bring. As Thierry Gervais (author of the Etudes Photographiques editorial linked in the last paragraph) wryly observes, “A historian by training, I am once again reminded that it is easier to analyze the past than to predict the future.” I have an uncomfortable feeling, though, that when we look back on this revolution we may find that now, in the intermission between old and new, was the peak of the trajectory: that, as in so many revolutions, the new world (however different from the old) is not so much better as we hoped in the heady days of bringing it about.

We live in exciting times of change; best to make the most of them.

Ungrudging admiration

I've just been feeding on some of my personal favourite fine photographs, as I often do, marvelling at what others have done.

This portrait (Abshiro Aden Mohammed, Women's leader, Somali refugee camp, Dagahaley, Kenya. 2000) by Fazal Sheikh is one of them.

I love its uncompromising, confrontational honesty, calm dignity, assured assertion of equality. The photographer's visually courageous decision to slice depth of field right down to a narrow zone embracing those indomitable eyes and cheekbones (allowing nose and lips to blur) moves the image up a level from merely wonderful to superb.

Quotation of the day

“I think one does best, in life as well as in art, to focus on one’s own likes and loves, enjoying the pursuit of idiosyncratic experimentation. My own new goal is to live as much as I can in the work I do when I’m in love with what I’m doing for its own sake.”

Well said, Christopher Volpe.

Today

Joining up the dismal dots

In view of the recent raised temperature in diplomatic relations between the west (particularly Britain) and Iran, I'm suddenly less certain of my belief that there is no appetite for yet another disastrous war. Not just any old war, either, but one which will geographically connect up the existing errors of arrogant misjudgment in Iraq and Afghanistan into one continuous mess.

In view of which, I've just been back to re-read Paul Rogers' ORG briefing last month, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, well worth reading in full, which concludes in part that...

“... an Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it. This would be in addition to the extensive instability and unpredictable security consequences for the region and the wider world. ... ... ... the consequences of a military attack on Iran are so serious that ... ... ... war is not an option in responding to the difficult issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

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• Paul Rogers, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran. ORG International Security Briefings, 2011(2011-11).

Today

History fatigue

I've just watched an episode of Anthony Horowitz's second world war police drama sequence Foyle's War, in which the eponymous Foyle tells his son that he (the son) is suffering from "combat fatigue".

My immediate assumption was that this was an anachronism. At a guess, I'd have fairly confidently said that the term dated from the 1960s. Not that I am viscerally opposed to anachronisms; it just surprised me in a fiction known for its diligent research.

Looking up combat fatigue, however, I discover that I couldn't be more wrong.

The OED seems to locate "combat fatigue" (“n. a nervous disorder resulting from prolonged or severe battle experience”) 1943 – firmly in Foyle's time. There are references to it in US medical journals from the mid to late 1940s, even though the earliest PubMed hits are from 1945.

Google Labs' Ngram shows a peak frequency at 1948. It also shows occurrences from as early as 1860, but a quick sampling suggests that this is a red herring – a dozen spot checks all yield either usage such as “At present we have no drugs that combat fatigue of the central nervous system directly”* or retrospective reference from later dates.

On a lazy search, then, it seems that this description dates from about twenty years earlier than I had assumed.

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* Psychiatric bulletin of the New York State hospitals: Volume 2, Page 311, 1917)