A Time of Magic

Reuters is one of those organisations whose name you know but for which that’s about all that you know about them.

In fact, they pull together reports from journalists all over the world and repackage them for publication in various newspapers, journals and TV stations. Therefore, it’s only natural that they should extend their reach into one of the most widespread information networks the world has ever seen. Yes, the world of blogging.

But surely blogging is just a bunch of amateurs writing a lot of nonsense? Well, whilst the word amateur might mean unprofessional in some senses today, in days gone by the sense of the word was very different: amateurs were people who had loads of time on their hands and produced by far the best work. OK, so we’re not there yet with blogging but in many circles bloggers are treated in much the same way as professional journalists.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed that this very blog is one of those supplying articles for Reuters and hopefully it’ll encourage me to gradually improve the standard of articles.

I’ve just been to a rally and, of course, there were lots of people with compact digital camera trying to take photos of the race.

I say trying because few of their photographs will come out properly. Cars obviously move quite quickly in a race so for one thing, most people will have a lot of blur in the image they’ve taken. Compact digital cameras are also rather slow in actually taking the photo so the majority of people won’t even have an image of the car at all which is probably the greater problem.

That slowness in capturing the image is one of the main differences in cheap cameras vs expensive ones. For example, when I press the button on my Nikon D40X, the camera takes the photo pretty much immediately. You still need to track the car in the viewfinder obviously but when you don’t need to allow for any delay. Compare that to the Nikon 3700 which I used when taking the photos last year: the (large) fraction of a second between pressing the button and the camera capturing the image made it almost impossible to get a decent photo of the cars.

Usually there’d be a third problem in that the flash on compacts is usually automatic which, of course, doesn’t go down too well with the race organisers as it’s rather dangerous to have a bright flash in your eyes as you’re about to turn a corner just beside a sheer drop which is, naturally, exactly the type of spot that you’d stand to get the best photos. Today was quite lucky though as it was sunny so the flashes weren’t required.

Actually, what’s more surprising is how few of the ancient bridges are still around.

Building bridges was a trial and error process until relatively recently. The designs that survived were worked out through eliminating many designs that weren’t up to the job and fell down. This isn’t entirely a recent phenomena either as the bridge at Tacoma illustrates.

Obviously small bridges weren’t really a problem. Throw a log over a river and it’s not going to collapse under you. It’s the larger constructions that are the problem as they involve all kinds of structural stresses that just weren’t well understood until quite recently. Hence, you don’t see anything like the number of Roman bridges as you might expect to see if you thought about it for a while. After all, their roads went pretty much directly from A to B so they would have crossed numerous rivers along the way yet few of those bridges remain.

Ah, but they’d have been worn out and collapsed by now. Yes, some of them would have of course but the Romans built pretty chunky artifacts as those which remain attest to so there should have been a whole lot more of them still around. Obviously, they’d have needed some repairs after 2000 odd years but you still see substantial buildings around for that length of time.