Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • In 2007 President George W. Bush visited the Vatican. One of the gifts he gave Pope Benedict XVI was a walking stick with the Ten Commandments carved into it. Oops—they were the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments, which are slightly different from the Catholic version.

  • In March 2009, President Barack Obama presented British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a 25-DVD box set of classic American films collected especially for the occasion by the American Film Institute. A few days later, Brown sat down to watch Psycho, reported the Telegraph, but was disappointed to find that the U.S.-made DVDs wouldn’t play in his British DVD player. (One reader wrote in to the newspaper to ask if Clueless was one of the movies in the box set. It wasn’t.)

  THE DIGITAL CAMERA REVOLUTION, PART IV

  Here’s a philosophical question: Just because you can make the sky in

  your image prettier, or remove the wrinkles from under your eyes,

  does it mean you should? (Part III is on page 382.)

  THE DIGITAL DARKROOM

  A major factor in the digital revolution has been the camera’s partnership with the computer, specifically, with graphics editing software. The most popular program: Adobe Photoshop. It was invented in the late 1980s by brothers John and Thomas Knoll. The sons of a photographer, they combined their love of working in their father’s darkroom with their love of computers. Ever since Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990, the program’s ability to alter the colors, tone, brightness, and elements in a photo file has advanced right alongside the digital camera’s ability to take better images. By the 2000s, it had become obvious that anyone who is serious about taking and selling pictures must master both photography and Photoshop. Those who were able to master the latter have found their skills in great demand.

  THE PHOTOSHOP EFFECT

  Altering photos of celebrities, athletes, and models for use in magazines and advertising is nothing new; it’s been done to some extent for much of photography’s existence. But the advent of Photoshop has taken it to a whole new level—the process is much easier than working in a darkroom, cutting and pasting prints together, or airbrushing photos. Today, nearly every one of the millions of magazine and advertising photographs printed each year are first manipulated by a Photoshop artist. They’re experts at removing blemishes and making hips curvier, busts bigger, and waists slimmer. In many cases, a Photoshopper will take elements from many different images of a person—the head from one shot, the nose from another, the body from yet another—and combine them all into one picture.

  In the eyes of advocacy groups and government health agencies, this is having a profound effect on our culture’s collective self-esteem. In short, Photoshop, they say, is changing society’s definition of what is considered “beautiful” into something that cannot exist in real life. The most common sufferers: teenage girls. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 70 percent of girls report that images of models in magazines influence their definition of a perfect female body.

  The “Photoshop Effect,” as it’s called, affects young men, too. Being constantly bombarded by “perfect” images of male celebrities, models, and athletes may be a contributing factor in an increase in steroid usage in teenage boys who want to attain the perfect “cut body.” Health officials are so concerned about these trends that they’ve urged lawmakers in the United States, France, and England to force magazines to disclose the extent to which their images have been retouched. Currently, no such laws are on the books.

  PRESSED

  On a similar note, digital manipulation can be a quick, easy way to alter journalistic images. Most news organizations around the world—worried that they’ll lose the confidence of the their readers—have enforced strict no-tolerance policies toward image manipulation. Two examples:

  • In 2003 the Los Angeles Times printed an image by staff photographer Brian Walski of an American soldier walking through a crowded Iraqi village. It turned out, though, that it was actually two images. In one shot, the soldier had the pose Walski wanted, but the civilians’ positions didn’t work. In another, the civilians were lined up to Walski’s liking, but it appeared that the soldier’s gun was pointed toward a child. So Walski used Photoshop to combine the soldier from one image with the civilians from the other. When the editors at the Times found out, they apologized to their readers and fired Walski.

  • In 2006 Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider altered a photo he took of some firefighters silhouetted against the sky, which he changed from dull gray to deep red��and was fired. After further investigation revealed that Schneider had regularly enhanced his backgrounds and rearranged elements before turning his photos in, the North Carolina Press Photographers Association rescinded his three previous “Picture of the Year” awards.

  Both of the fired photographers argued that they were merely using Photoshop to make a more accurate portrayal of the scene they actually witnessed; they weren’t using it to lie, but to get closer to the truth. The editors who fired them, however, viewed it differently: The journalist’s job is to objectively present what he or she sees, not to create an idealistic version of it. According to John Chapnick, executive vice president of Black Star, America’s oldest photojournalism agency, “The profession as we know it is threatened by technological transformation. It’s under fire from a suspicious public—watchdog bloggers, cable and radio pundits, and other critics who question the profession’s credibility and authority to bring us an accurate picture of the world.”

  A WHOLE LOT OF NOTHING

  Another downside to the digital photography age: the storage and retrieval of images. The negatives, slides, and prints of yesteryear can last for a century or more if properly stored. Digital images are much more fickle—they’re nothing more than electronic bits of information. As Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, recently put it, “Being able to retrieve, find, and organize images is critical. There is no lack of pictures; there’s a lack of being able to find them. It has to be as easy as taking a picture, and that is going to be a challenge.” Sasson, who still works for Kodak, is one of many scientists working on methods to make it easier to organize digital images, make them more secure wherever or however they’re stored, and make it easier to find and retrieve them. In the meantime, billions of digital pictures remain at the mercy of the world’s hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet. And as the people who bought the first inkjet printers in the mid-1990s are finding out now, their prints are fading fast. But at least they have something tangible. In reality, only a tiny fraction of all of the digital pictures taken will ever get printed.

