The Haversian Canal

Here's a good article on inks, from André Béguin's fascinating little dictionary of printmaking.

André provides a three volume hardcopy of his dictionary; his contact information is

2 rue Danville, 75014 Paris, France.
tel./fax. +33.1.43.21.41.16.

Flickr's next DILO day is 21 December 2005, so get your cameras out!

This is a series of postings I made on Flickr. The discussions always seemed to collapse into adolescent drivel, but I hosted my posts as static content and they actually get some good Google searches, so I'm reposting them here to solicit your comments and further the conversation. Thanks for reading.

I believe the Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v. Washington was that recordings, such as written letters, tapes, and photographs, may not stand on their own as evidence. This is based on the Sixth Amendment, which states the accused has the right "to be confronted with all witnesses". Insofar as the photographer is the actual witness a photograph is admissable only if the photographer is willing to take the stand or is subpoenaed. In the case that was heard I believe the particular argument was that the defense can't cross-examine an audio tape.

The Crawford v. Washington opinion is an interesting read in and of itself, particularly the discussion of Sir Walter Raleigh's conviction based in part on the reading of a letter written by a witness who did not appear before that court. This quote is also interesting, coming from the conservative Judge Scalia "The Framers, however, would not have been content to indulge... They knew that judges, like other government officers, could not always be trusted to safeguard the rights of the people".

This is a series of postings I made on Flickr. The discussions always seemed to collapse into adolescent drivel, but I hosted my posts as static content and they actually get some good Google searches, so I'm reposting them here to solicit your comments and further the conversation. Thanks for reading.

Here is the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Aubry v. Edition Vice-Versa inc. to which brevity refers. There was no question but that the photographer infringed on Ms. Aubry's privacy. As Barrybar touched on above, the fine lines the photographer walked were 1) whether or not publication caused damage, and 2) whether or not publication served the public interest. Uidzero's argument conflicts with the court's final basis which was the fact that the artistic expression rendered the subject identifiable is what made the photographer liable a priori. That is, the court felt the photographer should have known he was assuming responsibility before ever taking the picture because theory and a reasonable knowledge of social context alone should have led him to the conclusion that the photograph violated privacy and publication lacked adequate public value. That seems like a shaky argument. The majority opinion relies heavily on context (i.e., would the decision have been different If the claimed damages had been less? If the public value had been greater? To take it a step further, if the subject wasn't a female minor?). Tough decisions make bad precedent.

However, stripped of context, one would have to read the court's decision to mean that a hyperrealist painter with a photographic memory would in fact be liable (not guilty, but liable) if he did in fact paint the image of the face of a passer-by. This would come back to the privacy argument: yes, such a painter would be violating the subject's privacy. Why do we find the hypothetical painter test rediculuous compared to the hypothetical photographer test? Because we know, and there's evidence against, anyone, ever, having been such a good painter as to be able to render someone identifiable without a photograph or the subject's cooperation (i.e, sitting for a portrait). The reason Uidzero's painter evokes our sense of rediculuousness has nothing to do with whether or not privacy is violated, but only to do with our knowledge of the painting and photographic arts.

So, for the Canucks, and anyone else who finds themselves in Canada, assume that you are violating privacy by doing street photography, as Genista explains above. If you proceed without securing permission, you are on your own to evaluate the court's two contextual questions: 1) whether or not damage will be caused by publication, and 2) whether or not publication adequately serves the public interest to offset any damages.

I'm very interested in this as I plan to be doing some street photography later this month in the French Quarter.

This is a series of postings I made on Flickr. The discussions always seemed to collapse into adolescent drivel, but I hosted my posts as static content and they actually get some good Google searches, so I'm reposting them here to solicit your comments and further the conversation. Thanks for reading.

The Sensitive Photographs thread has some more on this. Here are my readings of a recent US Supreme Court ruling and a Canadian Supreme Court ruling. They include links to the actual court opinions. Does anyone have other references? US Code, etc? Here's the US Government Printing Office's site, GPO Access. One thing on the site that really ought to be on the front page is is the Constitution. You can browse down to the First Amendment. The First Amendment page includes very intense discussion including citations to relevant court opinions.

The Photographer's Right is an excellent field guide, but nothing replaces the confidence of having first-hand knowledge of legislative, executive, and judicial law. With the hope that we can develop that first-hand knowledge through conversations on Flickr, here's a quick overview of US legislative, executive, and judicial law.

