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December 30, 2004
Adding Zeros
There's been a bunch of debate about whether the US was called stingy with disaster relief for the tsunami in South East Asia or not. And not a lot of perspective. So here are two good comparisons.
1. $35 million is about the cost of the presidential inauguration ceremony next month.**
2. $35 million is about what we spend every 4 hours in Iraq.*
I’m not sure how much we should send, but when I heard $15 and then $35 million, I did think the amount was missing a zero or two. So last night I sent a couple of zeros ($100) to the Red Cross for disaster relief. And maybe that’s an idea worth passing on. A positive protest against a government whose priorities are wrong by at least 2 orders of magnitude. If you can, I encourage you to do the same.
* I saw this on a blog and don’t know what it is based on, so I did my own calculation. $200,000,000,000 divided by 700 days (about 2 years) divided by 6 (to get every 4 hours) equals about 47.6 million. Close enough.
** I’m not saying we’re spending too much on the ceremony. Not my area of expertise. It’s about the most important ceremony we have and it should be grand.
Posted by dme at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 22, 2004
Flickr Joy
The purchase of a new camera for a trip to Amsterdam, and my discovery of Flickr have combined into a full fledged photo-mania. Nothing to rival Timo's photo-mania, but still pretty good. I even bought another camera, a real-life SLR. I've generally thought of my self as a lousy photographer. I tend to do something analogous to bad amateur painters. You can tell by looking at the painting that they fundamentally value the paint in the tube more than the paint on the canvas. In the tube it has a price tag, and potential. On the canvas, not so much. And I was like that with film. What a difference a gig of memory can make.
So I decided to do this Day in the Life thing. A group of people decided to take pictures on the same day, Dec 21, and put them all together. It was promoted on the Flickr blog. I took about 200 photos from 9:00 am to 11:30 pm. I uploaded about 20 to my Flickr account and added the maximum suggested 15 to the Day in the life Group.
Of the 500+ photos posted, the swell people at the Flickr blog picked one of mine to post. That made my day. And I don't feel like such a lousy photographer anymore.
You can see how I spent Tuesday, December 12th 2004, right here.
Posted by dme at 02:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack