I ran into a problem using Lightbox plugins on my blogs. I’m currently running modified versions of the Constellation Theme, which is full of HTML 5 goodness and styled to re-flow according to screensize (ie is mobile adaptable).
No matter what Lightbox plugin I’d been using since upgrading WordPress to the latest version (3.3), the overlay was showing a margin and an offset as exemplified below:
This is because of the way the overlay is codded to effect the < body > tag. Constellation styles the < HTML > tag in ways usually reserved for < body > so by making a change to the Lightbox Javascript file, one can correct this behavior.
I ran into a problem using Lightbox plugins on my blogs. I’m currently running modified versions of the Constellation Theme, which is full of HTML 5 goodness and styled to re-flow according to screensize (ie is mobile adaptable).
No matter what Lightbox plugin I’d been using since upgrading WordPress to the latest version (3.3), the overlay was showing a margin and an offset as exemplified below:
This is because of the way the overlay is codded to effect the < body > tag. Constellation styles the < HTML > tag in ways usually reserved for < body > so by making a change to the Lightbox Javascript file, one can correct this behavior.
From The Mona Lisa Curse which aired last night on TVO.
[9m:04s] The death of Bob Rauchenberg to me is not just the loss of a friend, it suggests the death of something that I love about art. So much about what I loved about Rauchenberg’s work was that every formal choice he made came from meeting the world head on. Most of his work like all good art is dense with meaning. It’s not some vacuous exercise in picture making meant to sustain the boys at Sotheby’s or Christie’s with a big price. It’s entirely born of experience, it isn’t born of the market. Some think that so much of today’s art mirrors, and thus criticizes decadence. Not so. It’s just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function. It is part of the problem. The art world dutifully copies our money driven celebrity obsessed entertainment culture. The same fixation on fame. The same obedience to mass media, jostles for our attention through it’s noise and wow and flutter.
Art should make us feel more clearly and more intelligently. It should give us coherent sensations which otherwise we would not have had. That is what brought me to this city [New York]. That is what market culture is killing.
For me, the cultural artefact of the last 50 years has been the domination of the art market. Far more striking than any individual painting or sculpture. It has changed art’s relationship to the world and is drowning its sense of purpose. The flood that threatened to destroy a rich history of art in Florence in the Sixties has its parellel in today’s art world. From the Sixties on the belief in art as a way of making money began as trickle, turned into a stream and finally became a great, brown, roaring flood.
And what resurfaces after this deluge? Art like this, stripped of everything but its market value.
THIS:
[13m:37s] If art can’t tell us about the world we live in then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.
And that is something we are going to have to face more and more as the years go on; that nasty question that never used to be asked because the assumption was always that it was answered long ago: what good is art? What use is art? What does it do? Is what it does actually worth doing? And an art which is completly moneterized in the way that it’s getting these days is going to have to answer these questions or its going to die.
I love how cinematic they are …. they all look like stills from a film. Also I’m noticing their quality, probably due to the lensing, maybe also due to the richness of the grayscale. Could similar be achieved with an iPhone? Is it all pretty much just a question of shooting angle?
Greg Bear, The Country of the Mind (From Queen of Angels). Attributed to pseudo-author and character from the novel, Martin Burke, in his meta-fictional book, The Country of the Mind 2043-2044.
The advent of nano-therapy – the use of tiny surgical prochines to alter neuronal pathways and perform literal brain restructuring – gave us the opportunity to fully explore the Country of the Mind.
I could not find any method of knowing the state of individual neurons in the hypothalamic complex without invasive methods such as probs ending in a microelectrode, or radioactively tagged binding agents – none of which would work for the hours necessary to explore the Country. But tiny prochines capable of sitting within an axon or neuron, or sitting nearby and measuring the neuron’s state, sending a tagged signal through microscopic “living” wires to sensitive external recievers … I had my solution. Designing and building them was less of a problem than I expected; the first prochines I used were nano therapy status-reporting units, tiny sensors which monitored the activity of surgical prochines and which did virtually everything I required. They had already existed for five years in therapeutic centers.
