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Cover Story: The world according to Ashraf

22 Jul

-by Terrina Hussein –

Ashraf Sinclair shares his views on life, love and little green men.

How do you combine a love of acting, image consulting and environmental awareness? According to Ashraf Sinclair, however you chose to do it, do it with style.

The handsome and (if you’re lucky), cheeky actor/host/ex-model environmentalist is all about living life to it’s fullest.

And, as is too often ignored in the entertainment industry, he balances the glitz and glam of the limelight with the integrity of defending and protecting our environment.

Sure, he’s the current co-host of the music show Beat TV. Naturally, he’s been chosen as the new host of Mentor Season 2. And of course, he’s the absolute epitome of eye candy in 8TV’s new series, Gol & Gincu.

But, he’s also about to embark on an even bigger task, as the emcee of the TUNZA International Children’s Conference on the Environment, to be held in Putrajaya at the end of August.

There, Ashraf will leave the big stage and bright lights of the media world and take up his position as emcee of an event that plays host to 250 young environmental activists from over 60 nations.

“TUNZA ICCE is a chance for these kids to discuss environmental problems and come up with solutions together,” Ashraf explained, with a different kind of gleam in his eye.

“The Agenda of Rio De Janeiro states that all world leaders must listen and pay heed to the children of their countries, because it’s them who inherit the earth,” he said.

“That’s why these discussions and forums are so important, plus I’ll also be in charge of making sure that the participants from all over the world have fun while they’re in Malaysia … I’ll be their comic relief!”

Ashraf’s duties will include coming up with games and more discussions for the 250 participants (all of whom are between 14 to 17 years old), and also to be the mediator between them and the adult organisers.

Which proves there’s still a lot of ‘kid’ left in Ashraf too.

“Myself, as well as a few others have been charged with being the big brothers and sisters of the participants while they’re staying here. We have to keep things energetic and lively for them at all times, and ensure that there’s no down time for them, that shouldn’t be hard to do. I’m really looking forward to it!”

If his current hosting skills are anything to go by, these kids are in for a real treat.

Buzz caught up with Ashraf recently to get the low down on his high on life:

If I was Prime Minister of Malaysia for a day, I’d …

I would ask my secretary to call all the other Prime Ministers around the world and find out who’s free for coffee, and I’d make an impromptu, spontaneous visit to the ones that weren’t too busy. And I’d ask them what it was like to be them, what it was like when they were a child, and growing up. I’d have a conversation with all these world leaders about what moulded them into who they are today, which I think is something they’d never speak about.

Your biggest fantasy girl is …

Siti Nurhaliza.

Your worst nightmare girl is …

Siti Nurhaliza! No, my worst nightmare is leaving [this world] without leaving anything behind.

Your perfect date would be …

Siti Nurhaliza! Okay, okay. It would be anonymous without knowing where we’re both from, or who we both are and spontaneous, without any labels or social expectations placed on us.

Boxers or briefs?

Boxers! Sometimes plastic bags.

What is your dream Hollywood role?

Brad Pitt in Fight Club.

If I could change one thing about the way I look it would be …

I want to be six feet, bold head, African American … I want to be Michael Jordan! I’m into basketball, I’m into Futsal, I’m into competitive sports. But, if I just become Michael Jordan, would I inherit his skills too? It’s his skills I want.

What is your worst personal trait?

I’m a perfectionist.

What does the world need more of?

Gravity! The world doesn’t need more of anything. If I have to chose something, I think it needs more books, and more people who actually read books.

You’re going to rock Mentor because …

I’m going to bring everything I have to the show, all that I am. I’m not just going to host, but I’m going to be there, in the present, to connect the viewers at home with the energy in the studio. It’s a live show, and I’m going to make it feel like a live show.

You were voted Cleo’s 2006 Bachelor with the Coolest Character … what’s so cool about your character then?

I don’t know. Maybe it was my Batman impersonation. I had to get on stage and do a whole Batman monologue. I guess it worked. It’s nice to have walked away with a consolation award.

Which is better, acting or hosting?

Acting is harder, and I feel like I’m not up to par just yet with the standards I’d like to achieve. I’d have to say I like acting more, because it’s a challenge. But hosting is great too, because I get to be completely present in that moment, it’s just me being me.

What would you do with RM1 million?

I would invest some in a trust fund, give 10 percent to charity, and I’d go completely crazy with the rest. I’d spend it on clothes, travelling and would go anywhere I wanted to, eat, sleep, and tip everyone who gave me a service … any service. I’d live doing everything spontaneously. When it’s over, I’ll just go back to work.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve done to impress a girl?

The strangest thing I’ve ever done is attempted an eight-month long distance relationship that spanned Thailand, Malaysia, Sweden and London. It was a mutual understanding that we break up. I believe you can’t be committed to a relationship like that if you’re both just seeing how it goes. In order for a relationship like that to work you have to both be aiming at something like marriage.

What’s the strangest thing a girl’s done to impress you?

She was the female version of a player … a playette. She didn’t play me, but I was seriously impressed with how nonchalant and unemotional she was towards me. I was thinking that I need to have that! So I played the game back, as you should, only if you’re in that situation. And the psychological warfare was … well, let’s just say it was an intense trip.

But it didn’t last?

I don’t know … [smiling coyly].

Most bizarre experience with a fan?

A fan once kidnapped my mobile phone. I even received a ransom demand! [laughs]

Life is beautiful because …

Life is beautiful because everything works. You can live life in any way you want. You can challenge life and, most importantly, you can always have choices – that’s the key. You always have a choice.

His cheeky side…

by Zuhaila Akmar Mohd Sedek

Being eye candy doesn’t seem to bother this stud.

Have you ever met a guy who admitted he has a feminine side? Ashraf Sinclair has absolutely no problem embracing that other side.

“I’ve always been in touch with both my masculine and feminine side, in fact everyone should. In Gol and Gincu, it stresses a lot on issues of women’s rights and I am honoured to be able to apply my feminine side in this show. The dynamics of being able to know when to flip to the side needed is a great thing,” Ashraf said.

In the movie version of Gol and Gincu he plays the childish Eddy who dumps his girlfriend for another girl. His role has evolved into a whole different Eddy in the series version.

“Eddy has actually grown up in the series. He realises that he has made a mistake dumping Putri [played by Nur Fazura] for another girl. His personality has changed tremendously in the series.”

Even though he doesn’t have an issue with his feminine side, make no mistake, Ashraf is every bit a man’s man.

“I had a crush on Ezlynn the first time I met her and I have no problem at all working with her!” Ashraf smiled cheekily.

Plus, his crush on Ezlynn will boost the chemistry between the two co-hosts.

“Seeing the talented contestants we have this year, I’m so excited to be a part of the outcome of this show. And with it being a live show, it allows me to actually feel the constant adrenaline rush of it.”

*Catch Mentor Season 2 live concert on TV3, every Sunday, at 9pm

2 Responses to “Cover Story: The world according to Ashraf”

  1. Heru December 6, 2007 at 3:45 pm #

  2. Alexwebmaster March 3, 2009 at 8:50 am #

    Hello webmaster
    I would like to share with you a link to your site
    write me here

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Valuing Child Health Utility 9D Health States with a young adolescent sample: a feasibility study to compare best worst discrete choice, standard gamble and time trade off methods.

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QALYs are increasingly being utilized as a health outcome measure to calculate the benefits of new treatments and interventions within cost-utility analyses for economic evaluation. Cost-utility analyses of adolescent-specific treatment programmes are scant in comparison with those reported upon for adults and tend to incorporate the views of clinicians or adults as the main source of preferences. However, it is not clear that the views of adults are in accordance with those of adolescents on this issue. Hence, the treatments and interventions most highly valued by adults may not correspond with those most highly valued by adolescents. Ordinal methods for health state valuation may be more easily understood and interpreted by young adolescent samples than conventional approaches. The availability of young adolescent-specific health state values for the estimation of QALYs will provide new insights into the types of treatment programmes and health services that are most highly valued by young adolescents.
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Our Storied Future

Painting: David Alfaro Siqueiros

THE EUROPEAN tradition loves opposites. One that Hannah Arendt dwelt upon in The Human Condition is the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. For Arendt, the active life was the life lived in the world, the life of making, laboring, and acting; the contemplative life was the monastic and philosophical life, life on the sidelines. But contemplation is what gave the monks of Burma the tranquil courage to walk out of their monasteries and temples last fall, chanting the Metta Sutta of compassion for all beings amid rows of heavily armed soldiers prepared to kill them. It was as moving, as brave, and as defiant an exercise of nonviolence and spiritual strength in action as we may ever see, those boys and men in robes the color of blood standing up to the military junta that has long ruled their country. The ethics of their contemplative life demanded action.

