greco
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@red
Re central valley floods, look up great flood of 1862 which turned the central valley into a lake. This was before the current warming and seems to occur every 140 years or so. CA went bankrupt. Farming is a crapshoot, facilitates population growth which in turn sets the stage for great famines when it fails. Without farming, famines don’t exist because there’s no one to record them, except orally in local lore.@Kultsommer
Hals was a professional, that means, he worked for money. The more portraits he knocked out, the more money he made. Painters of his era had access to optical projection technology which eliminated the need for preliminary drawings. The painter could directly trace the projected image on his canvas and then fill in with paint, facilitating the rendering of difficult drapery and the placement of small details like buttons etc. The downside of tracing is that it results in a more mechanical look.@Dr. D
“Was Vermeer a prisoner? He only seems to inhabit one room.”
For an explanation go to youtube and search for David Hockney’s secret knowledge.
Yes, Vermeer set up a tableau for a number of his paintings in the same room and projected the image onto his canvas. Hence the same room look. For technical details see youtube or read Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge.Back in ’70 when I was a member of the US occupying army in Europe, They, our superiors told us that if the Russians attacked, they would overrun us in 3 days. And when the Russians got to the Rhine the US would unleash nukes which were waiting west of the Rhine. That was the plan then 50 years ago. Doesn’t seem to have been upgraded much.
A German friend, a cynic told me that the reason for NATO was that the US wanted to do their nuclear war over in Europe instead of at home.
By the way, back in Roman times, Germany’s western border was the Rhine. The Rhine was also the Eastern border of the Roman empire.
In the futue can we imagine that the Russian empire ends at the Rhine?Jb-hb, thanks for dissertation 5 out of 4. You have inspired me to do a little more reading on the current state of AI. Were I about 24 years old, that is what I would like to be doing, spoofing intelligence. Current state of the art seems to pass the Turing test. Took a course in AI programming way back when the bar for passing the Turing test seemed to be a lot higher, if only because of lower number of cpu cycles available.
Asked my son who does video game creation about the lag time between when new methodolylogy for simulating visual reality and when computational speed catches up with algorithmic requirements and he opined something like 5 to 10 years.
Seems like AI methodogies are likewise lagging computatio nal capabilities.
On the humanistic front, I think that given sufficient exposure to textual AI some people will be able to develop the ability to distinguish between AI and human generated text. But of course AI will evolve and misspell and use bad grammar to to simulate human falliability. Perhaps there will even be different bot flavours like Indian, Chinese, and Nigerian.
Yeah well, possibilities are endless.
And then, the predominant flavour of electricity will become intermittant and people will be forced to talk to other people face to face ever more frequently and fall back on old human bullshit detection skills. Oh well, possibillities are endless and as pt barnum claimed, there’s a sucker born every minute. Probably more like a sucker every second these days possibly more.
Still, the struggle between humans and machines goes on. I’m putting my money on humans.Bach produced all Bach that can be produced.
Of course. Brilliant summary of the limitation of AI. As constituted, AI is incapable of producing anything original in a stylistic sense. It can rearrange Bach but it cannot produce any new Bach.
Human art and music is driven by the emotions and full human apparatus of the artist/musician. Absent the human, there is only apeing of what already is. Real art for humans could only be created by an AI that was not An AI but an intelligence grounded in the human experience. AI at best can simulate a sociopath who can learn to fake human emotions.I imagine people come to Tae for a variety of reasons. Ilargi supplies the lettuce. The commenters provide the dressing. Personally, I come for info about .gov shenannigans and tips on how to stay out of the way. Dr. John and Germ are helpful.
Then there’s the entertainment angle. DR D and Bosco rank high. So do the fights and name calling on the far end of the playground. Something about agw. I usually don’t bother reading those. Just skip to the end where they call each other names. Trolls also entertain. Why do they try to det in a club where nobody likes them. Must be somebody puts them up to it.Thanks Raul for featuring Saul Leiter, artist photographer. I checked out his bio. Started color photography in the 50s, then worked mostly incognito for 30 years then somebody published a book of his photos and now he’s regarded as one of the best photographers of the 20th century.
How did he pull that off, avoiding succes for thirty years and producing great work under cover of anonymity?Dali in his painting of 1926 was looking into the future. The woman on the right side of the picture is checking messages on her cellphone.
He says tomato you say potato.
Let’s call the whole thing off.In holland they grow tomatoes above ground. No need to wash the mud off.
