What’s up with text messages?

cell phone I’ve been griping about this for years: it costs cell-phone carriers effectively nothing to send text messages, yet they’re charging 10 or 20 cents a piece. Consider the size of an mp3 file vs. a text file: my This American Life downloads (which are of course efficient, low-quality files) are 27,700 kilobyte files, which comes to 470 kilobytes — or 470,000 bytes — per minute. How many bytes is a 160 character text message? I actually had to work this out, but you’d be correct to guess that in text messaging, one character still = one byte, so it’s 160 bytes.

I.e., one minute of audio costs phone companies several thousand times as much to transmit as a text message. Calling plans are of course totally arcane, but an average between pay as you go and the less expensive monthly plans seems to be about ten cents per minute of calling. So, they’re charging twice as much for the text message while it’s costing them 1/1,000th as much to send (this is actually a conservative estimate which assumes that the phone call uses a quarter of the bandwidth as the This American Life mp3). In other words, Highway 2B Robberiez.

So the obvious solution is to not send text messages? Well, not really. If we knew they cost 20 cents before, they’re obviously worth it to us to send. This is what happens in Europe: Nobody has a prepaid plan: you pay for the minutes you actually use. (In an added twist, only the person initiating the call is charged.) Text messages are charged some trivial amount, which makes a round of texts much cheaper then a short conversation.

So, I’m not sure we want a world where minutes on the phone are expensive and text messages are cheap. I guess what I’m saying is, look at your cell phone bill. If it makes sense for you to switch to a cheaper plan, do it. If you’re off-contract, consider a pre-paid plan. And if you’re sending and receiving an average of 5 text messages a day, consider whether that $30 per month is really worth it to you.

Image: IamSAM

Investigate the Bush lawyers

I’ve been catching up on my reading of Slate, and this caught my attention: Lawyers aren’t Special. Milan Markovic argues that Bush administration lawyers ought to be investigated for their role in the commission of war crimes. Traditionally lawyers are exempt from such investigations, but this may be absurd:

[S]ince the Nuremberg trials, it has been a fundamental precept of international law that soldiers must disobey orders to commit war crimes. If soldiers are supposed to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders, why should lawyers, who are trained to know the law, have the privilege of never being held accountable if they advise unlawful conduct?

That stance seems especially unwarranted since lawyers can offer legal advice in such a way as to account for differing points of view when addressing controversial legal issues. In fact, lawyers are mandated to at least consider opposing points of view. They may, moreover, refer to moral and political considerations when advising clients, not purely legal ones. And yet John Yoo and other administration attorneys wrote one-sided arguments about crucial aspects of the coercive interrogation policy.

Also, if you haven’t already listened to the Fresh Air interview with Philippe Sands, you really should. He argues not only that Bush administration officials (including the president) ought to be indited for war crimes, but that there is an excellent chance that they will be at some point, in a foreign country. This may or may not be little more then a thought experiment, but it’s a dazzling listen.

A couple of David Foster Wallace links

It seems like I’ve done a million posts about David Foster Wallace, but Google says no. So, a couple of things: Interviewed by Dave Eggers, and the syllabus from the literary interpretation class he taught at the University of Arkansas.

Part of your grade for written work will have to do with your document’s presentation. “Presentation” has to do with evidence of care, of adult competence in written English, and of compassion for your reader. Your three major essays, in particular, must be proofread and edited for obvious typos and misspellings, basic errors in grammar/usage/punctuation, and so on. You are totally permitted to make neat handwritten corrections on your essays’ final versions before you hand them in. You are also welcome to contact me with questions about proofreading, grammar, usage, etc., as you’re working on revising and editing your essays. But papers that appear sloppy, semiliterate, or incoherent will be heavily penalized, and in severe cases you’ll be required to resubmit a sanitized version in order to receive any credit for the essay at all.

For DFW neophytes, I as always recommend Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Consider the Lobster. For more DFW, see Rex’s postmortem link central.