The Congress passes Public and Private Laws. Many of these are Good-job-to-Benny-for-twenty-five-years-of-public-service laws, but the serious ones, the ones that get reported in the news, like the Patriot Act (Public Law 107-056), are changes to the US Code. These laws are literally telling the Government Printing Office which words and what punctuation to add and delete from the US Code. The first part of the Patriot Act is fluff, but scroll down to Section 106 and you'll see what I mean.

SEC. 106. PRESIDENTIAL AUTHORITY.
Section 203 of the International Emergency Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1702) is amended--
(1) in subsection (a)(1)--
(A) at the end of subparagraph (A) (flush to that subparagraph), by striking ``; and'' and inserting a comma and the following: ``by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States;'';

(B) in subparagraph (B)--
(i) by inserting ``, block during the pendency of an investigation''after ``investigate''; and

(ii) by striking ``interest;'' and inserting ``interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; and'';

This is why you hear Congressmen says no one has read the Patriot Act. Reading these changes to the US Code doesn't make any sense unless you've got the current code open next to the Act and you are prepared to go through it with a pen and make the changes. That's what the Government Printing Office does. Notice the snippet above is amending 50USC1702. Here's the bit of Section 1702 of Title 50 of the US Code to be amended by the above snippet of the Patriot Act

(A) investigate, regulate, or prohibit--
(i) any transactions in foreign exchange,
(ii) transfers of credit or payments between, by, through, or to any banking institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments involve any interest of any foreign country or a national thereof,
(iii) the importing or exporting of currency or securities;
and
(B) investigate, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest;

Notice the changes haven't been made yet. it's only every six years that the GPO has to provide a certified up-to-date copy of the US Code to Congress. We're currently one the 2000 edition. Everything should be in by January 2006.

As the Congress issues laws, and some of those laws change the US Code, the President issues Executive Orders and some of those orders change the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). A well-known example is President Clinton's ban on smoking in federal buildings, Executive Order 13058. Browsing the CFR can be tricky. If you don't have an exact citation to search for, then you need to know the year and title to browse. For example, the smoking ban was issued in 1997 and affects Title 3. Since it was issued in 1997 it is in the 1 Jan, 1998 update. If you only know the subject matter, you're usually better off Googling until you find some random webpage that states the CFR citation or the Executive Order citation. Organizations with a vested interest in the subject at hand often post not only the citation, but the entire text. IF they do, I recommend you still get the copy from GPO Access, because who knows where somebody made a critical typo.

The US Supreme Court issues opinions which can trump the US Code and the CFR. They haven't finished putting the 2004 opinions up yet, but here are the 2003 Term Opinions. They can also change their rules, which effect how lawyers and judges behave, and what constitutes evidence. When reporters say a case was overturned on a technicality, they are often referring to rules violations.

The states and most post-American-Revolution democracies follow a similar pattern. Would representatives of the 50 states and the internationalists among us please provide links to your legal sites and any other cases you've heard about in the news so we can find out what law actually applies to us? - Photo taking and the Law...

[A]dmittedly I'm American so that's what I know best. I believe Her Majesty's Stationery Office is where you want to start. From my discussions with Britons, European legal systems are very involved compared to the US, which hasn't been around as long, so things usually boil down to, what's the phrase? Principle and precedent?

Two ways to take good family pictures inside a home with white walls and windows:
1)Euclid's Method (geometry students unite!) Stand next to a window with a thin white shade drawn. Imagine an acute isoceles triangle. The window is one long leg; the camera, at one end of the window, is the acute angle. Your family is at the other end of the window. So, the line from the camera to the person in your family closest to the window is the other long leg of the triangle. The line from that person to the edge of the window is the short leg of the isoceles triangle. The remaining members are on the arc of a circle who's center is the camera and is tangent to the short leg of the triangle, arcing away from the window. This only works for single portraits, two adults and a family with one or two kids. Take as many pictures as you can before the victims (I mean, family members) start to drift away.

2) Expensive. It's easier to get good results with this and it works at night, but it's tough to get dramatically brilliant results. Euclid gets you brilliant results even with cheap cameras. Anyway. Get a digital SLR and a flash that pivots both up and sideways. And a lens that provides you a 50mm to 80 mm focal length (as measured for 35 mm bodies. DPReview.com provides conversion factors for various digital camera bodies with sensors that aren't faithful to 35mm dimensions). Point the flash straight up for groups, up and to sideways toward the nearest wall for singles (this gives a nice sidelight).

