Shattered Glass Ops: The Purple Squirrel

On February 5, 2012, a couple in Pennsylvania trapped a purple squirrel. That's right a purple squirrel. Percy and Connie Emert caught the squirrel in their yard, which they'd seen roaming around for a few days. Connie said, "I kept telling my husband I saw a purple one out in the yard. ‘Oh sure you did,’ he kept telling me. Well, he checked the trap around noon on Sunday and sure enough, there it was.” Tests done on some of the squirrel’s hair were inconclusive as to the cause of the coloring, except that it was not born purple. Experts have theorized over the cause but no one can be quite sure. Theories include too much bromide in the squirrel’s diet, rolling in a pokeberry patch (which are not in season, so this is unlikely), and the most favorite explanation of the experts, falling into a port-a-potty. Yes, the most plausible cause to the squirrel’s  purple color is that the little guy was trying to find somewhere warm and fell into a port-a-potty and the blue dye commonly used in them colored his fur. However, it is fairly certain that someone did not capture the squirrel and dye it purple to confuse other people. 

Fan Fiction

Fan fiction is a type of story written by fans of a particular TV show, movie, band, book, etc. Basically whatever you can be a fan of, there is likely a fan fiction of. Take a band for example. A fan of, say, Justin Bieber…wait, that’s not possible, they don’t exist. Let’s try this again. A fan of, say, the Backstreet Boys (which do, undoubtedly, exist) might write a story about how they or a character, often based on themselves, met or interacted with the band members. Usually this involves a romance between the character and one of the members. The majority of fan fiction is written by teenage girls and so is often overdramatic and not very well written. This is not to say that all fan fiction is bad, just in general it tends to be.

Fan fiction also sometimes gets out of hand with some writers including graphic sex scenes. Other writers like to write about what is called a slash pairing, which is two members of the band and the same sex paired in a romantic relationship. In keeping with the Backstreet Boys example, if a writer were to describe a romantic relationship between Nick Carter and A.J. McLean, that would be a slash pairing. Disturbing. Very disturbing, indeed. A few basic plots are recycled over and over again with specifics and deviations changing in every story. There are many sites, often specifically for a certain kind of story, where fan fiction writers can post their stories and read stories other people have posted. Some of the popular sites are dedicated to Twilight (excuse me while I go barf repeatedly) and the far superior Harry Potter.

Facebook

Launched by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook.com (originally thefacebook.com), has grown to become the second most popular website in the world. Google holds the number one spot. Facebook was first used by Harvard University, then it expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Within the first year of its operation it spread to most colleges in the United States and Canada, and now is open to anyone. By September 2011, there were 800 million users, about 11% of the world’s population. A movie, The Social Network, was made about the site and Zuckerberg in 2010.

Facebook allows people to network between friends, classmates, coworkers, and anyone else on the site. Users post photos, links, and status updates; play games like Farmville and Words With Friends; make groups and plan events; and instant message friends. People like it because it allows them to keep up with friends they wouldn’t normally keep in touch with and easily communicate with people because nearly all young people are on it. 

Graffiti

Graffiti are generally thought of as the artwork spray painted (usually illegally) on walls in a curvy, semi-distorted style. However graffiti can also be drawing on desks, carving initials in a tree, or any act of drawing or writing on something not meant for that purpose. The most common style of graffiti are words, often the artist’s nickname, called a “tag.” Recently graffiti has grown to include commissioned pieces fore stores and incredibly intricate portraits and other drawings.

Some artist use stencils, which produce clean, sharp lines, whereas free-handing has softer edges due to the way spray paint disperses. Highway underpasses are one of the most common places to find graffiti, including Duluth’s own Graffiti Graveyard (pictured below). Other common places are on high school desks, subway stations, and walls in urban areas. In the past, many people associated graffiti with gangs, as gangs sometimes mark their area with simple symbols; however that is not the case today as most artists are not affiliated with gags. The graffiti style has incorporated its way into advertising and computer fonts—there are even graffiti creators online. 

