Revisiting the Mountainous Landscape

 kw: generated art, photo essays, art generation, AI art, experiments

A few days ago I posted about the first image I generated using DALL•E 2, four years ago, and the way the most recent art engines responded to the same prompt. I noticed that the four images from November 2022 were quite diverse, while the various sets of four images from the newer software tended to be more similar to one another. I did a test of the internal diversity of one of those engines, which I'll discuss below, but first, my favorite among them:

This image and its three siblings were produced by the Seedream 5.5 model (what I call an engine). (See Coda at the end)

Here is a montage of the 16 images produced four days ago:

From top to bottom, the engines (also identified in brief in the file names) were

• Nano Banana 2.1
• Seedream 5.5
• GPT Image 2.6 Flare
• GPT Image 2.6 Sunburst

When I was making the images I was immediately struck by the similarity of all those produced by GPT Image 2.6: Deciduous trees at the left, a river from near-center to lower right, a range of mountains dominated by one peak, great similarity of cloud styles, and the setting sun either in the image or just outside the frame. Secondly, the four Nano Banana 2.1 images resemble one another nearly as much: masses of trees both left and right, a river from near center more directly toward the viewer, similarity of cloud styles, and upon close examination, one or two people in each image in the middle ground toward one side; however, the mountains are more diverse from image to image, and one image has a nice set of sunbeams.

The Seedream 5.5 images are not so obviously similar: the trees vary more in size and location, the water features are more diverse, the clouds vary more, but the mountains are also single-peak dominated in three of the four images.

Some of the art engines I used in the past had the option to set the Seed, or to leave it up to the software. The Seed is used in a random-number generator to produce the initial spate of noise, which is then run many times (20 to 50) through a "denoising" algorithm until it settles on the final image. What is not stated in the "help" text is that the Seed also affects the placement of elements of the image, and perhaps the identity of some of them. Thus, when I would set the Seed to, for example 142857 (which is 999,999/7), a specific prompt would always yield exactly the same image. However, when the prompt is changed, even a little, but the Seed is the same, a different image is produced. By experimentation I found that if I set the seed to 142857 and asked for four results (four "generations"), the actual Seeds used would go in sequence: 142857, 142858, 142859, 142860. One of the older engines, no longer available, would helpfully include the Seed in the file name.

From the notes above I conclude that the engines I used to produce these images vary in the amount of influence the Seed has on the contents and arrangement of elements in the final images. Noting that Seedream 5.5 produces images with the greatest diversity, at least using such a short prompt, I experimented further. This time I set the number of images to produce at 2, and ran it twice. Here are the preview images; the first pair is on the right, and the second pair is on the left:

I have to say, without really digging into the weeds, that running Seedream 5.5 twice produced about the same level of diversity as running it to produce four images all in one go. My favorite is the fourth image, which is on the left of this montage, and shown at the top of this page. It is the only one with people clearly visible; one other has a few distant dwellings and perhaps very small people in a meadow in the distance. This fourth image also has overall coloration I like better than the others.

I hope to find out more about how an art engine actually composes an image, so that denoising has a target, a conceptual image to denoise towards.

To conclude, I'll supply the other three images full size, and you're free to download them for your own use if you like.

CODA, 8 hours later. It occurred to me to try this with Nano Banana 2.1: Produce two images, wait a bit, and produce two more. The images thus produced were a little different from those produced four days ago, but the overall diversity was still significantly less than the images produced by Seedream 5.5. My advice? Pick the engine to use depending on the amount of variation you prefer.

A few more early images

 kw: generated art, art generation, AI art, history

Yesterday I compared my first generated image to four images produced using the same prompt, four years later. Here I present four more very early images, without updates this time; maybe I'll get into that later. These were all outpainted from square 1,024 x 1,024 images by DALL•E 2.

1. We had gone to an exhibit of Cezanne's paintings in Philadelphia. Soon after, I prompted thus:

Still Life with apples, pomegranates, and bananas in the style of Paul Cezanne

This does look remarkably like a Cezanne still life. The final image is 1,984 x 1,280 and is a PNG, as are all DALL•E productions. The image above was reduced to 992 x 640 and saved as a JPG. The wallpaper version is 1,984 x 1,116, which cropped out some of the table cloth.

2. I used to read a great deal of science fiction. I still read SciFi, mostly short stories. I wanted a SciFi image of an alien landscape.

Futuristic city on hilly alien planet with violet sky and two moons

Here I outpainted only right and left. The original square had the two ringed moons, and outpainting added a couple more plus a flying saucer. As I discovered over the years, art generators have a hard time realistically depicting moons or nearby planets, pasting them onto the sky rather than showing them as beyond it and usually partly obscured by it. The final image is 2,624 x 1,024 PNG, a wide panorama. This is reduced by half and was saved as a JPG. This time, rather than remove the logo, I put my initials and the date into it: LJV23 in a bold sans-serif typeface. This image is well suited to the panoramic format.

3. I enjoy the deserts of the American southwest, particularly in early winter, the best season for rock collecting.

Desert landscape with mesas and saguaro cactus

This was probably the shortest prompt I used in those first few months. The original outpainted image is a 2,624 x 1,664 PNG file. This version is half the dimensions, saved as a JPG. The wallpaper version is 2,624 x 1,476 cropped from the bottom. I would have prompted ocotillo and cholla cacti to achieve a Mojave Desert look; this is more like Arizona.

4. One more: I like the style of early paintings by Thomas Kinkade (and I'm nearly as fond of his later works). For the prompt I didn't specify an era, however.

A mountain cabin in the style of Thomas Kinkade

I didn't really want the extra cabin at upper right, but it hides the rootlessness of the mountain behind it. The mountain on the left is also nearly rootless. Outpainting is tricky. Image dimensions are 2,432 x 1,664. I didn't produce a smaller version. This was saved full size as a JPG. The wallpaper version is 2,432 x 1,368. As I mentioned, this is more like the artist's earlier work. These days his paintings have a much more luminous appearance.