For a healthy mentality, what is aware in each of us at any given moment is the primary personality and whatever subpersonalities, agents or talents it has deemed necessary to consult and utilize; that which is not “conscious” is merely for the moment (be that moment a split second or a decade or even a lifetime) either inactive or not consulted. Most mental organons – for such is the word I use to refer to the separate elements of mentality – are capable of emergence into awareness at some time or another. The major exceptions to this rule are undeveloped or suppressed subpersonalities, and those organons that are concerned solely with bodily functions or maintenance of the brain’s physical structure. Occasionally, these basic organons will appear as symbols within a higher-level brain activity, bid the flow of information to these basic organons 1.5 almost completely on sided. They do not comment an their activities; they are automatons as old as the brain itself.
This does not mean that the “subconscious” has been completely charted. Much remains a mystery particular, those structures that Jung referred to as “archetypes”. ” I I have seen their effects, their results, but I have never seen an archetype itself and I cannot say to which category of organon I would consign it if I could find it.
The individual differetiates from its world and its social group when it is able to observe all their elements as manipulable signs. In any individual, cultured or not, “conciousness” develops when all portions of its mind agree on the nature and meaning of their various “message characters”. This integration results in a persona, an “overseer” of the mental agreement – the concious personality.
Imagine somebody else being allowed to lucidly dream within you; to be awake yet explore your dreams. That’s part of what the Country of the Mind experience is like; but of course, our personal memories of dreams are confused. It is even possible for two or more agents to dream seperate dreams at the same time – further adding to the confusion. When a dream intersects the Country at all, it does so like an arrow shot through a layer-cake, picking up impressions from as many as a dozen levels of territory. When I go into your Country I can see each territory clearly and study it for what it is, not for what your personal dream-interpreter wants it to be.
* * *
“Why does the Country of the Mind exist, Mr. Burke?” Albigoni asked. “I’ve read your papers and books but they’re quite technical.” Martin gathered his thoughts though he had explained this a hundred times to colleagues and even the general public. This time, he would not allow any artistic embellishments. The Country was fabulous enough in plain.
“It’s the ground of all human thought, for all our big and little selves. It’s different in each of us. There is no such thing as aunified human consciousness. There are primary routines which we call personalities, one of which usually makes up the concious self, and they are partially intergrated with other routines which I call subpersonalities, talents, or agents. These are actually limited versions of subpersonalities, not complete; to be expressed, or put in control of the overall mind, they need to be brough forward and smootly meshed with the primary personality, that is, what used to be called the conciousness, our foremost self. Talents are complexes of skills and instincts, learned and prepatterned behaviour. Sex is the most obvious and numerous – twenty talents in full grown adults. Anger is another; there are usually five talents devoted to anger response. In an integrated, socially adapted adult older than thirty, only two such anger talents usualy remain – social anger and personal anger. Ours is an age of social anger.”
“Talents are personalities?”
“Not fully devloped. They are not autonomous in balanced and healthy individuals.”
“What other talents are there?”
“Hundreds, most rudimentary, nearly all borrowing or in parallel with the primary routines, all smoothly intergrating, meshing,” he knitted his knuckles gearwise and twisted his hands, “to make up the healthy individual.”
“You say nearly all. What about those routines and subroutines that don’t borrow, that are most likely to be … what you call subpersonalities or ‘close secondaries’?”
“Very complex diagram,” Martin said. “It’s in my second book.” He nodded at the tablet’s screen. “Subpersonalities or close secondaries include male/female modeling routines, what Jung called animus and anima … Major occupation routines, that is, the personality one assumes when carrying out one’s business or a major role in society … Any routine that could conceivably inform or replace the primary personality for a substantial length of time.”
“Being an artist or a poet, perhaps?”
“Or a husband/wife or a father/mother.”
Albigoni nodded, eyes closed and almost lost in his broad face. “From what little research I’ve managed to do in the last thirty-six hours, I’ve learned that therapy is more often than not a stimulus of discarded or suppressed routines and subroutines to achieve a closer balance.”
Martin nodded. “Or the suppression of an unwanted or defective subpersonality. That can sometimes be done through exterior therapy – talking it out – or through interior stimulus, such as direct simulation of fantasized growth experiences. Or it can be done through physical remodeling of the brain, chemical expression and repression, or more radically, microsurgery to close of the loci of undesired dominant routines.”
Also, from Slant (where Martin Burke is again a character):
“Intelligence and creativity often accompany more fragile constitutions,” Martin says. “There’s every evidence some people are more sensitive and alert, more attuned to reality, and this puts a greater load on their systems. Still, these people make themselves very useful in our society. We couldn’t get along without them – ”
“Genius is next to madness, is that what you’re saying Doctor?”
