Photography Links - Sept 30, 2022

Here are some articles about photography that I found interesting or useful. 

Sleeping swans (Pixel 4a)

• Stanley Kubrick's rare Zeiss Planar 50mm F0.7 'Barry Lyndon' lens now in Museum of Optics. "Only ten units were ever produced, with six of them being made specifically for NASA. Three of the remaining units were acquired and modified by iconic filmmaker Stanley Kubrick for use in his film, Barry Lyndon. In a day in age when low-light filmmaking was limited by the sensitivity of the film being used, Kubrick and his executive producer Jan Harlan opted to use one of these ultra-fast primes to film a scene that was lit by only two candles, each of which had three wicks for additional light."
• Aperture in Photography: A Complete Guide. "Aperture can seem like one of the most challenging camera settings to fully understand, but once you understand it, your photography will improve immensely."
• Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners. "The 2022 competition saw over 8,000 images competing for the title of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2022, with photographers submitting images from all around the world."
• Ansel Adams’s Interview with Playboy. A long summary of the interview. No direct link as far as I can see, unfortunately. If anyone has a link to the full interview, please post it in the comments.
• Blind Photographer ‘Hopes for the Best’ in Capturing Stunning Macro Shots. "Rachael Andrews is a visually impaired photographer who first used a camera purely as a practical tool to help her see everyday objects such as food labels."
• How To Get More Dynamic Range In Your Images. "The term ‘dynamic range’ is used a lot in photography, but what exactly does it mean, and how can you ensure your images have it? Read on for James Paterson’s straightforward guide to getting maximum resolution and tonal range in your images."
• The Importance of Aspect Ratios in Landscape Photography. "Back in the days of film photography, you had to think very carefully about the aspect ratio of your image before you shot it, and different aspect ratios held enthusiastic fans that specialized in their usage. The advent of digital and the standardization of the sensor into just two aspect ratios has seen that focus die away a bit, but they remain highly important in how your images are rendered, and this excellent video tutorial discusses their usage."

COVID-19 Infrection Increases Risk of Vascular Problems

Here's more bad news about COVID-19 infections. A large study in the UK shows an increase in vascular problems (heart attack, stroke, thrombosis) after infections. The study analysed cases after the onset of the pandemic through December 2020, so doesn't show the effect of vaccination. However, it is noted that the risk of post-COVID vascular problems is lower in people who weren't hospitalized, so I would hope that vaccination would reduce the risk.

(I wanted to quote the conclusions, but copying text from the article appears to be blocked, so you'll have to read them for yourself).

The 100 Best TV Shows

Rolling Stone has updated it's list of the 100 best TV shows of all time. It's an interesting list and about what I expected. I am not, and never have been, a heavy watcher of network and commercial TV so I'm not familiar with about half of the shows. 

There are a few notable omissions. Fawlty Towers is included, but not Doctor Who. Several classic comedies but no classic westerns; if you're going to include The Honeymooners, then where are Bonanza or Gunsmoke? Yes, there's Star Trek but what about Babylon 5?

But I wouldn't argue with their top pick.

Tampa's In Trouble

Tampa has had a reputation for being relatively safe from hurricanes. With the approach of Hurricane Ian, it looks like that is about to change. Even if the city is spared a direct hit, it's in serious danger from storm surge, which could inundate large portions of the city and surrounding coastal areas.

The Tampa Bay Times recently published a series of articles called Rising Threat which looks at the risks Tamps faces from hurricanes. It's gripping and occasionally grim reading.  Keep in mind, as the articles point out, that even a relatively weak storm could wreak havoc, and Ian is not a weal storm. 

Tampa Bay is more vulnerable to less intense hurricanes than anywhere else in the state. The perilous position is a matter of both geography and explosive development. The threat is greater because too few people comprehend it. Faulty maps, complicated science and outdated mindsets instill a false sense of security.

The region’s vulnerability has drawn national headlines. Fascination turns on an imagined Category 5 laying waste to cities. With potential surge cresting 20 feet, a big storm would no doubt be devastating. But dwelling on a Hollywood doomsday obscures threats that residents are more likely to encounter and could more reasonably prepare for.

Update: I wrote this yesterday evening. As of this morning it looks like Ian may make landfall south of Tampa, which would spare it the worst of the storm surge. Even then, there could be a lot of flooding the Tampa Bay area. 

