Polar Polar “Test! TEST!”

... put the needle on the record

pse9 fp 0.5

pse9 fp 0.4

pse fp 0.3

Filter Palette 0.2

How “Meta” Are You

95* “shades” worth

Some time before during or after “flying” around atypical, two dimensional hyperspace I resolved to invest time into fully exploring Photoshop Elements' (pse9) filters and get a handle on its nearly overwhelming array of effects.

In the same spirit as Halftone Drilldown, this inquiry works toward a fuller understanding of the nuances and applicability of what's available. My own bit of “content aware”ness—I guess.

Initially there are two distinct approaches to the effort. The first is depicted by the “pse9 filter menus” chart at the left which begins a process of organizing the effect groups based on where they are within the GUI and more loosely upon their related functions. Additional design constraints included a desire for density without crowding and reading ease. It's not nearly as complicated as London or NYC subway maps ... at least until I add the subsequent effect's dialog boxes.

“Well. How Did [We] Get Here?”

“... this is not my beautiful house ...”

a b

Hyperspace Must Be A Trip

Plato's “House”

“The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1½ pro mille”

It is a curious fact that √2 + √3 very nearly approximates π. (Cp. E. Borel, Space and Time, 1926, 1960, p. 216 ... ) The excess is less than 0.0047, i.e. less than 1½ pro mille of π, and a better approximation to π was hardly known at the time.

Using The “Drill-bit”

Halftone Drilldown

Virtually “Wet Textiles” & Seeking Moiré

	Not all digital artifacts are bad. Some, like the ones you see here, may even be desired. Experience is the best guide I know, and the practical application of theory demands trials and (one hopes) error correction, therefore the images in this post are part of an investigation into the Moiré patterns produced with chosen sets of channel degrees employed by Photoshop Elements' “Color Halftone” filter found at the top of its “Pixilate” menu (i.e.: Filter→Pixilate→Color Halftone). The top right monochrome thumbnail was used to produce all the “test” images here. The table below aligns columns with particular sets of degrees of rotation in each color channel with rows containing increasing radii (in pixels) for each set. The first column's set of rotations are at 45 degree increments which generates a square grid Moiré. These angular values were also used to create the two larger images above the table: image top-left was produced using a radius of 7 pixels, the one to the right was metered to 20 pixels. Both are full size, whereas the images below have been scaled down to fit this layout.
		Color Halftone Channel Rotation
r↓		045   090     135       180	030   060     120       150	095   100     105       110	072   144     216       288	000   072     216       288	091   034     254       009	Ch. 1 2  3    4
	4

Wiggling Visual Inquiry

Details details

Wiggle Room

 

Halftones on Crack

and then there's this

“Fire Detail”

and this

“Fire Detail” Details with original xero-reproduction

but not forgetting these

The Evolution of Small Things: “aye-aye ... ”

and then there's this

The Evolution of Small Things: i

American Immoderacy

Consumerism, stimulated by advertising and marketing practices, thus became finely knit into American economic, social, cultural, and political institutions—and ... into foreign policy as well. American advertisers, business executives, and labor leaders generally endorsed ever higher levels of consumption and mass production as the economic counterparts to American democracy. They touted a system of broad-based participation in which purchasers, in effect, possessed the power to elect and to reject products—a system in which the right to buy seemed as fundamental to civic life as the right to vote. Appealing within and across lines of ethnicity, region, gender, and class, consumerism forged communities around rituals of purchase and of leisure. It became the terrain upon which personal identities and rituals of belonging could be performed and reinforced. Within this “democracy of goods,” by the second half of the twentieth century most Americans, regardless of their actual incomes, could imagine themselves as “middle class” and “free." 

Irritation, Thus Consciousness

We must assume that consciousness grows from small beginnings; perhaps its first form is a vague feeling of irritation, experienced when the organism has a problem to solve such as getting away from an irritant substance. However this may be consciousness will assume evolutionary significance — and increasing significance — when it begins to anticipate possible ways of reacting: possible trial-and-error movements, and their possible outcomes.
pp. 250- 251

Karl Popper, "Of Clouds And Clocks" in Objective Knowledge

“catalogue of swindles and perversions”

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.

“All clocks are clouds”

In other words, I am an indeterminist—like Peirce, Compton, and most other contemporary physicists; and I believe, with most of them, that Einstein was mistaken in trying to hold fast to determinism. (l may perhaps say that I discussed this matter with him, and that I did not find him adamant.) But I also believe that those modern physicists were badly mistaken who pooh-poohed as antediluvian Einstein’s criticism of the quantum theory. Nobody can fail to admire the quantum theory, and Einstein did so wholeheartedly; but his criticism of the fashionable interpretation of the theory—the Copenhagen interpretation—like the criticisms offered by de Broglie, Schrodinger, Bohm, Vigier, and more recently by Landé, have been too lightly brushed aside by most physicists.¹⁷ There are fashions in science, and some scientists climb on the band wagon almost as readily as do some painters and musicians. But although fashions and bandwagons may attract the weak, they should be resisted rather than encouraged;¹⁸ and criticism like Einstein’s is always valuable: one can always learn something from it.

---

¹⁷ See also [Popper's] book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, especially the new Appendix *xi; also chapter ix of this book which contains criticism that is valid in the main, though, in view of Einstein’s criticism in Appendix *xii, I had to withdraw the thought experiment (of 1934) described in section 77. This experiment can be replaced, however, by the famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, discussed there in Appendix *xi and *xii. See also my paper ‘The Propensity Interpretation of the Calculus of Probability, and the Quantum Theory’, in Observation and Interpretation, ed. by S. Korner, 1957, pp. 65-70, and 83-9.

¹⁸ The last sentence is meant as a criticism of some of the views contained in Thomas S. Kuhn’s interesting and stimulating book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1963.

pp. 216-217

Karl Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks”
Arthur Compton Memorial Lecture, Washington University, 1965

Contravening Prevailing Othodoxy

From [William Appleman] Williams' efforts to understand American power, four noteworthy points survive. The first is that during the twentieth century the United States came to play a role that cannot be understood except as a variant of empire. That notion, employed in the midst of the Cold War more as an epithet than as an explanation, became by the 1990s almost a statement of the obvious. In the aftermath of the Cold War, references to an American empire or to American hegemony, which formerly came with barbs attached, were no longer fighting words. Though still avoided by government officials, such terms infiltrated the lexicon of everyday discourse about U.S. foreign policy. As even Schlesinger, Williams' particular nemesis, conceded, "who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an ’informal’ empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet."⁶⁸

Beltway Circle-Jerking