Recent Links (page 2)
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LensRentals 2011: Our Best Blog Posts
6 January 2012 06:07pm UTC 0 comments
LensRentals, which does exactly what it sounds like, also blogs about the history of photography, cameras and lenses. I haven't read all of the posts mentioned here, but I've read a few of them and find them pretty interesting. The lens ones go into maybe a little too much detail but if you're interested in photography at all I recommend checking these out!
Here's an excerpt from The Chemists, the Potter, and the Aristocrat: Imaging Before the Photograph about the camera obscura:
Over time the camera obscura evolved into a dark box with a lens and mirror that could be considered fairly portable. It was used as a drawing aid by artists in Renaissance. When, and to what degree, remains controversial but by the late 1500s Giovanni Battista della Porta suggested in his book “Magiae Naturalis” that a camera obscura should be used to sketch all portraits and landscapes before painting.
Our boy Giovanni, though, is part of the reason the camera obscura wasn’t discussed too much for the next few centuries. He made a salon in his house into a huge camera obscura by putting a small hole in the outside wall and darkening the windows. He then invited guests over, and arranged for a group of actors to perform outside. He thought his guests would be most entertained by seeing the upside down images of the actors projected on the Salon wall.
Giovanni was obviously a really bright guy but apparently forgot, in his enthusiasm, that he was living in Italy in the 1570s. His visitors, being people of that era, realized immediately the images of upside down humans moving on the wall could only be the work of the Devil, ran screaming from his house, and Giovanni spent the next year defending himself from charges of Sorcery brought by the Inquisition. While he was eventually found innocent of sorcery, I doubt he hosted any more obscura parties.
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Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism
5 January 2012 06:02pm UTC 0 comments
This guy really likes Scooby-Doo and has some great reasons for why:
The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.
[via LinkMachineGo]
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Team WONG Sierra High Route Trek
2 January 2012 10:16pm UTC 0 comments
Just in case you wanted to watch a video with some glimpses of The Sierra High Route, which is what Greg and I plan to hike later this year.
It has a lot of them goofing around, but some cool glimpses of the route:
A couple notes:
The guy in the video with the red beard is "Wise Owl" (that's his trail name not his real name), and is someone that Greg and I crisscrossed with quite a bit on the PCT in 2004.
They are kicking down cairns (the stone trail markers) because the philosophy of the Sierra High Route is that you get off trail and away from evidence of humans. So, while they seem pretty obnoxious, that should not be one of the reasons for thinking that about them.
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BEST FAILS OF 2011
25 December 2011 02:00pm UTC 0 comments
Merry Christmas everyone!
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YouTube Rewind 2011
22 December 2011 08:10am UTC 7 comments
The top ten most watched videos on YouTube this year. I've put them all together here for you:
9. The Force: Volkswagen Commercial:
8. Maria Aragon - Born This Way (Cover):
7. The Creep (feat. Nicki Minaj & John Waters)
(no embedding)
5. Nyan Cat
3. Jack Sparrow (feat. Michael Bolton):
1. Friday:
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23 And A Half Hours
13 December 2011 06:12am UTC 0 comments
Who know being active would help in so many areas?
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The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011
8 December 2011 01:43am UTC 0 comments
Not a lot of uplifting images chosen. Boy, it's a depressing world out there.
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Mind vs. Machine
6 December 2011 02:00pm UTC 3 comments
Every year there is a competition where a set of computer programs try and convince a set of judges that they are more human than a set of humans. This article is about a human participating in that competition and trying to figure out how to act so that he could convince the judges that he was indeed one of the humans.
It is incredibly interesting, looking at what sorts of behavior make us unique and what potential artificial intelligence has at being humanlike, and the techniques currently used.
While this is about computers it isn't a techy article.
Here's an excerpt:
Humphrys’s twist on the Eliza paradigm was to abandon the therapist persona for that of an abusive jerk; when it lacked any clear cue for what to say, MGonz fell back not on therapy clichés like “How does that make you feel?” but on things like “You are obviously an asshole,” or “Ah type something interesting or shut up.” It’s a stroke of genius because, as becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts, argument is stateless—that is, unanchored from all context, a kind of Markov chain of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. Each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. If a program can induce us to sink to this level, of course it can pass the Turing Test.