The same was true for many Vietnamese monks during the U.S. war on that country. Action and contemplation can be parts of the same life. The latter gives us the depth, the ethics, the imagination, and the understanding to become active, to work for what we believe. And action brings our contemplative work to life, gives it purpose and meaning; compassion may be learned by meditation but it can only be realized by some form of engagement. I know I have learned much by reading and writing, but I have also learned by traveling, by encountering, by watching history firsthand and sometimes participating in it. There is no divide.

An equally disabling distinction, handed down from Plato, is the one between representation and reality. This exiling of representations to the realm of the irrelevant, the inactive, the opposite of acts and actualities, trivializes the power of words and ideas. Campaigns of destruction always begin with language and symbols — even calling a forest a natural resource makes it easier to see it as board feet. People die of ideas all the time. The representation of people as loathsome or invasive, for example, is often the first step toward brutalizing or exterminating them. The anthropologist Hugh Raffles points out that the Nazis made constant analogies between Jews and insects and then made the metaphors real by using the insecticide Zyklon B to murder some of us in the gas chambers. Ideas matter. This is what Patrick Reinsborough, founder of San Francisco–based Smart Meme, calls “the battle of the story.” There are battles in the streets and then there are battles over which metaphors and images will be used to tell those stories and, ultimately, which version of history will shape the memories and imaginations that guide and limit the future. To write, to make art and film, to work as a journalist or an educator can be a radical act, one that blurs the lines between action and contemplation by employing ideas as tools to make the world as well as understand it.

I often joke that I want to be a Latin American intellectual — a loose rubric for the remarkable contributions of Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez, Subcomandante Marcos, and many more writers from south of the border — because these writers offer great examples of the union of the active and contemplative lives, the union of art and politics. They do not believe, as so many English-speaking writers do, that there could be, let alone should be, an art that is not political. Apolitical art and artless politics are the fruit of a divide-and-conquer strategy that weakens both; art and politics ignite each other and need each other. The idea that political art must degenerate into propaganda or unsubtle screed is also misguided. There is enormous beauty in the way Galeano and Marcos, for example, write about politics, a poetics of policy and possibility, of seeing the unexpected and teasing out the meaning. And there is hope. As Galeano said on the radio recently, “We are all obliged to live life as a duty, but secretly willing to live it as a feast.” And sometimes the feast is not on luxuries and private pleasure, but on braveries and public hopes.

Another dichotomy that we can throw out immediately is the false opposition between the naïve and the cynical. English-speaking writers too often believe that you are one or the other. But cynicism is itself naïve. I often hear people make cynical statements in defiance of actual history — you can’t change anything, they control everything, we’re powerless, it never works — as if there had been no civil rights movement and no feminist movement; as though to be gay or lesbian in 1960, when it was considered both a crime and a mental disease, were the same as today; as though unarmed citizens had not overthrown dozens of governments in recent decades. Yet cynicism, defeatism, and despair are often considered to be signs of worldliness.

At a conference where I’d stood up to celebrate the Zapatistas as an example of revolution in our time, a powerful man from an environmental foundation later hissed at me angrily, in private, “The Zapatistas lost.” He was so attached to their failure, as so many U.S. progressives are attached to failure and defeat, to the excuse for doing less, hoping less, dreaming less. If not much is possible, not much is demanded of us. He meant that they had not succeeded in what he imagined to be their goal, abolishing the Mexican government in Chiapas or in Mexico altogether. But they have survived, and that is one victory. They have created autonomous areas in Chiapas, another. And their greatest victory has been a victory of art, of story, of the revolutionary vita contemplativa: they have inspired people around the world to rethink power, participation, revolution, and the possible in the most beautiful and unexpected ways. When the Zapatistas rose up on the day that NAFTA went into effect, most people around the world knew little and cared less about neoliberalism, corporate globalization, and the economic forces that shape our lives; that has all changed, in part because of them.

Despair is a luxury. If I despair I can drive a Yukon and watch bad television. Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything. For people around the world, in places like Burma and Chiapas, giving up means accepting hideous conditions of life, or death. Despair is cheap for us, expensive for them. What does it mean to be radical, to tell radical stories in our time, to win the battle of the story? The North American tradition seems to focus its activity on the exposé, the telling of the grim underside of what we know: the food is poison, the system is corrupt, the leaders are lying, the war is failing. There is a place for this, but you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. You need to tell the stories they are not telling, to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.

Thus the Latin American intellectuals: having survived coups, gone into exile, faced off dictatorships, seen their countries taken over by generals and neoliberals, seen destitution and death squads, they understand that cynicism is naïve and hope is radical. The mainstream story about the Burmese insurrection last fall was that the monks rose up spontaneously and naïvely, met with an unexpected crackdown, and were quickly defeated. It was a story with no imagination for how history unfolds, told even while competing stories about fissures and defections in the Burmese army emerged, small acts of resistance and great determination continued among the Burmese citizenry, and activists around the world organized in solidarity with the ongoing uprising. As citizens engaged in the daily task of remaking the world, we get to choose our stories — the stories that divide and conquer or those that tie things together with possibility.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of seventeen books including Men Explain Things To Me (2014), Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013), and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Midwest (2004) . She is a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch daily newsgram.

  1. This essay claims: “you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. [[Forgot??! or is this some kind of cynical irony?]] You need to tell the stories they are not telling, [as is happening more and more, via the internet, but more despicable obscene off-stage lies are spread there too, in the grossest ways], to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.

    Thus the Latin American intellectuals: having survived coups, gone into exile, faced off dictatorships, seen their countries taken over by generals and neoliberals, seen destitution and death squads, they understand that cynicism is naïve and hope is radical. ….

    Yes, the last statement is true, but aside from the tiny marginal gestures of Buddhist monks or some saintly gesture of a single compassionate giving person or perhaps some small powerless group, just where today are progressives “winning” in the globally dominating US CENTER of expanding imperial power? What activity in the US is a basis for progressive hopes even at the margins? Maybe we can see a few tiny environmental gains (despite huge losses, some of them in the name of environmental sanity)?

    Let’s see how solidly the potential for a continuing social revolution in the US against racism and feminist ideals/hopes is tested and remains hopeful in the struggle between Obama and Hillary and between their supporters and the bigotry of the US populace at large…. who depend upon bigotry to maintain their false sense of superiority.

    A race and class and gender war is certainly going on but that story is ignored or denied, is not just off center stage, but effectively obliterated. The mass media makes its external traces into a horse race sufficiently open for profitable gambling but, as they maintain and thus make generally happen in this their created world, dependent on star jockeys and elite expensive breeds of horses.

    All our metaphors cannot make despair go away, nor, as it happens, stop the generating of new consoling metaphors and stories, like the concept of radical hope (i.e., that without any rational or evidentiary basis). I have been moved, after all, by this essay’s pleas, but perhaps most, these days, by John Berger’s seeing “undefeated despair” as the living and sustaining cultural/personal expression of those doomed to repeated, unending disappointment, as are the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (no longer labelled that and so, practically speaking, the concept disappears as a basis for effective public action….). See Berger’s essay entitled with that powerfully descriptive expression in HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR (2007).

    Sorrowfully, neither naively nor cynically, with radical hope that recognizes its baselessness in publicly effective collective action, we are necessarily resigned to stories of feeble gestures at allowable margins. Such acts are initiated, of course, for selfish reasons of creating/preserving a self-tenable, self-sustainable self-image while the global power system ignores the powerless and keeps on destroying itself and us all. Keep hope alive will be our epitaph, expressing our undefeated, despairing hope for love, peace, justice and hope for all. ATB, JOP

  2. (I lost a longer essay, with a few more points, because my session timed out. Maybe that was a good thing…)

    I agree with Solnit’s tendency to reject our strict cultural distinctions–representation vs. reality, contemplation vs. action. Indeed, I think they often fail us.
    But the distinction between hope and despair–even cheap despair and real hope–doesn’t help either.
    It leads us, for example, to point at certain people and say really cynical things like, “Despair is a luxury.” In the face of real despair, we wouldn’t dare say that. And in the face of destructive luxury, it doesn’t really help anything to say that anyway.