In the folder stack where I keep nearly everything I generate I have lots of experiments. I want to know ahead of time the limitations of the software so I can get good images with less back-and-forth negotiation, which costs credits.

It all started with DALL•E

 kw: photo essays, art generation, generated art, history

Four years ago I first got access to DALL•E, version 2. Version 1 was almost two years old already when Version 2 was released by OpenAI in September 2022 and I began to use it in November. Based on only the briefest of introductions, I created a prompt that I thought would be a bit of a challenge:

Mountainous Landscape in the style of the Hudson School

Working only from memory, I left out the word "Valley" for the Hudson Valley School of landscape painting. Nonetheless, the art engine produced four images with the appropriate "look" and presented me with these choices:

These images were 1,024 x 1,024 pixels, and I learned that prior art generators all topped out at 512 x 512 or smaller. The set of colored blocks in each image is the logo of DALL-E 2 (I'll use a hyphen in the name hereafter rather than the bullet). The image I like best, that looked the most like a HVS painting, is the second one:

OpenAI was touting Outpainting as a new thing in November 2022, so I tried it on this image. Here is the result, which used up most of my trial credits:

This image size is 1,920 x 1,344. Once I began post-processing generated images for use as wallpaper, I cropped this one to 1,920 x 1,080. That discarded the bottom 20% of the image, but it had the benefit of removing the logo also. From this time forward, when I've made a wallpaper file I have "signed" every image with my signature and the name of the art generator. IrfanView has a useful Paint function for this.

I soon began buying credits to use DALL-E 2. I also heard about MidJourney from my brother, and Stable Diffusion in a blog post by a friend. I tried each of these. At the time MidJourney could only be used through Discord; somehow I could never get used to using Discord and I haven't tried since early 2023. The Stable Diffusion interface was also harder to use than DALL-E 2, so I tried a couple of prompts and didn't try again. DE2, as I began to call it, kept me contentedly busy for about a year. Nearly eighty of the images I produced with DE2 pleased me enough that I produced wallpaper versions, almost all with an exact 16:9 aspect ratio, 1,920 x 1,080 or larger.

At the end of 2022 I learned that DE2 was being phased out, and that its replacement would be DE3, available through the Bing Image Generator in the Edge browser. However, DE3 didn't have Outpainting, but until DE2 became unavailable I would use DE3 to produce a higher-quality beginning image, and outpaint it in DE2.

Over time, as I learned of new art generators, I would try them. Some came, lasted a while, and were discontinued. One I miss is Playground, because it was the first engine aggregator I came across. I could use several versions of Stable Diffusion and a dozen or more others (most of which I've forgotten), including Playground's own engines. There were dozens of "filters" for different kinds of images, such as drawings or acrylic paintings or cinematic views. But by the end of 2024 the company changed strategy and focused on graphic design, dropping art generation.

Skipping boring detail, we can fast-forward to the present. I subscribe to two aggregators, OpenArt AI and Leonardo AI, which each seem to provide access to about 100 art engines, as I call them. New ones are added from time to time. I also use the free versions of Gemini, Google Flow, two versions of Microsoft AI Image in Bing Image Creator, and on occasion whichever GPT engine is available at the moment in DuckDuckGo.

During the past week I noticed that OpenArt had released four new engines, each called a "flagship". I decided to try them with the short prompt I used four years ago, with the addition of the word Valley in the prompt. All but a very few of the OpenArt engines can create images with a 16:9 aspect ratio (approximately, in some cases) and some can make them 1k or 2k and sometimes 4k. Depending on the cost of images, I might create all 2k images, or 1k for later upscaling with Upscayl, which I obtained in mid-2024. There follow the four engines' productions, the 4-image preview montage and then the image I like best from each montage.

First, GPT Image 2.6 Flare (faster):

When I can I avoid having the sun visible in the image, my primary reason for choosing this image of the four.

Second, GPT Image 2.6 Sunburst (more detailed):

Here, all four had the sun in the frame. This has the most pleasing arrangement, in my view. This image and the prior one are 1,792 x 1,008, or 112 x 63 times 16 x 16. I've noticed that all art generators work on 16 x 16 units. To render these images for wallpaper I will upscale them 2x to 3,584 x 2,016. No further cropping is needed because this is an exact 16:9 aspect ratio. If I later want to use them with a 4k screen, I'll re-upscale the originals 3x, to 5,376 x 3,024.

Third, Seedream 5.5 (from ByteDance):

Image size is 1,360 x 768 (85 x 48 times 16 x 16). For wallpaper I'll upscale to 2,720 x 1,536 and crop to 2,720 x 1,530.

Finally, Nano Banana 2.1 (Google):

If you look carefully you'll see that all four previews have at least one person in them. Nano Banana really "likes" having people in its images. Image size is 1,376 x 768 (86 x 48 times 16 x 16). Upscaling 2x produces 2,752 x 1,536. The way I like to process images this size is by rescaling in IrfanView to 2,741 x 1,530, then cropping to 2,720 x 1,530.

When I want a 16:9 wallpaper image, I aim for a multiple of 32 x 18.

All these images are more detailed than the one DALL-E2 produced. I have a certain affection for that DE2 image, though, because it is my first foray into the world of art generation. All my life I've loved art, but I cannot draw well. For a long time I tried and tried. Now it is like having a "stable" of artists I can hire economically, and some work for free. I get the ideas, they do the painting/drawing. Each image I produce is a "negotiation" with one of these artists.

In four years I have amassed more than 2,000 wallpaper files in three dozen categories of subject. From time to time I hope to present selected images from various categories…as time and interest dictate.

