Considering the others

 

Kim and I have failed to locate our Sony digital camera.  It has been missing for more than a week.  We've lost cameras before, but never in such a seemingly confined amount of space and time.  We had it in my parents' van on Wednesday night, and that's the last time we saw it.  After we got out of the van, we got in our vehicles, and drove home.  When Kim looked for the camera the next day, she couldn't find it.

  

There just aren't many places it can be.  We looked everywhere we could think of, and in most cases we looked there three to five times.  I still think there is a good chance it will turn back up.  Maybe it fell behind something at a weird angle, or…that's about all that's left I can think of.

 

We decided we still need a camera while we wait for ourselves to find the missing one.  So Kim bought a little Canon camera.  It's tiny and very pink ("I'm sorry," said Kim, "it's the only color they had left.")

 

I read the small owner's booklet a couple of nights ago, and came across this sentence: "CAUTION:  Do not point the camera at very bright objects (the sun, etc.) Doing so may damage the sensors."

 

I'm intrigued by the "etc."  "et cetera" is Latin for "and the others," and the general modern meaning is that there are others things of the same sort that, for the sake of brevity, aren't listed.

 

So, in other words, it is inadvisable to point the camera at the Sun or other things of that sort.  That made my mind race. What are those other things?

 

First I thought of lit candles.  They are hot, and they are bright.  However, I've never seen a candle as bright as the Sun.  It seems unlikely that anyone would market a $160 camera that would break if it were used to photograph a child blowing out birthday candles.

 

What else is like the Sun?  The Moon?  It's not nearly as bright; it hardly ranks as a celestial birthday candle.  Did you know that the Earth's moon has one of the lowest albedos (abilities to reflect light) in the solar system?  If you lined up all the planets and moons and shined light on them, our moon would be way down at the bottom of the scale.  It's a very dark object, and just looks bright to us because it is so big and close.

 

So, I don't think that the Moon is one of the things meant by "etc."

 

Obviously, stars would have to fall into the category of things similar to the Sun.  Upon careful consideration, though, this doesn't seem to work very well in the context of the owner's manual.  Humans as a rule are only allowed to photograph stars from a great distance.  They are fainter in appearance than the Moon.  I feel that it could not possibly have been the intention of the technical writer of the owner's manual that you should not point your camera at the night sky and snap a photo.

 

This "etc." could serve to warn off lawsuits from NASA several hundred or several thousand years from now.  If scientists prepared an interstellar probe and decided that the philosophy of "faster, smaller, cheaper" meant that a small Canon digital hand-held would be the best choice for imaging technology, then it could spell trouble.  The probe would spend centuries crossing the gulf between us and Proxima Centauri (not a particularly bright star, by the way), point itself at the star, and fry itself.  Another NASA fiasco to frustrate the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the same engineers who forgot to convert their English measurements to metric on that Mars probe that crashed a few years ago.

 

All this strikes me as unlikely to have been in the mind of the writer of the owner's manual.

 

Another theoretical way to get close to a star is to be abducted by aliens and brought back to their home solar system.  People are always trying to get good photos of UFOs, after all, and a well-documented close encounter of the third kind would be worth a good amount of fame and money.  I don't think this kind of event really ever occurs, but maybe the technical writer is a believer, and he doesn't want someone burning out their camera's optics before snapping some great shots of the Grays, spacecraft interiors, and alien cloning operations.

 

After these considerations, it struck me: The most likely item to fall under "etc." is a nuclear blast.  That has the brightness of the Sun; it can and does occur here on Earth; there are probably lots of people who would try to photograph one if it occurred near enough to see and they had their cameras in their hands.  The warning would be wise to heed for those people who want their cameras to be intact to record the effects of post-Armageddon firestorms, nuclear winter, and rampant hair loss.

 

After thinking of this, it occurred to me that similar energies can be released on a smaller scale and in more tightly controlled conditions during particle physics experiments.  The newly started Large Hadron Collider in Europe might do this.  Grad students, make sure you read your tiny hot pink camera's manual before hooking it up to your research project.

 

That's all I can think of.  Therefore, the camera's manual could read, "Do not point this camera at the Sun, at alien suns around which you may orbit, or at nuclear explosions.  Do not attempt to use this camera to record data for high-energy particle physics experiments."

 

This would certainly make the manual more interesting to most people (not to me; I fill in all those boring blanks myself, obviously.)  There is, however, value in just leaving it as "etc."