All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
For it is an ordinance of nature that nothing great can be achieved in a moment, and that all the fairest tasks are attended with difficulty, while on births as well she has imposed this law, that the larger the animal, the longer should be the period of gestation.
Quintilian
So you take the Sony A7IV camera with the latest firmware update and you attach the Sony 90mm f/2.8 Macro G Lens and set the camera for focus bracketing using the small interval focus change and a hundred exposures with an f/8 aperture and ISO 100 quality and you get 100 files that look this bad:
Then you put the 100 files through a photo editor to get the exposure just right and process them in another piece of software that combines them into a focus stack and get this:
And if you crop that stack photo you’ll find quite a lot of detail:
Admittedly, this isn’t the loveliest insect photo on record but you have to admit it has a lot of detail.
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Quintilian
I’ve has some fun and success with coins. I use a lightbox and a frame surrounding it made out of 1” PVC to support lights.
Lately my days have been filled with frustrating road blocks. Things that should resolve themselves easily instead get bogged down in endless complication and delay. Because of this I’ve been pretty stressed out. So today while I was contemplating this it occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow days at a time to go by without any fun. So, I’ve decided to try and add at least one fun thing into each of my days.
Sounds easy. But what it means is that I have to first free my mind from the annoying things I’m trying to overcome and instead think up some small diversion that I can do in a short amount of time. For instance, today I dragged out my camera, the Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens and a bellows mount and started taking some macro shots of a dead preying mantis that I’ve had sitting on a house plant for a few months.
Now was this a terribly valuable use of my time? No, not at all. But it was fun and it got me thinking about what kind of a macro rig I’d like to set up. The bellows device I was using had a bunch of problems associated with it. It didn’t attach to my tripod very well and it was not rigid enough to avoid a lot of vibration. But working around these issues was stimulating and fun. And it made me think about something other than my problems. It was a distraction and it lightened my mood brilliantly.
So, for the foreseeable future (meaning, until I get past my problems), I will be trying to add something fun to my days in order to stave off depression. But in general, maybe I’ve hit on something worth pursuing. I’ve never been someone who lived a balanced life. My instincts have always been a sort of all or nothing strategy to most things in life. Probably this was a matter of necessity caused by an almost pathological laziness that left me always forced into an eleventh hour, hail Mary effort to stave off disaster.
So maybe late in life I’ve discovered a miraculous unheard-of strategy; balance.
Tomorrow is a big family party. But I think I’ll get up early and try to set up a focus bracket with the 90mm macro lens and some interesting macro subject. I think I saw a dead spider down in the exercise area. I think he might make an interesting target. If not, I’ll find some still life thing; a feather or a coin or something. And I’ll have some fun.
And that will leave Sunday to do some work. I need to figure a few things out that have been stalled for a couple of weeks. And then Monday and Tuesday are unavoidable hell. I thought Tuesday would actually turn into a horrifying fiasco but blind luck stepped in and turned a horrifying nightmare into a merely tedious exercise in futility. But just two days later and it will be Thanksgiving and that should be a wonderful way to recover.
Balance. What did Siddhartha preach? The Middle Way?
There is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory.
Quintilian
The original utopia was Plato’s Republic. And in that hypothesized city-state one of the most important precepts for producing good citizens was proper education. Now, if you’ve ever read “The Republic” you know it’s literally gibberish. Plato proceeds from unsubstantiated statements to illogical conclusions throughout the argument he uses to design his state but one thing I think he was right about is the necessity for highly superior education. So, my republics will incorporate the most scientific and practical methods for educating and testing the young in order to maximize their future value as workers and citizens and to provide a worldview that would allow them to harmonize with their fellow citizens.
Now, since I am not an educator or a psychologist, I have no fixed ideas about methodology or even the content of this educational regimen. I will hazard a guess that mathematics should still have a very important place in these schools. I think thousands of years of western educational practices has proven the link between mathematical learning and general mental fitness. But beyond that I’ll say that identifying the curricula for the various levels and types of schooling is something that will be of the highest importance for these communities. And by no means do I intend for schooling to be strictly academic. Specific vocational training is something I see as extremely valuable for individuals of all types. Even a particle physicist or a concert pianist could benefit from knowing how to solder a component onto his computer motherboard or snake a bathtub drain. But all of this is tangential to the main reasons why education will be critical to making these communities successful.
The schools will identify the academic capabilities of the children and combining this with their interests the correct academic and vocational curricula will be provided as choices. This should maximize the probability for a successful citizen. But the schools will also educate children with the ethos and expectations that the community is based on. In this way the young will align themselves with the goals that are expected from them as members in the association. In this way, the likelihood that these later generations will fit in with the community is maximized.
As with every other aspect of the community, feedback from the testing will inform the goals and needs of the community. For instance, suppose the community is lacking in machinists. So, the forecasting will be used to increase the monetary incentives for machinists. And so forth for whatever other imbalances occur.
And education can also apply to other aspects of life. For instance, men and women need to find mates in order to produce the next generation. Education can include counseling on adapting to married life and even providing a dating service to locate compatible mates.
Now, Plato had his citizens indoctrinated with myths that justified their strange lifestyle. For instance, he did not want the nuclear family to interfere with the loyalties of his citizens and so the children were raised together as a pack. And he had stories that supposedly reinforced this lifestyle. I wouldn’t expect these optimized communities of mine to attempt to destroy families. On the contrary, I would expect them to do everything possible to prove that their lifestyle and community provide the best human environment possible.
I wonder what aspect of my optimal communities I’ll talk about next? Well, maybe that’s enough for a while. I better post on something else tomorrow.
