« August 3, 2009 | Main | August 12, 2009 »
Friday, August 7, 2009
Reading List: Separation of Power
- Flynn, Vince. Separation of Power. New York: Pocket Books, [2001] 2009. ISBN 978-1-4391-3573-0.
- Golly, these books go down smoothly, and swiftly too! This is the third novel in the Mitch Rapp (warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers) series. It continues the “story arc” begun in the second novel, The Third Option (June 2009), and picks up just two weeks after the conclusion of that story. While not leaving the reader with a cliffhanger, that book left many things to be resolved, and this novel sorts them out, administering summary justice to the malefactors behind the scenes. The subject matter seems drawn from current and recent headlines: North Korean nukes, “shock and awe” air strikes in Iraq, special forces missions to search for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and intrigue in the Middle East. What makes this exceptional is that this book was originally published in 2001—before! It holds up very well when read eight years later although, of course, subsequent events sadly didn't go the way the story envisaged. There are a few goofs: copy editors relying on the spelling checker instead of close proofing allowed a couple of places where “sight” appeared where “site” was intended, and a few other homonym flubs. I'm also extremely dubious that weapons with the properties described would have been considered operational without having been tested. And the premise of the final raid seems a little more like a video game than the circumstances of the first two novels. As one who learnt a foreign language in adulthood, I can testify that it is extraordinarily difficult to speak without an obvious accent. Is it plausible that Mitch can impersonate a figure that the top-tier security troops guarding the bunker have seen on television many times? Still, the story works, and it's a page turner. The character of Mitch Rapp continues to darken in this novel. He becomes ever more explicitly an assassin, and notwithstanding however much his targets “need killin'”, it's unsettling to think of agents of coercive government sent to eliminate people those in power deem inconvenient, and difficult to consider the eliminator a hero. But that isn't going to keep me from reading the next in the series in a month or two. See my comments on the first installment for additional details about the series and a link to an interview with the author.
Posted at
23:17
Penumbral Lunar Eclipse Imaged
Click image to enlarge.
One of the most subtle phenomena in naked eye astronomy is a penumbral lunar eclipse: the Moon does not pass into the region of the Earth's shadow where the Sun is entirely obscured by the Earth, and consequently, although sunlight on some or all of the Moon is partly blocked by the Earth, the visual effect is very difficult to perceive, especially with the logarithmic transfer function of human vision and its inability to make absolute intensity comparisons of events. Fortunately, here in the 21st century, although we don't (yet) have ATOMIC SPACE CARS, we do have magnificently linear digital sensors in our cameras, so it seemed entirely plausible to me that I'd be able to capture the ever so slight shading of the Earth's fuzzy shadow on the Moon during the penumbral lunar eclipse of August 6th, 2009. So, I set up my Nikon D300 camera and Nikkor 500 mm catadioptric “mirror lens” (you can see them here in another context) about an hour before the eclipse was to begin to allow the optics to equilibrate to the ambient temperature. Then, just before the start of the eclipse, I shot a number of photos of the Moon with various exposure times (although, from previous experience, I was pretty sure 1/500 second with the fixed f/8 aperture of the lens and highest resolution 200 ISO sensitivity of the camera would yield the best results which, in the event, they did). I selected the best pre- and mid-eclipse images with the same exposure time (this was a bit of a judgement call, since as is often the case in mid-summer the sky remains pretty gunky even in the middle of the night, and seeing was iffy throughout the eclipse; but then, I'm accustomed to that). The raw images from the camera sensor were processed using identical parameters with Adobe Lightroom, then exported as TIFF files which were loaded into Adobe Photoshop. Due to the interval between the taking of the images, there was an apparent rotation of the Moon, which I corrected for (almost) with the Photoshop free transform tool. (Yes, there's a tiny bit of residual rotation—so sue me.) I did not do any contrast stretching or other adjustments to the luminosity transfer function. Within the limits of the camera and the software tools in the workflow, this is what the image plane sensor saw. And it saw the penumbral eclipse! Look at the lower left side of the image above, and you can see the effect of the Earth partially obscuring the Sun painted upon the Moon. Few people have ever perceived this visually—certainly I did not; the Moon's disc was sufficiently blinding both before the eclipse and at its maximum that there was no clue such a subtle eclipse was underway. And yet a digital camera and a modicum of image processing can dig out from the raw pixels raining upon us from the sky what our eyes cannot see. Is this cool, or what?Posted at
01:14