My Quiet Life

ACK wrote today about the CIS and its supposed links to hate/racist groups:

To characterize someone or a group as marginal and outside the lines of permissible dissent, you need demonstrable evidence — more than just a decades-old donation and guilt by association.

Okay, so, I don't have a lot to add here except some pithy commentary. Aunt B probably knows more about the background of CIS. Mostly I just wanted to respond to this:

Calling the Center for Immigration Studies a hate group does nothing but radicalize and marginalize people who already feel alienated.

Boo fucking hoo. The unfortunate reality for anti-immigration advocates is that they are literally xenophobic, and there's a not a wide gulf between xenophobia and outright racism -- either as a philosophical state or in the people you tend to find yourself circulating with. And from a cursory review of the CIS's literature, they're not advocating open borders and they openly oppose amnesty. So they're not merely anti-"illegal immigration", they're anti-immigration. Fear or dislike of foreigners. That's xenophobia. I mean, by definition. No, really, look it up. A lot of anti-immigration advocates seem to live in a state of perpetual denial that they are, in fact, xenophobic -- even to the extent of feigning shock/outrage at being labeled as such. Take Donna Locke in the comments here, for example. Because I've called her xenophobic in the past, this somehow translates to "calling her ugly names". I'm not name-calling, I'm just using words.

So, this wide-eyed, shocked appeal to martyrdom is a little tired, to me. When you cast your lot with the xenophobes, you can't act all shocked and indignant at the association. There is a difference between xenophobia and racism, yes, and it's worth pointing out. But, please, spare me the persecution complex. Poor, misunderstood, downtrodden white majority, being picked on by the big bad minority immigration advocates. Give me a break.

So, I've had a lot of conversations/debates with people about the ethics of reproduction, centering around who should be having babies and who shouldn't -- particularly as a factor of economics. These debates always frustrate me, because they invariably descend into straw-men tactics citing eugenics ("you're suggesting that poor people shouldn't have babies?!?") and so forth. I thought I'd expound on my opinions a little, since that's what blogs are for.

I've noticed in these debates the word "right" gets thrown around a lot, so to start, I think I should clarify what I mean by "right".. I'm going to avoid digressing into the myriad different sociological/philosophical conceptions of rights (you can put away your copy of Rousseau, the danger has passed), and just offer a very crude definition of a "right" as "something everyone is allowed to do". This is pretty basic, but it's interesting to me how often people load all sorts of other assumptions into their use of the word. For example, a lot of people (primarily the more liberal among us), consider a right to be not just something that everyone is allowed to do, but something that is to be subsidized if they don't have the means to do it. If that sounds fuzzy or rare, realize that we do it all the time. Consider food, for example. For better or worse (I'd say better, call me crazy!), we consider eating a fundamental right that we not only allow, but attempt to subsidize as a society (the how and why is where chasms start to form between the liberal and the libertarian). So, for the purposes of this discussion, I am discussing "right" in the context of something we not only allow but subsidize, more or less. I'm not at any point advocating "banning" something.

So, consider making a baby. A friend of mine was in on the conversation that spurred my line of thought, here, so I may as well quote her directly as a starting point:

"some people think that it's ok to have babies they can't afford to feed, because that's what WIC is for"

Obviously this statement was posed with disapproval -- the implication being that poor people shouldn't have babies they can't afford. I agree, incidentally, though in a slightly skewed way, but I'll get to that. Consider the opposite, more "progressive" stance: poor people have a "right" to make babies, and any statement to the contrary is class warfare -- an attempt to "breed out" poor people. Obviously statements like this are nonsense, because poor people aren't a species or a race -- they're a class, and (for the rich, and the status quo) a very structurally functional one. You can't "breed" them out, and you can't eliminate the lower class without the others toppling in on themselves. But even considering this hyperbole on its face, there's a dangerous implication that is contrary to the seemingly progressive stance. Claiming that "poor people have a right to make babies" seems to take it for granted that we're always going to have poor people. This, to me, is an incredibly unambitious and myopic way of thinking. The real question we should be focusing on is not "should poor people be having babies", it should be "why do we still have poor people?" Or, to put it in a more melodramatic way: how is it that for all our forward progress as a society, there still exists a class of people for whom reproducing and raising a baby -- something the human race has been doing effortlessly for eons -- is no longer "affordable". How messed up is that?