Featured Links - September 26, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Fall flowers 

• The Big Bang should have made cracks in spacetime—why haven’t we found them? "Cosmic strings' greatest power? Their ability to confound physicists." Me too. I have never felt comfortable with string theory. Maybe we haven't found them because they're not there?
• GTA VI hack emphasizes how the video game industry is far too secretive. "Companies routinely treat game development like some nebulous process, and it only adds to the general lack of knowledge regarding how it all works."
• This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it? "Silphion cured diseases and made food tasty, but Emperor Nero allegedly consumed the last stalk. Now, a Turkish researcher thinks he’s found a botanical survivor."
• Shock! Horror! It's a Shaggy Dog Story. "The September update to the OED features revised entries for SHOCK and related words, including an intriguing "group of words for dogs dating back to the early modern period."
• Astronomers unveil new—and puzzling—features of mysterious fast radio bursts. "Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun's annual output. More than 15 years after the deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves were first discovered, their perplexing nature continues to surprise scientists—and newly published research only deepens the mystery surrounding them."
• Long COVID Experts and Advocates Say the Government Is Ignoring 'the Greatest Mass-Disabling Event in Human History'. I am seeing more articles about Long COVID, so maybe people are finally starting to take notice.
• Stick A Note — It’s life-changing! No, really … life-changing. A sticky note program that might actually be useful. 

Photo of the Week - September 25, 2022

Here are some wildflowers on the trail through Alex Roberton Park down to the lake. I thought most of the flowers would have died off because of our drought and heat over the last month but I was pleased to see I was wrong.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F8, 1/400 second, ISO 640, Velvia film simulation

 

Pharoah Sanders, RIP

Sad news today. Jazz great Pharoah Sanders has died at the age of 81. I was fortunate to see him perform several times, each time was something special. His album Karma with its spiritual anthem, "The Creator Has a Master Plan", is one of the absolute greatest pieces of 20th-century music and something that I turn to for solace in times of need. RIP, Pharoah, and thank you. 

Update: Here's a lovely tribute from Pitchfork.

Sanders’ playing on late-1960s and early-‘70s albums like Karma and Thembi is visionary and intense; critics, in some sense, were not wrong to hear a hard break from the music they knew. But it is also tender, hopeful, and generous. There are big, buoyant grooves and warm, communal melodies. In the shifting inflection of a single note, he can move you from joy to anguish, terror to beatitude. Short of Coltrane himself, no saxophonist had access to further extremity of feeling. Awful pain, simmering defiance, burning need, sweet consummation—if you’ve ever felt it deep in your spirit or your gut, it’s there somewhere in Sanders’ music.

Saturday Sounds - Pete Seeger - Rainbow Quest TV Show

Pete Seeger was an icon of American folk music so it's not surprising that he had his own TV show. Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest ran during 1965 and 1966 and featured Seger with a cavalcade of folk music stars: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, June Carter and Johnny Cash, to name just a few, as well as Pete himself on banjo and guitar. You can view all 39 episodes on YouTube.

The shows were copied from the original broadcast masters so the quality (both audio and video) is quite good for the period. They're recorded in mono and the video is black-and-white, but you can't have everything, and the performances are excellent. 

I've only sampled a few of the shows so far, but this one, featuring Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee is my favourite.

We're Toast 28

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Fallen trees

The End of Roe Will Spark a Digital Civil War. "New privacy and expression laws that vary state to state will be a nightmare for platforms, and for users’ rights."

The Hunt for Big Hail. "Hailstones of record size are falling left and right, and hailstorm damage is growing. But there is surprisingly little research to explain why."

Reality is Trolling You: The Farcical Nightmare of Post-Trump America. "To be an American, picking your way through the debris field of what used to be, at least nominally, a democracy—before Trump and his confederacy of dunces defiled, corrupted, plundered, pimped, sabotaged, and otherwise destabilized it from within—is to live in a nation permanently on edge, a nation whose nervous system has been short-circuited by post-traumatic stress, a nation that knows it will be retraumatized tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and maybe for every tomorrow to come by the farcical awfulness of just about everything."

Climate Change Is Shaking the Global Economy. IMF and WTO Demand a United Front. "The heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization on Monday warned about the risk of inaction on climate change and called for broad collective action at a time when threats from extreme weather events are escalating around the world."