    Whether in hope or despair, if we’re specifically interested in the attitude that makes a better difference, we shouldn’t make another strict distinction. Hope and despair are meaningless without each other. Real hope comes from knowing despair. Despair can give way to hope. The posture of possibility, the constructive posture, comes from both (and I find hope and despair just come flat out all at once!).

  3. John Oliver Perry asked: ”…just where today are progressives “winning” in the globally dominating US CENTER of expanding imperial power?”

    You’re right that “progressives” are making no real impact, but you miss the point. Progressives are those who continue to believe (and perhaps strive for) social/economic/political progress – in other words a more enlightened version of the same old story.

    Solnit’s essay is a tribute to those who are crafting a new story, or at least taking possession of the language and metaphors and images (the vision) that springs from contemplation and fuels action.

    The problem is not that we are enacting a good story badly, but that we are living a self-defeating (and world-destroying) story. Real change always comes from the margins populated by visionaries and mavericks and revolutionaries, and is easily overlooked by those acclimatized to the atmosphere of RealPolitik and blinded by the cloud of cynicism.

    Making art in the face of despair is, itself, an act of hope. And using art and language to craft a new story (a story that many millions are enacting in the multitudinous margins of the world), is the only hope for a sideways shift into a life-affirming zeitgeist.

  4. A sideways shift, indeed! I have always thought there were parallel universes, this being just one of many possible versions of reality, albeit the “commonly” agreed upon one. I enjoy and appreciate Solnit’s ways of looking at things. Just posted a review of her book, “Hope in the Dark,” in my blog at http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com

  5. Dear Friends,

    Let us remember that an ordinary fellow named Noah built the vital Ark that saved life as we know it. It took a remarkably large number of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe to construct the colossal, now sunken wreckage known as the Titanic.

    Steven Earl Salmony
    AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

  6. What a great sentence, Ms. Solnit: Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything.

  7. Thank you, Rebecca Solnit, for your insights and poetic languaging. You spark my brain to rethink and rejoice. I see the world falling apart in so many ways – all my 67 years of life – and continue to hope. I work with teenagers whose only negatives are dramatic – but there is always hope – perhaps untested – but very present! What are we without our hopes and dreams? Life is incredibly resilient. Thank you for that confirmation!

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Talk:Independent Orthodox churches

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Let's rename this article "Independent churches" so as not to cause any confusion, ok? Fr. John

As you may imagine, I'm in favor of the name as it is.  :) The introductory paragraph makes it crystal clear what's being referred to, so I can't see any confusion arising except perhaps from someone who doesn't look at the article itself (which would indicate a confusion probably so invincible as to be insurmountable even by a name change). The reason I'd be against "independent churches" is that term could refer to anything from what the article's about to your corner Southern Baptist church. I'd also venture to guess that anyone doing a Google for information of this sort will probably use the word "orthodox" in the search. I'm willing to concede to a change in the name, though, if that's the consensus. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs (THINK!) 15:12, January 15, 2006 (CST)
Perhaps putting 'Orthodox' between quotes could serve as a mid-way solution?
Independent "Orthodox" Churches
Well, it's that way in the intro paragraph. I'm not sure if that would interfere with searching or not. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs (THINK!) 06:31, January 16, 2006 (CST)
I don't think quotes should be in titles -- it complicates things too much. I see Dn. Andrew's points, but still don't like the title as is. What if called it "Independent Movement" or "Non-Canonical groups" or something like that? Fr. John
Regarding "Independent Movement," I don't think it represents what people would be searching for, and "Non-Canonical groups," besides also falling under that critique, opens up a whole can of worms in itself. It's also not exactly what is being addressed by the article (e.g. a particular Old Calendarist group might be "non-canonical" but not qualify for the definition given in the article). I honestly fail to see how the title as it currently stands offers a problem, except as noted above, in the case of someone who utterly failed to read it. I don't hold out much hope for understanding in that event, no matter what we call the article. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs (THINK!) 16:25, January 16, 2006 (CST)

Al Green's Website

I have a problem there being a link to Green's website. It is flawed in a number of ways, beginning with (1)the definition of canonical at the top of the page. It is a statement from the American Carpatho-Russian diocese about its own identity as a church under Constantinople. Most Orthodox in the world do not fit that description.

It is also (2) out of date. I know of at least one entity that dissolved years ago, namely, The Orthodox Church of the West -- which was a group of American parishes under the Orthodox Church of France. And even when it existed, Green's commentary was false -- he claims that the OCW's location was "secret." His polemical attitude gets the best of him.

He (3) lumps together lots of disparate bodies. There is a world of difference between the Orthodox Church of France, which has spent most of its history under the blessing of unquestionably canonical Orhtodox churches and years under the archpastoral care of at least one Orthodox saint (St John of Shanghai and San Francisco), and the various independent churches that promote active homosexuality and other beliefs and practices alien to Eastern Orthodoxy. Isolation from Constantinople or other canonical Churches is not the logical equivalence of being "uncanonical." If so, the OCA spent much of her history prior to 1970 as "uncanonical."

I also have a problem with his treatment of the Ukrainian situation. The Ukrainians in the US that are under Constantinople, for example, were -- in Green's thinking -- simply uncanonical before they came under Constantinople. Now when Patriarch Bartholomew received them under his protection some years ago, he began by telling them that they were already canonical, and no one was re-baptized, re-christmated, re-ordained, etc.

In short, the truth is a good deal more complicated and nuanced than Mr Green imagines, and I don't think that such an unsophisticated and flawed treatment of the subject should be a link on an encyclopedia website. Fr. Lev

Fr. Lev, I think you offer a good critique. I'd like to leave both the link and your comments so that people can get the fullest picture possible. — FrJohn (talk)
I actually think it would be useful to offer this critique as a subsection of the article, since the Green site is arguably the most thoroughgoing attempt at treating this subject from an Orthodox angle. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs (THINK!) 16:26, January 16, 2006 (CST)

Kemetic Orthodoxy

I don't remember how, but I stumbled across an article on Kemetic Orthodoxy. I am not sure why they use Orthodoxy in their title, but I just wanted to mention this here because it seemed fitting. Anyone else heard of this? {{User:Joe Rodgers/sig}} 21:51, August 7, 2006 (CDT)

They don't seem to be Christian or a church in any way. No doubt this group of Neopagans is using the word orthodoxy in its more general sense of "correct belief." —Dcn. Andrew talk random contribs 22:11, August 7, 2006 (CDT)

A Question

Seeing a certain person on the Liturgy of St Tikhon use the term "vagantes" like a mantra I was wondering if "episcopi vagantes" should be merged into this article, or vice versa. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by JosephSuaiden (talkcontribs) .

They're related, but not identical topics. I'm in favor of keeping them separate but linked to one another. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs (THINK!) 02:51, August 9, 2008 (UTC)


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Ohio wrestling grabs comeback win from Eastern Michigan to finish weekend with a split

By Taylor Greik

Going into their two home matches this weekend, the Ohio Wrestlers knew they had two “grind-it-out” matches ahead of them. They took on #12 Central Michigan on Saturday and Eastern Michigan on Sunday in the Convocation Center.

Central Michigan was a tall task for Ohio to overcome, the Chippewas were ranked #12 in the nation and not to forget, the defending Mid-American Conference champions. The Bobcats took it on the chin Saturday, falling 23-12.

The match started with a marquee match-up at the Heavyweight division, featuring #4 Jarrod Trice and Ohio’s Jeremy Johnson, ranked #14 in the nation. Johnson found himself down early in this match and was never able to recover. Trice dominated the match by beating Johnson with a 3-1 decision. This really set the tone for the Chippewas as they started the match by beating Ohio’s best wrestler.

With the 3-0 advantage, Central Michigan was then able to rip of four more wins in a row to take the 17-0 lead. This proved to be too much of a lead to overcome for the Bobcats, despite some strong performances from their Middle-Weights.

