A Tale of Two States

It was the worst of times.

Granted, these aren't coming from the same state legislatures -- yet -- but they are brought to you by the same folks.

PIERRE, S.D. — The South Dakota Senate voted Wednesday to require women to wait 72 hours before they can have abortions and to submit to counseling about why they shouldn't go through with the procedures.

And this...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is expected to sign a bill that will make the state the first in the nation to prohibit doctors from asking patients if they own guns. The bill is aimed particularly at pediatricians, who routinely ask new parents if they have guns at home and if they're stored safely.

How do Republicans reconcile these two ideas without appearing insane?

The Climate of Status Quo

Science writer Chris Mooney had a good article in Mother Jones yesterday. Titled The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science -- How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link, it looks at some of the factors that are involved with how certain people trust or distrust facts with which they are in disagreement.

According to some classic research, our attitudes can be based upon our classifications as "individualists" or "communitarians" in combination with either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" outlooks. Conservative Republicans are typically "indiviualist-hierarchical" while liberal Democrats would be "communitarian-egalitarian."

Dan Kahan, the author of the study, sums it up nicely:

Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

On a tangential note, I see that today's Rapture Index is the highest ever: 184. This is because category #38, Wild Weather, has been recently elevated. I think it's funny that the keeper of these categories sees no irony between category

43 Climate: Record cold temps put the freeze on global warming hype.

and categories #38 and #45:

38 Wild Weather: The US is hit by a historic tornado Outbreak.
45 Floods: Heavy flooding in South America and Europe.

What values would give these facts a fighting chance?

I Feel Fine

I had an amusing thought: what if the Rapture has already occurred? Everything is the same as it ever was -- nobody is missing. Nobody qualified. Not that it should come as any surprise.

According to the Rapture Ready web site, today's rapture index is 183, which on their scale translates to "fasten your seatbelts!" Scan the "Comments on Active Categories" section:

• 04 Unemployment: Unemployment tops 10 percent.
• 05 Inflation: Several commodities are at multi-year highs.
• 06 Interest Rates: The yield on bond prices has reached a 9 month high.
• 07 The Economy: The debt crisis in Europe is spreading around the world.
• 08 Oil Supply/Price: The price of oil climbs higher.
• 09 Debt and Trade: The mortgage bailout will add $1.2 trillion to the Federal debt.
• 10 Financial unrest: The U.S. dollar is down sharply, and gold is at a new high.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? The Republicans are trying to bring on the apocalypse! They think that Obama is the Antichrist, and maybe this will finally expose him.

Some other wonks on the net are trying to rain on everyone's parade. They offer a list of years throughout the ages where the end of the world ^(TM) was forecast. Mark your calendar for May 21^st.

Silly prognosticators! The Rapture has already occurred. The only things missing are a couple of socks, some pets in my neighborhood, and a hitherto undiscovered tribe in the Amazon. I hope they like harp music.

Endless Tweaking

Not being able to leave well enough alone (see previous post), I realized that the criticism about lack of shadows was valid. My hesitation to act on that criticism was partly because I was sick and tired of endlessly tweaking that work. The other reason was that I just didn't have the knowledge and experience with lighting effects in PhotoShop.

So, I rested and I learned (a little). Results are more pleasing:

Notice a couple of new eggs?

Putting my eggs into one basket

In a previous posting, I described how I made a basket using some simple tools in Adobe Illustrator. Here's the same basket loaded up:

This final composition was done in PhotoShop. Each of the eggs, as well as the basket, table cloth and candles, is an Illustrator drawing. If I try to put all of that together in Illustrator, I quickly run out of memory.

A person who I rely upon for PhotoShop advice offered the criticism that shadows were noticeably missing from this piece. Each egg should have a shadow..., etc.

Damn! No, wait. My picture is just well-lit. That's it.

Illustrator Basketmaking 101

The Distort and Transform tool in Adobe Illustrator can really do some cool effects. This basket that I recently did was easy and involved just a few tools and techniques.

Here's how I did this.

I started with a small swatch that I made of short lines in various stroke weights and shades of brown/tan. I turned this into a pattern brush.

Once I had the pattern brush, I used the circle tool to create an oval that matches the lip of the basket. I applied the brush to the oval and tweaked the stroke some more until I was happy with the look.

The rest of the bowl was really simple: I used the Transform tool and started with an arbitrary 29 repetitions. I then tweaked the horizontal scale control down into the minus category (the Preview feature is really handy here). Then I tweaked the Move Vertical a bit into the minus category, watching the preview until I stopped seeing white space between the rings. Expand the Object, and that was all there is to the bowl of the basket. I added some extra body to the basket by copying the bowl layer, pasting it over the top of the original and shifting it horizontally and vertically several keyboard clicks. This worked to fill in the occasional blank space between coils.

The lip of the bowl was created from a fresh circle that I visually matched up with the top ring. Once again, I applied the pattern brush to that. To get that the cool windings, I used the Zig-Zag tool in the Distort and Transform tool set. You can see the dialog box for that below:

Like always, I turned Preview on, so I can see what I'm rendering. By setting Points to Smooth, I got a coiling effect instead of the basic zig-zag. Then I just pumped up the Ridges per segment slider until I got some tight coils. Voila!

Finally, the handle is the top half of a circle arc with the same wood brush applied. After thickening it up a little, I put another circle arc over that and applied the actual zig-zag transform to that.

Now I'm ready to put some Easter eggs in this basket!

Where's the Beef?!!

Somebody at work turned me on to this guy's blog page, Words From The Mountains. If you clicked on that link -- why didn't you? -- you'd see the July 22, 2010, entry titled "The Ghost of Woodburn Hall." It tells the story of a prank from more than a century ago, when some agricultural students led a cow up into Woodburn's bell tower.

Cows being -- well -- dumb, this one managed the climb up several flights, but it seemed unable to walk back down. Consequently, it was removed in much the same way that the dead horse in Animal House had to be removed from the dean's office, albeit before the days of chainsaws. Thus was born the legend of the Woodburn Hall Cow, whose ghost is still mooing in the night.

Now the reason for the story about the unfortunate cow is because I had done a vector drawing of Woodburn Hall, based upon a night-time Christmas lights photograph that I had taken. I was able to catch the night-time look of the building, but I was hesitant to attempt the lighting effect.

Something about my showing this Illustrator drawing to a coworker caused him to remark that my picture needed a cow, whereupon he told me of the legend. Lest you think that I keep strange company, this person is a director-level at the University.

It's funny how an idea grows.