Russian official says civilian satellites may be “legitimate” military target. "Russia wasn't happy about Starlink providing broadband in Ukraine after invasion."

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic. "As of May 31, 2022, there were 6·9 million reported deaths and 17·2 million estimated deaths from COVID-19, as reported by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME; throughout the report, we rely on IHME estimates of infections and deaths; note that the IHME gives an estimated range, and we refer to the mean estimate). This staggering death toll is both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels. Too many governments have failed to adhere to basic norms of institutional rationality and transparency, too many people—often influenced by misinformation—have disrespected and protested against basic public health precautions, and the world's major powers have failed to collaborate to control the pandemic."

Norman Rockwell's Political Art

I've always liked Norman Rockwell's art ever since encountering it on the covers of Saturday Evening Post when I was young. I know he is sometimes regarded as bland and "just an illustrator" but if you take a closer look at his art, there's much more to it than that.

Here's a YouTube video that looks at some of his political art (yes, he did some political paintings). I found it quite fascinating. 

Norman Rockwell is known for his paintings which, many people will say, are far from daring. Some will say that they’re outright boring. He illustrated the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, a very popular magazine during the first half of the century. His art was made to be as “mass-market” as possible, which is why it’s unsurprisingly apolitical and uncontroversial. Yet, Rockwell has done political paintings and social commentary and, in this video, we’ll take a look at two projects of his which had a political undertone: The Four Freedoms series (with notably Freedom From Want) during WWII and The Problem We All Live With, which depicts the story of Ruby Bridges during the New Orleans Desegregation Crisis in 1960.

 

Income Inequality in Britain and the United States

We tend to think of Britain and the United States (and Canada, by extension) as rich societies. That's true in many respects, but that wealth isn't evenly distributed. This means that other countries, with lower standards of living by standard economic measures, may be better places for people at the low end of the economic spectrum. In other words, you're much better off being poor in a country like Norway than you are in the United States or Britain.

This is described in more detail in this Financial Times article. 

Starting at the top of the ladder, Britons enjoy very high living standards by virtually any benchmark. Last year the top-earning 3 per cent of UK households each took home about £84,000 after tax, equivalent to $125,000 after adjusting for price differences between countries. This puts Britain’s highest earners narrowly behind the wealthiest Germans and Norwegians and comfortably among the global elite.

So what happens when we move down the rungs? For Norway, it’s a consistently rosy picture. The top 10 per cent rank second for living standards among the top deciles in all countries; the median Norwegian household ranks second among all national averages, and all the way down at the other end, Norway’s poorest 5 per cent are the most prosperous bottom 5 per cent in the world. Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor.

Britain is a different story. While the top earners rank fifth, the average household ranks 12th and the poorest 5 per cent rank 15th. Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

I don't have equivalent statistics for Canada, but I'd assume that we are somewhat better than the US, mainly due to our (stressed) universal health care. But we have a long way to go to address some of the clear inequalities in our country.  

Project Orion Deep Dive

Project Orion was a secret Cold War project to develop a spaceship powered by nuclear explosions. It sounds like a crazy idea but it probably would have worked and delivered hundreds or even thousands of tons of payload into orbit. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of the early 1960s rendered it politically unfeasible. 

There's a good BBC documentary about it on YouTube.

If you really want to geek out about the details, here's a link to a declassified document (a 176 page PDF) of highly technical design information. I found it quite fascinating. 

Of course, setting off a few hundred nuclear bombs in the atmosphere (or even low-Earth orbit) isn't a good idea, but the design is feasible assuming you could assemble it from large sections launched into orbit by non-nuclear boosters (something that is covered in the design document). 

Featured Links - September 19, 2022

 Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The marsh on a hot summer's morning

“Word Window” in trouble with Microsoft. "Microsoft has dropped down hard on a UK teacher with a little bit of plastic helping dyslexic students read.  It seems the company can’t learn from past mistakes."

Tolkien and the Horrors of the Great War. "The First World War left a lasting impression on Tolkien.

2022 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology."

Imagining COVID is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short. It’s time to wake up. "COVID is nothing at all like the flu. It is causing a vastly worse scale of damage. We must change our tactics to dramatically cut transmission. In addition to a more vigorous campaign to increase vaccine booster coverage, we need to invest in indoor ventilation and actively promote the benefits of wearing high-quality masks in crowded indoor settings."

‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug filled reality of life in an oil camp. "Before work like Hark! A Vagrant made her famous, the Canadian cartoonist spent two years in the Alberta wilderness, see-sawing between boredom and fear for her safety. Now she is finally ready to tell the story."

“It’s just what I did:” First woman to drive solo around Australia in a non-Tesla EV. "It’s a simple statement that belies some hard truths. One, that there have only been an estimated 20 people to date who are known to have completed the “Big Lap” in an EV – across remote expanses of the outback with little in the way of electric car chargers."

15 Reddit Acronyms Everyone Should Know. "Feel right at home while browsing Reddit by learning these popular acron yms that Redditors use.'  Having been on the internet for about 30 years, I knew some of these, but not all.

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms. "Worshippers are leaving the Church of Latter-day Saints in record numbers, and some are finding solace with an apostate band of psilocybin-loving spiritual explorers looking for God — one trip at a time."

Photo of the Week - September 18, 2022

Here's a picture of a building in downtown Port Hope, Ontario. It isn't quite the angle I wanted, but I didn't want to risk standing out in traffic to get it. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F2.8, 1/4700 second, ISO 400, Provia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - James Keelaghan - Second Hand

James Keelaghan is a Canadian singer-songwriter who now has released more than a dozen albums. Nancy and I saw him for the first time not long after we started dating in 1986. In the intervening years, we've seen him perform at least a dozen times (maybe more, we've lost track). He's a brilliant songwriter and several of his songs have become standards in the small world of Canadian folk music ("Jenny Bryce", "Kiri's Piano", "Cold Missouri Waters", to name a few). 

His new album, Second Hand, has just been released, and it's another good one. All of his albums are available for purchase on his website. History is a good place to start. And if you ever get the chance to see him perform, go. You won't regret it. 

A Deep Dive Into Text Spam

The odds are pretty good that you've gotten some spammy texts. Usually, they're pretty easy to spot, but there are some that on the surface, at least, seem innocuous. They appear to be just the text equivalent of a wrong number. But don't be deceived; there's a lot more to these, and none of it's good. 

 This is the first step in what is, at its core, an old-fashioned “romance scam,” in which the scammer exploits a lonely and/or horny person by faking a long-distance, usually romantic relationship. After the scammer has gained the trust of their victim, they convince them to transfer money, often for an investment; in some cases, the victim can be enticed into several successive transfers before they realize they’re being played.

This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or “pig-butchering,” because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter. Originating in sophisticated online-fraud networks first developed to take advantage of Chinese offshore gamblers, the sha zhu pan scams end with targets depositing money into forex or gold trading — or, seemingly most commonly, into fake cryptocurrency platforms. (Interestingly, they’re often not “romantic” at all, and instead rely on cultivating a trusting friendship that culminates with a little bit of friendly investing advice.)

The article goes into detail on how these scams work and what's behind them. It's definitely worth reading if you value your online security.  

Generating a Video from Text

Last week I posted about AI imaging generators and how the technology "will change everything".  That's especially true for AI-generated videos. I thought that technology might be somewhat down the road, but it's already being marketed. 

Video editing software company Runway put out an awesome promotional video where it teases creating any scene that you can think of but as a video.

The video starts with an operator typing in “Import city street.” A street scene is created and then tweaked with the input “Make it look more cinematic.”

An Ode to Casey's Rubber Stamps

Rubber stamps are one of the oldest printing technologies and yes, they are still around. My first job out of university was working for a company that made them, among other printing gear, so I got quite familiar with how they were made. But nothing that Barnard Matthews made compares with the stamps made by John Casey of Casey's Rubber Stamps in New York City.  

See how stamps are made inside NYC's iconic Casey Rubber Stamps. The shop has been owned by John Casey for nearly 20 years. It's located on East 11th Street in downtown NYC. I loved watching Casey make his stamps in the video. So much care and focus goes into his process. Residents and tourists can make their own rubber stamps in the shop, too. Nothing beats handmade items, so if you're in need of some high quality stamps, you can check out the shop's site here or stop by in person.

