Visual Wilderness: “To Swap or Not to Swap…”

Some photographers are all for it, some are diametrically opposed to it, and a few couldn’t care less one way or the other. In any case, a common conclusion from these discussions is that “art is art” and how one photographer chooses to create an image is solely that individual’s business. But in my view, such a laissez-faire approach isn’t sufficient because, while art may be art, all art is not photography. Meaning that do whatever you want doesn’t apply here. After all, brushing a bunch of acrylic paint onto a metal sculpture and calling it pottery doesn’t make it pottery. I believe that, as photographers, we have an obligation to stand on one side of the issue or the other and decide… is this photography?

I’ll start. I’m one of the curmudgeons who staunchly believes that sky replacement has absolutely no place in landscape photography. I’m not saying it doesn’t take skill to pull off seamlessly or even that it doesn’t make an image look better. But it does take an image from the realm of photography and plops squarely it into that of graphic design or digital art. Semantics and definitions aside, I am actually far more interested in the concepts represented by landscape photography. And from that standpoint, I believe that swapping skies weakens the art as a whole and, more importantly, cheats you out of one of the most magical parts of photography: the profound experience.

Joshua Cripps

I’m of a similar opinion. For me it’s also an issue of trust: when I browse a photographers’ portfolio, I assume the photos presented there are genuine, not Photoshop collages. I’m more interested in his or her sense of composition, light and location than their Photoshop skills. I remember the first time someone mentioned using the technique, I was surprised and disappointed, because I immediately thought of the other beautiful images on his site and wondered how many were the result of the same digital manipulation. Ultimately it’s the personal choice of the photographer, but I think they are limiting their potential by relying on these sort of techniques, instead of working harder to capture that ‘perfect moment’.

The Telegraph: “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: With Jeremy Clarkson, we’re entering a new golden age of television”

I think we’re in a golden age of television, so if you go back in time even just five years, you couldn’t get A-list talent to do TV serials, or, if you could, it was a rare thing. But that’s flipped completely.

Bezos points to Amazon’s investment in series such as comedy drama Transparent, for which lead actor Jeffrey Tambor won a Golden Globe, as the main reason for the transformation.

The investment is very high now in serialised TV, and the amount of time you have to tell a story is much greater. That format change opens up a lot of storytelling possibilities, which, when mixed with the movie-like production standards, and the A-list talent, is why we’re seeing amazing television.

James Quinn

Not one to miss an opportunity, Amazon’s CEO is also investing in original television content, taking advantage of the shift from passive watching to more active on-demand shows. If the rumored replacement for Top Gear will be available exclusively on Amazon Video, I’m quite sure it will drive many new customers to sign up.

Recently visited pages highlighted in Google search results

Apparently, sometime in the first half of the year, Google removed some search filters, including the filter for visited pages – I say ‘apparently’ because I’ve never used the feature and was barely aware it existed. But in the mean time Google found a better, more transparent way to integrate this information into search results. For links visited through past search results (and logged-in users), Google now shows a small grey label underneath, including the date and number of times you visited the page. It’s a powerful indicator of relevancy, especially if you’ve visited the same site multiple times, meaning you found important information there. The feature is most likely powered by Google Search History – recently I’ve been browsing mostly in Edge, so the integration with Google Chrome browsing history can’t play a significant role.

Skynet & Ebert: “When do we stop keeping up with popular music?”

For this study, I started with individual listening data from U.S. Spotify users and combined that with Echo Nest artist popularity data, to generate a metric for the average popularity of the artists a listener streamed in 2014. With that score per user, we can compute a median across all users of a specific age and demographic profile.

What I found was that, on average…

• … while teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music, this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes “mature” in their early 30s.
• … men and women listen similarly in their their teens, but after that, men’s mainstream music listening decreases much faster than it does for women.
• … at any age, people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to a smaller amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of that age.

Ajay Kalia

Interesting study, both looking at the results, and because it demonstrates how powerful insights can be gained by properly analyzing the data online services routinely gather on their users. I’m over 33, so this could partially explain my lackluster reaction to Apple Music, where I haven’t bothered with curation, discovery and playlists. But it also signals a problem for the music industry: new artists and hits appeal mostly to the demographic under 30, who have less disposable income to spend on purchasing music, concerts and streaming. And the more mature demographic with more varied tastes is probably inclined to purchase their favorite albums (or have already done so), rather than spend on streaming services.