Photos by Steph Koehnen

Texts From Last Night

Textsfromlastnight.com is a website, similar to fmylife.com, that allows you to laugh at the stupid, crazy, or entirely weird things people text their friends. It can be assumed that the texters are usually drunk or high. All texts stay anonymous because when submitting at text, only the area code needs to be provided. This allows readers to see what stupid things people have been texting in their area. Also like FMLs, texts from last night (TFLNs) can be up- or down-voted and commented on by readers. However, TFLNs have no format and cannot be user-moderated.

FMLs

Fmylife.com is a website where people submit short anecdotes of crappy things that happen to them for the sake of making other people laugh, hence why the site is called fuck my life (FML). It is basically the definition of Schadenfreude—the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. There is a simple formula that all FMLs: they must start with “Today,” and end with “FML”; the story goes (obviously) between them and must be 300 characters or less.

FMLs can be submitted by anyone with internet connection—there are French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, German, Russian, and Swedish versions. Readers can up- or down-vote each story by clicking “I agree, your life sucks” or “You deserved it.” Readers can also comment on stories or help moderate by choosing which FMLs deserve to get published. People tend to post FMLs when things happen to them that suck so much they’re funny or want to validate the suckiness of the event.

Chlorophyll Prints

Chlorophyll printing is a photographic printing technique that results in an image on a leaf or group of grass. Binh Danh, a Vietnamese immigrant (his parents left Vietnam in 1979 because the aftermath of the American-Vietnam War) who grew up in California, invented the process sometime within the last decade—it is uncertain precisely when this was. The chlorophyll process is incredibly simple: make a positive transparency of a black and white image (basically a photograph on a transparency, so the black areas are more opaque and whites are clear), choose a leaf that fits the image both in size and subject (the right shape, veining, etc), then you sandwich the leaf and transparency between two pieces of glass, and simply leave it in the sun for a few days to a few weeks depending on the intensity of the sunlight. Once the image is done, it is cast in clear resin to preserve it.

Danh uses found images from the American-Vietnam War and foliage from his mom’s yard that would be common in the jungles of Vietnam. He said, “It reminds us of where we came from, which is actually from the land. The continuation of the landscape is in us and when we die we return to this land again.” Through the chlorophyll prints he makes people rethink the war, the people who died in it, and our relation to nature. It is a simple and inexpensive way to make natural images. To make your own chlorophyll prints, buy Pictorico OHP Transparency Film which allows you to make transparencies out of digital images using any inkjet printer, choose a leaf, find some glass panes, and follow the steps outlined above. 

Tattoos

Tattoos are essentially drawings done in ink on the skin, well in the skin actually. The skin is punctured partway into the dermis by needles or other such sharp objects, then a form of pigment, usually ink, is applied to the skin and allowed to sink into the tiny wounds.

Dating back to about 3300 BC on Ötzi the Iceman, tattoos have been prevalent in many cultures. Needles have been made out of bamboo, other plants, human and animal bones, and metal; pigments were generally made of organic materials in ancient times—ashes were often used to create black, plants were used to produce colors. Today tattoos are done with metal needles or groups of needles soldered together, and pigments are inks manufactured specifically for tattoos. Instead of the painstaking of making individual needle pricks by hand, machines are used to puncture the skin 80-150 times per minute.

Meanings differ from person to person, and from ancient forms to today’s. Now each tattoo on someone has a special story or meaning, representing things like family, favorites, quotes to live by, or loved ones. In the ancient world, however, tattoos were used often to show status—some cultures would tattoo slaves or criminals, others would tattoo leaders or warriors. Then tattoos had a more evident reason (status), whereas they are currently entirely personal works of art and expression. With this move towards personalization, there are many idiotic tattoos rife with misspellings, bad grammar, and poor design. 

MMORPGs

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are games in which players create characters, called avatars, and interact with each other in an online setting. Usually these avatars are fantastical with different skills and abilities based on which race or kind you choose. MMORPGs are different from single player or small multiplayer games in that the world in which the characters exist continues even if a player is not online—the game will go on even if you do not play.

Characters from World of Warcraft

The most popular MMORPG is World of Warcraft (WoW), set in the world of Azeroth. Players first choose a faction—either horde or alliance—which determines who you can communicate with in the game. Horde players can only communicate with other horde players, and alliance with alliance. Next you choose your race, which depends on whether you chose horde or alliance. Then you choose a class, depending on what race you choose—not all races can be all classes. Once your character is made, you explore Azeroth competing quests or fighting other players or non-player characters (NPCs). To see what your character's race and class were if you play, take these quizzes: race and class.

