This film and slide scanner beats out the device I bought by Wolverine Tech that snaps a digital picture of my negatives and slides. The Canoscan FS 2710 has no vignetting and no ill considered custom color curve that must be undone in post processing.

I posted two articles at the viXra archive for physics outsiders. Have a look if you will. I try to post first drafts of fresh thinking here, though. And look for my book "Hacking Physics".

http://vixra.org/abs/1211.0139 is my article "Neglect of General Covariance".

http://vixra.org/abs/1212.0094 is "Draw the metric!".

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Michael J. Burns

Think about it in a careful way. Visualize a spacelike line, then extend it as a geodesic. Using a proper diagram of the universe, it is easy to show that this eventually intersects the big bang horizon. Don't be confused by convention; the Friedmann coordinates are very deceptive.

So shards of the big bang, expanding at light speed from a universal starting point in the past, are essentially contemporaneous with us.

I read his essays on this point but did not understand until this year. He knew that natural selection on groups was a truism. And so he did not even argue at length for it, only focusing on the selection that acts on various sizes of groups, as opposed to accidents of history.

My Samsung ST65 camera actually has a contrast control, and I have now realized that the proper setting for it is not zero. The default setting enhances contrast in the shadows and compresses the highlights. A -2 setting for contrast balanced by a +2 setting for saturation improves the appearance of the gray scale on a picture of the Color Checker 24 card. This might not be the final word - I will look at -1, +1 as well; but I have no desire to do post processing on photographs from this came

For film cameras using the same film, the bit rate proportionality simplifies to the product of the aperture area and the frame area. Slower film has the higher bit rate. For digital cameras that use the same technology, the proportionality is to the product of the aperture area and the number of pixels. But smaller sensor areas can force you to take multiple exposures in order to complete the picture with the required signal to noise ratio.

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Michael J. Burns

Study of natural selection on groups is the most thorough rejoinder to to the libertarian dogma. Natural selection on groups is actually a mathematical truism. And it has a proportionate practical effect whenever transactions between individuals are not zero sum. The prominent effect is to promote specialization of individuals. Witness all of the specialties in the groups called ecosystems. The deprecation of groups by promotion of the concept of individuals is mathematically only a false dic

I am very interested in the question of what kind of digital camera can match the quality of a 35mm film camera. In the context of the new high definition digital post processing, how many pictures with a standard information content can I take with a camera in one second of open shutter?

Cosmologists need to check their work by using different coordinates. The Friedmann coordinates conventionally used are rife with fictitious potentials which interact nonlinearly with real sources of gravity. It is Cartesian coordinates alone that have no such effects. And hyperspherical coordinates are still orthogonal everywhere, so they have no off-diagonal fictitious potentials.

The quality of CD player reproduction is on my mind today, as is the contribution of fictitious potentials to cosmology. Both questions are guarded (at sites like Wikipedia and arXiv) by the orthodox priesthoods that censor discussion for the sake, in the end, of their personal equanimity.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/11/06/the-cosmic-magnifying-lens/

I really think that this calculation by Dr. Castelvecchi of the magnification of the cosmic background radiation is spoiled by an artifact of Friedmann coordinates, that he takes as real instead of discounting it.