  NOW MUSEUM, NOW YOU DON’T

  So which digital storage system is the best? Bad news: none of them. “There isn’t any computer-based storage medium that can be considered archival, irrespective of its physical longevity,” said Darin Stahl, senior research analyst at the Ontario-based Info-Tech Research Group. The problem with backing up your images on a Web site is that there’s no guarantee the site won’t get hacked, or that the company will stay in business. The problem with using magnetic-based storage media (disks and hard drives that use a magnetically coated surface to store information) is that they’re going to last only about 25 years…if the hard drive doesn’t break first or the disk doesn’t get scratched. The problem with using optical storage (tiny deformations in a disk that are read by a laser beam and transferred to data) is that it’s also unstable; if the disk gets scratched, much of that data—your pictures—will be gone.

  So if you want your pictures to last beyond your lifetime, you have to keep up with the latest technology, transferring your files over to the next medium before your current hardware becomes obsolete. Industry experts advise people to back up their most important photos in at least two different systems. But the most stable method of all is still the old-fashioned analog one: Make archival prints, which won’t fade or deteriorate, and store them in acid-free folders in a dry, dark place.

  A
PICTURE OF TOMORROW

  What’s on the horizon for digital photography? Plenty. Tech developers are hard at work on coming up with “the next big thing.” Already available are 15-megapixel cameras that can take dozens of high-resolution images in less than a second, and point-and-shoots that incorporate “smile recognition technology”—they automatically take a picture when a person smiles.

  In the not-too distant future, cameras may finally be able to record a scene as well as the human eye sees it. Don’t they do that already? Not really. If you were standing in a room during the daytime and looked out a window, you’d see details inside and outside. Due to the limitations of today’s cameras, a photo can only show detail in one of these two areas, making the other too dark or too light (unless you use a flash). A new technology under development could change all that. High dynamic range imaging will make cameras achieve what’s called “photo-realism,” recording the scene as it’s seen through human eyes. Poorly exposed pictures will be a thing of the past.

  But tomorrow’s cameras will go even beyond what the eye can do—they’ll record the ambient temperature, measure distances between objects in the picture, identify people and objects, and photograph full-color images in the dark without the use of flash.

  And as these cameras get better, they’ll get smaller, even by today’s standards—some the size of credit cards, and some resembling pagers (remember those?), that will clip on to your shirt pocket. And when you want to upload your new pictures, new interactive technology will allow you to simply hold your camera a few inches away from your computer, press a button, and the images will automatically be transferred wirelessly. You’ll use this same method to print your images as well. And thanks to an emerging technology called 3-D optical data storage, you’ll be able to store your entire photo library—no matter how large—on a single DVD-size disc.

  FUSION

  Looking beyond that, the cameras of the somewhat distant future will look less and less like a traditional camera. One that’s in the planning stages will be incorporated into a pair of eyeglasses and respond to voice commands. Looking beyond even that, scientists have proposed a tiny camera that will mount onto the surface of the human eye and link up directly to the brain. So when you’re walking in the park of the future and Big Foot emerges from a UFO, you can just “stare and shoot” and then download the image from your brain, sell it to the tabloids…and get rich!

  Yet no matter how advanced these futuristic cameras get, they will all incorporate the same basic light-sensor technology utilized in Steven Sasson’s toaster-size digital camera from 1975. Until, that is, some young digital whiz comes up with the next “next big thing”—perhaps the Kodak Think-and-Shoot Insta-3-D Levitation 3000. (“You think of the picture, we do the rest!”)

  “I have made mistakes, but have never made the mistake of claiming I never made one.”

  —James G. Bennett

  DOG TIRED! THE STORY OF THE IDITAROD

  Maybe it��s the original extreme sport—an 1,100-mile dog race across some of the roughest, coldest terrain in the world.

  MUSH!

  If you don’t live in a near-polar region, you probably can’t really imagine how harsh the conditions can be at the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Wind can sweep snow off the ground and create a choking, blinding white curtain with visibility measured in inches. Temperatures can go down to–50°F, as was the case during the 2009 race. Snow can be so deep that leaving the trail buries sleds, suspends mushers (drivers) up to their chests, and forces dogs into desperate dog-paddling just to keep their heads above the surface. People get frostbite. Dogs get injured (and some die). Yet the Iditarod is also supposed to be fun—something done for recreation, prize money, and a chance to prove something about yourself.

  ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLES

  Long before the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s, Native Alaskans used dogsleds along sections of what became the Iditarod Trail. During the 1896 Alaskan gold rush, it was an important dogsled highway during the winter, when steamships didn’t run. Sleds would haul as much as 1,100 pounds of freight between cities, making stops with goods and mail in little towns along the way.