Re today’s painting, outside the western ethos, like much of what happened in the east at the time up to the fall of the iron curtain. In 2013 I toured eastern Europe by train, hungary, czech republic, Ukraine etc and found to my surprise that the region was not at all the gray, artless place that our propagandists had painted for us. The art museum in prague exposed me to a a wealth of paintings that as far as I can tell have essentially been blocked in the west to give the western consumers the impression that the east never had any culture or art worth looking at. A shame.
Rembrandt always struck me as a narcissist, that is, he was his own favorite subject, which is not to say that he lacked talent. He was one of my favorite artists when I was still in school. I bought a book of his pen and ink landscapes and carved my own reed pens to accurately mimic his technique. His landscapes of the Dutch countryside are my favorite works. But when back in his studio, Rembrandt loved nothing more than dress up in fancy costumes and paint his own image reflected in the mirror, looking at himself lovingly.
According to wiki, he completed over 40 paintings, 31 etchings and 7 drawings of himself. To accomplish this, he bought some of the largest mirrors available at the time, 80 inches tall.
Maybe he wasn’t a narcissist. According to wiki, there was in his day quite a market for paintings of famous artists. Still, if he was alive today, I picture his facebook page updated almost daily with selfies.
Google self-portraits by rembrandt for more info and also a gallery of his selfies.“we’re dealing with a highly emotionalized, aggressive, future-pessimistic mood in society, whose trust in the state, its institutions and political actors is fraught with massive doubts,” he explained.”
“Future-pessimistic?” Can we be pessimistic about the past.
Overall, it seems like German thought leaders have been infected stylisticly by Babylon Bee.Germany must be prepared for the possibility that “legitimate” protests over energy and economic crises could be “infiltrated by extremists.”
As Dr D keeps pointing out, our leaders openly publish their plans in advance
Government planning mostly peaceful riots. Limited amounts of arson.
“False flag on Nancy P time? Sounds too weird, huh.
Maybe she’s posing to look (back-door) presidential.
That’s more probable.”
Photo shoot for vogue by Annie Leibovitz?Annie leibovitz, our own Lenie Riefenstahl.
Artists should avoid getting involved in propaganda
Hurts their resale value in the long run.
She’ll be remembered for her sleasiest photo shoot ever.Thank you, D Benton for your tale. I’ve done a few trips out to the Alaska penninsula and the Aleutian and Shumagin islands. In the process I became familiar with traditional food items, seal oil included. I had read accounts of its awful taste but found the real thing to be quite tolerable. Seal oil used to be a universal condiment in arctic cuisine since seal and sea lion meat is free of fat. The meat is almost black and all the fat is in a layer right under the skin.
If anyone is interested in a detailed account of starving in a cold climate, read The Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, available right now for free on Amazon Kindle.
By the way, preppers always mention beans and rice as part of their survival kits. Don’t know if they talk about fat at all. I would suggest some good amount of lard as part of the mix.“Why Pregnant People Should Get COVID-19 Vaccines As Soon As Possible”
Pregnant people? In the old days when just what used to be called women would get pregnant, this would have read Pregnant Women. But pregnant people is open to other possibilities, or is it that people who don’t identify as women could get pregnant and calling them pregnant women would be insenstive to their chosen identity?
Might be interesting to read Time’s style sheet.@zersum
Thanks for the Freightliner post.
It points out that prepping for disaster is not the only strategy for surviving hard times. Prepping is successful if you can predict the future. Nobody expected parts shortages, so prepping was not done.
So who steps in and deals with shortages, the hustlers who see a need and figure out how to deal with it in the moment. In hard times, hustlers come out ahead, partly because they understand that enforcement of laws takes a back seat to meeting people’s needs.
Want to survive hard times? Look into hustling if you have what it takes. If not, join a gang with a good number of hustlers who you can do support for.
Reminds me of working as an engineer. Sales hustled new jobs. Engineers delivered the product. Took both kinds to make it work.
Come to think of it, join a gang that can use your skills, hustler or otherwise.A few days back, Raul lead with Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s painting Monna Vanna. Rosetti was not only a painter, but also a poet, that is a man not only involved in the visual, but also in the verbal arts. The movement that he lead, the Pre-Raphaelites had as its charter the notion that it was not sufficient for painters to merely render objects faithfully, but that they also had to tell a story and do it with paintings executed with high degree of polish.
OK, so nobody these days outside of art history world gives a hoot about a pissing contest between two factions of the art world, but it occurred to me that there was a parallel here between the current fight between the US and the RF as to who was ahead in the war. The US was supposedly winning the image war, that is, the US are the pre Raphaelites winning against their opponents on the basis of their quality of image against the R F who is supposedly losing the image war where victory is defined as perception according to the standards of the winner.