“Genius is a particular state of mind … a type of mind, only distantly comparable to the types I’m talking about.”
I have some private posts here and there on my various WordPress blogs. WordPress is coded to display the word ‘Private:’ in front of whatever your title is, like this:
I had the thought that it might be better to replace the word with a lock icon, so that it would look like this:
In order to do this, I looked into the WordPress Codex and found the function that inserts the word ‘Private’.
WordPress’ get_the_title(); function inserts the string `Private`
this function is coded between lines 104-120 of the post-template.php file, located in the wp-includes directory.
line 115 reads like this $private_title_format = apply_filters('private_title_format', __('Private: %s'));
Now that I knew what to change, I Googled for a lock image and found a no-copyright black one on Wikipedia, at size 360 x 360 pixels. I resized it to 16 x 16, and uploaded to the wp-includes folder. (I didn’t see why it should be in another).
Next, I coded it with an absolute url, since WordPress’s various functions to make clean urls meant that simply using <img src="lock.png"> didn’t work. Line 115 in post-template.php now looked like this example:
“Politics was the new popular entertainment, in a way that it had not been since the war and as it would not be for a long time to come; he estimated the interval at twenty-two years: 1945; 1967; 1989 ….” -Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven 1992 (p82, English trans 1997)
I posted this last December 10th on my Curation.ca blog/project and have been surprised to see it actually come true. Mulisch died in October of last year, so hasn’t lived to see it, but since January we have seen popular protests all over the world – from the Arab Spring, including the Libyan Civil War, to the Occupy movements.
On November 12th 2011 I was at the Design our Tomorrow conference, held at Covocation Hall at the University of Toronto. Except for the first two speakers (Steve Mann and Greg Kolodziejzk) I was able to record the presentations.
Session 1: Monumental
Edward Burtynsky
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_edwardburtinsky.mp3] Download MP3 Karim Rashid
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_karimrashid.mp3] Download MP3
Session 2: Rewire
Aza Raskin
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_azaraskin.mp3] Download MP3 Ron Baecker
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_ronbaecker.mp3
] Download MP3 David Keith
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_davidkeith.mp3] Download MP3
Session 3: Better World
Raghava KK
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_raghavakk.mp3] Download MP3 Aubrey de Grey
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_aubreydegrey.mp3] Download Mp3 Craig Shapiro
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_craigshapiro.mp3] Download Mp3 Eric Chivian
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20111112_ericchivian.mp3] Download MP3
GOAL:
I like how Flickr automatically generates six different sized photos on upload while preserving the original.
Not wanting to be dependent on Flickr for this, I wanted to learn how to do this automagically with my computer. With a developing awareness of the power of Unix, I realized that a command line function was probably the way to go.
So I learned about ImageMagick.
INSTALL:
The recommended method for install is through MacPorts, wherein you simply type
ports install ImageMagick
in Terminal, but I’d tried some MacPorts stuff over the summer which hadn’t worked so I avoided this in lieu of downloading the package from the ImagaMagick host site.
On install however, I immediately ran into a CPU error. This was because the download currently on offer for OS X is complied for 64bit processors, which is fine if you’re using a fairly new machine. My 2006 MacBook is still running with the now obsolete 32 bit processor. Googling this issue led me to a posting on Stack Overflow, where someone with the same problem figured out how to compile the binaries using one of the Unix distributions.
I tried this, but at first I couldn’t get it to work. The issue, it turned out, was that I didn’t have an install of Snow Leopard’s Xcode Developer tools. I’d installed the Developer tools years ago, and so have had the Developer folder on my hard drive, but I also had two hard drive crashes and a couple of system restores in between. This meant that while the files were represented, some of them were out of date, and while I’d updated my system to Snow Leopard, I hadn’t matched the update to the Developer tools.
So, using the Snow Leopard install disk, I ran the install process and got my system up to spec. I then figured I should try MacPorts again, suspecting that my earlier issues had just been resolved via my install of the Dev tools. This turned out to be the case: I installed MacPorts, and on complete, went to Terminal and typed the formula. The list of dependencies began to scroll down the screen, and after about an hour (seriously, it took a while), I had ImageMagick installed, one appropriate for my 32bit system.
However, I couldn’t get ‘display’ to function, but I realized this wasn’t necessary for my ultimate purpose.
MAGICK:
Now that I had my system ready for processing, the next step was to determine the code string to process, which for a relative Unix newbie like me, wasn’t intuitive.