  The trail got its name from the town of Iditarod, which was a Native Alaskan village, then a mining center in the 1910 gold rush, and shortly after that, a ghost town.

  By World War I, the gold rush had ended, the miners had gone home or into the military, and hauling goods by airplane was replacing dogsled travel. Towns along the trail became deserted, and the Iditarod fell into disuse. Its last hurrah was also its most famous: In the winter of 1925, the first stages of a fast-moving diphtheria epidemic threatened Nome’s 1,430 residents. Nome was accustomed to being cut off from the rest of the world for much of the year. But on January 22, the town’s only doctor, Curtis Welch, sent an urgent telegram to Juneau and Washington, D.C., saying that five children had died and thousands of people were in grave danger from a disease that, if left untreated, had a nearly 100 percent mortality rate:An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here. I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin. Mail is only form of transportation…

  THE DOGGY EXPRESS

  At the time, there were still only three airplanes in the entire state, all of them war surplus with open cockpits and water-cooled engines, making them unsuitable for temperatures well below freezing. Dogsleds were the only answer. At 9:00 p.m. on January 27, “Wild Bill” Shannon received the first shipment of emergency serum at the train station in Nenana. He and his dogs, although inexperienced, left immediately. The temperature began to drop, and Shannon had to jog alongside the sled to stay alive. Nonetheless, he arrived at his relay stop in the town of Minto at 3:00 a.m. with hypothermia and a face blackened by frostbite.

  As Pony Express riders had done decades earlier across the American West, mushers and their dogs were waiting and ready at relay stations that had been built along the trail. Over the next four days, 20 dogsleds took turns hauling the serum to Nome. Frostbite was common in the drivers and one reportedly needed hot water poured over his hands at the end of his run in order to unfreeze his gloved hands from his sled. Several dogs died of cold and exhaustion along the way, but four days later the first batch of emergency serum arrived in Nome.

  GAME ON

  In addition to commemorating the 1925 “Serum Run,” the first race was also intended to celebrate Alaska’s centennial, revive a near-dead sport, and generate enough publicity for the Iditarod to receive National Historic Trail status. The gambit worked. Dogsled racing was back, and the Iditarod Trail was designated as one of 19 National Historic Trails.

  Although the creators of the race, Dorothy Page and Joe Red-dington, had sponsored a much shorter 56-mile competition in 1967 and another in 1969, the first 1,100-mile Iditarod from Anchorage to Nome took place on March 3, 1973. Thirty-five sled teams started, and 22 completed the race. It took Dick Wilmarth, the winner that year, 20 days to get to the finish line.

  GETTING ALL YOUR DOGS IN A ROW

  Getting ready for the Iditarod can be a full-time job. Besides training dogs into a seamless team, mushers have to raise money for huge quantities of dog food, vet bills, and equipment. Most obtain multiple sponsors, as does the race itself.

  The rules are pretty loose about what kind of “sled or toboggan” can be used, only that it has to be big enough to haul injured or fatigued dogs, it must have a braking device that doesn’t extend beyond the back of the sled runners, and it can’t be equipped with sails or wheels. The rules are much more specific about what has to be inside the sled: an arctic parka, eight extra booties for each dog, a heavy sleeping bag, an axe, snowshoes, a pot, a cookstove and enough fuel to boil three gallons of water, food for both musher and dogs, and promotional material provided by the race organizers. Competitors may have extra sleds dropped off along the route, as long as they don’t use more than three different sleds during the race.

  To qualify, mushers must have competed in three approv
ed long-distance races of 300 miles or more and never been convicted of animal neglect or abuse. They also need money—in 2009 the organizers lost a major sponsor, causing them to raise the entrance fee from $3,000 to $4,000 and drop the total prize money 35%.

  The entrance fee, it turns out, is only a small part of the cost of competing in the race. Additional costs typically include $50,000 for a year’s supply of dog food and care during training, and $7,000 for race supplies (food and supplies for dogs and mushers along the route). In addition, there’s the cost of transportation, which can be significant for a person coming from the lower 48 states with sleds and a dozen big dogs.

  POLE POSITION

  During a ceremonial welcome dinner that takes place the night before the race, the contenders draw for starting positions. But being in the front at the beginning isn’t necessarily an advantage. Although organizers “break” the trail with snowmobiles before the race begins, storms can drop new snow, and wind can blow drifts across the path. As a result, dogs at the front may expend energy creating an easier path for those behind them.

  The race begins with a ceremonial “start” in Anchorage that doesn’t really count. It gives crowds and TV cameras a chance to see the racers and the dogs, creating excitement around the world for a sporting event that’s measured in weeks. (The Anchorage event is a ritual many contestants would prefer to skip, because the crowds can agitate and distress their dogs, who are more used to wide-open expanses than big cities.) The next day, the competitors reconvene in nearby Willow for the actual start. The race used to start in Wasilla, but that changed permanently in 2008 because of a lack of snow in recent years.