Pruning the tree of life

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, extinction, memoirs

On the inside back cover of Endings: Encounters with Extinction, the author blurb states that Neil Griffin gave up "the glitz and glamour of tropical fieldwork for the financial stability of freelance writing." OK, blurb writer, drag your tongue out of your cheek; it must be getting pretty sore by now.

Fortunately, Neil Griffin is a fine writer, and this lyrical elegy of a book is thoroughly enjoyable in spite of its funerary topic. The current era is being called the Anthropocene by many: a geologic era named for the species that has grown to be a geologic force in its own right, Homo sapiens, us. Yet the first third of the book leads us through a lyrical survey of the Big Five geological extinction periods.

I considered what to use to illustrate this post. A session of "negotiation" with NanoBanana 2.1 under the OpenArt umbrella resulted in this image I call "Pruning the Tree of Life." Note the bucket of clipped twigs at the gardener's feet.

It is often stated, including in this book, that "99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct." Having spent a few years specializing in paleontology, including a number of interesting experiences clambering up and down cliffs that cut through ancient reefs, I consider this estimate to be rather low.

"Ninety-nine percent is low?" you may ask, incredulously. Let me explain. Firstly, the statement refers to metazoan life, meaning creatures (animals, plants, & fungi) big enough to see. There are about 1.5 million metazoan species so far described, and between 10 million and 100 million waiting to be described. Admittedly, most of those are going to be little critters the size of a pinhead or smaller. Microscopic entities, protozoa (or protists if you're picky) and bacteria plus archaea and also viruses, may include billions of species. Biologists don't yet have the tools to pin these estimates down further. So I'll just analyze metazoan life briefly:

• First, the Big Five major extinction events:
• End-Ordovician, two periods at 445 mya (million years ago) and 443 mya. About 85% of marine species were lost, and there were hardly any terrestrial species yet.
• Late/end-Devonian, several events between 375 mya and 355 mya. Between 75% and 80% of all species were lost.
• End-Permian (the Great Dying), 252 mya (lasting about a million years). 90%-95% of marine species were lost, and 70% of terrestrial species: about 90% overall.
• End-Triassic, 201 mya. 70%-80% total species were lost.
• End-Cretaceous (the dinosaur killer), 66 mya. 75% total species were lost.

The number of species existing just before these events differed a lot from event to event. We can only combine survival ratios, using averages for the ranges. So, for example, if 75-80% were lost, we can average that to 77.5% and subtract from 100% for a survival rate of 27.5%, or 0.275. So we multiply:

0.15 x 0.275 x 0.1 x 0.25 x 0.25 = 0.000257812 which is 0.0258% survival, indicating 99.974% of species were driven to extinction, just in these five periods.

• Then, the background extinction rate in pre-human times:
• Bookends: 
• Older estimate: one extinction per year per million species.
• Newer estimate, including phylogenetic modeling: one extinction per year per ten million species.
• Species duration:
• Marine invertebrates: About 7 million years
• Terrestrial invertebrates: About 12 million years

The optimistic view is the newer background estimate, so if there are 10 million species currently in existence, one extinction yearly is expected from nonhuman factors. However, just since the big event 66 million years ago, and shortly (less than a few million years) after it the number of species was also about 10 million, there have been more than 60 million extinctions over that time. It also implies that about 60 million new species have evolved to keep the total number stable. A raw estimate of post-Cretaceous extinction, then, is based on a one-in-six survival (16.67%), or ~83%. Considering earlier periods to be very generally similar in this regard, based on their varying lengths, overall survival of species not wiped out in the major events, is about 1.5%, or 98.5% total extinction from background alone. I am not sure how this combines with the other figure, but a bonehead analysis yields 

0.000258 x 0.015 = 0.00000387, for an overall survival of 0.000387% or extinction of 99.9996%

Well, as geeky as I am, that's enough. Let's get back to what the book is about. 

The author's experiences illustrate that animals in particular, and even more particularly, vertebrates, are going extinct at alarming rates. He hopes, and hope is all he has at this point, that this will not continue until the only place most people will ever see most animals is in a zoo or a museum diorama. The cover art for the book is a portion of the painting "The Earthly Paradise" by Breughel, with certain animals whited out. I show a portion here.

In the last scene in the book he relates going with a team of biologists to search for a wild jaguar, as part of a conservation project in Belize. A month of searching turned up nothing more than a couple of footprints and a few piles of jaguar dung. One day he hiked alone in the forest, just to look around, felt he was being watched, and looked behind himself to see a jaguar crossing the path some distance back. It glanced at him, boredly, and slipped into the forest.

This has been more of a riff on the thoughts triggered by my reading Endings than a real review. The best books help us know ourselves better.

Imagining new religions must be hard work

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, warfare, politics, religion

In the course of time I have exhausted the local library's stock of recent books with a science theme. Furthermore, in the past year, the number of new acquisitions for the 500 Dewey Decimal section has dwindled from five or more per month to one at most. Thus, to keep up my reading pace of about a book per week, I have taken up a few stratagems: 

• Purchase e-books online.
• Choose carefully among the rest of the Dewey Decimal System.
• Choose even more carefully in the fiction collection. While I prefer collections of short stories, an occasional science fiction novel will attract my attention. I may read a mystery on occasion, otherwise I eschew mainstream fiction and also fantasy.

On this occasion I found Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. The blurb on the cover flap seemed hopeful, and it didn't seem to indicate any "sword and sorcery", which so often creeps in to "fantasize" books touted as science fiction.

I was almost put off by reading the second paragraph: 

"Like other families in the Chath Precinct of Ooioiaa, all the children [of the Consorority of the Translocation] are boys, whatever their personal inclinations. Unlike other families, on reaching adulthood those boys are sorted by the family's matriarch into those who will become women, and hence consorors, and those who will become men. Though Ooioiaan boys may group up to be any gender one may care to imagine, for the boys of the Consorority of the Translocation there are only those two options available."