Some Googling helped with this, and the site Perturb.org gave a list, from which I tried this one. First, I cd‘d into the folder that contained the copies of the images I wanted to work on. Then, confirming my location either with the ls or the pwd command, I typed:
for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 80 $i conv_$i; done
This didn’t do what I ultimately wanted, but it allowed me to confirm that ImageMagick would work, and begin to give me some clues as to what was going on.
With the help of this post on Cubiq.org, I got this thumbnail script to generate a 75×75 square (as per Flickr’s size):
for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -extent 75x75 $i th_$i; done
How this works:i in `ls *.jpg`; that is, make i a variable ($i) containing the listing (ls) of the folder, specifically, the jpgs (*.jpg) of that folder (excluding any other that might exist) and then convert them to -size 75×75 (reiterate a thumbnail of 75×75) with the -gravity of the image centered and output as a file named th_(name in variable $i)
This takes a file named 001.jpg and outputs th_001.jpg
In addition, I had a whole folder of .tif’s which I wanted to convert first to .jpg. Therefore, I used mogrify, which comes with a warning. As it operates on your files it will overwrite the originals if you don’t output them to a folder, as I did. Needless to say, it is always best practice to process copies of images, and never the original/onlycopy.
I mkdir a directory within the folder I cd’d into called jpg. Then, I typed:
mogrify -path jpg -format jpg *.tif
This command converted all the tif files (*.tif) and placed them in the “jpg” folder I’d created (via -path)
Transcribing to Human: use the mogrify command (-path jpg) and place in the jpg folder and change all the files to jpg (-format jpg) that are tiff (*.tiff)
I was now understood how this worked enough to modify it for my end use. I realized that ‘mogrify’ was a better command to use than the ‘convert’ and that I could make a directory as part of the initial conversion, by adding it to the string. I also looked into sharpening the thumbnails, as I was comparing the test runs against those generated by Flickr.
Here, you can see that the Flickr image is a little bit sharper.
I learned that the ‘unsharp’ command is incorrectly named because it is actually what we’d think of as the ‘sharpenning’ option. Thus, my new 75×75 thumbnail command read:
mkdir sq; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -extent 75x75 -path sq $i sq_$i; done
Human: make a directory called `sq` and while the `i` variable is what you find when you do a `ls` that are jpgs, mogrify them to size 75×75 as a thumbnail with the gravity of the image on the centre, and then sharpen them, and make sure they are 75×75 and output them to the `sq` folder you just made, and save them as sq_(what-you-found-when-you-did-the-listing-of-the-folder-of-the-jpgs).
I was happy to see that `unsharp` produced a thumbnail that seemed visibly better than Flickr’s!
Thumbnails are a special case. For simple resizing, the script can also be pared down. I noticed that Flickr resizes according to set widths: 100, 240, 500, 640, 1024. The next issue I had to figure out was how to get ImageMagick to scale proportionally to a set width. I learned that if you give ImageMagick’s mogrify one size, it will assume it is the width and resize accordingly. Thus, to generate an image 100 pixels wide:
mkdir 100; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '100' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 100 $i sq_$i; done
From here, it’s just a matter of entering whatever size you want. As noted above, my script includes a mkdir folder called 100, but that isn’t required, it’s just good to have the output directed to a folder so that the files aren’t overwritten in the processing.
Finally, here are my current list of resizing abracadabra scripts.
mkdir sq; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -size 75x75 -thumbnail 75x75^ -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -extent 75x75 -path sq $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 100; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '100' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 100 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 240; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '240' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 240 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 500; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '500' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 500 $i sq_$i; done
mkdir 640; for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -resize '640' -gravity center -unsharp 0x1 -path 640 $i sq_$i; done
(The photo is of my father examining the body of his 1939 Oldsmobile in the driveway of our home in Etobicoke in the late 1970s).
In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Reamde, there is a passing reference (page 33) to an article that the main character once read about virtual currencies. Given that this character is a draft-dodger who lives in British Columbia, chances are pretty good that the article was this one published in The Walrus in the spring of 2004. (And which I linked to on my blog-project Goodreads at the time).
The article in turn references the work of Edward Castronova, whose paper on this subject can be found here.
(Joseph Wright, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1771), depicting the discovery of phosphorus by Hennig Brand in 1669).