4chan

4chan.org is a forum-based website where posters can have completely anonymous conversations. The different boards are usually denoted with / and a letter. Many people enjoy these boards because social inhibitions of people judging you or your ideas are removed—you only identify yourself if you want to. In fact, when you post something, the “Name” field is automatically filled with “anonymous,” which can be changed if one so desires, but rarely is. Thus people talk about things or ask questions in ways they normally would not if their identities were linked to the post.

Board topics range from anime/manga (/a), cosplay (/cgl), video games (/v), sports (/sp), photography (/p), music (/mu), and random (/b). Some of the most creative, and also disturbing, things on the internet have come from 4chan. Occasionally insightful comments or threads pop up, but it’s not as common as the disturbing stuff. People on 4chan, /b in particular, can be incredibly offensive, racist, and hurtful. Everything can be turned into a joke or a meme, whether it is actually funny or not. 4chan popularized lolcats, rickrolling, and Pedobear. However, 4chan also promotes incorrect, incredibly harmful things. In middle school, my roommate’s best friend killed himself, and /b made him a meme, saying he did so over losing his iPod (which is completely ridiculous and false). So 4chan (/b in particular) contains both hilarious and harassing material, so visit at your own risk.

Fluoridation to Cannibalistic Space Zombies

A few times in class, we have talked about fluoride—“there’s fluoride in the water.” Sodium fluoride is a neurological poison that, in large enough doses, can cause docility and stupidity. A 2003 study in China showed that fluoride significantly reduced intelligence in children aged 8-13. The study followed two villages with extremely similar conditions—similar family income and education levels as well as similar environmental conditions—except the level of fluoride in the water. The village Wamiao had a “mean water concentration of 2.47 ± 0.79 mg/L,” whereas Xinhuai had a “mean water concentration of 0.36 ± 0.15 mg/L” (read the full report here p. 173). Average IQ of children in Wamiao was 92.2 ± 13.00 (the actual range was from 54-126), and that in Xinhuai was 100.41 ± 13.21 (actual range 60-128). In these villages, the fluoride was naturally occurring, but the effects are the same whether it is naturally present or added.

I don’t yet know how much fluoride is put in our water or what recommended daily intake for different age groups is, but the idea of adding a flat rate for all people is unsettling. As with all substances, recommended dosage depends on age, weight, height, etc., and adding a flat rate of a substance does not seem ethically right. If the dosage in our water is high enough to affect our brains (which eventually is likely to happen once enough builds up in one’s system) that leads to whole other ethical issues. Governments should not be allowed to add chemicals to water or air because they think it will have some supposed good effect. An (although fictional) example that immediately comes to mind is from the movie Serenity.

Crew (from left to right): Jayne Cobb, "public relations"; Kaylee Frye, mechanic; Sheppard Book, man of the Lord; Simon Tam, doctor; Inara Sera, Companion (high class prostitute); Mal Reynolds, Captain; Zoe Washburne, First Mate; Hoban "Wash" Washburne, pilot; River Tam, psychic.

Serenity was made as a follow-up to the short-lived TV show Firefly. The premise of the show is that once we used up all the Earth’s resources, we found a new solar system with many more planets and moons, which were terraformed to support life (terraforming just means stabilizing the ground and atmosphere to make it safe for humans). A war followed after settlement of the new solar system between the Alliance, who hoped to unite all planets and moons under one central government, and the Independents, who fought to allow each planet and moon to govern their way with their own laws. The Alliance won and all planets were united under the rules of the more urban central planets (the outer planets were frontier planets like what we imagine the American West in the early 19^th century. Sargent Mal Reynolds from the Independent army bought a Firefly class ship called Serenity and got a crew together so they could stay out of Alliance control.