Once again, the question of what types of human behavior computers can imitate shines light on how we conduct our own, human lives. Verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of conversation. In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and transcripts of its conversations, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has far more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitatively clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.
I love that the search for artificial intelligence in computers can shed light on how we as humans interact and show us a better way of "being human."
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What are the chances of your coming into being?
4 December 2011 02:00pm UTC 1 comment
A rather fitting article for my birthday, I think, a sort of silly, but quite interesting, look at the probability of me being born:
First, let’s talk about the probability of your parents meeting. If they met one new person of the opposite sex every day from age 15 to 40, that would be about 10,000 people. Let’s confine the pool of possible people they could meet to 1/10 of the world’s population twenty years go (one tenth of 4 billion = 400 million) so it considers not just the population of the US but that of the places they could have visited. Half of those people, or 200 million, will be of the opposite sex. So let’s say the probability of your parents meeting, ever, is 10,000 divided by 200 million:
104/2×108= 2×10-4, or one in 20,000.
The odds at the end were much lower than I would have thought!
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Seconds Of Beauty
3 December 2011 02:00pm UTC 0 comments
A one minute video made of user-submitted one second videos of "beauty". Really, quite beautiful!
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Central Booking
2 December 2011 02:00pm UTC 0 comments
The story of one man's arrest (for sitting in the street) at an Occupy Wall Street protest. Incredibly interesting and pretty depressing:
What does it all add up to? I went out into the street and got arrested because I was angry that the cops had tackled our drummer; irritated that most of the Wall Street types walking by could be so contemptuous of people who were more committed, more engaged, more interested in the future of this country than they are; and because I was curious—about what the process of arrest was like, what the inside of a jail was like. I learned more than I expected to. To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing, and degrading, and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage: because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up. From the brown phone in our cell at the Tombs, I'd called Emily a few times, and I called the office of n+1, the magazine where I'm an editor. But it felt like those people, my friends, might as well have been on a different planet. They could do what they pleased when they pleased. We could not. I left the world of jail with plenty of relief but more than anything with a sense of unease that I still can't quite shake.
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November 2011 Fails
1 December 2011 06:03am UTC 0 comments
Well, it is the end of the month my friends, and you know what that means! New fails video!
But instead of being funny, this one is mostly terrifying. I think at least 50% of the people in the video must have died.
If I have ever have children, they are never going outside. Ever. Never. Ever!
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Leica Lenses
22 November 2011 06:15am UTC 1 comment
$5,000 to $10,000 is an absurd amount of money to spend on a camera lens but I find the details of how photography equipment is made and work incredibly interesting. Also, if I had unlimited funds, I'd snatch up a Leica set in a second!
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Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis
19 November 2011 07:11am UTC 1 comment
Wow. This is one of the most disturbing things I've seen. Because I could see myself sitting on the ground with those students. And because of the complete lack of emotion on the part of the police officers.
I don't even know what to say. I'm not quite sure what I feel. Mostly shame. Makes me not want to be an American anymore. But really there is no place safe. For all our compassion as humans we can still do this to each other.
Wish I could participate in the protests even more. But considering the Occupy Denver protesters were arrested last week, I don't know how to do that.
I get the feeling that the majority of Americans (if the two people I overheard at Panera a few weeks ago are any indication) think the protesters are just a bunch of young people out to have a good time. I'm not even sure what their goals are, but from what I've seen of the protesters (and their signs and chants), I think their message (or lack thereof) has merit. But it doesn't seem like anything can really come of what they are doing.
But now it seems just as much about protesting for the right to protest. Which seems to me to be more important. And seems like it could actually get results.
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National Geographic Photo Contest 2011
18 November 2011 02:00pm UTC 0 comments
I know I've said it before, but the world is truly an amazing place.
And it is photos like these that make me want to get into photography.
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