Not taken with a cell phone
Check out this site, which features a very-wide-angle photo of Harlem. (Actually it's a "stitched panorama" made up of a couple thousand photos taken from the same vantage point.) Then use the tools at the bottom (especially the triangle) and zoom in wherever you like. Check out the resolution on the close-ups -- amazing considering what's in the total image. I shudder to think what technology this powerful could do in the wrong hands.
Comments (3)
Note the wide stance of the individual on the right.
Posted by Allan L. | September 10, 2007 7:10 AM
That is interesting. It took them 2.5 hours just to shoot all the pictures, so how they were able to make this look like roughly the same exposure is fascinating.
Hate to mention, but satellite photo-telemetry has resolutions like this already (like beign able to see a pack of cigarettes from 25 miles up.)
Posted by Steve | September 10, 2007 1:51 PM
(Satellite cameras can read a license plate. From 'space.' IF anyone was interested in the boring visible wavelengths of the spectrum ....)
Jack, can we define 'the wrong hands' and 'the right hands.' That would be 'them' and 'us,' I suppose, whoever 'us' is and whoever the 'them' du jour may be.
Point being, some technology is intrinsically a bad idea, and evil concoction. Like nuclear bombs. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' hands to hold it. It is absolute power, and whoever holds it becomes absolutely corrupted, powercrazed, mad with visions of immortality -- no matter how goody-goody two-shoed 'right'-handed they were when the bad idea came to them to hold.
The very idea that there are 'wrong hands' and 'right hands' is where elitism and bigotry and prejudice and fascism and racism and homophobia and misanthropy begins. You ain't no better 'right hands' than nobody. Nor am I. There are no 'wrong hands,' there are only 'our hands.'
At any given minute there are some disadvantaged, who are 'wrong' to cheat, (steal, abuse, inflict wrong), to 'catch up.' Yet the task is, clearly, to set everyone equal in everyone's eyes -- and 'equal' does NOT mean 'each the same.' As much as anything, in those terms it means 'each equally unique.'
All is gained in agreeing that the proper task at hand is seen: equal under the law, justice. Sure, it is going to take a couple generations, at least, to 'educate' everyone equally, no dropouts, no exceptions. So let's get started.
It only takes thirty years, say, of peace, and in it attending to the task. Which is the extinction of poverty and royalty, illiteracy and ignominy, prisons and exceptions 'above the law,' and a few players to be named later.
Such peace is the very target rightism aims deliberately to interrupt. The plan of rightism ( = self-devotion) is to preclude and pre-empt all plans. To oppose, and withhold cooperation in, any universal uniform plan, and beyond that to sabotage any plans that start. To prevent peace. Rightism is planning on no plan at all.
Rightism invents enemies -- 'them' -- and the concept of enemy, in the first example of themself. WE have no enemies; rightists are their own enemy.
Each must balance responsibility to self and responsibility to group, community, society. Learned from childhood by imitating role models, as were all the good teachers we each had and remember them for being. Each 'student' (child) has a different 'good teacher.'
The hands which should hold all the top secret snoopy-eye surveillance technology, and product, from satellites on down, to the one on the lightpole in front of your house, is our public hands. ALL visual (photo) output ON THE INTERNET. Everyone see everything. Especially since we all paid the taxes that invented it and now operate it. The day we choose to stop paying those taxes, elitist exceptional royal better-than-you-and-me 'right hands' stop operating.
Please, please, help yourself lose the myth addiction that there are boogeymen and 'wrong hands' in humankind. There are only our hands, and all are 'right hands' except for some who took some selfish advantage and went 'wrong.' Because they thought that 'wrong' existed.
Posted by Tenskwatawa | September 10, 2007 11:22 PM