One of the outer planets, Miranda, had G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, or “Pax” (meaning peace in Latin), added to the atmosphere during terraformation in an attempt to make the population more calm and weed out aggression. Well, it worked, except it made people so docile they just laid down and let themselves die. However, 0.1% of Miranda’s population (about 30,000 people) had the complete opposite reaction—they became excessively and mindlessly violent. People called them Reavers, and it was unknown until the end of the movie how they came to be that way (sorry for the spoiler). They're like space zombies who are more brutal and bloodthirsty, who have the capabilities to communicate with each other and form basic thoughts, to fly ships, to run and fight. Zoe, the second-in-command of Serenity, said, “If [Reavers] take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.” And Reavers only came into existence because the Alliance thought it would be a good idea to try to alter how human brains work (not their only instance of this—they basically lobotomized gifted children to make them psychics and powerful fighting machines).

 

This is kind of an extreme example, but the idea rings true—you can’t try to control people by making them involuntarily ingest chemicals to alter their actions. It is blatantly immoral and could blow up in their faces. I have more research to do before I completely buy in to the idea of fluoridation to make us docile, but whether that is the motive or not, I still don’t think it’s right. 

Corn is in Everything

I rewatched the section of Food, Inc. on corn because I wanted to learn more about how companies put corn into our food. Most people never give corn products a second thought, but there is a select few who have to. My mom is one of them. When she was little, she could never peel corn or even touch the husks or hairs because she was allergic, but she could eat it without problem. Over the years the allergy has gotten worse and worse, and now one of the only corn products she can handle is high fructose corn syrup. She can’t even let someone have a sip of her drink if they’ve had something with corn. So when I’m home, meals can be lots of fun between my mom’s corn allergy and my tomato allergy.

My sister, my mom, and I--my sister is the only one without a food allergy

The difference between our allergies (aside from the fact that mine is a lot less severe) is that mine is inconvenient but easily avoidable, whereas hers is one of the hardest food allergies to deal with today. Michael Pollan in Food, Inc. reported that about 90% of supermarket products have corn or soybean products, oftentimes both. I knew corn products were in a lot of food, but I had no idea it was in that many. That 90% includes ketchup, cheese, Twinkies, peanut butter, Cheez Its, salad dressing, Coke, jelly, Sweet & Low, syrup, juice, Kool-Aid, charcoal, diapers, Motrin, meat, and many fast food products. Nearly all Tyson chicken products contain modified food starch, which is a starch derived from corn. Corn is also in some antibiotics and steroids (like certain doses of Prednisone).

A huge reason corn is in so many different foods is that it’s so incredibly cheap. According to the documentary, farmers are subsidized by the government to overproduce it, then big companies buy it at under production cost and use it to feed animals or break it down to be put into products as a filler or give it a longer shelf life. Cows and fish are not meant to eat corn, but it’s so cheap that they are being forced to. When cows eat corn, their stomachs don’t digest it very well and E. coli mutates in their stomachs into new strains of the bacteria. When the bacteria mutates in one cow’s stomach, all the other cows in the pen catch it rapidly because the pens are covered in manure—it is common for the cows to stand in up to a foot of manure. With the speed at which infected cows are slaughtered, it’s nearly impossible to keep manure off the meat, which then infects the meat. But this is another problem entirely.

Part of the problem I have with putting corn in so many things (aside from my mom not being able to eat them) is that the big companies are taking advantage of the farmers and the general public just to make more money. They influence the government to subsidize farmers to make so much so they can buy it under cost, modify it, then sell it at a much higher price. Some companies (Mon Santo) modify the seeds and make farmers buy rights to each individual seed. That’s just ridiculous. Mon Santo is also lobbying to make it illegal to use non-GMO seeds, meaning all farmers would have to buy seeds from them at higher prices than other suppliers.

A list of ingredients made from corn from Food, Inc.

Corn may be cheap, but so is cellulose (wood pulp which is put into food as a filler). Cellulose has no nutritional value and cannot even be digested by the human body. Straight corn does have some nutritional value, but I’m guessing when it’s modified to the point that we can’t even call it corn anymore, all the nutritional value is gone. Take a look at the ingredient lists on your food sometime—it will surprise you how many things corn is in. Look for these ingredients, all of which are made from corn: alpha trocopherol, ascorbic acid, calcium stearate, canola oil, citric acid, citrus cloud emulsion, corn starch, di-glycerides, ethel acetate, ethyl lactate, ethylene, fibertol-2, fructose, fumeric acid, high-fructose corn syrup, inositol, maltodextrin, modified food starch, polydextrose, saccharin, sorbic acid, sorbital, sucrose, xanthan gum, xylitol, and zein. 