Examples: Euclid, Expensive

He turned around fast, and he saw a small Who!
Little Cindy-Lou Who, who was not more than two.
The Grinch had been caught by this tiny Who daughter,
Who'd got out of bed for a cup of cold water.

A friend recently asked me why he couldn't just buy a floodlight from Home Depot to use for photographic lighting. Here's my response:

The floodlight from Home Depot doesn't work because it glows at a different temperature. "White" light is not a very good description of light in photography. I'm sure you've noticed things look warmer at sunset and colder, or at least 'white hot', at noon. The red line in this graph indicates, roughly, the intensity of different colors of sunlight that actually make it across space, through the atmosphere, and land on us during daylight hours (the numbers on the bottom: red is 750, green is 500, blue is 250, ultraviolet is everything really close to zero and infrared is in that long right-side tail. Why does the sun produce 'warm' light during sunset? Because short wavelength light, like blue light, scatters more easily when it bounces off particles in the atmosphere, than long light, like red light. This graph compares the spectra of noon and sunset. You can tell, however, that if we ignore the spikes in that first red line, there's one smooth curve, like this, and that curve is defined by the temperature of the sun, which is commonly measured in units of Kelvin (like Celsius but 0 K is absolute zero: 0 K = -273.15 C; 273.15 K = 0 C = 32 F; 373.15 K = 100 C = 212 F). Flash bulbs are designed to emit light of almost the exact same temperature (6000 K) as the light from the sun (5770 K). Flood lamps, household bulbs, stadium lighting, they all use different gases, different heating elements, yada, yada, yada, that cause them to emit light, but the light is of different temperatures, so that imaginary smooth curve is shorter, or taller, has a longer taper, the peak is moved to the left or right, yada, yada. Basically, things that get really hot glow. It's blackbody radiation, which Wiem's law and Stephen's law describe, and quantum mechanics governs. They all get that sharp spike near zero and taper gradually. Really hot ones spike blue and taper quickly, realitively cold sources spike red, or even infrared, and taper gradually. Here's an article on the theory, as applied to vehicle lighting, and here's a nice superb summary article of many different sources.

What's really important in understanding photographic lighting is understanding that hot sources, like flash-bulbs and the sun, the spike is sharper and closer to zero, which means more blue light. Hot source means blue light, which looks 'cold'. A relatively cold source, like a halogen flood lamp, has more red, so it looks warmer. Most "light bulbs" use tungsten filaments. Here's the tungsten spectrum, note it spikes in the infrared! It's so cold (3200 K), most of it's energy is lost as heat!. Review the sunlight spectra, where do they spike? About 500 nm, which is green. The spectra I have described represent virtually every spectrum you'll actually use, except florescent, and I'd just advise avoiding that like the plague because it's so highly variable and cruddy (greenish, you know?). It's a screwed up technology that uses radio waves to excite vaporized mercury. Not cool. The one good thing about florescent light is that it is usually very dim so you can blow it out with a flash, even a flash bounced of a ceiling or wall.

If that's entirely murky, read this a couple of times, and read the other articles. If it's still murky, go take some pictures under different lighting situations, read again, and then, if it's still murky, talk to some people, call me, whatever. If it's still murky, repeat the above steps in random order and times throughout your life until you get it or die. ; )

So, quick summary of the important light sources:

• Sun, 5770 K, hot, more blue, looks cool. What most films and CCDs are designed for.
• Flash, 6000 K, hot, more blue, looks cool. Designed to replicate sunlight.
• Tungsten, 3200 K, cold, more red, looks warm. Certain films are designed for it and are labelled thusly, and most CCDs can be adjusted to accomodate
• Sunset, 5770 K but blue filtered out b/c it passes through more atmosphere, more red light locally, looks warm
• Clouds, windows not in the sun, and outdoor shadows: Rejoice! This is not another light source! It's good old 5770 K sunlight without the harsh shadows! You're in the shadow!
• Florescent, ????, hosed up, who knows, looks like everything is painted in snot or blacklight, or who knows what. Use a flash.