Accepting the rules of your opponent of what victory is consigns you to defeat whether in art or war.
It is important to win according to your own rules. Pre-Raphaelites be damned.Re the Brueghel, i lean with dr d. Friend of mine used to hang with the abstract expressionists in ’50s New York. One day at a party at Franz Kline’s studio, he asked Franz, “Franz, why are all your paintings black and white?” And franz said, Because that’s the only color paints I can afford. And then my friend said, hey Franz. Where can I take a leak, and Franz said, there’s a bucket out in the hall.
Sometimes deep questions can have shallow answers.Re seeding the virus in selected cities, and countries, and having multiple versions to choose from and inocculating people with anything from saline solution to toxic blends of various concentrations I personally favor the most outrageous suggestions,. For one thing, they are most easy to deny, and for another they make for the best medical thriller plots. The official story is incredibly unimaginative.
“But we are not all completely stupid.”
Thank you for that, Ilargi.A colleague and I worked on a piece of software that we had inherted from a company that our company had bought. The product was supposedly almost finished and close to working. On closer inspection it turned out to be not working yet.
Every morning I would walk over to my colleague’s desk and say, “you know, John, we are not stupid. This piece of shit just isn’t working” and then go back to my desk and hack away at it to make it work.So yes, we are not stupid. No need to pretend that what we are watching makes any sense. We are being played.
Yeah wp has all kinds of problems, none of them raul’s fault. The user interface, comments and such is buggy as heck and has been for some time. There seems to be no effort to fix the bugs. Could be the quality control person got the job on account of being somebody’s brother in law.
Or they’re using third party software for spam detection etc. Links might not play if they get checked against some blacklist. One of wp’s products called wordfence kicked me off somebody’s site. Not tae, i think because it’s an add on that you have to buy to make your site work less well.
Another way to get blocked on some sites is to go through a vpn.
In the end, even if you have a pretty good machine of any kind, adding a sufficient amount of safety gear will stop making it work.
In any case, I admire the tae comentariat for continuing to attempt commenting in spite of all the roadblocks that wp puts in hir way.Reading TAE Summary makes me think that we might be entering late state CCCP like state propaganda fatigue where state propaganda inspires jokes rather than outrage.
Re problems with wordpress, easily fixable by any competent coder. The fact that they’re not fixed makes them look like a feature. Makes the user blame bad code rather than censors for their posts not posting or links disappearing.
Raul, exactly. The chart shows why at 45 cycles even potted plants test positive for Covid. The power of exponential functions.
@mister roboto
If my understahding of PCR is correct, each step increase of 1 represents a doubling of whatever you’re amplifying.
So, 25 cycles would be an amplification of 2^25, or or roughly 32,000,000. 35 cycles would be roughly 32,000,000,000 or 32 billion, 40 cycles would be roughly 1,000,000,000,000.
In other words, each additioal 10 steps would add another 3 zeros to the amplification. These are rounded numbers.
2^10 = 1024, or 1K in digital binary parlance.@sumac carol
Type pfizer corporate rap sheet into your favorite search engine.
Should take you to corp-research dot org /pfizer
And it will take you to other criminal drug organizations
And as dr d points out, nobody ever goes to jail@sumac carol
Type pfizer corporate rap sheet into your favorite search engine.
Should take you to corp-research dot org /pfizer
And it will take you to other criminal drug organizations
And as dr d points out, nobody ever goes to jail@Wes
Saw you mention Milwaukee in yesterday’s post. Did you work for Bucyrus Erie or Harnischfeger? This is not related to Covid of course, but more to the decline of US manufacturing and the role of coal in our economy. These days, these sprawling rust belt factories stand empty or have been taken over by strip malls.
I was a tech writer for a while. Did manuals on coal mining machinery like draglines and got to hear a lot of stories from field engineers. It’s a job most marriages don’t survive. One guy, ex navy at Marion draglines told me he had a navy wife who was used to him being gone six months at a time and was capable of running their house all by herself. Erecting a dragline took a whole year and if it was in Siberia or South Africa, you didn’t get home much.
There are still a whole bunch of jobs like that, like military contractor bridge builders, etc. Whole segment of jobs mostly male where people’s social life is in bars and home is a cheap motel and the wife divorced you long ago.Consider the Pfizers, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even Solomon in all his glory was not arraigned like one of these.
To see the rap sheet of this group, go HERE. then ask yourself when taking the shot, am I feeling lucky?