1. The Baroque Cycle
During the first week of the summer I discovered Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Browsing on Amazon, going through the ‘others-who-bought-what-you-have-bought-have-also-bought’ my eye was caught by the English cover of System of the World. In reading more, I learned that it was the third novel in the trilogy, which began with Quicksilver. I downloaded the sample chapter of Quicksilver to my Kindle.
Now, I’d seen these novels in used & remaindered bookstores for years, but they had never caught my interest, especially based on the blurbed summaries printed on the back. However, you could say that I’d reached the point where my background interests had finally intersected with a series of novels set in the 17th Century (listening to the Ideas series Origins of the Modern Public almost immediately prior to discovering the Cycle probably helped) and the sample chapter intrigued me. I dived in, taking two months to read all three books (as well as the ‘sequel’ Cryptonomicon).
Quicksilver begins with an account of the alchemist Enoch Root arriving in 1713 Boston to seek out one Daniel Waterhouse. This is noteworthy as one of the underlying themes of the Cycle is how the 18th Century Enlightenment had its roots in the foundation of the English Royal Society in the 17th Century, and how its letter-based communication network spanned Europe. The immediate predecessor to this activity was the Europe-spanning Esoteric Brotherhood of Alchemy, which given a scientific overlay in the 19th Century became Chemistry.
The character Enoch is depicted as visiting the Royal Society in 1670 to demonstrate the new substance phosphorous, which can be distilled from urine. This method of creating phosphorous is used at various plot points in the novels, and the substance itself features prominently in many scenes. So I was surprised when in browsing my RSS feeds Saturday to see the following article on io9.com.
2. Alchemy & Art
The Baroque Cycles‘s alchemy sub-plot reminded me of something I’d first heard in the late 1990s. In November 1998 CBC broadcast an Ideas episode which consisted of a recorded round-table discussion on art, featuring Ideas producer Max Allen, then Globe & Mail art critic Blake Gopnik, as well as Liz Magor and Diana Nemiroff. At one point (starts at 26:27min) Allen asks if their talk on gallery-based art might sound as strange to a far future audience as we would find a conversation on alchemy. This analogy between art & alchemy struck me as particularly apt, and I remember mentioning this point to a friend. My concern was that in pursuing art I was doing something wasteful, whereas his response was, “I wouldn’t mind doing ‘alchemy'”. His answer essentially recognized the aesthetic of doing something perhaps useless but also intriguing and fun in and of itself. This ‘use-based’ critique of arts is one happens all the time and it incredibly hard to avoid. My friend’s answer in turn, is also hard to avoid – that there are some things in life that are worth doing simply because it’s fun to do them (aka “the journey is the destination”).
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/audio/1998-11_CBC_IDEAS_youcallthatart.mp3 ] (Ideas from November 1998 • Lister Sinclair! • Download Mp3)
So, in reading The Cycle, and with this memory, I found it surprising when I read the following tweet:
This immediate association between art & alchemy in light of my reading and memories rose my eyebrows. Then, more recently, the following line occurred in another article about art:
“Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster.”
My suspicion is that this relationship between alchemy & the arts will become more and more prominent over the next few months (years?) and that maybe it’s because art & alchemy are similar to each other, as both being traditions with long histories that disappeared. Art, as it has been structured and known, is changing into something else, primarily through ‘the alchemy of the internet’. Given that we are so immersed in mediated images, it seems more and more impossible for a static artistic image or a mise en scene (‘installation’) to have much resonance, where resonance is proportional to its level of reproduction on the net (ie, today a famous image is blogged).
Under today’s conditions, a cultural product seems relevant if it goes viral. For the record, Liz Magor answered Max Allen’s question in 1998 (which presumed the future would consider 20th Century art & culture to be mass products like movies and television) by stating that assumes things have value simply because they are popular.
Of course, those who have known me for a long time will point out that I was once a part of the Instant Coffee collective, and that in August 2003 we put on a show called Alchemy & Mysticism. This was ‘Alchemy & Mysticism #2″ as #1 was the title of a collection of art videos shown in the Urban Disco Trailer earlier in June. The title was taken from the Taschen book, and chosen mostly for humour, as it had nothing to do with the content of either collection.
