I’m afraid that when it comes to digital photos, I’m foolishly listening to obsolescent instincts. I’d like some advice.

Although my camera will capture images at up to 2.1 megapixels, I shoot at 1024×768 because then each image is only about 360MB instead of 830MB. Worse, I then compress the JPG’s to about 125MB because even when I zoom in to the pixel level, I can’t see any loss of quality.

Since I have 180GB of hard drives on my desktop machine, why do I worry about image size? Here’s my “thinking”:

I have a plain old Epson ink jet printer that does an ok job with photos but nothing special.

I don’t use “archive ink” so anything I print out is going to fade in a few years anyway.

Therefore, my digital photos are destined to be viewed on computer monitors. And uncompressed 1600×1200 uncompressed images don’t look any better on my screen than compressed 1024×768 JPGs do.

So, would increasing the resolution make my photos look better in some circumstances now? In the future? Will I regret my pixel parsimony? What type of fool am I?

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According to a Harris Poll:

…half of all adults believe in ghosts, almost a third believe in astrology, and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation – that they were themselves reincarnated from other people. Majorities of about two-thirds of all adults believe in hell and the devil, but hardly anybody expects that they will go to hell themselves.

Really? I myself don’t believe in Hell but am convinced I’m going there. If I don’t go to Hell it’s only because God wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Here are the details of the poll’s results:

Many people believe in miracles (89%), the devil (68%), hell (69%), ghosts (51%), astrology (31%) and reincarnation (27%)

Of these, there’s one that is demonstrably, falsifiably false: astrology. Ack. So, what percentage believes in evolution? And how do the belief sets coincide?

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I’m at the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana) to talk at a meeting of web masters, web designers and webheads.

Interesting dinner last night. About half the table is on a first-name basis with Stephen Wolfram. Someone suggested I read the Amazon reviews of A New Kind of Science which are, apparently, pretty durn funny. For example, one reviewer refers to it as “a new — kind of — science.” Har! That’s the question, isn’t it? Wolfram is proposing the type of unfalsifiable paradigm shift that only prevails if it enables significant progress in addressing old stumbling blocks and new areas of research. I’d be interested in hearing about instances of such progress, so long as you keep in mind that so far I’m up to p. 70 of his book (i.e., I’m, 0.34% of the way through) and I don’t got the math to actually unnerstan any of it.

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Dan “Walk the Walk” Gillmor is working on a book about his concept of “we media” and he’s inviting us to participate:

The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is “Making the News” — reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today’s (and tomorrow’s) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person’s grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.

I’m doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let’s practice what I preach.

To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline…

From the outline, it sounds like the book is going to be the definitive stake in the ground for the new new journalism. And the very process Dan is initiating — open the outline, continue the online conversation after the book is published — points to one of the most important changes the Web has brought to publishing: publishing is not longer a discrete moment of done-ness when the private is made public. We Media is continuous media.

(FWIW, I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined entirely on-line. Writing on line was a great experience, but I got the increment wrong: Do not post drafts every day, especially when you know that what you just wrote is crap that you’re going to un-write the next day.)

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I enjoyed Dan Bricklin’s history of the development of VisiCalc. Ah, memories!

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Tom is funny-because-it’s-true about the way in which MovieLink’s attempt to protect its property makes its property valueless.

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I’m at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, skating on the thin ice of my technical knowledge. I stumble into the untested Time Machine on display there. It goes off in an explosion of colored cellular automata strips. I emerge, chagrinned at having set it off, but I wave to the uninterested passersby that it’s ok because I got it autographed: there on the side of the time machine is Einstein’s signature.

This dream is certified 100% authentic.

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A year ago, Kevin Kelly and Steve Talbott engaged in a long-form dialogue called “What Are Technology’s Gifts?” that is a quite remarkable inquiry not only into what technology is good for but also into how to think and talk about such a topic. The dialogue was published in Steve’s newsletter, NetFuture.

Here‘s the correspondence that began the dialogue.

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Scott Rosenberg points to a USAToday story about how the war is wearing on W. in which we learn two important facts:

1. “Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day.”

2. ” He’s being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began.”

That Bush believes he’s on a mission from God is scary. But that he thinks that giving up sweets is a deprivation that in any way compares to that of our soldiers much less the people of Iraq is like a bad joke.

Just one more implausible detail in the ludicrious novel that is this administration.

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RB’s back and savagely hilarious about psychologism, his readers and himself.

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