Ohio seemed quite dead at this point, but Freshman Spartak Chino gave Ohio the jolt they needed with a 3-1 win in overtime. Spartak, aka “Sparty”, found himself down 1-0 going into the third when Lucas Smith was called for stalling with less than a minute to go. That was all the momentum Sparty needed, as he scored a thunderous take down in the extra period to put Ohio on the board.

The energy from Chino’s victory seemed to be contagious, as Harrison Hightower was able to win the very next match 9-4. This was a huge win for the team and Hightower himself because Harrison beat the defending conference champion Mike Ottinger. It’s also important to know that Ottinger came in ranked #20 in the 165 pound weight class. Hightower wrestled with fierce tenacity, as he really dominated this match, scoring two take downs and three back points.

“I’d like to think that I pumped him up a little bit, but he went out there and wrestled great. I don’t really like to think about it that I started it because he works really hard, but maybe I gave him a little bit of a spark” Spartak Chino on the Ohio momentum swing.

“Going into the match, I knew it was a big match, the kid was ranked in the top 20 so I knew I had to pull out a big win for our team” said Harrison Hightower.

After Hightower, 174 pound freshman Cody Walters remained undefeated on the season with a 5-3 overtime win. This was the third straight win, in the match, for Ohio as they cut the Chippewa lead to only eight points with two matches to go.

The teams split the last two bouts as Central Michigan finished off Ohio in the 184 bout.

Ohio had nothing to hang their heads about since they only lost by 11 to a top 15 team. Also, three of four Ohio’s victories came from freshman and the other came from Hightower, who is a sophomore.

“Going into the match, it was just about wrestling as hard as you can for seven minutes and winning or losing would take care of itself. For us wrestling seven freshman, I thought it was a great dual for us” said Ohio coach Joel Greenlee after the loss.

Sunday was a new day for Ohio, as they notched an exciting victory against Eastern Michigan. The match started at the Heavyweight bout, for the second consecutive night, and Jeremy Johnson had no problem with this match-up.

#14 Jeremy Johnson convincingly beat Chris Eggert 12-4 to pick up the four team points that come with a major victory. Johnson dominated with three take downs in the first period and one in the second and third period respectively. Johnson now moves to 10-3 on the season and looks to continue building his top 15 ranking in the weeks coming.

“You can’t think about the night before if you have a match the next day. If I came out here and said ‘oh I lost last night’ and felt sorry for myself, I wouldn’t have gotten it done. I knew I had to come out and get bonus points for my team and that’s what I did” Jeremy Johnson after going 1-1 on the weekend.

Unlike the night before, the Bobcats were not able to ride the momentum from their first win, as they dropped their next three bouts by a combined 30-16 score.

Looking to get his team back into the picture, 149 pounder Andrew Romanchik got the Bobcats going again with a close 6-4 decision victory.

“Sparty” Chino could not keep the flow from last night going as he dropped his match 3-0 to Aaron Sulzer.

As this match began to develop a “see-saw” feeling to it, Harrison Hightower picked up another huge win for Ohio, beating Jacob Dorulla 3-0. Hightower won his second match in as many nights, to cut the Eagles lead to 10-7.

Another wrestler who has caught fire for Ohio is 174 pound freshman Cody Walters. Walters gave Ohio a one point lead with a 9-2 major decision win. Walters now improves to be 12-0 on the season and starts out 2-0 in conference duals.

After Phillip Joseph gave the Eagles another lead, the stage was set for 197 pounder Phil Wellington. Wellington has been a little under the radar for Ohio in this young season, but he really put his name out there in this match. The Ohio freshman jumped out to a 2-1 lead after the first and it was tied at two going into the third. This match went right down to the wire as Wellington escaped the clutches of Anthony Abro with 38 seconds left to score the final point of the match. With his win, Ohio grabbed three more team points, giving them the 17-16 victory.

“Phil’s a beast. He’s trained hard all year long, he even spent the summer here and has done everything he’s supposed to” Coach Joel Greenlee on Phil Wellington.

“Some matches got out of control, like Phil’s, but he kept his composure and was good for the win. I was pretty confident having Phil out there to go out and seal the win for us” Jeremy Johnson on Phil Wellington’s late win.

Ohio has a lot of young talent on this roster and it was evident in both matches this weekend. In the weeks to come, Ohio has their next dual match versus Appalachian State on December seventh, then a couple of tournaments around the holidays. Those include the Reno Tournament of Champions and the Southern Scuffle, before the team encounters more conference duals in January.

“I think we’re pretty good. We’re young, but we fly under the radar for most teams so we just have to gear up for App State next week and start thinking about Reno” Jeremy Johnson looking forward to the next few matches.

“In all honesty, Reno is one of the tournaments we try to peak for. Our whole early season is geared towards that. That’s a ranking tournament, as I look at it. You go there and do well, you’ll get ranked as individuals and you’ll get ranked as a team” Coach Joel Greenlee looking forward to Reno.

The Bobcats seem to be on the upswing and Bobcat fans sure do hope that they peak, as coach Greenlee mentioned, at this point in the season.


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Rising To The Challenge

The following is a part of the TPMCafe Book Club group discussion of the new book “Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price” by Jonathan Cohn

Several participants have rightly insisted on focusing us on a large order question: what kinds of fundamental reforms are necessary to get a health care system that will cover everyone, improve health and make the health care system much more efficient?

And the big debate is over the role of the private health insurance industry: can we regulate and “incentivise” big health insurers to get them to achieve these goals, even though their business model has produced many of the very problems the public wants solved?

A few others have plaintively insisted that all this talk about systemic change and the model of single-payer is politically unrealistic and therefore irrelevant.

Mark Schmitt  and others rightly ask if we can combine our long-term vision with a constructive participation in the messy realities of the political process.

As I noted earlier in this conversation, the public has signaled to the politicians that health care is a priority issue, and the politicians (at least on the Democratic side of the presidential race) have responded with a generalized pledge: “I will make sure that everyone is covered by the end of my (first or second) term.”

Since they are all scrambling to figure out how to do that, we have an enormous opportunity before us.

I submit that one of the best things we on the “progressive” side of this debate can do this year is to engage the nation—and the politicians—in a public discussion about the private health insurance industry: about the many ways the industry deforms and cripples our health care system—and about how they actually kill people.

I reported (via the OurFuture blog and The Huffington Post ) about New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s masterful presentation at the Las Vegas presidential debate on health care.

Former Sen. John Edwards was of course, specific and eloquent, embarrassing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for lacking details. But Clinton firmly took out after the health insurance industry. Take a look at this short excerpt and tell me it doesn’t sound like she’s getting ready to cut private health insurance completely out of her health care plan:

I am in favor of universal health care coverage. [And a system] that begins to guarantee coverage to people who already have insurance, because, let’s not kid ourselves, there are a lot of people who think they have insurance except when they need it. [She tells a story about a woman excluded from insurance because of a pre-existing condition.]

Now, I don’t want to wait until I’m president to begin. I’m going to introduce legislation while I’m in the Senate to end insurance discrimination. Guaranteed coverage. No more cherry picking.

You cannot eliminate people on the basis of preexisting conditions, because that’s what we need insurance for. And, you know, we’ve now met the human gene. We’re going to find out we’re all susceptible to something.

So, none of us are going to be insurable if we don’t change this system. And I think we need to start now in order to make sense out of it and get people the coverage they deserve to have.

Now this kind of populist rhetoric is also useful if she is planning to go for a wimpy and dangerous plan like that of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that essentially gives all our public subsidies to the insurance companies—while pretending to regulate them. The point is that Hillary is aware of the public anger at insurance companies among the voters, and she is determined to make it work for her.

We should be doing the same thing—but with the goal of channeling that anger to some productive conclusions:

• Insurance companies distort our health care system at great cost, and therefore:

• We should demand politicians tell us how they would make insurance companies change their business model—now based on insuring the well and the wealthy. or

• We should build our health-care-for-all vision around a public system—like Jacob Hacker’s Health Care for America —not the private insurance companies.

Even if you are one of those who believe the next president will have to capitulate to the insurance industry in order to get anything passed, you’ve got to see that having the companies publicly on the defensive—explaining that they don’t want to cut off peoples’ insurance or charge outrageous premiums—has got to give us an advantage even if our goal is getting a plan for America that is marginally better than Massachusetts or California.