Ancient Media

Simply put, the media are the ways in which we communicate ideas. Whether you believe in creationism or evolution, the media date back to the dawn of mankind. Humans have always needed ways to share our thoughts and ideas, and things we consider the media are the ways people throughout history have come up with to impart these messages on others. Prior to Gutenberg’s printing press, various media were used to communicate ideas within a group or culture—there was not really one medium that was widespread among all societies. Rather three main categories of media developed: auditory, visual, and written. Each historic community fashioned an amalgam of the three that was unique to them based on their mythology, values, traditions, and style of innovation. However the reasons varied, many of the acts themselves were of the same nature.

Auditory media are not just the languages we speak. Music, in the form of both singing and instruments, has been around since before the invention of written language. It is believed that the first musical instrument, the human voice, mimicked spoken patterns in a more rhythmical fashion—we can never know for sure because this dates back to before writing so we have no surviving records to verify this. Aside from the voice, flutes and pipes were made from animal bones, reeds, and wood. Tunes would have special meanings so that a particular song could tell a village that hunters caught a big kill, that a baby was born, whether a battle was successful or disastrous, or other important news. Some tribes also believed that music was a medium to help them communicate with their god(s) or a spirit.

Visual media include every way people have tried to communicate information thatis understood by looking at it—simply messages we see. These media range from drawings to smoke signals, flags to fireworks. Some of the most interesting visual media to me are tattoos and piercings. In many ancient societies, earrings were used as a rite of passage to show whether someone was considered a boy or a man, a girl or a woman. Piercings could also indicate such things as fertility, as in nose rings traditionally worn by Indian Hindu women, or status as in the size of jewelry worn in the septum of some tribes in Alaska, New Guinea, and Central America. In China, tattooing the character for “prisoner” on a criminal’s or slave’s face was a common practice from 1045 B.C. until the 17^th century. Other cultures used tattoos to show accomplishments or a societal rank or class. Some tribes also used tattoos to indicate a warrior, with more extensive tattoos on more fierce or accomplished warriors.

Obviously written media includes written languages. This does not mean just alphabetic writing like we use today; it includes languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics that use pictures to indicate words, ideas, or phonetic sounds. The earliest language we are aware of is Sumerian cuneiform which dates back to around 3000 B.C. Cuneiform was a system of pictographs that included around 1,000 different characters early in its existence, but decreased to around 300 by around 1 A.D. The Phoenician alphabet, which is eventually what caused the decline of cuneiform by 2 A.D., was developed around 1000 B.C and used symbols to depict individual letters (no vowels) instead of words or sounds like cuneiform. Written media also includes the ways in which these languages were written—ie what they were written on, what they were written with, how they were used, and how they were circulated. This category thus includes carrier pigeons, Chinese bone writing, scrolls, and different mail systems throughout history.

Many people today often think that the media are just news stations, advertising companies, and the like, but the media are vastly more extensive. The media include any possible way we can transmit ideas to other people. Even such simple things as religions can be considered media because they convey a set of values a society deems respectable. Most people today do not give enough thought to the media and never notice that they influence our thoughts and behaviors.

Aspartame: Carcinogen or Harmless Sweetener?

Aspartame was developed by accident in 1965 by James M. Schlatter, who was working on an anti-ulcer medicine. It then took TWO DECADES for the FDA to finally approve it: in 1981 for use in dry goods and 1983 in carbonated beverages, and in 1993 for other beverages, baked goods, and confections. When it finally was approved by the FDA, it was under suspicious conditions. President Reagan fired the FDA Commissioner who refused to approve it. Reagan also happened to be a friend of G. D.  Searle, owner of G. D. Searle & Company, which manufactured aspartame. Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed as the new commissioner, and he set up a Board of Inquiry about the artificial sweetener. The board reported that the FDA should not approve aspartame, but Dr. Hayes overruled the Board of Inquiry and passed it anyways. Not long after he approved it for use in carbonated beverages, Hayes left the FDA for a position with G. D. Searle’s Public Relations firm. Suspicious indeed.

