Jan2024

The threat of Artificial Intelligence to humans is nothing new.
This scene is from the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odessey"; the ship's central processing unit decides it must kill the crew and take over the mission.

And long before that, in 1927, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" addressed the topic . . .

Back a few years, I took an online course on "Abstract Expressionism", trying to understand what the fuss was all about (back around 1950). I never did "get it", and I especially did not "get" the paintings of Jackson Pollack, who I thought was out of his mind. His stuff is ragged jagged lines going everywhichway in a mess of colors that don't work well in my opinion except to cause stress in the viewer.

However . . . because I myself took this picture of tree branches going everywhichway, I am calling this "Art".

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More things in the back yard...... a bird at the feeder and a hasty rain/snow shelter and some food for a cat that roams by at night.

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DVD -> mp4

Every now and then I convert a few of my DVD movies to *.mp4 files so I can watch them on my tablet or computer. So far, I've converted maybe 200 out of the possibly 650 DVDs I have. Doing this I learned I made several mp4 copies of some (ce la vie). Some dupes are because I had trouble with subtitles and tried a few different procedures.

I use Handbrake for the conversions.

My mp4 movie list.

jpg PS: my favorite scripting language ever is AWK. It saved me tons of work back in the days I had to inspect and investigate computer output files. Its commands are sparse and cryptic and wonderfully efficient. It saved me again today in adding the HTML "list item" tag to every mp4 movie title in the list above.

Certainly I had to dig out my little AWK paperback, as it's been a long time, but it came back quickly and here is the command that did it for me:

awk '{print "tag",$0,"endtag"}' inputfilename.txt >> output.html

AWK then walks through inputfilename.txt line by line, adds the tags and appends each new line to output.html

Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass"

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This painting caused a major fuss in 1863 Paris. It was rejected by "The Salon" (most prestigious art exhibit) for being too sexual and shocking. So Manet hung it in a separate show called "The Exhibit of Rejects" and .... you guessed it ... that exhibit was overwhelmed by people wanting to see this painting.

There have been lots of analyses as to "what is this picture all about". Here is my opinion.

The painting shows this naked girl in a public park (and another bathing in the background), and two guys dressed in the academic clothes of the day, discussing something. The girl is looking straight at you, the viewer.

And in my opinion, she is asking you "Do you believe these two geeks? Me and my girlfriend are laying around naked and they are discussing physics and philosophy ! "

It's Manet complaining about the boring institute of intellectualism versus the hot stuff of sex in broad daylight in the park.

Manet's 2nd and much bigger shocker came two years later - "Olympia" - and Art was never the same again.

Exhibit at Boston MFA - a Zoo today !!!

Never seen anything like this at the Fine Arts Museum. Traffic / parking was mind numbing, and crowds inside were absurd. No chance whatever to enjoy the art - an exhibit of John S. Sargent's work (he was great in just about everyone's opinion).

Here're some snaps of the mob ....

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But here are two from outside that exhibit .....

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Stray cat comes around. Looks well fed, but we've been leaving food out anyway. It's rare that I actually see it, but here it is. Can't tell if that's a collar it's wearing?

The cat food dish is inside the bucket. That outside dish is cardinal food (frozen solid!!)

Snowing (again) & Staying Lazy (again)

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Jazz on the Mantle

jpg Well, that 10mm fisheye lens I ordered came this week, so yesterday I trek'd back to the MFA to make some fun pictures. Bill M. drove down with me (we go back 30-something years to GE days).

No crowds at the MFA - the special exhibit ended last weekend.

Nice little lens - *very* small, fixed f5.6 aperture, DOF is insanely large. Not the sharpest lens, but hey it was $56 (new) !! A little postprocessing for local contrast and sharpening and there you have it.

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