But millions of Americans are telling the politicians that we can do better. Edwards deserves the praise he’s been getting (including from me) for the way he’s detailed a plan that bites the bullet on paying for coverage in a progressive way and for requiring employers to “pay or play.”

But on the role of the private insurance companies, Edwards essentially splits the difference. His plan is a cross between California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hacker (the Hackernator?).

Obama is now on the spot. He’s got to decide whether he advances a plan (or at least principles) that are more progressive than Edwards—by limiting the role of the private insurance companies. And as we all know, the grass roots and the progressive bloggers have some influence on the policy decisions of Democratic candidates trying to excite the Democratic base.

Many of the participants in this conversation are very good at explaining and detailing the many ways in which the health insurance companies have helped to create our dysfunctional health care system. We at the Campaign for America’s Future are eager to work with you to turn that explanation into a grass roots campaign for change.

And then, of course, we need a positive plan to cover everyone in America. One of the things we learned last time around is that Americans want a vision for health care that they can understand—and a solution to big problems of costs and coverage that proceed from an understandable diagnosis of why we face those problems.

What we do over the next few months can help shape the proposals the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates offer to the nation on health care. And what we do over the next several years can help shape how those proposals evolve—and whether they have a chance of succeeding in our lifetimes.

This forum helped clarify the challenge we face. And, as motivation, I leave you with Matthew Holt’s description  of the outcome he fears. (It’s a pretty good description of my fears about our legacy if we don’t rise to the challenge.):

My essential fear though, is that we’ll only get to some kind of compromised quasi-universal coverage system that doesn’t really cover everybody, keeps a role for a private insurance industry operating under the wrong incentives, and looks like welfare for the poor.

In that case this whole cycle will start again, and in about 15-20 years when we go into a more violent collapse—then we will end up with Soviet-style rather than Danish-style socialized medicine. And we ought to be able to do much better than that.

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Unemployment Cuts To Grant Business Tax Breaks

By Efrain Nieves & Victoria Cepeda

In the hopes of incentivizing people to “get out” of unemployment and into the job market, some conservative politicians are proposing the reduction of unemployment benefits and granting corporate tax cuts instead. Take Utah and Florida for instance. The latter has proposed bill HB 7005 “that would establish some of the deepest and most far-reaching cuts in unemployment benefits in the nation.” The bill is heading for the desk of Gov. Rick Scott.”

“The Republican sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Nancy Detert (R), relied on the same false assumption as the lawmakers in Utah, saying that cutting benefits “encourages people to get back into the job market.” Meanwhile, research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits.”

Which brings us to B.F. Skinner’s Positive Reinforcement Theory.

B.F. Skinner defined reinforcement as creating situations that a person likes or removing a situation a person doesn’t like, and punishment as removing a situation a person likes or setting up one he doesn’t like. Positive reinforcement is superior to punishment in altering behavior. Punishment was not simply the opposite of positive reinforcement; positive reinforcement results in lasting behavioral modification, whereas punishment changes behavior only temporarily and presents many detrimental side effects.

Skinner’s reinforcement theory should be a must read for supporters of this bill across the country. Assuming that reducing unemployment benefits will ” encourage people to get back into the job market” (miamiherald.com) is a desired outcome, not a proven one. The assumption would hold true if there were jobs readily available matching the skills of all those this bill will affect.  Consequently, encouragement is the least unemployed people will feel when their benefits run out three weeks earlier than expected.  To make things more discouraging, the same bill would give businesses a tax break.

Detert said her proposal already was the “gift of the year” for Florida’s business community.“Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,” Detert said. “Learn to like it or get nothing.”

The bill cuts by 10 percent the tax rate that businesses pay to cover the costs of unemployment benefits and makes it easier for companies to keep former workers from collecting benefits.To qualify for benefits, workers would have to prove they were seeking jobs and complete a state-approved skills test or training program. Is this not what most folks need to comply with anyhow in order to get their unemployment benefits extended?

What is about those less fortunate (not affluent) that makes Republicans want to take from them?  Why is the average American the one bearing the brunt of budget cuts, reductions and scale backs?  Don’t corporations get enough breaks already? Haven’t they taken our jobs overseas in hopes of even greater tax breaks and greater margins of revenues?

Enough is enough. 2012 coming soon to a voting booth near you.

photo from westorlandonews.com

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A Tribute to the Internet’s Funny Photos 9 January, 2007

Posted by paralleldivergence in funny photos, Humor, Internet, Life, Music, My Thoughts, Weird Al.

I’ve spent way too long at goofingoff.com – I have to finish that report I’m supposed to be doing. Let’s see. The eleven major Ad Valorem rates reduced to Central Excise of 16%, Merit Rate of 8% and Demerit Rate of 24%. [You have new mail]. What? I don’t have time for this! It’s from Jerry. [Subject: You gotta see this!]. I don’t have time now Jerry! My God! How many times has this been forwarded before it got to me? Bwahaha! That’s so cool! I have to forward this to the rest of the accounts team!

 Windows Vista crash

Funny photos and the Internet have become truly synonymous. These anonymous snippets of life, sometimes photoshopped, sometimes real, have brought joy to millions of office workers the world over. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and in the case of the above photograph, a thousand memories…You goddamn Microsoft piece of crap! No! No! I’m sorry Windows. I love you. Without you I wouldn’t have a job. Nice Windows. Nice Windows. I’m going to restart you now, OK?

From funny road signs to strange accidents to stupid people. The subject matter is endless. And there’s even a spinoff industry – start with one funny photo and photoshop it into another – from Silly Mosh Girl to the Tourist of Death image galleries.

Sure, nowadays it’s all YouTube videos and Flash animations. Funny photos just don’t have the same impact as they once did when we were all living in dial-up modem world. Some of those photos were classics. Some deserve a second chance. So as my tribute to the Internet’s Funny Photos, I’ve put together a music video, with help from Weird Al Yankovic’s “You Don’t Love Me Anymore“. Watch, listen, laugh and enjoy…

Comments are appreciated.

1. tobeme - 10 January, 2007

Really enjoyed the video! Fun stuff, thanks for sharing.

2. Neal Watzman - 11 January, 2007

Enjoyable video with some classic images.

3. paralleldivergence - 11 January, 2007

Thanks tobeme and Neal!

4. Kevin - 23 December, 2007

that was fantastic! the internet wouldn’t be the same without these pictures. nice use of Weird Al as well!

5. paralleldivergence - 24 December, 2007

Glad you liked it Kevin.

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As my blog title probably makes clear, I’ve always been ‘into’ computers. I like them, I like what they can do, and I’ve always been fascinated with them. During my degree program, though, I decided to switch a Windows class for a Linux admin class, and I’m extremely glad I did. I learned so much about what goes on inside an operating system that makes me feel much more confident about using my computers in ways that help me.

And curiosity usually begets curiosity, so I decided I needed to learn to code more than simple shell scripts. I searched out resources, and I’ve started learning Python, a fairly simple (to learn) coding language often called a scripting language.

What’s great is that you can learn this language for free from resources all around the internet. Me, I wanted to be able to make simple games, and the two resources I went to made that really easy.

Invent With Python

The first I used was the Invent With Python series, the first book of which is called Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python. I actually skipped this book because I had a foundation in programming logic and was mostly wanting to learn some meat of the pygame module. I started with Making Games With Python and Pygame.

These books are mostly a ‘follow the pattern’ books that will get you familiar with looking at code, and it helps learn Python syntax, but I don’t feel this teaches you the language very well. For complete newbies, though, it’s not a bad start.

Learn Python The Hard Way

I discovered this book after I finished Making Games because I wanted a more fundamental understanding of the language, and this book has definition provided that.

It starts you off with the classic ‘hello’ program and works you through more complex concepts like importing modules, writing functions and classes, and programming logic including a basic Boolean algebra (Though fair warning, Python changes the rules a bit). After that, it sets you off to produce your own programs for scratch using the basics you learned through the book.

If you’d like something more than a book, they offer the video course for $29.

The last few months of learning more robust coding has been a blast, and I hope someone finds these two resources useful. Have you ever considered learning to code?