So, do poor people have a "right" to make babies? Well, no more or less than anyone else -- that is to say: uh. I'm not sure. To refer back to my earlier example, an interesting thought exercise is to replace "make babies" with "eat". Do poor people have a right to eat? We as a society have decided (arbitrarily, for various reasons) that yes, everyone should be able to eat -- it's generally a bad thing for society as a whole to have any constituent part starving to death. So, the question of reproduction as a subsidized right in that regard is essentially a question of "how many (babies) and how often". I won't get into the messy business of the rate at which we make babies as a whole and the questions therein: too few or too many, who that's good for, the ways in which various societies control that, and so forth. I do think that birth control should be made about 1,434,465 times more readily available to poor people (well, to everyone, really), so that having a baby is a choice and not an (un)happy accident. A lot of people really don't need to be having babies. But I also think we need to get rid of this sneering condescension I keep seeing directed at poor people that dare to reproduce. You find this attitude directed at the lower class about other things, too, not just reproduction. "How dare these poor people have a nice TV!! How dare these poor people have cable TV while they're on food stamps!" and so on.. Until we break down the structural forces that keep poor people poor, it's hard to get too holier-than-thou. God forbid the lower class try to find some comfort in this world.

There's also good quote/section of a book I've read -- probably The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson -- where he explores the phenomenon of lower class teenage mothers. He points out (crude paraphrasing ahoy) that a lot of young women have a baby merely because their class situation doesn't really afford a lot of other options. College is not really an option; there's no career ladder begging them to hop on, and even high school is a seemingly pointless exercise in forced quarantine, so you may as well skip all that and start makin' babies. I'm not sure where I was going with that, but it's an interesting perspective, and more fair than the hysterical culture of poverty "single mothers having babies just to get more food stamps!!" angle on teenage/lower-class/out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

I'm not sure I had an overarching point, but instead I just wanted to think out loud. I'll conclude by tossing out a tangentially related thought from a friend of mine sure to offend at least half my readership. I'll just quote him:

health insurance should cover abortions but not childbirth
reason: abortions are legitimate preventive medicine. pregnancy is elective; insurance shouldn't cover it any more than it covers plastic surgery or college tuition.

This is interesting in a lot of ways -- in particular, it highlights the ways in which we subsidize childbirth. It's basically a mechanism by which we choose to control our population via economic means: the invisible hand of the market rather than the iron fist of state mandate (i.e. China's reproductive policy). Food for thought.

Okay, some serious camera gear nerding below.. read at your own peril:

So, I have been having some technical difficulties with my 20D, and it's a fair bet that it's going to die sooner or later -- and probably sooner. While I'd planned on using it till it died, it's dying a slow malfunctioning death rather than a quick, painless one. So I'm starting to consider options of replacement sooner than later. I am nearly 100% satisfied with my 20D as it is, and I'd consider replacing it with another newer 20D, were it not for one sticking point: the noise. I'm not happy with the performance of the 20D at ISO 3200. More on that below.

I've narrowed it down to a few scenarios, but it's raising some interesting questions:

Scenario One: Canon 7D

This is a pretty tempting option, but it ain't cheap. $1700 is a lot of money. There are all sorts of various bells and whistles that come with this newer line of camera, but the primary draw for me is the advertised ISO capabilities and the noise in the samples I've seen so far. I do a lot of available light photography, and a lot of it in low light. I abhor a flash, but with the recent addition of the Canon EF 50/1.2 to my kit, I'm starting to push the limits of optics in getting better pictures with less light. The natural next step, then, would be to work on the camera end. So, pretty tempting here.

Total cost to me: $1700

Major downside: uh, $1700 total cost to me.

Major upside: I can take pictures in the dark now?

Scenario two: Canon 5D (mk I)

The other lingering option I've always had is to go full-frame. This is tempting for a number of reasons: narrower lenses become wider, the full frame sensor is Very Pretty, and so on. The problem here is that the Canon 5D is EF mount lens only -- meaning that EF-S lenses do not work. And what's one of my favorite lenses in the world? My Canon EF-S 10-22 -- my go-to (super) wide angle lens. So, I had previously been stymied by the fact that if I moved to a 5D, I'd also have to sell and replace the 10-22 -- the nearest equivalent in Canon's line for a full-frame sensor being the 14mm prime, or the 16-35 zoom. Both of are basically prohibitively expensive, at least when coupled with a concurrent camera upgrade.

What I hadn't considered, though, is that on a crop sensor (i.e. on my 20D) that 10mm end of the 10-22 is basically 16mm. It occurred to me that I actually have in my possession, right now, a Sigma 20mm/1.8 lens. This lens, at 20mm, on the full-frame sensor of the 5D would not be that different from the 10mm (16mm) on the 20D. Despite the fact that I sorta reamed the Sigma 20mm in a review, it was entirely because it didn't really suit my intended purposes -- a "fast" wider lens for low-light portraits, etc. It'd probably still make a splendid landscape type lens to replace the 10-22.

So, suddenly a full-frame camera isn't seeming so far-fetched, especially because I could sell the 10-22 and pay for most of a 5D with it. I even know someone selling one that I know is well-cared for and a good deal.