Other light sources you may come across:

• Sodium: Yellow. Just yellow. Single wavelength yellow. And bright. If you have to shoot under this light, you're hosed. Popular in school gymnasiums and interstates.
• Halogen: Usually a tungsten filament in a small glass ampulle filled with a gas that gets so hot it undergoes a phase shift from gas to plasma and emits its own light in addition to the tungsten's filament light. Commonly seen in track lighting, landscaping, and cars after about 1995. Check you car's manual. I'll bet it says don't touch the bulb when you install it? Because the thermodynamics required to dissipate all the infrared heat from that tungsten filament also require the glass to be perfectly clean. Even the oil from your fingerprint is to much insulation and will cause a hot spot in the glass ampulle, which usually causes the whole thing to overheat, and the filament melts about three seconds after your turn the headlights on. The gas is usually xenon, but that can be doped with all sorts of stuff that make funny colors.
• Neon: Actually various gasses, neon, xenon, sodium, hydrogen, etc. These are monochromatic sources excited through high voltage electrical current, just like sodium light. That green, red, or blue is the only color. If that's you're only source, then everything is green, red, or blue.
• Biological sources. Don't go there. Man, I'm in medical school and I have a degree in physics and I still don't understand how all these work. Besides, you ain't never gonna use them for photography.
• Lasers. For photographic purposes, they are the same as neon lights except the light is emitted in a perfectly straight line.
• Moonlight. Sunlight bouncing off the moon. 5770 K, but a little more yellow due to absorption from moondust. Romantic, isn't it?

At least, here's how I took these. The camera body doesn't matter. Any camera body can fire a flash and take pictures at a 1/100 second shutter speed. I've got fifty year-old double-reflex cameras that can do that. A bounce flash with a high guide number was the moneymaker on these. In this case a Nikon SB-22s, guide number adjustable up to 92. I was manually controlling exposure by adjusting the amount of light the flash put out and rotating the flash head up and down. I pointed the head up, or in some cases up and slightly forward. The basic idea was to bounce the light off the ceiling, which was thankfully white. The lens was on f4, the sensitivity of the CCD was ISO 1600, and the flash was set to ISO 1600/f32. That is, if the flash head was pointed straight forward, I could have taken these pictures at f32. Instead I was taking pictures at f4 because the ceiling was high, so there was a lot of dispersion on the way up, I lost a stop as the light bounced off the ceiling, and then it dispersed more on the way down. I was literally sending 32 times more light out with each picture than I would need if the flash was straight. Don't be confused by f32 and 32 times. The 32 times comes from 2⁶, or 6 stops of exposure value difference between my lens and my flash (f4-f5.6-f8-f11-f16-f22-f32). The two occurances of 32 are coincidental. The advantage of all that dispersion and bouncing was using the entire ceiling as a huge soft light source, so the shadows are soft, instead of harsh, there's no red-eye, blown out highlights, any of the stuff most people expect from flash photography. A medium telephoto zoom, in this case a Nikon 70-210mm/f4 was also helpful to get through the mess of microphone stands and speakers, and control the messy background by only selecting a small amount of it.

Texas has a bright, harsh, washed out, hot atmosphere except when it's bright, harsh, washed out, and cold. Except for the rare spring day when a cold front has covered the sky with a roll of cloudy gray. Gray with an a. Younger and brighter than grey with an e. For a few hours everything takes its full range of color. Tree bark is every shade of brown except for the deepest black crevice and the lichens, which are white, or almost so. The lawns and leaves are every shade of green that's bright. People walk through portrait light. Friends look just like the ideal images of them you carry in your mind when it's harsh, washed out, and hot, or cold.

Too cool.

Republication. Hah! I kill me. . . Too many ways to have read that. . . Anyway:

I often comment on Edward Tufte's forum. My comments, like those of many others, are often deleted. I think he even deletes some of his own comments. Some comments I want to keep around though. Here's an edited version of some of my recent comments on his thread about formalizing photographic aesthetics.

Here's the first article google searching for dynamic range ccd velvia: Photoshop for Astrophotographers:

Different recording media can accommodate a variety of dynamic ranges. Early model consumer digital cameras could capture detail in a brightness range of only perhaps 3 to 4 F/stops and the latest models can record about 6 F/stops. High contrast transparency films, such as Kodachrome and Velvia, can capture about 5 - 6 F/stops. Color negative film can capture 8 or more F/stops of usable detail if correctly exposed.