Straight photography

Photo by Joel Sternfeld

I was talking to my friend Christiaan Lopez-Miro the other day, and he pointed me in the direction of a couple of his favorite photographers: Joel Sternfeld and Alec Soth. In looking at these photos I’m struck at how alien the very notion of photoshop becomes. “Straight photography,” as a branch of art, is all about the delicate tension between two seemingly incompatible motivations: the desire to show something inherently interesting, and the desire to create an image — through a shift in perspective, the posing of people, etc. In other words, a subject is photographed in such a way that it is simultaneously transformed and not transformed at all.

This delicate tension requires that the viewer implicitly trust the authenticity of the image before them. While photo manipulation has a long history and we are all well-advised to view any photo with a certain amount of skepticism, for straight photography it is imperative that we believe. To question such images, to begin to look for digital seams and other evidence of tampering, is to immediately weaken them. This is why many photographers who do choose to tamper with their photos, digitally or otherwise, do so in a way that is fairly easy to spot (see for example Joel-Peter Witkin’s The Raft of George W. Bush). It’s why artists who use photoshop in a way that is not immediately obvious, such as Andreas Gurskey, occasionally cause such a stir. And it’s why certain bodies of work, such as Denis Darzacq’s falling series, are accompanied by not-so-subtle whispers of “its not photoshopped.”

Photo manipulation is of course a much more pressing problem in news photography then in art. But photojournalists have extremely clear guidelines about what is permissible. (Or do they?) But in art, ostensibly anything goes if the results are compelling. Photos that required extremes of effort and endurance sit alongside simple digital tricks.

Yet straight photography has its own aura. Manipulated images can be powerful, but they are either obvious or they are susceptible to debunking. And as manipulated photos become more and more ubiquitous and shameless, one craves the integrity of the unmanipulated image, shot on film and printed optically.

Weekendly clickables V

Argh. Sorry to lay this on you people on Sunday night, but I have a cubic assload of open browser tabs and I need someplace to dump them. Bees a dears and clickie away:

(This, and all future clickables, are variously via kottke, fimoculous, Waxy, Cynical-C, Meta Filter, and others.)

Shanghai 2004: day one

Shanghai
CLICK FOR SLIDESHOW

My friends are leaving Friday for three weeks in Shanghai, and I’m stuck here in Miami. But I thought the occasion called for something, so I’m posting a few pictures from my trip there back in 2004. All these were taken on the first day, August 5. Mostly we were just wandering around the neighborhood adjacent to our hotel. There are some original British colonial buildings (our rundown hotel had once been visited by the likes of Bertrand Russell) mixed in with Russian-era Communist architecture and a dash of the ultra-modern that dominates other parts of the city. But mostly it’s just a homey regular Shanghai neighborhood, in a state of constant and frantic flux.

Fuck you, Picasa

Like a complete n00b, I use Picasa to manage my computer photo archive. In conjunction with a couple of lightweight photo viewers and Photoshop, I can do whatever I need. It easily imports, does light photo modification, and exports in conveniently resized batches.

It’s got it’s share of flaws too, though. The color balance is just useless for removing anything but the faintest of color casts, there’s no way to darken midtones (fill light will lighten midtones, but the slider only moves in one direction?!), and it’s impossible to apply sharpening after an export/resize, which is the only time sharpening makes any sense (so everything going to the web needs to be run through a photoshop unsharp mask first).

But it was all stuff I could deal with, until yesterday. See, it turns out that the import option “Safe delete: only pictures that are copied will be deleted from the source media,” really means “UNLESS ANYTHING WHATSOEVER GOES WRONG, THEN I DELETE YOUR PHOTOS PERMANENTLY.”

What happened apparently was that the destination drive was full, and instead of doing what it SAID it was going to do, Picasa (yes, 3, the latest version) decided to drop me a friendly warning and then delete the photos off the memory card. Didn’t even crash, just hapily sat there while the realization that two days worth of photos were flushed down the digital crapper.

I just finished Planet Google, and now I’m really having some second thoughts about trusting any more of my information to this company. If a version 3 of one of their products can do this, what am I to expect from the legion of “Beta” products they’re pushing on the world?