I'd be more than happy to contribute to a united fund that pools tax-deductible donations to OSS projects, like United Way does for its charitable causes. The key here is to make the donations recurring and automatic. It used to be that payroll deductions were the only way to achieve that, but now there may be more options. I don't want to give to just one organization, I'd like to spread the love around. And, I only want to be asked once a year, not every time I download something.

If government were run like a business it would not only be taking care of the disabled, it would be doing it while making a profit. Nearly every convenience of modern life, from the food you eat, to the clothes you wear, to the shiny smartphone in your hand was made by a private business business, not government.

You can get a lot done in this world if you don't care about people and give yourself free reign to push, abuse, over-praise, or cajole them to get where you want them to go. Its too bad you have to be horrible person to bring out the best in people.

The purple fringe problem is an old one when it comes to digital cameras. Most famously this spoiled the production models of the Sony DSC-F828 in 2004, which was supposed to be the ultimate high-resolution digital camera in its day with perfectly optimized Zeiss optics. The irony was that the very quality that made the lens superb in visible light made it that much more aberrant in infrared. Infrared blocking filters are not perfect, so out-of-focus infrared images appear whenever there is extreme contrast in the scene at extreme off-axis angles.

Purple fringes like this are not due to lens coatings or sapphire windows. Nor are they due to lens flare, flare being due to internal surface reflections, so it is wrong to call it a purple flare. Strictly speaking, it is a chromatic aberration, compounded with some coma effects.

The cause is simply infrared (IR) light being imaged by the image sensor. The lens is highly corrected to sharply focus visible light, but such corrections result in severe aberrations in focus for for any light outside the visible. These aberrations worsen with wider angles, that is, the farther out toward the edge.

Of course there is an IR blocking filter in the lens, but it is not perfect. A very small proportion of the IR does get through, but not enough to normally be imaged. However, when you have an severely bright highlight in the scene that is overexposed on the edge of the frame, the light itself will be "blown out" (pixels all white), but abberant unfocused IR rays will form a fringe. This fringe is purple because that is the false color that IR light yields in an RGB sensor. This fringe is not blocked by the IR filter because the highlight is far more intense (potentially by huge factors) than the exposure for the rest of the scene, so even 99.99 percent IR blocking filter lets through enough rays that when aberrated show up as a bright fringe.

Example from a Sony DSC-F828. Note the camera flash reflections from the shiny trophy at the edge of the frame have purple fringes, while the reflection off the glass near the center of the frame does not.

This problem only appears when you have a highly corrected lens, a high-resolution sensor, a high-speed-wide-angle lens, less-than-perfect IR filtering, and a scene of high spatial contrast at the edges. That's why it doesn't appear in most cameras, because few cameras are so high-performance in all of those areas at once.

Fixing the problem can be done by reducing the performance in one or more of those areas. Or you can design even better optics, but that is difficult to implement in a compact size like a phone requires, because it takes bigger bits of glass and more of them. You can also correct in firmware or software.

Tell me about your family of origin. What do you admire about your parents?

Every now and then we run into those people who have that rare gift of crystallizing things in an elegant way. On whose shoulders have you stood over the years?

Calling someone names is what passes for persuasion these days. No wonder people don't agree with you; agree with what? That you think they're a fucking moron? Yeah, that works.

An interesting and informative blog. She points to America Hears as one of the very few vendors who sell a software interface to their hearing aids so users can self-tune.

Watts published an entire paper on siting problems for temperature recording stations. But in any event, even temperature going "all the way back" to the 1800s doesn't do much to help us with the problem of a geologic time scale. We can see that temperatures are cyclical, but on which side of the slope are we? Probably something in the magnitude of the interval between ice ages is about as fine as one should cut it.

... and that would be a proxy for temperature, not a direct measurement.

One thing you're missing is the condition of the data. Unfortunately, it's not very good, especially temperature data. There are gaps, there are insturmentation issues, there are siting issues, and, the 800lb gorilla in the room, there's just the simple fact that climate changes happen in geologic time frames, and we literally don't have any direct measurements of that scale.

So we must proxy, and normalize, and adjust, and model. Really, I don't think anyone can definitively prove anything one way or the other yet. It's not like people have no legitimate reason for doubting claims on either side.

"Public records" means all writings and recordings that consist of letters, words or numbers, or their equivalent, set down by handwriting, typewriting, printing, photostatting, photography, magnetic impulse, optical or magneto-optical form, mechanical or electronic recording or other form of data compilation, however stored, and regardless of physical form or characteristics, prepared or owned by, or in the possession of a public body or its officers, employees or agents in the transaction of public business. Records that are not prepared for or used in the transaction of public business are not public records." VA Code 2.2-3701

IANAL, but it seems this case would likely hinge upon whether Prof. Mann is considered an employee of the State, and whether his emails were documenting transactions of public business.

You can't "know" that it doesn't likely exist, because these claims are, by definition, beyond human knowledge. Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence (or non-existence) of God. Belief and non-belief are both judgments, not facts. They are conclusions one reaches upon examining the world, and there Science may help you. But Science ends at material things.

If I don't like what YouTube is doing, there are many other competing services I can use, including hosting my own content myself. If I don't like what my government is doing, I have no alternatives. What they say is "law", it must be obeyed.

As governments have a monopoly on the law, only they are obligated to protect the rights of citizens. All other actors on the scene are engaging voluntarily, and are obliged only to act in their own best interest.

This is as it should be. "Don't be evil" is as much a business principle as it is a statement of personal ethics. Don't be evil ... so you will attract the largest number of customers.

And I could argue that as atheists aren't smart enough to know they should believe in God, it's obvious they couldn't have produced this film. There's a logical fallacy in here somewhere, if only we could find it.