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Grassroots Commentary

A Nostalgic New Year's Look at the '50s

Mark W. Hendrickson · Jan. 3, 2013

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at

New Year’s observances blend recollections of the past, celebrations in the present, and anticipation of the future. For a variety of reasons, I’m feeling nostalgic this year. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the decade of my childhood – the 1950s.

In October, my wife and I saw a play in which people weary of the hectic pace of contemporary life could escape to an “authentic” 1950s community where the more relaxed pace of the past had been recreated. In the play, the benefit of relocating to the ‘50s was a simpler, less stressful life, but it came at a price – enduring racial and sexual prejudice. The problem was that the playwright – a man in his 30s – had zero feel for the era. He simply reproduced various one-dimensional stereotypes about the '50s that he had heard or read.

Why do so many intellectuals disparage the '50s? Bashing “the man in the gray flannel suit” became an intellectual cause celebre. Writers vied to see who could heap the most scorn on the allegedly boring conformity of that receding decade, drawing supercilious caricatures of middle-class men and women of the era as superficial, plastic figures.

My view of the '50s is more benign. I recall it as a happy, safe time – almost a Golden Age in American history. Playwrights might prefer the pathos of the depression-filled '30s or the tragedies of the war-torn '40s as more fruitful backdrops for their stage dramas, but in real life, I’m glad I got to be a kid at a time of relative peace and prosperity.

In the '50s, homes were smaller, cars larger, attire more formal, and the range of consumer products far narrower. A sense of order prevailed. Neighbors watched out for everyone’s kids. We left our homes and cars unlocked. Kids behaved in school or were expelled. Most of us toed the line, because we knew that our parents would take the teacher’s side. Teachers were respected and principals feared. People accepted responsibility for their actions.

People dressed up more often and generally were more polite. They used less profanity in public. Movies depended on good acting instead of special effects to tell engaging stories, and depictions of sex and violence left the details to one’s imagination. If you hurt yourself doing something careless, you never thought of suing the company that made the thing with which you hurt yourself. Most of us went to Sunday school or synagogue every weekend, learning right from wrong and that we are accountable to a higher power.

Were the '50s perfect? Certainly not. Back then, millions of Americans believed that smoking was cool and had not yet shed centuries-old racist attitudes. Few of today’s white kids can grasp how blacks were treated. They would find Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son,” illuminating. They should read Cold War historian Paul Kengor’s “The Communist” to learn how outrageously Barack Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was mistreated because he was black.

An insightful, enjoyable book that captures the 1950s dichotomy between the innocent bliss enjoyed by us white kids and the dark underside of the adult world is Bill Bryson’s alternately funny and sobering memoir, “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.” But even as wrong practices persisted in some quarters back then, we kids were being taught, both in Sunday school – and in TV shows like “Rin Tin Tin” and “The Lone Ranger” – to show respect for all people. Lo and behold, a decade later we began to excise the sick habit of racism from our society.

We can’t go back to the ‘50s. That is both a blessing and a loss. Thankfully, we have corrected some of the most egregious shortcomings of that era. Unfortunately, however, we also have taken backward steps in terms of innocence, safety, order, respect, familial stability, secure property rights, etc.

It was a privilege to grow up in the '50s. This New Year’s Eve, I reminisced and listened to the Guy Lombardo records that Pop used to play every December 31. Given the broke and broken state of government and the accompanying venomous friction that permeates our society today, Lombardo’s signature New Year’s Eve song had an ominous relevance at the dawn of 2013: “Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think.”

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.


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I am a storyteller. Any time I use language, either in speaking or writing, I tell a story. I can’t help it. Someone once asked me  if I could ever turn it off. I responded, “Why would I ever want to do that?” I started my career as a high school English teacher, holding  the dreaded red pen over thousands of essays for seventeen years. When I lost the passion for teaching others how to write, I knew it was finally time to put the pen to paper and do what writers do. So I wrote. And I still write. After gigs as a reporter, columnist, editor, publisher, and public relations director, I’m now a full-time writer. I write my blog, and I have several novels in various stages of production. I’m also putting myself through an independent study program on how to use social media and the web. I published three novels and one work of nonfiction traditionally.

I was born and raised in Michigan. Then Florida beckoned, and I moved there in 1980 and raised my daughter on 20 acres in rural northern Florida with my first husband. After my divorce, and while working for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission as a public relations director, I reconnected with a lost love from my teenage years in Michigan. He lived in Pittsburgh and when we married, I left Florida for the Steel City. All the places I’ve lived thus far share a part of my heart. But the biggest part of my heart goes to my daughter Anna and my new husband, Robert.

I write about life and love; I write about wildlife; I write about the environment; I write about climate change; I write about my love of outdoor activities, from gardening to kayaking. In this blog, I express my philosophy for thoughtful living on this planet whether it concerns other human beings, wildlife, or the changing environment.

Live lightly and responsibly. And above all else, laugh, love, and live with passion.

Please visit my website, P.C. Zick for my ramblings on anything and everything to do with the world of publishing and writing. I interview other authors and write book reviews, when the spirit moves me to do so.

Click here to sign up for my newsletter for updates on my publishing news.

13 thoughts on “ABOUT

  1. What an amazing blog you have started. I loveove your philosopy and love your writing. Your entries are all thought provoking and are written with an obvious love and passion for your world. Looking forward to reading more….much more!!

  2. “Thoughtful living”… I love this and believe it to be the golden rule. Your writings are filled with passion and express so well your thoughtfulness. I’m blessed to know you.

  3. I like your blog posts and your philosophy. What are the novels you have written? And what was the independent study program you did on social media and the web? I’m interested in both!

    • Hi Betsy –
      My novels can be found on my website at http://www.pczick.com. My first one released on Kindle is Live from the Road. I downloaded a couple of books from Kindle, took a webinar from Writer’s Digest (maybe two of those), and I purchased some books that have been semi-helpful. Please email me at pczick@verizon.net and I can give you more specifics. I’m challeneged today with a new computer I’m setting up! Thanks for taking the time to look at my blog!

  4. Pingback: And The Nominees Are… « hazyshadesofme

  5. Hi P.C. I am nominating you for TWO awards: The Beautiful Blogger Award and the Super Sweet Blogging Award. I have not posted my posts as yet but I am notifying you so you can get a head start. You know the drill! Congratulations!

  6. What a nice , welcoming blog/place – I felt instantly at home, and look forward to future visits!

    I have a question about your Florida time – particularly with the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission: wondering if through that, you may have had any contact with or news about the whooping cranes that were re-introduced to Florida as a non-migratory flock in the early 90s? Or the migrating whoopers that (every year since 2001) are trained, as chicks, to migrate by following ultralight aircraft to wildlife refuges on the gulf coast?

    Best wishes to you and all your endeavors.

    • Thanks for stopping by. I wasn’t directly involved in the ultralight aircraft but I kept up on it because I lived only 30 miles from the wildlife refuge which is managed by the feds. They kept a pretty tight circle on who could come down there during that time (with good reason), but I worked with some biologists who had the privilege of working closely on that successful project.

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More Sensor Nonsense

March 23, 2010

I can’t think of any greater achievement in press-release puffery than having your claims uncritically repeated in the New York Times.

As many of you have heard, a company called InVisage has announced a “disruptive” improvement in imager sensitivity, through applying a film of quantum dot material. The story has been picked up by lots of photography blogs and websites, including DP Review.

But don’t throw your current camera in the trash quite yet. The Times quoted InVisage’s Jess Lee as saying, “we expect to start production 18 months from now”—with the first shipping sensors designed for phone-cam use.

InVisage Prototype

Sensitivity: Good. Hype: Bad

I have no way of knowing if InVisage’s claims will pan out in real-world products. But it’s interesting that a few people who work in the industry have skeptical things to say.

I do find it exaggerated to claim that the new technology is “four times” better than conventional sensors (95% versus 25% efficiency). Backside-illuminated sensors are shipping today which have much higher sensitivity; and refinements to microlenses and fill-factors are continuing.

However one true advantage of the quantum-dot film is that incoming photons slam to a stop within a very shallow layer (just half a micron thick). This is in contrast to conventional photodiodes, where longer-wavelength (redder) photons might need to travel through 6-8 microns of silicon before generating an electron.

