More than an app for that

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Glif stand and tripod adapter

I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the camera on the iPhone 4. I no longer carry my excellent Panasonic LX-3 for snapshots while traveling. The iPhone is good enough. And of course, it’s always with me. But one thing I’ve been really missing is a way to properly hold it steady for long exposures, or video, or even multiple exposures to produce HDR photos. I wish I had some sort of pocketable tripod for it. So did two guys in New York. And they went so far as to prototype the whole thing. They’ve designed something called a Glif which clips onto the iPhone and provides a tripod mount, but also acts as a little tabletop stand for it as well.

Instead of finding some company to manufacture and market it for them, they are using the power of the internet to create and fund the project through Kickstarter. I kicked in fifty bucks. I first heard about it through John Gruber’s website. Now The Economist describes the story in detail.

“Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”

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If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Great article in the New York Times, titled “Depression’s Upside”, on a developing theory that human depression may have evolved as a biological advantage.

Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish…

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From Fish to Infinity is a new series in the New York Times by Steven Strogatz exploring math. A math professor, he realized that many perfectly intelligent people are frightened or at least made uncomfortable by math.

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.

In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.

I will always be indebted to my 4th grade teacher Ms. Gellerman at Peralta Elementary school. She had no fear of math. Even though I make my living as a graphic artist today, I use math constantly in my work. Even my comfort with the computers I use as my tools probably results from my early exposure to the basic concepts of programming she taught us.

Our Gulu visit featured in Ugandan paper

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Devapriyo Das wrote an article published in The Observer yesterday about the photography class Moses taught in one of the IDP camps outside Gulu. Dev is a journalist originally from India, but now working in Uganda where he lives with his wife Line who had been working for a Danish development organization. Dev and Line hosted us for a couple of nights at their home in Apac after we left Gulu. Dev also let me borrow a telephoto lens one afternoon, which I used to take one of my absolute favorite pictures in Africa.