However, I forged on. Indeed, the book has several interesting ideas. Two in particular stand out. Firstly, the planet Aaa, in which the single city of Ooioiaa is located deep underneath an ice shell, is a rogue planet, coursing through space without a star. One complication of having surface facilities for spacefaring vessels is that planet-native creatures called snowrollers are able to eat whatever metals are used for those facilities, albeit very slowly. This makes them equivalent to corrosion, I suppose, and continued maintenance is required to stave off disastrous accidents.

Secondly, the city is centered on the Translocation of the Radiant Star, and several competing religions have grown up around its worship. One of these is the Chath and two others are named, but their (unpronounceable) names aren't important here. Rather, the mutual suspicion is as expectable as that seen among Catholics, Protestants, and Pentecostals in modern Western society. So is the grasping for wealth under a mask of piety by the religious leaders. Ms Leckie seems to have produced a satirical reflection of the religious landscape she grew up in (Fortunately, she didn't try to extend the metaphor to deal with the 8,000 or so denominations in America, a few hundred of which are to be found in any city of more than 100,000 inhabitants).

Invasion by a superior force is a great way to introduce dramatic tension. The plethora of intrigues already present in Ooioiaa multiply when the Radchaai arrive. The governor is found to be reasonable and comparatively just, in spite of being alternately bemused and aghast at the religious practices around her. Of course, the Radchaai have a religion of their own, and the governor is guardedly tolerant of the Chath and the other Consororities. Though Radiant Star stands alone, it is placed in the conceptual space of the author's Imperial Radch Trilogy. 

After half the book has been spent on setting things up, the big turn arrives when "gates" (similar to Stargate, I suppose) are shut off, and easy communication with other worlds ends. This turns out to be a consequence of civil war in Radch space. Since Ooioiaa exists largely by interworld trade, including many foodstuffs, the result is famine. An infecting organism begins destroying growing crops, particularly one called skel that was imported by the Radchaai. The famine deepens; starvation become the primary cause of death. A struggle ensues over control of access to the Translocation of the Radiant Star. (I was puzzled about how to illustrate this story. I "discussed" it with Gemini, and it brought up several ideas. I elaborated on one, with the result shown here. The two words on the sign are Russian for "riots" and "gunder", which is probably a misspelling of "gender", a loan-word into Russian. It makes sense for Gemini to include it because gender roles and gender confusion run throughout the book, with the author using at least eight sets of pronouns for various unnamed genders.)

A story that plays out across this drama is that of Jonr, a Chath boy who was born to be sent to another planet as a slave. This lends a Disneyesque sheen: an abused or neglected child eventually escapes into either prosperity or freedom. It feels like a cross between Oliver Twist and Star Wars.

I don't know if I would recommend this book to any generally conservative audience (more than half the country, if you're counting). But I enjoyed it. The author looks out the fourth wall sometimes to address us, kind of like the "stage manager" in Our Town, but with more irony. These asides allow her to save space by referring to aspects of the Radch universe without too much explainery. 357 pages is already long enough, if barely enough for the several braided themes found therein.

After a big effort, the spiders slack off

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI agents, AI training

I'm wondering whether to devise a different term than Spiders for the AI agents that are producing all the traffic. I suspect there is less LLM training going on, and more cases of my blog being checked by agentic tools, because I have such an eclectic range of subjects. It is a nice thought. 

I produced this image with Gemini and did no further edit prompting. I could have asked for the text to be removed, but it's cute enough just like it is.

Anyway, have a look at the view stats for the past year:

That big blast lasting nearly two weeks, and which ended about a week ago, represents more than a million views. Then things dropped significantly. However, it's not totally quiet; there are still 10,000 to 15,000 daily views since then. Note that a year ago, most days were in the 1,000 range for most of November and December, with a blip as high as 2,500/day in mid December.

I thought things were crazy when the hash hit in the middle, from March to early August. I don't know what this October Surprise could be. If it was really AI agents, what changed?

Anyone else who's on Blogger, what do your stats show?

Shifting Spycraft

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, espionage, memoirs

When I was an active member of a Toastmasters club, an elderly woman joined. I will call her Carol. Members are encouraged to prepare a 5-minute speech every month or two. Carol did so. Sometimes her speeches were quite memorable. She and her husband were retired from the U.S. State Department, and it became clear that they had been spies. I'll paraphrase her most memorable speech in Toastmasters:

"We were sent to Thailand to surveil a Russian team who had obtained a compound at the edge of a rice paddy. We were able to obtain a small house in a row of houses on the other side. We decided to put a listening device under the Russians' house by pushing a pipe through the ground; once it was installed we would push through stiff wires with a microphone at the end. We dug a trench so that we could pound a pipe along, and screw on new sections as needed. We did the pounding only when there was a lot of traffic on a nearby road, using irregular blows to avoid a patterned sound. Late one winter evening, during the rush hour but after dark, the pounding got very hard, but we persisted as long as we dared. When rush hour ended we stopped for the night. In the morning, we looked out, and saw that the pipe must have hit a rock because it was sticking a couple of feet right out of the ground!"

She didn't say what happened next. Later my wife and I met them at a YMCA event, and I asked about it, but she said some secrets still have to be kept. That is our only contact with spies…that we know about.

More recently, both Andrew and Jihi Bustamante worked for the CIA for several years, and then another dozen years or so training security teams. They founded Everyday Spy, teaching spy skills to help individuals deal with more ordinary matters. They have written Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America's New Spy War. There they tell of their most significant achievement in the CIA, applying the "cell model" that has long been used most successfully by terrorist networks and the spy operations of some countries; I remember reading decades ago about cell networks in America operated by the USSR. If it works, use it! This is the basis of the "new spy war" and it breaks down the overly bureaucratic stovepipe structure that had arisen in the traditional CIA. 