That difference might enable sensors without microlenses to absorb light efficiently even from very oblique angles. It would permit lens designs with shorter back focus (as with rangefinder cameras); and thus we could get more compact cameras overall.

Kodak’s full-frame KAF-18500 CCD, used in the Leica M9, could only achieve the same trick by using special offset microlenses. (And if we are to believe this week’s DxO Mark report, that sensor may have compromised image quality in other ways.)

But I’m still slapping my head at the most ridiculous part of this whole story:

To give an example of what the “quantum film” technology would enable, Mr. Lee noted that we could have an iPhone camera with a 12-megapixel sensor.

Can I scream now? Is the highest goal of our civilization trying to cram more megapixels into a phone-cam? And WHY? But the über-iPhone is just nonsense for other reasons, even if we desired it.

As near as I can tell, an iPhone sensor is about 2.7 x 3.6 mm (a tiny camera module needs an extremely tiny chip). Space is so tight that a larger module would be unacceptable. So, to squish 12 Mp into the current sensor size, each pixel would need to be 0.9 microns wide!

An iPhone’s lens works at f/2.8. At that aperture, the size of the Airy disk (for green light) is 3.8 microns. This is the theoretical limit to sharpness, even if the lens is absolutely flawless and free from aberrations. At the micron scale, any image will be a mushy, diffraction-limited mess.

Also, remember that noise is inherent in the randomness of photon arrival. No matter what technology is used, teensy sensors will always struggle against noise. (The current “solution” is processing the image into painterly color smudges.)

And the dynamic range of a sensor is directly related to pixel size. Micron-scale pixels would certainly give blank, blown-out highlights at the drop of a hat.

But let’s be optimistic that, eventually, this technology will migrate to more sensible pixel sizes. Even if the sensitivity increase only turns out to be one f/stop or so, it would still be welcome. A boost like that could give a µ4/3-sized sensor very usable ISO-1600 performance.

But before we proclaim the revolution has arrived, we’ll need to wait for a few more answers about InVisage’s technology:

  • Is the quantum-dot film lightfast, or does it deteriorate over time?
  • Is there crosstalk/bleeding between adjacent pixels?
  • Is the sensitivity of the quantum-dot film flat across the visible spectrum, or significantly “peaked”? (This would affect color reproduction)
  • How reflective is the surface of the film? (Antireflection coatings could be used—but they affect sharpness and angular response)

So, stay tuned for more answers, maybe in the summer of 2011…

Some Theory About Noise

February 14, 2010

The first thing to understand about picture noise (aka grain, speckles) is that it’s already present in the optical image brought into focus on the sensor.

Even when you photograph something featureless and uniform like a blank sky, the light falling onto the sensor isn’t creamy and smooth, like mayonnaise. At microscopic scales, it’s lumpy & gritty.

This is because light consists of individual photons. They sprinkle across the sensor at somewhat random timings and spacings. And eventually you get down to the scale where one tiny area might receive no photons at all, even as its neighbor receives many.

Perhaps one quarter of the photons striking the sensor release an electron—which is stored, then counted by the camera after the exposure. This creates the brightness value recorded for each pixel. (There is also a bit of circuit noise sneaking in, mostly affecting the darkest parts of the image.)

But no matter how carefully a camera is constructed, it is subject to photon noise—sometimes called “shot noise.” You might also hear some murmurs about Poisson statistics, the math describing how this noise is distributed.

When you start from a focused image that’s tiny (as happens with point & shoot cameras), then magnify it by dozens of times, the more noticeable this inherent noise becomes:

Compact Camera Noise Sample

Small Sensors Struggle With Noise

In fact, the only way to reduce the speckles is to average them out over some larger area. However, the best method for doing this requires some consideration.

The most obvious solution is this: You decide what is the minimum spatial resolution needed for your uses (i.e., what pixel count), then simply make each pixel the largest area permissible. Bigger pixels = more photon averaging.

Lets recall that quite a nice 8 x 10″ print can be made from a 5 Mp image. The largest inkjet printers bought by ordinary citizens print at 13 inches wide; 9 Mp suffices for this, at least at arm’s length. And any viewing on a computer screen requires far fewer pixels still.

The corollary is that when a photographer does require more pixels (and a few do), you increase the sensor size, not shrink the pixels. For a given illumination level (a particular scene brightness and f/stop) the larger sensor will simply collect more photons in total—allowing better averaging of the photon noise.

But say we take our original sensor area, then subdivide it into many smaller, but noisier, pixels. Their photon counts are bobbling all over the place now! The hope here is that later down the road, we can blend them in some useful way that reduces noise.

One brute-force method is just applying a small-radius blur to the more pixel-dense image. However this will certainly destroy detail too. It’s not clear what advantage this offers compared to starting from a crisp, lower-megapixel image (for one thing, the file size will be larger).

Today, the approach actually taken is to start with the noisier high-megapixel image, then run sophisticated image-processing routines on it. Theoretically, smart algorithms can enhance true detail, like edges; while smoothing shot noise in the areas that are deemed featureless.

This is done on every current digital camera. Yet it must be done much more aggressively when using tiny sensors, like those in compact models or phone-cams.

One argument is that by doing this, we’ve simply turned the matter into a software problem. Throw in Moore’s law, plus ever-more-clever programming, and we may get a better result than the big-pixel solution. I associate the name Nathan Myrvold with this form of techno-optimism (e.g. here). Assuming the files were saved in raw format, you might even go back and improve photos shot in the past.

But it’s important to note the limits of this image-processing, as they apply to real cameras today.

Most inexpensive cameras do not give the option of saving raw sensor files. So before we actually see the image, the camera’s processor chip puts it through a series of steps:

Bayer demosaicing —> Denoising & Sharpening —> JPEG compression

Remember that each pixel on the sensor has a different color filter over it. The true color image must be reconstructed using some interpolation.

The problem is that photon noise affects pixels randomly—without regard to their assigned color. If it happens (and statistically, it will) that several nearby “red” pixels end up too bright (because of random fluctuations), the camera can’t distinguish this from a true red detail within the subject. So, false rainbow blobs can propagate on scales much larger than individual pixels:

100% Color Noise Sample

100% Crop of Color Noise

The next problem is that de-noising and sharpening actually tug in opposite directions. So the camera must make an educated guess about what is a true edge, sharpen that, then blur the rest.

This works pretty well when the processor finds a crisp, high-contrast outline. But low-contrast details (which are very important to our subjective sense of texture) can simply be smudged away.

The result can be a very unnatural, “watercolors” effect. Even when somewhat sharp-edged, blobs of color will be nearly featureless inside those outlines.

Remember this?

Noise Reduction Watercolors

Impressionistic Noise Reduction

Or, combined with a bit more aggressive sharpening, you might get this,

Sharp Smudge Sample

Pastel Crayons This Time?

Clearly, the camera’s guesses about what is true detail can fail in many real-world situations.

There’s an excellent technical PDF from the DxO Labs researchers, discussing (and attempting to quantify) this degradation. Their research was originally oriented towards cell-phone cameras (where these issues are even more severe); but the principles apply to any small-sensor camera dependent on algorithmic signal recovery.

Remember that image processing done within the camera must trade off sophistication against speed and battery consumption. Otherwise, camera performance becomes unacceptable. And larger files tax the write-speed and picture capacity of memory cards; they also take longer to load and edit in our computers.

So there is still an argument for taking the conservative approach.

We can subdivide sensors into more numerous, smaller pixels. But we should stop at the point which is sufficient for our purposes, in order to minimize reliance on this complex, possibly-flawed software image wrangling.

And when aberrations & diffraction limit the pixel count which is actually useful, the argument becomes even stronger.

Some Very Nice Pixels

January 24, 2010

Lets say you want to own the ultimate digital camera. You want the image quality to be absolutely state-of-the-art; something that can see even better than the human eye.

And you have a little money to spend. Like, 132 million dollars. So you’re free to really go crazy with the design. You can have as many pixels as you feel like!

You hire yourself some really smart engineers, and you go to work. So, what kind of camera specs do you end up with?

Well, the little gadget I’m referring to is the “Wide Field Camera 3.” It was installed during the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission last May (after a several-year delay, while the Space Shuttle fleet was grounded).

