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#ideas

jjc@societas.online
John Jaarsveld

https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/

The Journal of Controversial Ideas is the first open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics. It offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive.

#journalofcontroversialideas #controversial #ideas #journal #academic

michelpatrice@diaspora-fr.org
MichelPatrice

Bring back the horses

A paper from Low-Tech Magazine, food for thought.

Replacing tractors with real horse power could be the revolution that agriculture needs.

Horses and other draft and pack animals revolutionized transportation, war, hunting, manufacturing and agriculture. Work horses formed the backbone of industrial society until the first decennia of the 20th century, mining coal, ploughing fields and transporting goods and people in fast growing cities.

Reintroducing horses in city traffic would be a bad idea - cars might be noisy, dangerous and polluting, but mounts are even worse. In agriculture, however, animal power would bring surprisingly large environmental profits.

Read more

#Ideas #Agriculture #Jardin #AgricultureUrbaine #LowTech #Low-Tech

Bring back the horses

Replacing tractors with real horse power could be the revolution that agriculture needs.

petapixel@xn--y9azesw6bu.xn--y9a3aq
petapixel (unofficial)

Astrophotographer Turns His Space Photos Into Kaleidoscopic Artworks

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Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio is known for spending 12 years exposing a gigantic photo of the Milky Way. In addition to his impressive photos, he has also been using them for abstract, kaleidoscopic "Vision" artworks.

"Pickering's Triangle," the original photo the above artwork was created from.

"I'm an astrophotographer but first of all I'm a visual artist," Metsavainio tells PetaPixel. "As an artist, I'm dazzled by all the forms I'm able to capture in my photos of cosmic objects, nebulae, supernova remnants, galaxies, etc. Colors from ionized elements are connected to the shapes and textures and they form a physical reality around us.

"The Vision series of photographic artworks is based on my photographs of cosmic formations. I have used an old photographic art method of multiple exposures over the same photo, or, as I call it, the 'overlapping lightning method'."

Mosaic Panorama of Western Gygnus A Vision artwork created from "Mosaic Panorama of Western Gygnus." A Vision artwork created from "Mosaic Panorama of Western Gygnus."

"[This concept] was fashionable back in the 1920s among experimental and surrealistic photographers, and at the time the work was done in a darkroom," the photographer says. "I'm using about the same technique but instead of a darkroom, I'm using digital image processing.

The original photo is rotated, moved, and/or mirrored as I like, and then multiple layers stacked back together so that the original brightness is maintained. For this task, I use Photoshop and various astronomical stacking applications."

Eastern Part of the Veil Nebula Supernova remnant. A Vision artwork created from "Eastern Part of the Veil Nebula Supernova remnant." A Vision artwork created from "Eastern Part of the Veil Nebula Supernova remnant." A Vision artwork created from "Eastern Part of the Veil Nebula Supernova remnant."

"The process is not very fast since I carefully plan the final composition before I do the actual work," Metsavainio says. "There is lots of trial and error before the correct combination of movements and rotations is found.

Metsavainio says he spends three to five days on average on each of his Vision series images. He has regularly created them over the past decade but has shared very few of them since they have largely been a personal project.

"As an artist, I'm telling a story with my photos, and many times my artworks are also personal notes," Metsavainio says. "The Vision series of photos are forming visual notes about shapes, structures, textures, and colors I have seen and captured during my couple of decades-long journey as an astronomical nature photographer."

You can find a larger gallery of Vision art here and more of Metsavainio's work on his website and portfolio.

#features #ideas #abstract #astro #astrophotography #jpmetsavainio #kaleidoscopic #space

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digit@joindiaspora.com
Digit

i love entertaining ideas, and discussion and development of ideas.

that's very often hard to interface with those who don't, or who like to think they do but largely don't.
and that cues me to introspect for where i merely think i like to entertain ideas, but don't.

#ideas #introspection #openmind #educatedmind #entertainideas #unconscious #identity #selfdelusion #arrogance #humility #personaldevelopment #spiritualprogress #sciencebabyyeah #dunningkruger #iknow #orly #reaffirmedcertainties #closedminds #questionmore

One person like that
petapixel@xn--y9azesw6bu.xn--y9a3aq
petapixel (unofficial)

Unwrapping Buzz Aldrin’s Visor in Moon Photo Reveals What He Saw

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Artist Michael Ranger recently had the idea of "unwrapping" the reflection seen in the visor of NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin in an iconic photo captured by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission. The result is an image that reveals what Aldrin saw the moment the photo was snapped.