Andrew and Jihi had worked, separately and together, in what they call Falcon House, where "Falcon" is code for one of the most secretive and paranoid countries (but not quite on the level of North Korea). At first I thought Falcon is an Islamic country because Arab men adore falconry. But the ease of movement of female CIA operatives nixed that idea. Falcon is probably in Asia; there's no need to speculate further. During their work with Falcon they lived in a nearby country, one with the freedom to come and go.

A foundational characteristic of spycraft is to go unnoticed. Memorable people are more likely to be caught. In this regard, I think Andrew is on the edge of being too memorable; from the description by his wife Jihi, he can be bold and loud, even arrogant. In this generated image (DuckDuckGo running GPT Image 2) several couples are visible. Does one stand out? If one couple were spies, it would probably not be that one.

The Bustamantes did not enter Falcon publicly as a couple. They had different roles. He often worked in the field, while she was a target specialist. Another couple, an extremely unmemorable pair, did operate as a couple, with good success. A long section near the end of the book outlines some of Andrew's forays into Falcon, and eventually his almost miraculous escape from capture, more due to bumbling by Falcon officials than his own skills. It ended his usefulness there. But by that time the "shadow cell" had been set up, successfully operating under the principle that only a single person in the Cell could be known to other CIA entities or cells; other cells were set up on the Cell's model once its efficacy became known.

Just as the Bustamantes began operating near and in Falcon, a mole had been detected operating in the CIA, someone who had been "turned" by Falcon's agents. His identity is not revealed in the book, but his eventual discovery and arrest are briefly outlined. While the mole was active, Andrew had to be even more circumspect than usual to avoid exposing the other members of the Cell.

The advice and stories in this book buttressed for me two principles I learned from lectures by police and security trainers: "security by obscurity" and "be a harder target than the next guy". In spy work as in personal security, the opposition isn't perfectly diligent (though in Falcon they come close!), and will often pay more attention to easier prey and sometimes can be distracted.

The astonishing popularity of Einstein

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, facebook, instagram, social media, Albert Einstein

How many people who lived in the early Twentieth Century but passed away before 1960, who are not your own relatives, can you name? Perhaps you wouldn't come up with this name right away, but if someone says it, you remember instantly: Einstein.

Did you know that Albert Einstein still has social media accounts with millions of followers? Not only so, there is still a hot market in Einstein artifacts and memorabilia, including his letters, copies of letters and articles he wrote, and even bobblehead dolls (Podcasting physicist Sabine Hossenfelder keeps an Einstein bobblehead handy in her videos).

The "voice" behind the Facebook page, Instagram site, and other media, writer Benyamin Cohen (titled "Manager of Einstein's Official Social Media Accounts") has written an enjoyable book about the great scientist and his own experiences as the guy behind the scenes: The Einstein Effect: How the World's Favorite Genius Got Into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds.

Say the word "genius" and most people will think, and usually say, "Einstein." The kid in math class who aces every test gets kidded, "Hey, Einstein, slack off and leave a few decent grades for the rest of us." Whenever you drive to a new place and plot your course on hour phone, or a Garmin or a TomTom, you're using tech with Einstein's math behind it. Use a TV remote, and the IR signal detector behind that tiny black window on your TV is using the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein's explanation for Brownian Motion (the jiggling of pollen grains seen under a microscope) proved the existence of atoms, long before more direct evidence was found. Nuclear energy (and, sad to say, nuclear weapons) have their origin in his most famous equation, E=mc².

To produce around ten posts and pictures daily, Mr. Cohen needs to do constant research. Fortunately, this is easier than in the past, because of the Internet. But he gets in a bit of travel now and again, such as his trip to see what is left of Einstein's brain. The story is much retold, how the medical examiner diced up the brain and took it home in several Mason jars filled with alcohol. Bits have been sent to various researchers over the years, but much is left. Cohen got to see it, at a secret location, meeting someone he just calls Dr. X.

By the way, while it would be nice if Benyamin Cohen were a talented physicist, he isn't any kind of scientist, which he freely admits. As a result, I noticed a number of scientific mistakes in the book, but I would not expect them to detract from the value of the book. I'll mention just one, for the record: when he saw the brain, he writes, "The cerebellum that gave us E=mc² was right there in front of me." Just so you'll know: The cerebellum is the little "bun" at the back of the brain which operates your body; the part that thought up the equation is called the cerebrum. 

It is quite amazing that Einstein is still so popular. Only a few people understand his theories of Relativity. Yes, theories; there are two of them. His popularity is based at least in part on his reputation as a maverick. In just one year, he overturned four areas of "known" scientific theory, with new theories that swallowed up the old ones. The GPS system we use to navigate is based on both theories of Relativity, and I'll try to explain how without getting into the scientific weeds:

First, the Special Theory of Relativity is based on the constant speed of light, no matter how fast things are moving. One result is the way speed affects time. In particular, the GPS satellites in their orbits some 20,000 km overhead (so they orbit the Earth twice daily), are moving fast, so the atomic clock that each satellite carries runs just a bit slow, about 7 microseconds daily.

Secondly, the General Theory of Relativity is based on the way that gravity shapes space, which also affects the passage of time. The altitude of the satellites puts them in a lower gravitational field, so their clock run just a bit fast, about 45 microseconds daily. 

Overall, their clocks run 38 microseconds per day faster than clocks on the surface of Earth. This has to be accounted for in the calculations made by a GPS receiver, or accurate location could not be determined. Thus, GPS, by its very existence, proves the effectiveness of both theories of Relativity.