And the specs are kind of interesting. Does it boast a bazillion megapixels? It does not.

The larger of the two detectors, the wideband UVIS, includes 16.8 megapixels (4102 x 4096). Considering that back down here on earth, you can buy a 56 Mp digital back for a mere $30,000, perhaps that’s surprising.

The secret is that each pixel is really, really big: 15 microns wide. That gives each one quite a large area to absorb light; and it allows each pixel to store lots of electrons (for a wide dynamic range from darkest to brightest).

Each UVIS pixel is about 7 or 8 times the area of the ones in your typical consumer DSLR. But compared to mini point & shoots, it’s even more ridiculous. Their teensy pixels are about 1/100th the area.

Anyway, the WFC3 does take pretty nice pictures:

Sample from Hubble Wide Field Camera 3

From the Hubble Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3

Even when price is no object, remember it is still fiendishly hard to make a large CCD completely free from flaws. Instead of one big chip, WFC3 needed to use two, pushed side-by-side.

And even the chips carefully selected to fly in the UVIS instrument have some pretty obvious scars (er, “prominent local structures”) that must be subtracted out of the final image.

Anyway, if you decide to you can’t live without this ultimate in digital cameras, I do have a couple of cautions:

First, it’s about the size of a piano. Second, the lens will cost extra.

And even though delivering the camera was a little slow, it wasn’t exactly cheap. You better budget a little more for shipping: 1.1 billion dollars.

At that price, you might as well go back to shooting film.


text:
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Hunter Middleton

I Love Animals And Spending Time With Them

Pet Sitter in Valdosta

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Genesee & Wyoming To Serve Utica NGL Fractionation Hub

January 2013, Vol. 240 No. 1

Genesee & Wyoming Inc. said its wholly owned subsidiary, The Columbus & Ohio River Rail Road Co. (CUOH), has signed a long-term agreement to serve the $900 million natural gas liquids fractionation hub being constructed in Scio, OH by Utica East Ohio Midstream LLC.

The processing/fractionation/storage facility will be the largest integrated midstream service complex in eastern Ohio and GWI’s largest customer to date in the Utica Shale. The location was selected based on proximity to the Utica Shale’s liquids-rich gas, to key natural gas pipelines and to the CUOH. The CUOH will build a one-mile rail siding and rehabilitate a three-mile storage track to serve the facility, which when fully operational is expected to ship 10,000 carloads of NGLs annually.

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Gallery tour Auguststraße and beyond

One on One

Recently opened (yesterday, to be exact), the Kunstwerke are showing „One on One“ – an exhibition with a rather unusuak setup. The idea is that the visitor is alone with the artwork, therefor nearly every exhibited piece has its own little hut in which only one person per time may enter. The goal is to create a situation of contemplation and also how the artists themselves are dealing with the situation – most of the works were newly created for this exhibition.

A Forest

The Alfred Ehrhardt Trust is showing in the 5th european month of photography pieces by photographer Michael Lange. The large scale photographys of forest scenes impress with an astonishing depth and nearly fractal like geometry created by the branches, leafs and columns of trees shown in the picture.

Shelters and Volcanoes

Neugerriemschneider – what a name for a gallery anyways -is showing photos by famous Olafur Eliasson taken in iceland and presented as a massive block of about 30 pictures for both volcanes and shelters. Besides of the Photography there are also some small installations using mirrors and treetrunks.

The gestalten space in the small passway between Gipsstraße and Sophienstraße is hosting a selection of photos by early russian colour-photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled and photographed landscapes and people throughout late czarist russia between 1905 and 1915. Thanks to the Library of Congress (who bought his works from Russia in the late 40ies) there are prints from the negatives for the first time. Sometimes with really strange colour-irregularities due to their age.

The IFA Gallery (IFA ist short for institute for foreign affairs) is showing fresh contemporary art from Tunisia, something you really do not see so very much. Interesting in their respective approaches only some of the works could really live up to their potential. Others seemed to be (naturally maybe) a little bit too naive or out of (contemporary) art-context.

Über philippkoch

author and curator, specializing in literature and writing on visual arts
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News tagged with career award

Turning pine sap into 'ever-green' plastics

Plastic bags are a bane of nature. And not just bags – just about all plastics, really. Most are made out of petroleum, and a piece of plastic, if it misses the recycling bin and ends up in a landfill, will probably outlast ...

dateFeb 21, 2013 in Materials Science
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See Details on eBay

Vintage German Enamel & Iron Sign 84 #AR11

$14.99 or Best Offer 2d, $8.00 Shipping, 14-Day Returns, eBay Money Back Guarantee: Get the item you ordered, or your money back!

Seller: eddy*s (11,753) 99.8%, Location: Wiesenthau, Ships to: Worldwide, Item: 400627287030 WELCOME AND HAPPY BIDDING THANKS FOR STOPPING BY PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER UNIQUE & INTERESTING ITEMS If you are interested feel free to send an offer You bid on a Vintage German Enamel & Iron Sign here or in my Tracks from use, condition see on pictures i found on a estate sale in Nuremberg Germany see on pictures feel free to follow eddy*s on Facebook Check out my other items! Be sure to add me to your favorites list! sold as seen on the pictures!! I send my Items over the entire world. All my articles cost dispatch. I combine naturally the dispatch with the purchase of several articles. Please consider that by the purchase of an article. Powered by eBay Turbo ListerThe free listing tool. List your items fast and easy and manage your active items. Condition: Tracks from use, condition see on pictures, Color: White, Material: Enamel & Iron

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Lampposts Rock

Sorry for the distinct lack of posts recently. This is due largely to the fact that I’ve been freezing my fucking nuts off and consequently hanging out anywhere offering even the slightest bit of hotness, like here for example:

Nice, and a favourite of the London pigeon during the winter months.

December 2, 2008. Uncategorized.

  1. Pigeon Rachel replied:

    mmm, lovely warm toes. Hope it’s in a quiet back street, out of the wind.

  2. pigeonblog replied:

    Pigeon Rachel: Not quite… it’s outside Charing Cross Station! Handily situated near to Trafalgar Square though.
    Your pal

  3. Professional Housegirlfriend replied:

    So it was you! I thought I recognised you when I walked past the other day, but I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong and you laughed at me. Wouldn’t be the first time I commited a social faux-pas.

  4. pigeonblog replied:

    Professional Housegirlfriend: More than likely, say hi to a pigeon and they’ll say hi back, or give a slight nod at the very least. A little acknowledgment goes a long way in London these days.
    Your pal

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Twilight Zone (Bally, 1993)

Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone is a Pinball Machine manufactured by Bally in 1993.

It is themed after the television series that was created by Rod Serling and which aired on American television from 1959-1964 originally. The game is often noted to be the game with the most patents (however Pinball Magic by Capcom has more), the most toys and the most over-cost budget in the history of pinball.

Main features include a life-size gumball machine that locks balls inside, a mechanical clock with rotating arms, a mini playfield with invisible (magnet) flippers and a ceramic ball that is not affected by the games' many magnets.

Twilight Zone is one of the most popular machines amongst home owners and many modifications (mods) are sold for it, including a robot toy, a real mini television screen, a flashing camera and more!

The above intro text acts a bit like a 'wiki' and can be edited by all Pinside members, including you!

Design team

Game Design: Pat Lawlor
Artwork: John Youssi

Game details

Bally Manufacturing Co.
May 1993
Solid state
15,235 produced
$5550 - $6450
Wide body
Dot Matrix

Click on a flyer image for full size.

Game quote

"You have come to the end of your journey. Survival is everything."

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Pinside rating

This game has been rated by 1793 Pinsiders and currently has a rating of 8.781 out of 10 ranking it #2 in the Pinside Pinball Top 100

Rating comments

There are 616 rating comments for this game.

Owners / Wishlisters / Places to play

1804 Pinsiders have this game in their collections.
996 Pinsiders have this game on their wishlist.
212 public locations known where you can play this machine.

On the market

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$ 8,000.00
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Price estimate

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Instructions card

Card courtesy of Peter “Inkochnito” Koch

On the forum

There are 3604 forum topics linked to this game,

“Twilight Zone” multimedia

Have you found a YouTube video related to this machine?
Simply paste the complete YouTube link in the box and click 'add video'!