NIKON D70 - 1/200 sec, f1.8 at 50mm
Radio NZ appears to be radically dropping it's standards on the Queen's English. Oddly though, it obviously spends huge money on training it's broadcasters on how to speak Maori correctly. The weather forecast is full of places that have odd sounding names. Mostly odd because the huge majority of us butcher the language.
The business news reporter (I can't drag his name to mind right now) that does the business news report at 6:45am every day insists on pronouncing gigabytes as jiggerbites. Kim Hill pronounces film as fillim (with 2 syllables instead of one.
I don't know why pronunciation has started to irk me lately. Dicks on TV referring to Centigrade when the correct measure is Celcius is really irking me too. Perhaps I'm getting old.
Last night on Discovery Channel there was a documentary on the building of a huge bridge and tunnel linking Sweden and Denmark. The amount of concrete used was massive, so was the earth moved and the steel used in the bridge. However the damn narrator decided that expressing those huge amounts in kilograms would make them much more impressive. For example, they moved something like 900 billion kilograms of rock to form a new island that was 4 kilometres (why didn't they tell us it was 4 million centimetres) long. Or that they used 500 million kilograms of steel.
Almost apocryphally at one point, we were told how many trillion litres of concrete was used in the Bridge. Who the hell refers to the amount of concrete used in litres? Cubic metres is how you measure concrete you dicks!
It got so bad, I was swearing at the TV. Why on earth does a serious documentary need to stoop to the level of reality TV and sensationalize every single damn thing to the point it's completely meaningless?
The Photo
It's 272,000 pixels, with 18,427 different shades of black and white, of some plant in our back yard. That plant has billions upon billions of cells all working together to keep it growing up towards the sun that is shining on it from 146,000,000,000 metres away. The shutter speed was set precisely at 0.000000000482 of a year. White balance was set to Cloudy (go figure why that is so simple). Nano-second timing was required by literally millions upon millions of components to get that photo captured and onto the Compact Flash card.
And since I started typing this post, my heart has beat about 1200 times. AND IT'S ALL FOR YOU!
Otto K. - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 1:21
BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 10:10
Michele - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 10:21
Dave - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 11:55
Ma - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:16
BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:22
BC - Thursday, 3 August, 2006 12:24
dean - Friday, 4 August, 2006 6:13
Dave - Friday, 4 August, 2006 11:37
m a r i n u s - Sunday, 6 August, 2006 2:27
crewcutter - Tuesday, 8 August, 2006 13:40
mikhail - Thursday, 10 August, 2006 23:57