“He might have shielded himself from the cold and the wind by walking up the length of the Privy Gallery, but he’d had quite enough of Whitehall, so instead he went outside, crossed a couple of courts, and emerged at the front of the Banqueting House, directly beneath where Charles I had had his head lopped off, lo these many years ago. Cromwell’s men had kept him prisoner in St. James’s and then walked him across the Park for his decapitation. Four-year-old Daniel, sitting on Drake’s shoulders in the plaza, had watched every one of the Kings’s steps” – Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (2003)
A young Daniel Waterhouse sits atop his father’s shoulders
~
The execution of Charles I occurred on Tuesday 30 January 1649, depicted as rather mild day (one of many inaccuracies) in the 1970 film Cromwell from whence these images are taken. Charles I, played by Alec Guinness is shown addressing the crowd in this scene, wearing a white shirt and a cape, delivering the lines recorded by historians, “I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be”.
In reality, historians record that Charles wore two shirts (to prevent shivers being mistaken for fear) and this waistcoat, shown in the British Archives at the beginning of the BBC’s The Seven Ages of Britain – The Age of Revolution (viewable online from TVO.org).
In introducing the waistcoat, host David Dimbleby notes that it is made of silk, and points out the details of the stitching and the buttons.
Then he notes the brown stains on the front. These are the blood stains from that day three hundred and sixty two years ago.
One can see from these images that Charles I was a small man, reportedly 5’3″.
Monday, August 8th, 2011 @ 11:00 AM
BA1160 (Bahen Building)
University of Toronto
40 Saint George Street
“INFORMATION IS QUANTUM”
How physics has helped us understand what information is and what can be
done with it.
Biography:
Charles H. Bennett received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion).
Following graduation, he worked at the Argonne Laboratory for two years. Since 1972, he has been at IBM where he has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information. He developed a practical system of quantum cryptography in collaboration with Gilles Brassard and John Smolin. As well, he is also known for discovering “quantum teleportation”. Other research interests include algorithmic information theory and the physics of computation. Bennett is known as one of the founding fathers of quantum information theory.
Bennett is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2008 Harvey Prize by Technion and the 2006 Rank Prize in opto-electronics.
For more information, please go to http://cqiqc.physics.utoronto.ca/ .
In October of last year (October 2010) the TTC showed off its new subway cars to the press for the first time, saying they would go into service “in the new year”.
By March 2011 the cars had not yet entered service. Then, an update: it was taking a longer than expected to adapt the cars to the system’s infrastructure, and that they would enter service in June.
May 2011 featured a repeat of October’s press-performance, when seemingly amnesiated editors essentially replayed the PR from six months prior.
Finally, July 21st 2011, the subway entered service. The TTC saw fit to Tweet the trains location throughout the day (an example )
We are informed that these new trains will replace the Yonge line’s T1 cars, which will be moved to the Bloor line, currently running H1 cars. The H1 cars, in turn, are going to Nigeria, for a subway system being built in Lagos. It is perhaps a low blow to say that this proves Toronto truly has had a third-world transit system.
“Dramatic growth in consumption has happened in the last thirty years: a period when the arts and the humanities have been unambitious in their efforts to guide and educate taste. The accumulated wisdom of humanity, concerning what is beautiful, interesting, fine or serious, was – to a large extent – left to one side at the precise time when the need for guidance was greatest, and when guidance was hardest to give, and so required maximum effort and confidence.
When one looks at celebrated figures of those worlds – such as Andy Warhol or today, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst – and asks what does their art say to people about consuming, the answer is very little. I do not want to attack those particular individuals; they seem, amoung other, to be creations of a profoundly damaged culture that tells itself it is being clever and sophisticated and up to date for the wrong reasons. The cultural laurels – and a species of authority that goes with them – have been awarded in unfortunate directions. Mockery, irony and archness are not what we need.
While the works of these artists have gained amazing commercial success, they suggest a loss of purpose in the arts. Loss, that is, of a really central and powerful claim upon the education of taste: upon the sense of what is beautiful, gracious or attractive.
We have suffered an astonishing corruption of consciousness practised upon us by a decadent cultural elite. Think of the language of contemporary praise: a building is admired because it is ‘interesting’ – like the average newspaper column. The gap between ‘interesting’ and ‘glorious’ or ‘adorable’ is vast. An artist is praised for being ‘provocative’ – like someone bleating into a mobile phone on a crowded train. We are miles from ‘profound’,’tender’, ‘magnificent’.