Mr. Cohen tells a dozen or more aspects of Einstein's continuing effect on our society and culture. Einstein was in on the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which now holds many of his archives and other artifacts. He was a lifelong pacifist. Although he, along with others, urged President Roosevelt to fund the development of the atomic bomb, it was because he knew Germany was determined to develop one, and the scientists realized that America had to do it first, or lose the war. After the use of atomic bombs against Japan, Einstein was aghast at their power. He advocated for denuclearization for the rest of his life.

Albert Einstein was a complex personality. His focus on science came at the expense of his family life. What the book reveals, I don't care to repeat. When he was stuck on the math for a theory, he would either go sailing (and often, get lost) or play violin, to rest his brain. He had his likes and dislikes, but, don't we all? What he liked the most was discovery, the search for truth. I don't know what he would make of an era where a popular mantra is "my truth," but he would certainly understand "fake news." He was not universally loved, but found himself the target of envious attacks and religious attacks because he was a Jew (he didn't practice the religion much, but had a kind of general belief in God, whom he usually called "The Old One.") He typically shrugged it off.

Rather than get into more details, I suggest to everyone to read this book. I greatly enjoyed it.

Spiders getting down to business

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

What I call spider scanning software seems bent on setting new records. The spiders have buckled down to work! For the past week the average hit rate has been quite steady near one per second.

What do you make of these numbers?

Compare this month (so far) with the prior month. Nearly 7 times the traffic. A full month at one hit per second would come to about 2.6 million. Note that the "All Time" figure goes back to the date that Google Analytics were applied to Blogger, around a decade ago. For more context, here are the charts for the past 30 days, 7 days, 24 hours, and 2 hours.

In the upper two charts, a one-pre-second rate would be 86,400. We see that wasn't quite achieved. In the third chart, it would be 3,600 per hour, and in the last, 60 per minute. The last couple of hours before I obtained these charts, we see that a sustained rate of 80 per minute is possible; that's 1.33 per second, 4,800 per hour, 115,200 per day, and 3,456,000 per 30 days (or a bit more than 3.5 million per average month). In a few days it will be more clear how this is progressing.

Meanwhile, I'm interested in "where?". Here are the 7 day and one day top countries:

For the most recent full day, USA is running at about half its rate for the prior six days. Otherwise, these top 9 actors are the same for both periods. It is an odd mix. Although I mostly attribute this level of activity to a combination of AI training and AI agent lookups, I really can't be sure.

By looking at a list of the most "popular" posts in the different time periods, it is still true, as I reported earlier, that page-by-page views only constitute a few percent. Most of these views are front page only, with the understanding that the most recent ten to fifteen posts are presented in their entirety, and a "Load Older Posts" button brings up the next group, and so forth. That means the entire blog can be reached with fewer than 200 clicks, clicks which do not add to the totals for individual posts.

I'm curious: to any folks who read this, who use Blogger, please check in your stats to see if there are patterns similar to what I am seeing, and leave comments. Thanks!

A possibly futile obsession

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, psychologists, parapsychologists, parapsychology, reincarnation

Disclaimer: The book being reviewed dwells on the subject of reincarnation and one physician's study of whether our minds can exist without a living brain, either in an afterlife or as a reincarnated person. I am a Christian, and similar questions are of great interest to those who believe the Bible. I do not oppose the work done by the subject of the book. I do have a different perspective on the experimental and observational results he obtained, which I will present in due time.

Dr. Ian Stevenson was a genius, with a solid combination of piercing intellectual skills and unflagging energy. For much of his life he was a practicing physician and psychologist. Over time he devoted more and more attention and energy to ascertaining whether the mind survives the death of the brain. He also led the Society for Psychical Research for a time and was a lifelong member, and in midlife cut short a fruitful administrative career to found the Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia, now called the Division of Personality Studies. The latter name was Dr. Stevenson's desire, to sidestep opposition to a major university having an endowed chair with the name Para-anything. But those in the campus administration who opposed his work would have none of it: they wanted it out in the open, in hopes a future administration would axe the whole project. 

One wrinkle: Dr. Stevenson was supported for much of his life by Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and founder of Xerox. Carlson's money shielded the doctor from much of the opposition and enabled him to work practically unfettered for decades. In particular, he traveled a great deal, including to countries such as India where belief in reincarnation was a part of the local culture.

As we find in The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul, by Jesse Bering (a research psychologist and professor in his own right), Dr. Stevenson's efforts yielded a great mass of material. Whether it counts as "evidence" is still much in contention. On one side, wishful thinkers and "true believers" over-advocate for their point of view, and materialists and skeptics argue just as strongly for theirs. Both point to the same thing: the many anecdotal cases with clearly astounding details, buried in a mass of less definitive and even contradictory cases, plus a lack of clear experimental evidence, at least in the view of the skeptics, that any of the contentions of psychics could be valid.

Ian was an odd fellow in a few ways. One was his tendency to write about himself, in his own journals, in the third person. He strove to look at his own mind "from the outside," just as we all must look at the mind of any other person. One might think he would thus be too cold and analytical to relate to his patients and study subjects. However, he was very personable and able to lower the defenses of others, to interview people and learn much that they would typically hide from others.

Throughout his work he sought out cases in which the person in question, often a child, had physical manifestation of a connection with the person whom the youngster claimed to be. In one extraordinary case, a child born with a hand missing its fingers began talking before the age of two about people, whom he named, who turned out to live in a nearby village, and a terrible accident that caused the fingers of one hand to be cut off, plus a later event that took the "inhabitant's" life. Quite a collection of stories, many with photos, showed various birthmarks or birth defects that connected the now-living child with things that happened to the person who had died a few weeks, months, or even years before the child was born.

The bulk of the work on any case was to determine whether the child's seeming memory of being someone else was genuine, and not the result of knowledge that came by more ordinary means, or by fraud, or even by telepathy.

