DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The other day I read in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone that asparagus is a spring crop, although it “appears again for the holidays.” I thought that was odd, that a particular vegetable would show up for the holidays like a weird cousin with bad hygiene who will pollute the bathroom but nevertheless wants a place to stay for a few days.

Ms. Madison is correct, though — I went to the grocery store, and sure enough there was a big display of asparagus, imported from some distant place like Anaheim. Heh. Actually it was from South America. I guess it’s not so much that the stores import asparagus for Christmas; more likely, the crops in the other hemisphere are just now being harvested.

Our photovoltaic array went online Friday, a day of overcast gray skies and rain. Our shiny new solar electric system produced an underwhelming 5 watts… enough, as a coworker said, to pop a bag full of popcorn, so long as you don’t mind waiting three years.

If you have any control over the timing, I recommend you schedule your PV install for a day without rain, because you’ll want to see your investment go to work immediately. (You probably wouldn’t buy a new car during a hailstorm, either.)

I begin to get a sense of the scope of this project when I think that these panels will be here for the next 30 years, enduring hot summer sun and cold winter squalls repeatedly while everything else about the house, and about our lives, changes underneath. We’ll probably even need to get a new roof at some point in the next 30 years. That will be “interesting,” in the American sense of the word, i.e. “difficult and/or unpleasant.”

The panels are impressively solid-state; they just lie there, stoically, working when they can.

The magic happens in the inverter, which converts generated DC to AC, and which keeps track of the amount of power coming out of the array. Sunday’s peak was just shy of 2kw, enough to spin my electrical meter backwards at an impressive rate.

That was the moment of epiphany: solar power is smart. I’d worked the numbers, read the articles, talked to the salespeople… but once I had a system on my roof, generating electricity from sunlight, I realized that every empty roof is a waste of energy. If there’s enough sunlight falling on my roof on a winter afternoon to power my house and my neighbor’s too, why the heck are we still burning oil for power?

Critics will point to the high initial investment. I find that argument specious. I guess it depends on one’s priorities. Buying energy from the utilities is certainly the easier way to go, but it’s clearly not the cheapest — not in California anyway.

And the environmental issue can’t be argued: solar energy is clean.

Anyway, we’re extremely pleased with ourselves. I will admit to frequent checking of the skies and the inverter and, yes, I enjoy watching my electric meter spin backwards, because frankly I feel like I’m getting away with something.

I’ve deprecated the old RSS 0.91 feed in favor of RDF 1.0. The immediate advantage: full, formatted article text is now available within the feed.

Nearly in time for your holiday spending spree, here’s a miscellaneous collection of stuff I think is neat. I’ve searched the entire planet to bring you the most intriguing stuff money can buy, at an incredible value to you. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Art and stuff that looks like it

• Gorgeous photos of the World Trade Center and NYC skyline from 1976.
• Two online stores now offer prints of Art Radebaugh’s Jetsons-era futuristic illustrations: Keystone Pictograph and Palace of Culture. Check out the swoopy technology!
• Adbusters’ Corporate US Flag provides a subversive commentary on the influence of corporations upon government policy. You can buy a 5'x3' polyester flag, or, for free, download a high-res PDF and print it yourself.
• For the photographers and illustrators in the audience: make a photo calendar. PhotoAccess.com offers a nice product. If you have twelve images that someone could stand to look at for a month each, a calendar makes a great gift.
• Chock full of conspiracy theories (some of which are actually true), the Deception Dollar is a unique piece of political propaganda. Matted and framed, it will serve as a time capsule of the American political landscape in 2003. Be sure to get two copies, so you can show the front and back within one frame.
• The Sierra Club offers free World War II Conservation Posters (which I’ve written about, at length, before). As with some of the other free art downloads described here, these could be printed in poster size by your neighborhood reprography center, to make an inexpensive and uniquely noncommercial gift.

Gifts for Photographers

• Professional Photoshop is the one book every digital photographer has to have. My review contains before-and-after examples illlustrating the color-correction and image retouching techniques in the book, which is an instruction manual for image restoration experts.
• Peter iNova has published two hardware-specific books on CD-ROM covering Nikon and Sony digital cameras. I own the Nikon version, Mastering Nikon Compact Digital Cameras, and have found it to be a fantastic resource. iNova has a separate edition covering the Sony Advanced Cyber-shot

Gifts for People who wear Clothing

• Grass Roots Natural Goods sells a wide variety of hemp and organic (“green”) cotton clothing and accessories. I’m a repeat customer; I’ve found their service to be excellent.
• Hemptown sells, you guessed it, hemp clothing. Their 3-packs of Hemp T-Shirts are a great deal.

Important Books

• (Regular readers are invited to cover their ears while I bang this drum one more time.) Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Just read it, OK?
• I’m halfway through this: High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. It’s fascinating, both as a study of Detroit marketing and of the American psyche.

I generally don’t list mass-market items here, because you’re innundated with them 24x7 via television, radio, and the-entire-internet.com. But I just stumbled across a DVD that needs to be better known. I make that claim because I’m the perfect customer for it, and even though it came out last year I only discovered it this morning:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD is the classic TV adaptation of Doug Adams’ triumphant 5-book trilogy. If you know it, I need say no more, and if you don’t, buy the books first (e.g. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• Which reminds me, I recently saw a companion book, a biography of Douglas Adams by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman. It’s called Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion and it’s on my own wish list.

If you’re not yet sated, check out last year’s edition: 2002 Gift Guide.

Dan Margulis holds the keys to the digital darkroom. If you own a digital camera and a copy of Adobe Photoshop, you need this book, for it will show you how to get the most out of your photos.

Even if you’re shooting film and scanning the prints (or negatives), Professional Photoshop will show you how to extract the best picture from your scan.

The book contains over 300 pages of instruction, with hundreds of photographs illustrating the techniques. Topics include: removing color casts, extending dynamic range, plate blending, sharpening, contrast enhancement, recovering too-dark originals, photo restoration, conversion from color to black and white, and more. I’ve put together two quick examples to demonstrate the most important, and most immediately useful techniques.

Use Curves to remove color casts
Humans perceive true colors no matter what the ambient light is like. But cameras aren’t as highly evolved. See the left side of my example; the photo was taken at dusk, when the lack of sunlight made everything appear blue. The left side of the example photo was not doctored — that’s the raw original image.

Professional Photoshop describes in meticulous detail how to use Photoshop’s Curves tool to remove color casts. The right side of the image is the result of a single pass with the Curves tool, using techniques presented by Margulis. Although it is not perfect, the corrected side of the image is a huge improvement.

Use Curves to expand dynamic range
“Expanding dynamic range” sounds like a mouthful, but all it means is to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. Even high-end cameras don’t make full use of the available spectrum… but it’s a simple operation in Photoshop to do so. Margulis shows how to find the important parts of an image and make them stand out.

The left side of the example image appears to have been shot through a cloud of flour. The detail on the right side is much more pronounced; the colors are more vivid. It’s a significantly better picture. The improvement took two steps:

1. Use Curves to increase dynamic range.
2. Use Unsharp Mask to bring out detail.

This correction took less than one minute.

I will caution potential buyers that Margulis’ book contains more than most people want to know. The learning curve for some of the advanced techniques is steep. But you only need to climb as far as you want — and the basic techniques have immediate payoff, as evidenced by my quick corrections above.

In my opinion this book is essential for digital photographers, especially for people who use online photo printing services like PhotoAccess.com, OFoto, ShutterFly, etc. I printed images straight from the camera for a few months, but now I’m going back and re-printing them, because the corrected versions are so much better.

You can see one more correction example here: using channel blends to correct underexposure.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)