 

A Good Magnifier App for Android

Being very nearsighted, one of the things I use my phone for is as a magnifier. Samsung has a good magnifier widget for its phones, which I used quite happily when I had a Samsung phone. Unfortunately, Google hasn't seen fit to include one for its Pixel phones.

When I got my Pixel 4a, I used an app that was called (I think) Simple Magnifier, but it hadn't been updated in quite a while and eventually I had to uninstall it. I used the camera app when I needed a magnifier (usually at least once a day) but that isn't really a satisfactory option.

I started searching again for new magnifier app and found this article that reviews eight of them. I wanted something free with basic features; I don't need fancy options like colour filters. I finally settled on an app called Reading Glasse-Free and Ad-Free. It's quite basic with just a slider for the zoom and a button to turn on the flashlight, but it suits my needs. 

Note that this is not the Reading Glasses app that's described in the article. I had intended to download that one but got the wrong app. However, based on the review, I prefer this one for its simplicity.

Featured Links - September 12, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

• Obnoxiously Large Satellite Could Mean Bad News for Astronomers Observing the Skies. "AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on September 10." As if the Starlink satellite constellation wasn't enough of a headache for astronomers, these satellites will be much brighter.
• New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun. "New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun."
• September 2022 La Niña update: it’s Q & A time. "Ocean and atmospheric conditions tell us that La Niña—the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern—currently reigns in the tropical Pacific. It’s looking very likely that the long-predicted third consecutive La Niña winter will happen, with a 91% chance of La Niña through September–November and an 80% chance through the early winter (November–January)."
• This Summer’s Drought Is Europe’s Worst in 500 Years. What Happened Last Time? "The 1540 megadrought brought mass suffering to the continent, but European society quickly bounced back."
• It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy. "The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism."
• I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah. "I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was homeschooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and take over the government through sheer numbers."
• A Time of Reckoning for US Media. "Our democracy is at risk in part because our media is failing. Every rational voice with a platform–on social media, in newspapers, on TV–must speak up, make that clear, demand best practices. If not, unmoored from truth, we will soon lose the essence of what made the US great."

Photo of the Week - September 11, 2022

Here's a picture of the rather imposing water tower in Coburg, Ontario. Like many modern tall structures, it's also capped by several cell network antennae. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F8, 1/700 second, ISO 400, Provia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Richard Thompson Acoustic Trio - Live From Honolulu

I've been a fan of the British guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson ever since his days in Fairport Convention in the late 1960s and have seen him perform seven times. He's the best acoustic guitarist I've seen and right up there with the best of the electric guitarists; proficiency at that level is a rare talent. And then there are his songs; he's up there with Bob Dylan and Neil Young as one of the best of his generation.

Today's album is a live recording made in Honolulu in 2006 featuring him on acoustic guitar, fellow Fairport alumnus Danny Thompson on acoustic bass, and Michael Jerome on percussion. It's a good sample of some of Thompson's best songs. Face it: most songwriters would be lucky to write one or two songs as good as Crawl Back (Under My Stone), Misunderstood, Al Bowley's in Heaven, or Waltzing's for Dreamers. And that's only four of the thirteen songs on this album. 

Thompson is still writing and performing. If he comes your way do not miss him. You will not regret it. 

We're Toast 27

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Tree at the beach

This Is How You Get a Second Chernobyl — Or a Third World War. "Artillery shells are falling all around a Ukrainian nuclear plant, increasing the risk of an environmental Catastrophe.

TRUMP ALMIGHTY: Meet the Apostle of Right-Wing Christian Nationalism.  "The new Republican fringe is done with the separation of church and state. William "Dutch" Sheets has been trying to tear down that wall for decades."

A "Solar Tsunami" Could Entirely Wipe Out The Internet Within A Decade, Suggests Study. A severe solar storm could affect undersea cables that carry much of the internet's traffic.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. "Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences."

Ag’s challenging future in a changing climate. "More drought and higher heat from climate change increase risks of devastating global food shock events."

Food supply and security concerns mount as impacts stress agriculture. "In recent decades, worrisome rises in drought, heat waves, and air pollution have stressed agriculture."

World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds. "Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change."

AI Imaging Tech Will Change Everything

Pardon the hyperbole in the title, but in this case, I think it's justified.