Ranger, a visual effects artist based in Los Angeles, says he initially realized how his experience in visual effects could be applied to this kind of unwrapping experiment.

"The reason I had the idea to do this and knew how to easily do it was that in visual effects we use mirror balls to take 360° HDRIs of an environment and then those images to apply photo-real lighting and reflections to CG content and place that content into real footage," Ranger tells PetaPixel. "I realized that the spacesuit visor is basically a mirror ball, minus a bit of information on the sides."

After sharing an initial result on Reddit (where it went viral), Ranger was tipped off to the fact that ultra-high-resolution scans of NASA photos, including this classic Armstrong one, are available online. The raw version of this particular scan weighs in at a whopping 1.3 gigabytes.

A low-res cropped version of the famous photo by Neil Armstrong showing Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The original scan available in ultra-high-resolution online.

Ranger took the spherical reflection seen in the visor, sharpened and color corrected in Photoshop, and turned it into this panoramic 360° image:

A closer flat crop showing what Buzz Aldrin saw.

This image can be viewed in a 360° photo viewer -- there are various apps out there you can use, but you can also open it in Google Street View.

Ranger also made this video in which we get to "look around" from Aldrin's point of view:

<https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2021/07/X87bTej.mp4>

"The visors of the spacesuits are coated with gold, so I color corrected the gold out of it using the full photo as a color reference to the real world colors," Ranger writes. "I also added more room in the initial photo crop around the edges of the visor so that when it was unwrapped it would more accurately account for the space in the final 360° image that represents the inside of his helmet. Notice the pale blue dot."

Ranger has since been applying this same concept to the reflections seen in other NASA photos, including climbing down the ladder to the moon on Apollo 12:

Apollo 12. Nov 19, 1969. Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan Bean donned their Portable Life Support System (PLSS) backpacks that provided oxygen and communications while they were on the surface and put on and locked their helmets and gloves. They depressurized the LM, opened the hatch, and Conrad backed out onto the porch and slowly climbed down the ladder. What Charles “Pete” Conrad saw.

…and the very first NASA spacewalk on the Gemini 4 mission:

Gemini 4. March 18, 1965. "Tied to a tether, Ed White floated out of the spacecraft, using a Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit (informally called a "zip gun") which expelled pressurized oxygen to provide thrust for controlling his travel. He went four point six meters (15 ft) out, and began to experiment with maneuvering. He found it easy, especially the pitch and yaw, although he thought the roll would use too much gas. He maneuvered around the spacecraft while McDivitt took photographs." # What Ed White saw.

You can follow Ranger on Reddit if you'd like to keep up with his "digital archaeology" experiments.

#culture #ideas #news #360degree #apollo11 #buzzaldrin #history #moon #moonlanding #nasa #neilarmstrong #reflection #spherical #unwrapped

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sylviaj@joindiaspora.com
Sylvia J

When Women Become Allies to Save Watersheds and Wildlife

https://socialistproject.ca/2021/05/when-women-become-allies-to-save-watersheds-and-wildlife/

#women #allies #watersheds #wildlife #environment #indigenous #minnesota #ojibwe #anishinaabeg #conomy #politics #enbridge #pipeline #line3 #fossilfuels #tarsands #pandemic #social #injustice #native #water #protectors #winonaladuke #janefonda #tessawick #honor #earth #sustainable #energy
#Winona quoted #ArundhatiRoy, urging us to see the “pandemic as portal”: “We must go through the #portal leaving #dead #ideas #behind, ready to #imagine a #new #world.”

When Women Become Allies to Save Watersheds and Wildlife - The Bullet

The word “Minnesota” derives from one of two Dakota words, either Mni Sóta meaning clear blue water or Mnissota meaning cloudy water. Just one letter can

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danieleg@joindiaspora.com
DanieleG

"Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.
There are nevertheless certain circumstances, pathological circumstances one might say, of spiritual depression, in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline entrusted with the task of continually leading a lazy spirit, by means of repeated excitations, back to an inner life. Books then play for the person in these circumstances a role analogous to that played by psychotherapists for certain neurasthenics. It is well known that in certain diseases of the nervous system, even if none of the organs themselves are affected, the sufferer is swallowed up in a kind of inability to will, as if trapped in a kind of deep rut and unable to pull himself out of it alone, where he would eventually waste away entirely if a strong helping hand were not held out to him. His brain, his legs, his stomach, his lungs are unharmed. He has no real incapacity that prevents him from working, walking, eating, being out in the cold, but he finds it impossible to will the various acts he is otherwise perfectly able to perform, and this inertia of the will would inevitably lead to an organic decay that ended up becoming the equivalent of the sickness he did not have unless the impulse he cannot find in himself comes to him from without, from a doctor who wills for him until the day when his various organic wills have little by little been rehabilitated. Now there are certain spirits we can compare to these sufferers, spirits whom a kind of laziness or frivolousness prevents from descending on their own into the deeper regions of themselves where true mental life begins. It is not that, once led there, they are unable to discover and exploit these true riches, but without such outside intervention they live on the surface, in a perpetual forgetting of themselves, a kind of passivity which makes them the plaything of every pleasure and reduces them to the stature of those who surround them, jostling them this way and that; like the gentleman who, having led the life of a highway brigand since childhood, no longer remembers the name he has long since ceased to bear, they will end by abolishing in themselves every feeling, every memory, of their inner nobility, unless an exterior impulse comes to forcibly reintroduce them into mental life, where they will suddenly recapture the power to think for themselves and to create."

Text: Marcel Proust, On Reading - Translator’s Preface to Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
Image: Journeys through Bookland - a new and original plan for reading applied to the world's best literature for children (1922)

#literature #book #reading #Proust #Ruskin #quotation #ideas

dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

Bullshit Arguments That Must Die: The "Materialism" Snarl Word

So, I've been accused of materialism, by which I'm understanding dialectical materialism.

Elsewhere, after responding to a tired rejection of the risks of computational propaganda:

The literal basis of all of our lives is propaganda. We are wholly propagandized from the start to end of every single day. How can people be so empty to turn and say 'Russia!', after the 87th advertisement experienced in three hours?

With:

  1. Changing the nature of the propaganda changes the social and political balance.
  2. Computational propaganda operates at a scale, rate, capability, anintensity, and pervasiveness unmatched in history. In an already globally interconnected and precarious world.

And noting that the printing press triggered the Reformation and Thirty Years War. Widespread literacy, the Revolutions of 1840. Yellow Journalism the Boer, Spanish American, and First World Wars. Radio and hi-fi sound recording and playback, Fascism. Our current tools are vastly more powerful, my interlocutor brilliantly quipped:

Yeah, materialism is a hell of a drug.

Asked for clarification they quote Wikipedia.

If I'm reading them accurately, "materialism" sounds like a snarl word shallow dismissal.

Theories of history have evolved: mythic, religious, Great Man, ideas. A systems model, in which inputs, information, relationships, and capabilities are mutually determinative is closest to my views, though you seem more interested in projecting a preconceived label than inquiring as to my own understanding.

Changing any element of the system, and information capabilities, including sensing, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission --- media technology being a large part of this --- do have major impacts on systemic function. As does material ability to effect the environment or culture through capital and energy, scientific and technical understanding, motivating values, and other factors.

Ideas tend to emerge regardless of capabilities (subject to limits on empirical observation, existing foundations, and collaborative capabilities). But their ability to become prominent or dominent is enabled or limited by capabilities, including technological. There are times that similar concepts have arisen independently in widely separated areas, the Axial Age (Greek, Hindu, and Chinese philosophical traditions) being one example. Democratic government, empiricism, liberal democracy, socialist principles, nationalism/tribalism, feudalism, market economics, polytheism, monotheism, and humanism similarly. Ideas themselves face Darwinian selection and fitness to specific niches.

And yes, scale effects absolutely matter. The modern industrialised world, and its ideas, aren't possible without vast energy, material resource, ag productivity, transport, communications, information processing/storage/retrieval, organisational, technological, infrastructural, transformational, and sanitary/hygenic/public health capabilities and scales. No quantity or intensity of ideas will move an Airbus A380 through the skies across continents, smelt a gigaton of steel, sequence a virus and distribute a vaccine worldwide, or create and run a broadcast network or social media server farm without requisite energy, materials, scientific and technical knowledge, and the human and social systems to manage and direct them. Put your ideas on an airless bit of space dust and see what they accomplish.

Long-time readers my recognise most of the nine elements of my ontology of technological mechanisms here; fuels, materials, process knowledge, causal knowledge, networks, systems, power transmission and transformation, information, and hygiene factors.

#BullshitArgumentsThatMustDie #ideas #materialism #Cybernetics #SystemsTheory#TechOntology

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