Note that if we measure the actual optical density of transparency film, there will be more optical dynamic range from the absolute blackest black (the D-Max)to the absolute whitest white (totally transparent) than recording dynamic range. This optical density range is greater than the range that the film can actually record detail in, so the effective useful recording dynamic range is less than the optical density would indicate. For instance, Kodak's Kodachrome has a D-Max of about 3.7, which is almost twelve stops, but its usable dynamic range is only about six stops.

Astronomical CCD cameras have a dynamic range of about 10 to 11 F/stops.

Thom Hogan reports about 7.5 stops dynamic range with the D100 or S2. If Fuji's claims are correct, then they're realizing about a 3 stop (400%) improvement. However, it's not at all clear to me that those 3 stops can be realized in prints, even from an Epson printer. I'm even more pessimistic about CMYK.

There are also certain visual deceits the visual system plays on the rest of the brain in real time. The eye very quickly changes aperture, by dilating the pupil, based on what part of a scene falls on the fovea, the very central high resolution optic disk, which is only a couple millimeters across. The subconscious also considers the ambient light of the entire scene. There are other control systems for enhancing visual acuity, inhibitory surround being the classic example. It increases contrast through neuromodulation.

Some additional articles by Roger N Clark and others have some interesting tidbits. I found them with the search dynamic range human eye stops.

One last one, and I'm done. From the Wikipedia:

At any given instant, the retina can resolve a contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6 1/2 stops). As soon as your eye moves (saccades) it re-adjusts its exposure both chemically and by adjusting the iris. Initial dark adaptation takes place in approximately four seconds of profound, uninterrupted darkness; full adaptation through adjustments in retinal chemistry (the Purkinje effect) are mostly complete in thirty minutes. Hence, over time, a contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 stops) can be resolved. The process is nonlinear and multifaceted, so an interruption by light nearly starts the adaptation process over again. Full adaptation is dependent on good blood flow; thus dark adaptation may be hampered by poor circulation, and vasoconstrictors like alcohol or tobacco.

There is also the phenomenon of bleaching: to much light can overwhelm retinal pigments. Thus the spot after staring at a bright light or a white paper looking faintly red after staring and a green sheet of paper.

20 stops of resolution seems enormous to me. Racing mountain bikes in forested areas, one experiences some tremendous variations in light, ranging from the darkness under the edges of roots to full sunlight in the same "frame", all at 3 to 30 miles an hour and looking with a central axis of the visual field regularly, forcibly, ranging between 45 degrees above the horizon to 45 degrees below the horizon. Imagine a wooden rollercoaster inside a forest but with a terrible need to understand what one is seeing because there are no rails. The decision
points are coming very fast and have serious consequences. Trees hurt, but not as much as the rocks at the bottom of a ravine. The sensations of blow-out and blur are quite familiar to this crowd. I suspect the five to eight stops of dynamic range that engineers seem to have been targetting in most production films and DSLRs may hint at the working range of the eye most of the time.

Taken in whole from gwpda.org

The following poem was posted on MARHST-L by Frank Pierce Young (PYoung1043@AOL.COM) on 3 August, 1998, and his opening comments have been included. This bit of verse was well-known in the English-speaking navies at the time.

Written at the turn of this century by a very wise Royal Navy captain who later rose to the rank of admiral, the following poem — a rhyming advice lecture, actually — is one of the most famous and oft-quoted pieces of naval literature ever penned. But its fame is in-house; it is virtually unknown outside Anglo-American naval officers' circles, apart from a couple of rare reprintings over the past 50-odd years in arcane yachting publications. Today, quite apart from its inherent naval parlance, some references are themselves arcane. For example, if offering it to others you may wish to substitute the words "strong armoured" for the author's "Harveyised" -- not since before World War I has anyone associated Mr. Harvey with development of nickel-steel armour plate for warships. But the poem's salty particulars cannot hide the essence of good advice for young hopefuls, whatever their sphere. Admiral Hopwood's words are all-encompassing and timeless, and deserve much more general appreciation.

THE LAWS OF THE NAVY

by Adm. R. A. Hopwood, RN
Now these are the laws of the Navy,
Unwritten and varied they be;
And he who is wise will observe them,
Going down in his ship to the sea.

As naught may outrun the destroyer,
So it is with the law and its grip,
For the strength of a ship is the Service,
And the strength of the Service the ship.

Take heed what you say of your seniors,
Be your words spoken softly or plain,
Lest a bird of the air tell the matter,
And so shall ye hear it again.

If you labour from morn until even,
And meet with reproof for your toil,
'Tis well, that the gun may be humbled
The compressor must check the recoil.