Dr. Bering confesses to be partly persuaded by the mass of material that Dr. Stevenson gathered. Having begun as a committed materialist, he is now somewhat open to the possibility that the mind can exist "discarnate", not entirely bound with a living brain, what some call a Soul.

For anyone who believes the Bible, this is foundational. The general view of most Christians is called Duality, that the soul and body are distinct and that the soul survives bodily death. The Biblical understanding is expressed in the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, where he wrote of "spirit, soul, and body [being] kept blameless". The person has a body, which deals with physical things and matters, a soul (including mind, emotion and will), which deals with psychological matters, and a spirit that is our means of communication and fellowship with God. Some psychologists, who are not Bible believers, have also written that human behavior seems to show that we have three "parts": spirit, soul and body.

However, for those who believe in reincarnation or "past lives", the Bible has a disappointing viewpoint. The author of Hebrews (probably Paul) wrote, "…it is reserved for men to die once, and after this comes judgment." (Heb. 9:27) No re-entering a different body and returning; souls don't get recycled.

What then of the amazing coincidences that Dr. Stevenson unearthed? I'll just summarize a few points to avoid turning this post into a theological treatise.

• In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 16, we read of a poor man and a rich man who both died. Jesus tells of a dialog that occurred in Sheol/Hades between the tormented soul of the rich man and Abraham. In the end, he asks Abraham to send the soul of the poor man, named Lazarus, to his brothers and warn them of their fate. Abraham refuses, saying they had the writings of Moses to warn them, and, "If they will not hear Moses, neither will they hear someone who rises from the dead."
• Ironically, I believe Jesus foreknew that his friend Lazarus would die and be raised from the dead (by Jesus); this is in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. In the next chapter, the religious leaders, who have been planning to kill Jesus, say that now they have to kill Lazarus also!
• The Bible tells of "unclean spirits" or demons, which are unseen by us, as also angels usually are. Whatever they may be, they sometimes "possess" or inhabit a person without permission. Telepathy in the ordinary sense is not needed if these beings can pass information in ways that Dr. Stevenson would have been unable to discern.
• The Christian view is that all Psychic manifestations are accomplished by such unclean spirits, seeking to deceive people and turn them from believing the Bible and the God of the Bible.

The Biblical Christian expects upon death to enter a restful state in Hades, awaiting "the first resurrection", whereupon to be given a spiritual body, a glorified body. There are other matters found in the Bible, but for the purpose of this review, this is sufficient. Whatever is the reality of the stories gathered by Dr. Stevenson, I believe unseen spirits are the source.

Dr. Stevenson did valuable work, discovering many cases that are hard to explain by purely materialistic means. Those who do not want to believe in God may be driven to reconsider the value of reading the Bible and giving it some credence; others they may be motivated to believe reincarnation or other things that a Biblical Christian would consider nonsense. We do have a free will, after all. I prefer a life with God to a life without God.

Another spider breakout

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

For many months the traffic to this blog has been ten to a hundred to a thousand times the level that it was for many prior years. I attribute the recent onslaught to the entire blog being snarfed up by online spiders for adding to training data for large language models (LLMs). The past couple of days the traffic has set a new record.

One one prior occasion this year it peaked at about 60,000 daily views, or more than forty per minute. Yesterday there were 61,894 and so far today there have been 62,417. For most of the past month traffic has been rocking along in the range of 3,000 daily views, just over two per minute. Now it is approaching one per second, as this chart of the prior two hours shows:

For the first hour, the average appears to have been at or over 60 per minute, or one per second, or 86,400 per day. The second hour sits near 50 per minute, or 72,000 per day. The sharp drop at the very end may portend a return to "only" a few thousand daily views. I'll know in a few hours.

This time, more than half the traffic originates (or passes through VPNs) in the US. China is not seen at all. I wonder if blogs that are a lot more popular—with tens of thousands to millions of "honest" daily views—are getting hit this hard, or perhaps much harder. Is anybody looking?

Illustrating a favorite hymn

 kw: photo essays, hymns, illustrations, ai art

I know many hymns. I usually have a hymn tune running through my head, which is why I am not to be found wearing earbuds. Certain hymns have such vivid imagery that I get a lovely scene in my mind's eye. I decided to illustrate one of these using the current version of Gemini Flash, which relies on Nano Banana 2 for image generation.

The first stanza and chorus of this hymn are:

Savior, lead me up the mountain,
  Where the Lord alone is seen,
Where we hear the voice from heaven,
  Where the air is pure and clean.

 

Lead me higher up the mountain,
  Give me fellowship with Thee;
In Thy light I see the fountain,
    And the blood it cleanses me.

I first asked Gemini how to properly format a prompt to produce an illustration for a poem or hymn. Following its suggestions I wrote a detailed prompt containing about 220 words. That yielded this image:

Then I began editing. I prompted Gemini to have the couple walking uphill. This was the result:

Now there is an uphill path, but the couple haven't started up it. So I asked for that:

Now we are getting somewhere. I could have requested them to be further up the path, but this is very good as it is. It's time for some finishing touches. 

At this point, the image size is 1376x768, Gemini's default for 16:9 aspect ratio (1.778:1). I make these images to run in a slide show on an HD screen (1920x1080), so the images need to be larger than that. I used the free program Upscayl to double the dimensions to 2752x1536. This is slightly wide, a ratio of 1.792:1. I like exact multiples of 32x18 for the slide show. All further work was done in IrfanView.

• I first resized to 2741x1530.
• I cropped a bit to achieve 2720x1530 (85 times 32x18), using a tool in Irfanview's Edit menu called Create Maximized Selection, picking 16:9 as the ratio to use.
• I added the text of the stanza and chorus, using drawing tools in IrfanView.

This is the final result:

For the file in my slide show, I added a signature; I sign with my name and date and the AI tool used, near a lower corner.