In the last few months, I've been hearing more and more about a new AI-based imaging technology (known as imaging synthesis modelling or ISM). You may have heard of programs like DALL-E 2 or Midjourney or seen some of the images that people have created using them. For example, here's a cat picture created by SF author John Scalzi using Midjourney.  

Cat by John Scalzi using Midjourney

As I person with no artistic talent other than photography, I find this quite impressive. 

Now there's a new ISM tool called Stable Diffusion that is getting a lot of notice because it's open source and can be run on a moderately powerful home PC (my son's gaming rig would have no trouble running it). And because it's open source, people are finding all sorts of interesting uses for it. Ars Technica has published a long article that looks at what Stable Diffusion can do, what people are using it for now, where it might go in the future, and some of the implications. Some of them are rather disquieting.

As hinted at above, Stable Diffusion's public release has raised alarm bells among people who fear its cultural and economic impact. Unlike DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion's training data (the "weights") are available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions. The official Stable Diffusion release (and DreamStudio) includes automatic "NSFW" filters (nudity) and an invisible tracking watermark embedded in the images, but these restrictions can easily be circumvented in the open source code. This means Stable Diffusion can be used to create images that OpenAI currently blocks with DALL-E 2: propaganda, violent imagery, pornography, images that potentially violate corporate copyright, celebrity deepfakes, and more. In fact, there are already some private Discord servers dedicated to pornographic output from the model.

But wait. There's more!

The synthesis technology used by tools like Stable Diffusion isn't limited to just images. People are already working on adapting it to video. 

 Stable Diffusion and other models are already starting to take on dynamic video generation and manipulation, so expect photorealistic video generation via text prompts before too long. From there, it's logical to extend these capabilities to audio and music, real-time video games, and 3D VR experiences. Soon, advanced AI may do most of the creative heavy lifting with just a few suggestions. Imagine unlimited entertainment generated in real-time, on demand. "I expect it to be fully multi-modal," said Mostaque, "So you can create anything you can imagine, like the Star Trek holodeck experience."

ISMs are also a dramatic form of image compression: Stable Diffusion takes hundreds of millions of images and squeezes knowledge about them into a 4.2GB weights file. With the correct seed and settings, certain generated images can be reproduced deterministically. One could imagine using a variation of this technology in the future to compress, say, an 8K feature film into a few megabytes of text. Once that's the case, anyone could compose their own feature films that way as well. The implications of this technology are only just beginning to be explored, so it may take us in wild new directions we can't foresee at the moment

Hold on to your hats, folks. To paraphrase Al Jolson: "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

A Style Guide for Sensitive Words

In my Google Chrome bookmarks bar, I have links to the two style guides I use the most: the Microsoft Writing Style Guide and the Google developer documentation style guide. I have several more in book form on the desk beside me. And in my info directory on my hard drive, there's a directory with quite a few others. I guess I'm a style guide junkie. 

I just found a new one that could be especially useful in these testy times. Language, Please is " a free, living resource for journalists and storytellers seeking to thoughtfully cover evolving social, cultural, and identity-related topics."

The most useful part of the site for most readers will likely be the Style Guidance section, which covers topics, such as class and social standing, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. 

Here's an example from the guide:

blind / low vision: There can be a wide range of experiences among people with blindness or vision loss. Total blindness is the complete loss of sight, while low vision is significant loss of sight; legal blindness is specifically defined as having 20/200 visual acuity. Terms like “vision impairment” or “visually impaired” can be read as portraying blindness negatively. Person-first language when discussing blindness can also be used, such as the “person who is blind” or “person with low vision,” though taking into account the person’s preferred terminology whenever possible aligns your framing with their lived experience.

I will be bookmarking this site, not so much for my own writing, but to help me understand some of the terms I keep running into in my daily reading. 

2022 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2022 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday at ChiCon 8, the World Science Fiction Convention. The awards are voted on by supporting and attending members of the convention and have been the pre-eminent SFF award since the 1950s.

These are the fiction winners:

• Best Novel:  A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (Tor)
• Best Novella: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: “Bots of the Lost Ark”, by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, Jun 2021)
• Best Short Story: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021)
• Best Series: Wayward Children, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Graphic Story or Comic: Far Sector, written by N.K. Jemisin, art by Jamal Campbell (DC)

Arkady Martine also won the Hugo for her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, which I have and will get to eventually. N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Best Novel Hugos for her Broken Earth trilogy. I got about twenty pages into the first book a while back and lost interest, but I will give it a second try one of these days. Far Sector looks interesting and is now available on Hoopla so I will read that in due course. 

