Our navigator had the pleasure of attending a fencing match this past weekend as a spectator. The range in ages of the participants was unusually large, which highlights some important considerations about newer and older people and things.
Our photographer is bemused by modern efforts to re-create, digitally, two of the least desirable qualities of fast film: high contrast and large grain. But the paradox of limitations and defects becoming highly sought-after features is not new, and is as widespread as ripped jeans.
For many purposes, books are no longer necessary. That is, for entertainment or learning one need not find or carry around a pile of bound paper. The internet contains a vast landscape of information and e-books are ubiquitous. So do will still need places to borrow paper books from—libraries? Or librarians?
Life was more complicated in the old days. Not only were many things more difficult and tedious to accomplish, often you had to work out which of several methods you should use depending on what you really needed done. It’s much easier now. Really.
We turn again to the theme of technology transforming society, or at least one part of it. With the invention of the 35mm still camera about a quarter of the way into the twentieth century, a whole area of life was suddenly opened up to photography. That was not the intention of the inventor, who was only looking for a lighter-weight way to take pictures himself.
Our astronomer visited the exercise room last night, as is his regular habit. This time there were several other people there. How one of them went about his workout routine prompted some thought and some speculation about the importance of the earphone to modern society, as well as underlining the differences between people.
Fooling around with a certain bit of relatively recent technology prompted our photographer to ask the question: why are there so many pictures? Our main way of capturing reality, that great manifold of experiences, is still the two-dimensional image. Being a scientist he then sought an answer (where a philosopher might instead have fallen into existential doubt). It’s not so hard to work out, really, but does highlight something important about our memories, and how technology is changing them.
We’ve just gone through the annual ritual of Falling Back, shifting our clocks by an hour to conform to Standard Time. It’s the regular opportunity for scientists to point out, with either smugness or exasperation, that all summer we haven’t really been Saving Daylight; that there is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what our clocks read. Sometimes they wander off into explanations of Local Solar Time, Standard Time Zones and, if not quickly stopped, bring up atomic clocks.
Here we will avoid that sort of thing. In the interests of understanding other people, or at least building character, we’ll look at time from the standpoint of non-scientists. It’s not the same time as we understand, and translation is in order.
Our photographic consultant is fond of pointing out to us, with the help of books and magazines, the different styles of great photographers. Clearly part of the variation in the final image is in the subjects they choose: Ansel Adams is famous for mountains and landscapes of the Southwest, quite a different thing from a New York City street photographer catching an instant among people. “But,” he says, “put in exactly the same place, facing exactly the same subject, they’d still come up with different pictures. They just see differently.” Which is true, and much more widely applicable than he meant. Even the same person looking at the same scene can see something entirely different at a different time. A simple exercise can show this.
We mentioned, some weeks ago, that our webmaster had been assigned to develop the Five Colors S&T social media presence. This wasn’t because he’s an expert already, but because he wasn’t; in fact his inclinations tend toward weekends reading eighteenth-century essays by the light of a kerosene lamp. We thought that, apart from the fact that he generally does a decent job of anything, it would be good for him to do something unfamiliar and especially to have contact with people not like him. As Calvin’s dad (from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) would say, he’d build character.