New Standards for Elections

The New York Times has an editorial entitled New Standards for Elections[*] in which several things are pointed out that, in the opinion of the author, are necessary for better elections in the future. One of them in particular reminded me of something I read:

12. Improved absentee ballot procedures. Voters outside of their states, including military voters, have a right to receive absentee ballots in a timely fashion, which did not always happen this year.

"Did not always happen". I suppose that's one way to describe the experience of at least one person on my friends list.

Incidentally, that editorial is part of a series which is online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.

[*] Free registration may be required, though I think this series of articles is open to anyone even without prior registration. If you are asked to register, try slashdotusers/newsfornerds or slashdot123/slashdot123, or use BugMeNot to get a login and password.

Choices, choices...

On the topic of abortions I recently read a comment by cairnsy in a journal entry by isabeau, with a line of thinking I hadn't seen before but which I found interesting.

I think it's commonly accepted that part of growing up and becoming an adult is learning to accept that choices come with consequences (e.g. "you broke it, you fix it or pay for it"), and this comment seemed, to me, to be based on this, though it wasn't explicitly stated:

I've never [bought] into the whole 'a woman should be able to do what she wants with her body' line of thinking, mainly because in most cases, she was doing exactly what she wanted with her body when she chose to have unprotected sex. The male partner is naturally just as responsible, but to me, arguing that a woman should have a control over her body and yet not have to deal with the consequences of how she uses that body, is just not my cup of tea.

(Ignoring for the time being that some conceptions occur despite precautions; I've heard them called "Tropi-Kinder" in German, a play on words with the Tropi- root meaning "tropical" and an abbreviation of trotz Pille "despite the pill".)

Colour and Gamma

I must confess that I am a Bear of Very Little Brain when it comes to colour processing and, in particular, gamma.

I was looking for a way to create a "proper" rainbow and grepped for "color FAQ" to see whether there's any way to convert a wavelength of visible light to an R,G,B triple, and I found a colour FAQ and a companion gamma FAQ, but for the most part, they both read to me like "Blah blah blah highly technical blah blah equation blah blah" :(

I'm sure that there are people who can easily understand this and who'll say, "It's really quite simple," but it all seems very confusing to me (especially the bit about gamma, how it's used, when and when not to apply correction, etc.). So I ended up cheating and just saying "give me an image that transitions from 'red' over 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', and 'indigo' to 'violet'" and trusting the colour name file to come up with suitable shades for those colour names.