Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I've just posted a third image update for this week, with I think about 1,800 new pictures which gets me caught up to some time yesterday; thanks to all the submitters for their images and their patience. Thanks also to Spot for the photo of Mothragirl.

I played a little more with the idea in the entry below. For example, in the pictures above you can see images from my $19.99 webcam. The left picture is a normal snapshot, with the settings optimized to give the best image. The image on the right is about a third of a second long video grab compressed into a single frame in an attempt to reduce noise and increase color depth — I could get much better quality with a longer capture, but I'm doing this manually for now so it's smaller framesets I'm working with. The middle image contains both before and after so you can clearly see the difference. Maybe I'll write a free capture tool for this tomorrow so others can use it — then those of you with cheap webcams can take pictures as good as on a digicam twice the price… I think webcams use a standard API so it might not be hard to write.

Anyway, today's update gets me caught up again, so I'm going to try and squeeze in some programming before I have to get on the next one. I'm sure I'll waste some time on the noise-reduction toy, but mostly I'll be adding new functions to IAM.

PS. Watch this music video. It's worth the time.

First of all, a big congratulations for Jen and Phil who just got engaged (not that it's a surprise). They joined Rachel and Saira and I for dinner — but there was no dramatic toasting or speeches or anything like that… the engagement had already happened under Jen's initiative.

Second of all, big congratulations to us for finding out where we're living when our lease expires at the end of December. It's somewhere we've talked about before, but it had been back-burnered. We hadn't realized this, but it had been cooking well on that back-burner and the bell on the stove just went off.

Anyway, those are some tourist pictures of the city we're living in and its outskirts. It's down at the tip of the Baja California penninsula in Mexico. If you apply for and get the BME internship, that's where it starts, at least for the first six months (I have trouble with roots, much to Rachel's dismay).

As you know, Bush has said that the US is coming out of a recession… but I'd like you to look at that claim a little more carefully and in the big picture.

It's true that jobs are up and home ownership is up from where it was two years ago. However, it is essential to understand that this happened not through growth but through debt. Government debt is at its highest rate in US history and is going up by a trillion dollars a year right now. Personal and corporate debt (business loans, home loans, and so on) are also at an all-time high, in part due to exceptionally low interest rates. Thus we have a seeming paradox — jobs and ownership is up, but net assets are way down.

Paying off your debts by getting another loan does not make sound financial sense — especially if you're spending more, making less, and might lose your job soon — and, if interest rates climb as they're expected to over 2005, a terrifying percentage of these loans will be defaulted on, passing ownership of most personal property in America to central holding banks.

As of January 2004 (and it's grown a lot since then, but those are the numbers I have), Japan and China held $1 trillion in US debt, international banks held $1.3 trillion more, and private international lenders (big corporations and wealthy families) have loaned the US $1.4 trillion dollars more (and there's an internal debt to US lenders of about $4 trillion more). The weaker the US gets, the more under the thumb of these lenders the nation becomes, unless of course it collapses totally in which case everyone's house of cards falls apart. The question is — can you play this debt/control game with the biggest and most dangerous world player? I'm not convinced you can turn a dragon into an ox.

Brief musical interlude.

This was what was outside my window this morning. The amazing thing is that it seems to happen on a daily basis, and even better, I'm pretty sure it's free.

Anyway, as I've said before, the question you need to ask yourself if you're preparing for the future is how the US government is going to play this out. Will Americans become slaves as the nation plunges into poverty and just become another international slum nation? Or will it go to war — nuclear being the only viable option — to ensure its dominance?

Personally I think slave nation is what's going to happen, but it's so hard to say. I suppose that's what the US started preparing for in the 50's when it added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegience and started “converting” itself to a Christian Nation to control the masses (the Founding Fathers were theists, but denounced churches as a poltical control group)… Slaves are a lot easier to control if they believe that their masters have God on their side.