When you walk in to a Best Buy here in Canada, and want to buy a $100 external hard drive, the process is as follows:

1. Take the empty box on the shelf to the Nerd Herd
2. Wait for about 10 minutes as some computer n00b tries to spell their email address to the customer rep: "All lowercase, no spaces, Jay-Eeee-En-Eye-..."
3. Have some geek locate the real box with the actual product inside in the back storage room once he is done with the n00b.
4. Pay for the product.
5. Complain that you do not want to pay the extra $50 or whatever for installation services as there is nothing to install.
6. Walk to the security dude at the exit and have him check your receipt and purchased goods, and tick them off one by one.
7. Leave feeling very good about the trust in humanity and how you were treated.

When you walk in to an Apple Store here in Canada, and want to buy a $500 Time Capsule, the process is as follows:

Over the years I have been accumulating watches that I found interesting at the time. Unfortunately the Seiko watch I had in the late 90's and early 2000's is no longer in my possession. Yesterday I decided to take some studio photos of my collection. Which one would you pick? Pardon the scratches - some of these watches are more than a decade old.

What's up with the shady characters lurking on Craigslist? When I post something for sale, I will get say 10 responses asking anything from whether it is still available, why I am selling it, pictures etc. However, 9 out of 10 times the person will just never respond to my reply. Of those 9, 8 will ask me to contact them about the item, I will respond within 10 minutes of their mail, and then I never see or hear from them. Why? WHY???????

There are many kinds of photographers out there. You have:

1. The crowd that uses shitty cameras, knows nothing in general about photography yet think if they mutilate their photos and upload it nano size it will look awesome.
2. Wannabe professionals with too much money and too little skill.
3. Internet forum trolls with no skills but mouths to compensate
4. Great photographers
5. Upcoming photographers
6. and too many other to care about writing

However I like to classify photographers as follows:

I have been wondering lately... Physicists are very certain that as far as they can see (meaning the observable universe which is estimated to be about 93 billion lightyears across), physics are the same everywhere. This excludes bubble universes (i.e. the multiverse scenario). That means, for as far as we can see, we believe that E = mc² applies on Earth just as it applies to the galaxies in the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, as does Entropy, as does F = G(m₁m₂/r²) and all the other theorems we came up with.

My question is, how can we be sure? Let me give you an analogy I was thinking of yesterday.

Assume we are all small retroviruses living in the ocean. We live in the Pacific Ocean, so our average SG is about 1.025. Since we are about 80nm in length, scaling the sea : microbe ratio, if a microbe was 1.6m tall (like us), then the ocean with a length of approximately 19,800km at the longest end would be 0.05 ly across. That does not seem like much, but think about this - the Voyager 1 which is the furthest man made object from our planet is currently about 0.00207 ly from us. That is 1/10th of the distance the retrovirus is from land in our ocean - universe analogy. So it is safe to say that this retrovirus (located in the middle of the pacific ocean) has not yet had any means to visit the boundaries of the universe to prove the physical properties are the same as in its current location.

The retrovirus performs various physical experiments and measurements. Lets look at specific gravity. He measures that to be 1.025. For him, it seems to be a fundamental constant as everywhere he looks the SG seems to be 1.025. Now he wonders whether this is truly universal. Since he cannot really measure this value at the boundaries of his galaxy (the Pacific Ocean) without making assumptions, he assumes it is constant because of the following reasoning. If the SG would have been significantly different than 1.025, say 1.020, life as he knows it could not readily exist. Osmotic pressure would become troublesome for living organisms (those that have evolved and adapted to SG of 1.025). So he theorises that if SG had not been 1.025 or very close to it, life (as he knows it), would not be possible. Without an example, he cannot fathom how life would look like at a different SG. So SG must be constant.