Total cost to me: $150-200

Major downside: the Sigma 20/1.8 on the 5D still wouldn't be as wide as my 10-22 is, and (probably?) not as sharp. Also, the 5D is a really heavy camera. that plus the 50/1.2 would be a brick on my back.

Major upside: beautiful 35.8 x 23.9 mm full-frame sensor. better noise performance than my 20D, but not as good as the 7D (maybe? See below)

So, the major sticking point for me really comes down to the low-light/noise performance of the 5D's full-frame sensor versus the far newer, smaller APS-C sensor. Although by the numbers alone, the clear "winner" is the 7D: witness this image (warning: 8MB JPG) -- a sample shot taken with the Canon 7D at ISO 12800.

But numbers aren't everything. The 5D's sensor is a different beast. I was curious to see what comparisons look like between the Canon 5D and the Canon 7D look like at 3200 -- the highest common ISO they share. From my cursory poking around, they don't really look that different, but it's not conclusive.

Further, based on what I know about digital camera sensor ISO (a murky understanding at best), it gets complicated quickly. (To know what I know -- or at least what I've read, try this article and the followup. It's dense reading, and if I read them again, I'd probably find the answers to my question/supposition, but blog posts are more fun.)

Here's my thinking -- anyone that knows more about camera sensor ISO stuff should chime in and correct me if this is wrong. A camera's sensor has a certain dynamic range that it can capture and store, measured in bits per color per pixel. A JPG, for example, stores 8 bits per color per pixel, whereas the RAW data that is stored from your average DSLR is 12, and in newer sensors, up to 14. So, there's a lot more dynamic range being captured than is typically condensed into a resulting JPG (one of the advantages in shooting RAW). So, based on that, I'm guessing that the resulting image you can get from a picture taken at ISO 1600 doesn't very that much from a picture taken from the "low end" (read: boosted exposure) of a shot taken at ISO 3200 -- or at the very least, that there's a lot of shared "overlap" in the dynamic range data stored for both. My experience doesn't bear this theory out 100% -- pictures I take at 1600 seem marginally better, even when underexposed and boosted to "ISO 3200" levels -- in particular when it comes to my "noise grid" issues.

So, my question is: if I took an underexposed shot with the Canon 5D at ISO 3200 and bumped up the exposure from the RAW image, would it even be remotely comparable to the noise/quality of a shot at a similar exposure level with the 7D taken at ISO "6400" or "12800"? (That is: how much of ISO "6400" is really just re-centering the exposure around dynamic range that is already somewhat present in the shot at ISO 3200 -- i.e. cheating.) My guess is probably a qualified "no" -- where the qualification is "but maybe good enough". That is, it may be good enough that it's not worth dropping an additional $1400 for the 7D.

Cameras are complicated. If I went the 5D route, would I still basically have the same noise limitations -- but just on a bigger sensor? Or would it be noticeably better than my 20D? Thoughts?

UPDATE: My friend Chris pointed me at this site, which has comparisons of various cameras' performance, including "low light" performance. Details on how they measure it here, but the tl;dr of it is: the highest ISO that the camera maintains 'sufficient' image quality. It doesn't have any data on the Canon 7D yet, but for some other comparisons:

Canon 5D: ISO 1368
Canon 20D: ISO 721
Canon 40D: ISO 703
Canon 50D: ISO 696

These are pretty stunning to me -- that the 5D would be so much better. I guess the larger photosites on a much larger sensor do carry a considerably significant advantage. If the 7D's numbers are similar to the 50D, that's a pretty big check next to the 5D option -- hell, even if the 7D matched the 5D's numbers, the 5D's cost advantage is still a huge win. Although, *technically*, just because the "acceptable" quality dropoff is higher for the 5D, that doesn't necessarily mean the rate of quality deterioration isn't higher for the 5D than the 7D -- i.e. the 5D might be better or equal to the 7D at ISO 1368, but it might go to complete shit quickly above that, making the 7D a clear winner at ISO 3200+. Phew, complicated. It'd be easier to say once that site has numbers for the 7D.

So, over on twitter, I suggested boycotting the term "mixologist" when applied to bartenders that (as far as I can tell) actually know how to make a drink. It's not that I don't appreciate the skill involved, it's just that I think rather than coming up with a new term, we should refuse to apply the existing one ("bartender") to people that don't deserve it.

Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Na-ghee-na-na-jar. Nagheenanajar.
Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

Anyways, this reminded me of the time I went to this bar in Wilmington (a really weird bar called "Pravda", I think). I went to the bar and ordered a sidecar, and the chick was like "oh, hon, I don't know how to make that.. we're not really bartenders, we're just pouring drinks."

It was a refreshing bit of candor.