Note: You can click on the images to get the full size versions. The last image is 4 Mpx, midway between HD and 4k.

The pre-Hippies of two centuries ago

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mini biographies, transcendentalism, social movements, abolitionism

My most recent wildcard selection, a rare excursion into reading about intellectualism and literary movements, is The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World by Bruce Nichols. Like many, I have read only a little of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and I considered him the originator and leading figure of Transcendentalism. He and several others founded the Transcendental Club in 1836, but I find from reading this book that Emerson didn't like the term "transcendentalism". The term he and his colleagues and acquaintances more frequently used was "the Newness".

From reading the book I didn't obtain much of an understanding of transcendentalism. I wondered, "What did they wish to transcend?" So I did some digging.

Per the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Transcendentalism is a 19th-century philosophical and literary movement that asserted that divine, fundamental truths can be known through personal intuition rather than through rigid religious dogma or sensory experience." Emerson and the others were originally Unitarians (Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister), and they were reacting to the cold rationalism and sobriety of what some have called a "faithless faith". They desired a more intense experience, something more spiritual.

Note: These Unitarians considered themselves Christians, but denied that Jesus is God. They had various explanations for this, while still considering that Jesus is worthy of worship, just not on the level of God. This is in contrast to modern Unitarian Universalists, an eclectic mélange of semi-theistic and non-theistic belief systems that are united primarily in their universalism, which is the belief that everyone eventually is received into heaven, perhaps even Satan. The Unitarians of two-plus centuries ago are well described by a term more recently laid upon Episcopalians, "God's frozen chosen."

The transcendentalists, then, weren't acting contrary to Unitarianism, but in parallel, seeking to transcend it. Thus, the Newness was embodied in dramatic experimentation: new ways of living, new kinds of schools, ways of speaking and lecturing and writing that differed greatly from the European models, and an exceedingly self-focused and experimental spirituality. Communes and similar mini-societies arose (and disbanded), new schools were founded (and then foundered), lecture series and small periodicals abounded, and "church" as most understood it was practically abandoned or dramatically changed.

All this reminds me a whole lot of the social radicalism of "the Sixties": communes, a surge of home schooling (quite different from the more effective methods currently in use), social protest against not just governmental authority but "the establishment" in general, and an intense focus on personal self-regard and autonomy. There is a current resurgence of similar trends, most evident in the notion of "my truth" coupled with the weird group-think of cancel culture.

Stepping back, I see all three movements, the Newness of the early 1800's, the activism of the mid-1900's, and the "political correctness" of the 1980's that led to more recent "wokeness", as being like the Hippies of my youthful social environment. In all three, it is evident that the abandonment of Divine morality such as the Ten Commandments leads unerringly to amorality, and the abandonment of God as "the truth" (which Jesus called Himself) leads to "my truth" which leads to "every man a liar." The characteristic of most modern political and cultural leaders now, in the 2020's, is, to paraphrase former President G.W. Bush, "Some lie when they deem it necessary, but these lie constantly, just to stay in practice."

The Newness was not based on overt lies, but on rejection of Divine authority in favor of personal autonomy. The Sixties was mired in falsehood and half-truths that made many fearful to speak the truth (I was one who did, and I was nearly assassinated as a consequence). American society of the current Teens and Twenties could be called the Triumph of Lies, beginning with "You can choose your doctor" and going downhill from there.

So I am not misunderstood, I am a triple Trumper. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 primarily to vote against Hilary Clinton, because she and her husband were the main focus of the Bush quote above. I voted for him again in 2020 because during his first term he won my respect (As an aside, various articles about Mr. Trump claim that he told ten thousand or twenty or thirty thousand lies. All such articles have been demonstrated to be riddled with lies against him, while proving no more than a handful of untruthful statements he made; in actuality, I observe that the legacy media perpetrates tens of thousands of lies about Donald Trump daily. This is the source of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which afflicts about 40% of the voting public). I voted for Donald Trump again in 2024 with the clearest of consciences. Not because he is a "good man" (I agree with Jesus that "no man is good") but that he is measurably better than literally anyone else in public office. Rather than answer, "but does he lie?" I would say that he tells the truth more than nearly everyone else, particularly the pseudo-journalists of the legacy media.

Back to the book. The Newness had fallen apart by the early or mid 1850's. The rising conflagrations around the country related to slavery and abolitionism forced the transcendentalists and their sympathizers out of their armchairs and writing-desks and into more public action. Firstly, they became more apt to speak in support of abolition publicly, and some took more direct action, such as harboring runaway slaves in their homes and helping them flee further northward. Finally even Emerson, one of the last to do so, spoke fervently in favor of abolishing slavery. As the nation teetered towards civil war, the "life of the mind" and "armchair philosophizing" became untenable, even impossible. The Unitarian and Transcendentalist belief that human nature is basically good was called into question, then denigrated, and finally demolished as more than half a million lives were taken in the war between the states.

The first prominent transcendentalist to die was Henry David Thoreau, on May 6, 1963. Although Emerson gave the eulogy at his funeral, he was himself in decline, at least mentally. Others followed over the years. Emerson himself lingered until his death April 27, 1882, followed about six years later by Louisa May Alcott. She was not a transcendentalist, but a parallel "fellow traveler" whose fame as an author had two strains: books based on her experiences in her family and the "Emerson circle", and rip-roaring adventure stories that she usually published under pseudonyms. 

Transcendentalism had come and gone. Remnants remain in the styles of writing that led to masterpieces such as Walden and Moby-Dick. Experiential writing, what one might call crypto-memoir, is a lasting legacy and informs today's best writers. Emerson's grave, shown here, centers the "transcendentalists' field" and represents more than a gravesite, but a legacy that opened the American mind, fortunately without destroying it.