On the strength of one link in the cable,
Dependeth the might of the chain.
Who knows when thou may'st be tested?
So live that thou bearest the strain!

When a ship that is tired returneth,
With the signs of the seas showing plain;
Men place her in dock for a season,
And her speed she reneweth again.

So shall ye, if perchance ye grow weary,
In the uttermost parts of the sea,
Pray for leave, for the good of the Service,
As much and as oft as may be.

Count not upon certain promotion
But rather to gain it aspire;
Though the sightline may end on the target
There cometh perchance the miss-fire.

Can'st follow the track of the dolphin?
Or tell where the sea swallows roam?
Where Leviathan taketh his pastime?
What ocean he calleth his own?

So it is with the words of the rulers,
And the orders these words shall convey;
Every law is naught beside this one:
Thou shalt not criticise, but Obey.

Say the wise: How may I know their purpose?
Then acts without wherefore or why.
Stays the fool but one moment to question,
And the chance of his life passes by.

If ye win through an African jungle,
Unmentioned at home in the press,
Heed it not. No man seeth the piston,
But it driveth the ship none the less.

Do they growl? it is well. Be thou silent,
If the work goeth forward amain.
Lo! the gun throws the shot to a hair's breadth
And shouteth, yet none shall complain.

Do they growl, and the work be retarded?
It is ill, be whatever their rank.
The half-loaded gun also shouteth,
But can she pierce target with blank?

Doth the paintwork make war with the funnels
And the deck to the cannons complain?
Nay, they know that some soap and fresh water
Unites them as brothers again.

So ye, being heads of departments,
Do you growl with a smile on your lip,
Lest ye strive and in anger be parted,
And lessen the might of your ship.

Dost deem that thy vessel needs gilding,
And the dockyard forbears to supply?
Put thy hand in thy pocket and gild her --
There are those who have risen thereby.

Dost think in a moment of anger
'Tis well with thy seniors to fight?
They prosper, who burn in the morning,
The letters they wrote overnight.

For many are shelved and forgotten,
With nothing to thank for their fate,
But that on a half sheet of foolscap
A fool "Had the honour to state."

Should the fairway be crowded with shipping
Beating homeward the harbour to win,
It is meet that lest any should suffer,
The steamers pass cautiously in.

So thou, when thou nearest promotion,
And the peak that is gilded is nigh,
Give heed to words and thine actions,
Lest others be wearied thereby.

It is ill for the winners to worry,
Take thy fate as it comes, with a smile,
And when thou art safe in the harbour
They may envy, but will not revile.

Uncharted the rocks that surround thee,
Take heed that the channels thou learn,
Lest thy name serve to buoy for another
That shoal the "Court-Martial Return".

Though a Harveyised belt may protect her
The ship bears the scar on her side;'
'Tis well if the Court should acquit thee --
But 'twere best had'st thou never been tried.

MORAL

As the wave washes clear at the hawse pipe,
Washes aft, and is lost in the wake;
So shalt thou drop astern all unheeded
Such time as these laws ye forsake.

Take heed in your manner of speaking
That the language ye use may be sound,
In the list of the words of your choosing
"Impossible" may not be found.

Now these are the Laws of the Navy,
And many and mighty are they.
But the hull and the deck and the keel
And the truck of the law is -- OBEY.

Not Dmitri Shostakovich, not Igor Stravinsky, not Beethoven, not Mozart, not Bach, not Handel, not Tchaikovsky, not Vivaldi. Here's a list of all the lists of classical composers. See if Pandora has any of them. But I can get the New York Philharmonic doing Stars and Stripes Forever?! Stars and Stripes Forever?! Are you kidding me?! That even appeared to be a gateway from a classical search by way of soundtracks. Okay, so I got one interesting follow-up from that, at least a novel follow-up: Danna/Devotchka's We're Gonna Make It. So Pandora's good for expanding the market share of pop, blues, soul, anything on the Billboard charts. It's great for jazz and blues, but it bombed classical in a big way. Why? I can get Kermit Ruffins and the Rebirth Brass Band, but I can't get Vivaldi?! What is it, they're not going to serve anything over five or seven minutes in length?

Update: The Pandora FAQ, way down, mentions that they have 400,000 songs from 20,000 artists from every genre except classical and world.

Blink.

Blink.

What? Is this some sort of marketeering experiment? Who's funding this thing?