Greg Egan - Diaspora

La un mileniu în viitor, Pământul și umanitatea s‑au schimbat radical: devastată de poluare și încălzirea globală, pe suprafața planetei nu mai trăiesc decât grupuri răzlețe de oameni, majoritatea exuberanți modificați genetic în diverse grade, dar și câțiva statici care se agață cu încăpățânare de sanctitatea moștenirii lor genetice. Alții au ales transferul în corpuri androide, formând comunitățile gleisner care populează sistemul solar și fac planuri pentru lansarea de nave către alte sisteme solare. Grosul populației însă trăiește acum virtual în polisuri adăpostite pe toată planeta, fiecare cu specificul lui cultural. În primul capitol urmărim în detaliu nașterea lui Yatima, un orfan – adică un cetățean creat după un model complet nou, parțial aleatoriu, de sistemul de operare al polisului Konishi, în timp ce majoritatea se nasc din amalgamul trăsăturilor digitale ale progenitorilor. Cu un dar pentru matematică, dar și o înclinație ascunsă către explorare întreținută de prietenii ei, Yatima se va afla în centrul evenimentelor romanului.

Orlando said contemptuously, Give them another thousand years, and they’ll be pissing up and down the Milky Way, marking their territory like dogs.

Yatima protested, That’s not fair! They might have bizarre priorities… but they’re still civilised. More or less.

Liana said, Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They’d probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they’ve just surveyed it from orbit. They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.

O descoperire bruscă făcută de observatorul gravitațional de pe Lună răstoarnă complet echilibrul fragil dintre facțiuni, care de sute de ani preferă să se evite. La sute de ani lumină de Pământ, orbita unei perechi de stele neutronice, Lacerta G‑1, începe să decadă accelerat, un fenomen complet de neexplicat prin fizica timpului. Calculele arată că în mai puțin de patru zile stelele vor fuziona într‑o explozie monumentală, iar Pământul va fi măturat de raze gama care vor devasta complet atmosfera și ecosistemul. Prea puține se mai pot face pentru oamenii neajutorați de la suprafață, în special în climatul de suspiciune față de virtuali și gleisneri. Dar care e explicația fundamentală pentru această scăpare majoră din teorie? Și cum se poate evita catastrofa în viitor, dacă supraviețuitorii vor reuși vreodată să reclădească viața de suprafață?

The New York Times: “The Singular Mind of Terry Tao”

That spring day in his office, reflecting on his career so far, Tao told me that his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood. When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed, he said in a lilting Australian accent. I sort of imagined a committee would hand me problems to solve or something. But it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorization of the math student. Even those who experience great success through their college years may turn out not to have what it takes. The ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians. Tao now believes that his younger self, the prodigy who wowed the math world, wasn’t truly doing math at all. It’s as if your only experience with music were practicing scales or learning music theory, he said, looking into light pouring from his window. I didn’t learn the deeper meaning of the subject until much later.

Gareth Cook

I would say this applies to many other fields beside mathematics as well, especially where creative thinking is involved: the theory learned as a student is just the tip of the iceberg; only after you start practicing you get a real sense of the work involved and it’s often very different than previous expectations.

Text stroke issues in Microsoft Edge

After Windows 10 became available as a free update a month ago, I already moved two devices to Microsoft’s new OS, first my Windows 8 tablet, then this past weekend a new laptop from Acer. My old laptop running Windows 7 will probably get the same treatment soon, but it’s not a high priority, since I was planning on replacing it for at least a year. Both upgrades went smoothly, I had some issues with Bluetooth support on the laptop, but I’ll write about that later. First I wanted to share a small bug I discovered in Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, in the hope that it will get fixed.

Since I settled on the current design for my blog, probably more than three years ago, I used a WebKit-only CSS property to decorate the header with a text stroke. It worked fine until now: WebKit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari showed the fancier stroked title, while the rest displayed a simple, bolded text in a custom font. But now, when I opened my homepage in Edge I was surprised to see that the header was gone!