on practice

practice can make
the wrong thing
you practiced
perfectly
wrong.

[oz/2013]

adobe and its hostages

i will get straight to the point. like ibm and oracle before it, adobe would like to have hostages, not customers. it has done everything it possibly can to lock the world to its costly [in multiple meanings of the term] products. now comes the next logical step: take the products to the "cloud" and charge continuously.

you weren't surprised, were you?

create suction.

what is about to happen to photoshop et al. should encourage us to review our image processing dependencies. what is in the image processing pipeline, and what if one of the components become unaffordable, perhaps in price, performance or compatibility? for most photographers [and comic book artists] photoshop comes close to a lock-in. on the other hand, it is big, heavy and sluggish; workflow tools have all but destroyed that lock. there is no reason to let an acr upgrade for a new camera to determine the costly upgrade path to another version of photoshop, or possibly a new license fee in the cloud [just where do you think adobe will stop?] but what about that workflow? are you able to deal with your images, and produce professional results without lightroom?

I can. started my photo workflow with aperture, not lightroom. I now use four different workflow tools. capture one pro happens to be the tether and raw favorite, even if lightroom catalogues have most of my images. I have also been spending some time with darktable. I suggest you do the same: explore other workflow tools.

As john paul caponigro says, stay loose, stay flexible. I will add: avoid getting locked in, sucked up.

here is my new logo for the next best image processing tool. [it was crafted using gimp, of course]

important books of twenty-twelve

Here are some of the most interesting and important books from this year. they may or may not be the "best" of the year, but by my lights, they are better "pickings" for your brain than found elsewhere. i can do quote-mining and tell you how singularly brilliant and seminal these are, but never mind. in all seriousness: quality varies from good to excellent to brilliant. some books, like harlan ellison's bugf#ck seem to have too little in them. [how anyone can come up with a tiny volume of ellison quotes is a puzzle] some, like neal stephenson's some remarks seem to have too much. [he stumbles through leibniz's monadology with literacy and grace. really.]

so here is the first batch. ben goldacre's bad pharma is not officially out in canada until the new year, but came out in england months ago. what causes the delay in publication? not sure, maybe editing required. fitzpatrick & collins-sussman's team geek and coleman's coding freedom are two exceptional books on software development. martin's there are two errors in the title of this book is now the third edition of a rich and entertaining book on philosophical puzzles and paradoxes. plotnik's elements of expression is in its second edition of expressiveness.

second batch is more essential non-fiction and fiction. i did not have enough room to pile all the good books in various genres i read. nate silver's the signal and the noise is getting some mixed reviews from specialists, and i feel it is deserved: it delivers some noise with its signal. mooney's republican brain is a disturbing read. that book in the middle? katz's information design - possibly the smartest book i have seen on the topic since tufte's four volumes, which it displaces quite neatly. [surely "brainpickings" could have had enough clue to pick this for one of its top ten "best" lists] two other books in this group really stand out: macintyre's double cross and taleb's antifragile - deep and rewarding books by two exceptional authors.

this last batch is an art batch, but more about photography. i have other good to exceptional books in this category but i thought they deserve a separate blog entry some other time. rocky nook has been publishing some important books on photography, and no surprise that four books on that table are theirs. tone poems are astonishing, as expected. last but not least, stillman's looking at ansel adams is an essential read for a photographer. 

enjoy.

seven principles of explanatory coherence

paul thagard have been working on a set of principles and computational models of explanatory coherence since late eighties. recently he applied these principles to belief revision about global warming. It helps explain the increasing adoption of the hypothesis that global warming is caused by human activities.

• Principle 1. Symmetry. Explanatory coherence is a symmetric relation, unlike, say, conditional probability. That is, two propositions p and q cohere with each other equally.
• Principle 2. Explanation. (a) A hypothesis coheres with what it explains, which can either be evidence or another hypothesis; (b) hypotheses that together explain some other proposition cohere with each other; and (c) the more hypotheses it takes to explain something, the lower the degree of coherence.
• Principle 3. Analogy. Similar hypotheses that explain similar pieces of evidence cohere.
• Principle 4. Data priority. Propositions that describe the results of observations have a degree of acceptability on their own.
• Principle 5. Contradiction. Contradictory propositions are incoherent with each other.
• Principle 6. Competition. If P and Q both explain a proposition, and if P and Q are not explanatorily connected, then P and Q are incoherent with each other. (P and Q are explanatorily connected if one explains the other or if together they explain something.)
• Principle 7. Acceptance. The acceptability of a proposition in a system of propositions depends on its coherence with them.

Reading: Paul Thagard and Scott Findlay, "Changing Minds About Climate Change: Belief Revision, Coherence, and Emotion"
2011.

unexpectedly, priorities shift

things change. i just terminated three small (free/ad-free) ios projects. they will now be re-implemented on android for my nexus 7 and phones.

/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools
Start time: Sat 25 Aug 2012 22:47:27 EDT
Analyzing devtools package: 'com.apple.pkg.ApplicationLoaderLeo'...
Analyzing devtools package: 'com.apple.pkg.DashcodeLeo'...
Analyzing devtools package: 'com.apple.pkg.DevDocumentationLeo'...
Analyzing devtools package: 'com.apple.pkg.DevSamplesLeo'...
...
Removing devtools files...
Removing generated files...
Removing Xcode Caches...
Removing Xcode Documentation...
Removing empty devtools directories...
Finish time: Sat 25 Aug 2012 22:47:58 EDT

recently noted quotes

"jargon marks the place where thinking has been. it becomes a kind of macro, to use a computer term, a way of storing a complicated sequence of thinking operations under a unique name." -- marjorie garber ["academic instincts"]

"simplicity overrules logic." -- terry o'reilly ["under the influence"]

"the warrior and the artist live with the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day." -- steven pressfield ["war of art"]

"Will it really take wall-sized prints that you can put your nose against and not see pixels to make you happy?" -- thom hogan

"Python and Ruby programmers come to Go because they don't have to surrender much expressiveness, but gain performance and get to play with concurrency." -- rob pike

i'm mad about good books,
cannot get my fill ... -- bobby mcferrin ["how about you"]

"paying attention, for long periods of time, is a form of performance athleticism.  like running a marathon, it requires practice and training to get the most out of it." -- clay a johnson ["finding focus"]

"I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and the Golden Rule will never be found etched on our ground glass" -- henri cartier-bresson "the decisive moment"

"The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it." -- richard w. hamming 

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - dietrich bonhoeffer [quote found in steve mccurry's blog]

abelson's laws:

1. chance is lumpy
2. overconfidence abhors uncertainty
3. never flout a convention just once
4. don't talk greek if you don't know the english translation.
5. if you have nothing to say, don't say anything.
6. there is no free hunch.
7. you can't see the dust if you don't move the couch.
8. criticism is the mother of methodology.

-- robert p. abelson ["statistics as principled argument"]

"high dynamic range is no substitute for high creative range." -- oz 

"Shadows are perhaps, the areas in which we dream." -- bruce percy ["personal exposures"]

"gorpah good guide! me guided young foreigner with little white dog before! me can show many yetis! only 500 rupees, blistering barnacles!" -- gorpah [spirou & fantasio "running scared"]

harder to see

what is in plain sight

is often harder to see

for the mind is busy

with a forest of possibilities

but not a tree.

[oz/12]