All of this has come about because of a misreading of history. It has been supposed that the point of high culture – of the greatest imaginative and creative effort – is to unseat some fantasized ruling class who had to be provoked and distressed into change. But that is not the task of art or intelligence. Their real task is to shape and direct our longings, to show us what is noble and important. And this is not a task that requires any kind of cagey, elusive obscurity. The way forward here is to be more demanding, truthful and – at first – courageous. We have to forget the shifting patterns of fashion. Something is good because it is good, not because it was created yesterday or five hundred years ago.”
– John Armstrong
$600.xx Chili Sept 1 1866
Received of James Goldw
Six hundred dollars to
apply one contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble
$450.xx Chili Sept 8 1866
Received of James Goldw
four hundred and fifty dollars to
to apply on contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble
$200.xx Chili Sept 15 1866
Received of James Goldw
two hundred Dollars
to apply one contract for
the building of his house
in Chili
Henry B Kimble
In order to fund the Civil War, in July 1862 Congress created the United States’ first income tax as well as the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes were also collected on documents through the use of stamps.
“Schedule A described the income tax and other taxes payable directly to the Office of Internal Revenue, including inheritance taxes; duties on carriages, yachts, and other luxury goods; and various duties on business activities. Schedule B described the taxes to be paid on documents, which required the use of adhesive stamps directly on these documents”. Revenue Stamps: Financing the Civil War (PDF)
This document, which I purcharsed for $3 at the Christie Antiques Show appears to show both levels of tax collecting: one on the contracts, and the other in the use of the 2 cent document stamps.
Chili appears to be an area outside of Rochester NY, and a search for Henry B Kimble of Rochester shows he may have been granted a patent in 1854 for a sash fastener.
Alex Livingston, Untitled Chromira Print on Dibond 2010 48in x 68in from the Leo Kaman website
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“The sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out,” he says. “The sketchbook offered a lot of portability, as you generated ideas on the go. I now travel with my drawing tablet and my laptop.”
Goddard in speaking with Livingston for his show (currently on at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto) explains that he’s currently using a Wacom tablet with his laptop, as opposed to paints and paper. I know myself, I looked into getting a Wacom tablet in 2009, but decided against it for the time being, as I still like using inks and brushes, and would prefer that tactility while image-making, as it’s just as easy to scan afterward as it is to create it directly through the computer.
What I wonder about though, is the measure of this shift. I came of age, and was inspired to be an artist, through the experience of 500 year old materials. Notebooks, manuscripts, paintings, and the older the better. I saw myself was working within that tradition, in effect creating things that would themselves be 500 years old one day. What then, is truly going on (what is the measure of this shift) when a professor at a prestigious art school says “the sketchbook tradition has pretty much died out”? If I were to ask, “will people in a century even understand paper?” is there an analogy which will help me understand what that experience will be like?
Since I was a child I’ve been fond of Jesus’ parable of feeding the spirit: that man cannot live by bread alone, but also requires the word of God. I think the reasons I’ve always appreciated this were because it was well explained to me by a teacher who had formerly been a priest, and it made sense to me in a manner that has remained true to my life as I’ve lived subsequently. That the spirit, or mind requires feeding seems self-evident.
This idea has been relevant to my interest in the arts, and I’ve also noticed over the years a personal preference for food metaphors. Food, after all, is a substance we ingest, we bring into ourselves, where it is transformed into something disgusting that comes out the other end of our bodies. This transformation is called digestion, and we understand through this process we remain alive through the derivation of nutrients, in effect becoming “what we eat”.
This physical digestion can mirror of that of the mind – we continually ingest, take into ourselves, ideas that enter our mind through conversation, reading, and general interaction. Our minds continually process the languages of our environment, be they symbolic, gestural, or spoken, and ‘digest’ them into some part of our worldview and subsequently some part of our sense of self.
Almost everyone alive is capable of feeding themselves in some way, even if they are not actually able to cook a meal. In that sense, we are all literate to the symbology of the gastronomic spectrum, all the way from food freshly killed in a hunt to the four-course meal of a fine restaurant. Along the spectrum are canned food we merely reheat, sandwiches, and fast food burgers. So-called special occasions require meals at the higher end of the spectrum, whereas quotidian meals after a long day can occur on the lower end.
Carr: Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone.
Carr: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on.
-Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)
If the spectrum of food goes from the self-acquired meal to restaurants, on what spectrum does art lie? Why in effect, is my question being asked? Because Art is a strange and forever undefinable thing, precisely because it is a food of the mind, an intangible and a philosophically confused concept. As Wittgenstein sought to make clear a hundred years ago, some philosophical problems are merely problems of semantics, entanglements of concepts without a clear language. Art is such a thing: forever subject to pithy definitions which merely become mottoes for one of its clique camps. For the conceptualists art is something different than for the painters, and thus like God it is subject to much under its name, in a variety of churches under many flags.
Why is it we consider it normal for children to draw? And why do we find it usual that adults mostly do not draw? For that matter, why do we find it normal for children to play, and find it usual that most adults do not play, but those who do are honoured as actors? In keeping with my food theme, children do not eventually grow out of making food for themselves. Sure, there are people who ‘can’t cook’ but presumably this means they are reliant on heating up frozen dinners. Food making remains a part of our lives throughout, while art making is allowed to disappear.
But does it? If you can’t cook, that can be done for you – simply go to a restaurant or a soup kitchen. But art? One goes to a gallery, and hence a gallery is analogous to a restaurant. Or, like the ever-present unquestioned nature of food culture, we could say the dominance of created visual products we call tv shows and/or movies (even video games) are somehow reflective for our appetite for imagined products.
Galleries do not seem to think of themselves as restaurants for the spirit, offering menus of imagined products. However, if pressed, I think they would see the similarity between the haute cuisine chef and the international exhibiting artist.
Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.
None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.” – Greta Christina, Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies| (My source)
Creating anything is a human thing to do: we take basic foods and we make meals, and we take sticks and make symbols. Everyday we manipulate a set number of symbols in composing text messages and emails, and to do so is to be part of our human community. A teenager unable to text (i.e. write) in today’s world would be one who is cut off from their community, and thus damaged. Being human is to be both a meal maker and an art maker, but importantly, I am using the word “art” in a generic creative sense of the word to encompass everything learned and extensive of the imagination, such as writing quotidian messages, or the dominating created world of pop culture.
Along the food-spectrum analogy, most everyone is capable of making a sandwich. Culturally, the creativity of everyday is not very advanced. Once we get beyond sandwich making, the understanding of these cultural worlds diverges: the fine restaurant has a place in our lives that a fine gallery doesn’t.
“Food” as a word is easily understood as something encompassing a long spectrum of things that are ultimately put in the mouth. But Art, through its semantic confusion, is not easily reduced as something “put somewhere”. It does not have an obvious end point, but is to be described as “experienced” or “felt” or “seen”.
What interests me is why the analogy of restaurants so easily breaks down, and why Art remains perceived as something privileged and removed, whereas restaurants and food culture are so thoroughly embedded. Why do galleries exist dependent on grants, whereas the idea of supporting a restaurant by grants is absurd? The easy answer is the physical need for food makes food culture obvious, but we do not speak of art as psychological need which would make its cultural contribution obvious as well. Also, the another obvious answer is that pop culture provides the feeding of the psychological/imaginative appetite so thoroughly that only those with “finer palates” seek out the higher forms in prestigious galleries. This is analogous to the “culture war” within Food: buying organic and local vs. fast & processed.
In the Art culture, we have fast and highly processed food as well. And just as a diet consisting entirely of highly processed food is extremely unhealthy, it is probably equally mentally unhealthy to be a digester of corporatized pop culture exclusively. Unfortunately, like a Big Mac filming a Whopper, reality television has begun to exploit the end products of generations of television: these terrible, stupid people who are not (in the old sense of the term) “cultured” precisely because they are instead “pop cultured” and thus comfortable with confessing to video diaries and being idiots on camera.
“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. – David Brooks, Social Animal
To be alive is to participate in a food stream, and to be human is to participate in a knowledge stream. A human beings, we participate in a collectively created culture which subdivides into subcultures, two of which are food-related and art-related. Food culture is so healthy in its level of participation that people need to be careful around it, lest they become obese, while art culture is a muddied, confused and sclerotic thing, always being defended and dependent on social largess.
Clearly, the place of Art in our lives requires a rehabilitation—one which recognizes its place in a healthy and full life. Just as a diet consisting entirely of fast food is dangerous, so too is a mental life informed solely by corporatized products. However, this is not to be read as a defence of government grants, but simply to remind you that restaurants do not require support. If we include film, we may already have a healthy art-culture. If we consider art to be something solely related to galleries, we may ask why haute cuisine is not dependent on grants, or why the art experience away from commercialization insists on being free, when it is free food that one really requires.