10% of aspartame is made of methanol, which is a deadly poison. I won’t go into all the chemical reactions, but methanol is released when part of aspartame encounters a certain enzyme found in the small intestine. Usually the amount released is very little and it would take a long history of aspartame consumption for adverse effects to occur. However, when aspartame is heated to above 86˚F, the absorption of methanol in the body is sped up considerably.  This heating up of aspartame can occur if the food or beverage containing it is improperly stored or if heated as directed, like in Jello. Note to self: don’t eat Jello. Ever again. Well, that’s unrealistic. I’ll still eat Jello, but I don’t think I can stomach eating much of it anymore.

The reason methanol is poisonous to the body is because it breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde. Yes, formaldehyde. Like what preserved the bodies of baby pigs in 7^th grade dissection. Can you still remember the smell? The awful, disgusting, gag-inducing smell of a chemical that preserves dead bodies. On pig dissection day, one of my friends cut out a pig’s eye, lids and surrounding skin included, and chased people around the room making it wink at them and saying, “The pig likes you! See? Wink, wink.” Well, formaldehyde is not just used as a preservative of dead things—it’s a deadly neurotoxin. Because both formaldehyde and formic acid are toxins, the recommended limit of consumption of methanol is 7.8mg per day. A liter of a beverage sweetened by aspartame contains 56mg of methanol. The FDA has released a list of 92 symptoms associated with consuming aspartame. They include headache, dizziness, change in vision, seizures, sleep problems, and fatigue. To see the full list go here.

Victoria Innes-Brown conducted a 2.5 year study of aspartame effects on lab rats. She added NutraSweet, which is just one brand of aspartame, to the drinking water for 60 rats, 30 male and 30 female. 67% of the female rats (20 of them) developed tumors golf ball size or larger. And I’m not talking about rat-sized golf balls. However only 23% of male rats (7) developed tumors. Of her control animals (48), 21% of females (5) and no males developed tumors, though these tumors were generally smaller in size.

I shall leave you with a gem from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It was written in 1906, but honestly sounds like this could still be applied today, what with all the chemicals and additives that companies put in our food. Well the working conditions highlighted in most of the book are not the same, but this seems to be. “They were regular alchemists and Durham’s [canned food]; they advertised a mushroom-catsup and the men who made it did not even know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised ‘potted chicken,’—and it was  like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows?... They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper… All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham…men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly.”

The Camera Obscura

Joe Boyle, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Men from a nomadic tribe in the Middle East utilizing the camera obscura.

The Camera Obscura was an ancient predecessor to the modern-day camera. While the term “camera obscura” was not coined until the 17^th century, meaning “dark room” in Latin, the idea dates back to the 5^th century BC. Mo-Ti, a Chinese philosopher, observed in the 5^th century BC that he could recreate an image through a tiny hole in a screen shining into a darkened room. When light rays, which travel in straight lines, pass through a small hole in a thin object do not scatter as they do with larger openings like windows; instead, the light rays act as if there was a funnel on either side of the hole. The rays converge to pass through the hole and then spread out again, only the image will be upside down and backwards.

In the 10^th century CE, the Islamic scholar Alhazen notes nomadic tribes of the Middle East utilizing the camera obscura for surveillance. Because of the intense heat during the day, the wanderers would rest during the day and travel at night when conditions were more favorable. They were able to watch the horizon for possible threats or family members through the fronts of their tents, but that allowed them only one side of view. By poking small holes in the other three sides and rigging them with pieces of cloth to work as shutters, they could watch each side one at a time through the process Mo-Ti, Aristotle, and Alhazen himself described.

One of my three pinhole cameras, which use the idea of the camera obscura

Usually camera obscuras were made in large rooms with a nice view. They were not extremely popular until they were turned into drawing aids with the help of lenses and mirrors in the 16^th century. This development allowed artists to gain better perspective in their drawings and study the human form more closely. Eventually this technology led to the development of photography in 1839. Though rare, people still use the idea of the camera obscura today in pinhole cameras.

Parallax Error??

A parallax error is what happens when you take a picture with a non-SLR camera. It is the difference between what you see through the viewfinder and what the camera actually records. I thought it was fitting for a media literacy blog.