Featured Links - September 6. 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Downtown Port Hope

• A Battle of Boos and Cheers at the Symphony. "In the early 1980s, John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music defied the seriousness of classical music. Not everyone liked that."
• Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman,’ from Giant Mechanical Spiders to the Joker. "In our epic new interview, the legendary author tells all: the status of future seasons of Netflix's chart-topping show, how he stopped the worst movie adaptation ever, how he really feels about the DC superheroes in the 'Sandman' comic book, and much, much more."
• Peter Nicholls’ “Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years” Available from Ansible Editions. If you don't know who Peter Nicholls was, then read the linked article. Then buy the book. Proceeds go to supporting the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 
• Study raises concerns about the effectiveness of the monkeypox vaccine. "But one of the senior authors of the paper said what is clear is that people being administered this vaccine ought to be cautious about assuming they are protected against infection."
• What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? 'Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams.'
• Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen. "Every time we saw a leak, it pretty quickly exceeded our flammability limits." They should have listened to Jeryy Pournelle.

No Labour This Weekend

It's another long weekend up here in the Great Not-So-White North, namely the Labour Day weekend in which we celebrate the toil of the men and women who made this country great. Or something like that. 

So I will be doing things like mowing the lawn, barbecuing, and watching the Blue Jays try to keep winning. I'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, here's a cat picture.

McGee

Researching the Earliest Printed Books

Printing has been with us for more than 600 years but not a lot is known about the earliest printed books. Researchers are using new technology to discover more about how the earliest books were produced.  

The typed word dominates our lives today, but it’s still a relatively fresh invention in the timeline of humanity—and despite how drastically printing altered our societies, there’s still a lot we don’t know about its early history. Recently, a team of scientists put some of the earliest known printed documents through a high-powered X-ray examination at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, to better understand how these texts were produced.

The first printed documents were made in Asia using woodblocks by 600 CE, a process called xylography. Centuries later, Johannes Gutenberg used a retooled wine press and a set of metal pieces to make a couple hundred bibles using movable type, an innovation that drastically sped up the rate at which information could be printed.

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2022

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in August. 

Movies

• Elvis. We saw this at the theatre and I'm glad we did; it's made for the big screen. It's the story of Elvis Presley through the lens of the 1980s MTV generation, big, bold, and flashy, just like Elvis. I liked it a lot. 
• Prey: This has been getting a lot of buzz, which is mostly well deserved. It's certainly one of the best movies in the Predator franchise, although I found it rather implausible. 
• Inside the Mind of a Cat. This short (just over an hour) Netflix documentary is a bit too cute for its own good but does offer some useful insights into the minds of our feline overlords. 
• Samaritan: The only reason you'd want to watch this is because it stars Sylvester Stallone. It's a decent enough superhero action flick but nothing special. (Netflix)
• Top Gunn: Maverick. Another recruiting movie for the US Navy. It really is time for Tom Cruise to retire. 

TV Shows

• Star Trek Discovery (season 4). I really disliked the earlier seasons of this, but season 4 was watchable, at least. (Crave)
• A Stitch in Time: Learning about history by recreating the garments people wore in historic paintings. I found it quite fascinating. (TVO)
• The Sandman: Neil Gaiman's comic book classic finally makes it to the screen and it was worth the wait. A beautifully realized adaptation. I want more. (Neflix).
• Locke and Key (season 3). This probably should have finished after the first season. I think they wrapped it up with this season; at least I sure hope so. (Netflix)
• Monty Don's Japanese Gardens: A two-episode series touring some of Japan's best gardens. (Acorn TV)
• For All Mankind (season 3). I enjoyed this a lot, but it is getting quite implausible. Most of the space technology has had at least some grounding in reality, but they lost me with the North Korean. (Apple TV+)
• House of the Dragon. I really didn't like the first episode. The second episode was quite a bit better, so maybe there is some hope for the series. (Amazon Prime)
• Endeavour (season 8): Another excellent season of the prequel to Inspector Morse. I'm always amazed at just how much death and depravity there is in a quiet British university town. (Acorn TV)