*STRONGMEN: The BULLY CLUB that wants to rule the world

"Strongman" - an illustration by AI

Vladimir Putin compared his invasion in Ukraine to rape, ”You Sleep my beauty, you're going to have to put up with it anyway.” Donald Trump, who captured the Republican party, did everything but pull down his pants and have a public hard-on to prove he was stud enough to grab-ass any woman or country. Xi Jin Ping, who plans to be China's president-for-life is bully-in-chief.

Putin and Trump, the tough guys in the playground,  strut their stuff, create chaos and leave a bloody trail in their wake. Members of the gang include Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Bolsanaro in Brazil, and Johnson in Great  Britain. The UN reckons that 85% of the world's people live in countries where authoritarian populism exists and freedom of the press is squelched.

In the US, unless there's a miracle, Trump, or one of his minions will be on the Rep ticket in 2024. Dems have got to use shock ad awe to knock Reps off their keisters. For ex., run a split Dem/Rep ticket. Once Strongmen get in power the game is...

*The Age of STRONGMEN by Gideon Rachman

Sources: Financial Times, New York Times, Economist

Next week:  Whatever happened to PLAYFULNESS? 

Note: Well, I'm an eternal optimist. I cannot believe people would be stupid enough to elect Trump *twice*. I see the current turmoil as as the last attack of the dying beast, the one-more-scare at the end of a horror film, after which all will be fine.

Gotta admit though, that people at large have proven me wrong time after time, the bar can't be buried deep enough to stop people from digging a route under it. Case in point: Bongbong Marcos and the Philippines.

PS: The illustrations in this post were all created by Artificial Intelligence, AI*. The only input was a string of text, similar to this: "An early 1900s painting of a strongman wearing striped tights, lifting weights in the circus". 

I actually made a whole bunch of them, here's a gallery of selected ones - from funny to menacing to disturbing to weird and even beautiful. 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/uqVUxMMxV6wMmhUR7

We live in interesting times!

*Most of these were done with Dall·E Mini, some used a Google Colab notebook with imagenet_16384.

CU

--

Eki

HELL & BRIMSTONE: the new religion – BAD NEWS

 

Wake up. Check your cell, laptop, TV, radio, and the morning paper. If you've got any marbles at all, the news scares the bejeezus outta you. War, atrocities, Covid variants, crime, inflation, starvation, global warming. All there in spades - 24/7.

It's become a hard and fast ritual. I know addicts who turn CNN on in the morning and shut it off when they go to bed. In the US Trump was, and is the great love/hate divider. One fervent cultist called him "God on earth".

Got a  break from Bad News when I read Finland was the Happiest Country in the world for the 5th year. To an outsider, Finland's evolution is a bloody miracle: 750 years under Swedish rule, 109 years under Russian rule, 1939-1940 wars with Russia. Today the country is prosperous and at peace, but prepared* for war and disasters. A beautiful, democratic country, with one of the best educational systems in the world and good social support. Finns have a lot to be happy about. Especially in these sad and terrible times.

"I'm 100% for President Niinistö." - The Shark

Source: *Financial Times, internet

Next week: STRONGMEN: the BULLY CLUB That wants to rule the world 

Note: Gotta admit, I'm no stranger to doomscrolling. And sure, there's plenty of doom to scroll. The last few years have been remarkably horrible. But at the same time, I guess we should remember that a postman biting a dog is news. A dog biting the postman is not.

Even when it comes to war reporting, we see the houses the bombs hit, not the ones that are intact. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that doom sells. Something being okay does not. Everyday good news, well, is not news and has low sales potential.

It's spring out there. Today was a beautiful clear-sky day, one could really feel the sun warm. For the first time this year, I sat about half an hour on a park bench, just enjoying being there (and okay, fiddling with my phone... but you get the point).

CU

--

Eki

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY: “Servant of the People"

Servant of the people - cover image from IMDB (2015)

“History repeats itself, first as farce, second as a tragedy.” *

2014: a history teacher gives a rant about Ukraine's corrupt government. A student catches it on his cell phone, the video goes viral.  He's put up as a candidate for president and wins.  Surprised, his only promise is to try to make Ukrainians proud of him.

He meets his entourage – a “suntan architect”, an “esteem raiser”, a body double suggested as useful for when “he has drinks with Lukashenko”, the staff of a government department devoted to downsizing government. “Servant of the People” got a five-star review: “Zany - like the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup”.

2019: Volodymyr Zelensky runs for president and wins. Surprised, his only promise is to try to make the Ukrainian people proud of him. It's not easy. Trump tries to shake him down to find dirt on Joe Biden.  And now Putin's war.  We see it every day - it is a gut-wrenching tragedy. Watch the series if you can find it. The Financial Times reported that it will make you laugh and break your heart.

“Servant of the People” is free in Great Britain and Ireland. Read that a small Swedish agency in Stockholm has copyrights.

* “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx, 1818-1883

Source: Financial Times, internet


Note: Again, I don't know much of anything valuable to add in these odd and sad times, other than repeating the obvious. Oh, in Finland, "Servant of The People" is freely available from YLE, the Finnish National Broadcasting Company, at their AREENA streaming service. Yet another case of well-spent tax euros, I say.

So far I've seen the first two episodes. It's pretty good, even without giving it the obviously deserved sympathy points.

CU

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Eki

NFTs: cool TOOL or rad FAD?

Spud in Paris; not yet NFT though.

When Beeple's non-fungible token crypto-art, Everydays*, sold for 69.3 m  at Christie's, it grabbed my attention. EVERDAYS is recorded on a blockchain (Ethereum). If the work is re-sold Beeple gets a cut.  Like cryptocurrency, NFTs leave a massive carbon footprint. But it's been a boon for digital artists, designers, games**, virtual property, films, you-name-it.

Bored Ape Yacht club's four founders created 10,0000 images of a bored ape. They originally sold for $300. An NFT owner meant to list his ape for $30,000. By mistake, it was priced at $3000 and snapped up. Paris Hilton paid $285,000  for her BA.  At this writing, BAYC was worth approx. 2.8bn. The buckets of money sloshing around the NFT world is off the charts.

A legacy player's recreation of London property sold for $54m before the site was launched. The Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal are for sale listed at $20,000 and $40,000. Originally they sold for $400 each. You can still buy property on Fantasy Island for around $105,000. A digital house on Mars costs $500,000. Nutty or not, little margie wants in on the digi-action. Eki!!

Naggy being persuasive: illustration By Maggy Fellman

 

*(5836 consecutive days). Digital artist Mike Winkelman, in an interview in the NYT, said most of his work was crap.
**Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for 68.7BN, the company's most expensive acquisition.

 

**Sony bought Bungie for 3.6BN

Note: Non-fungible token copyrights represent a specific item. If sold, the creator gets a cut. They can't be used to buy stuff like crypto coins.

Sources: The Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, BuzzFeed, Shark

Next week: CONDOMS come in handy: ask the CUBANS


Note: Well where should I start? I guess cryptocurrency. I see it as a sort of cancer in the monetary system - wasting a country's worth of electricity and huge computing resources calculating nothing meaningful, for imaginary wealth. The crypto miners are hoarding all the good graphics cards we digital creators could put into good use (if making imagery is considered better than nothing whatsoever, that is). Not to say the "real" money is any more tangible, it's mostly imaginary too - just a vague promise of future services in the form of zeroes and ones.

Sigh. I just hope NFT:s, Bitcoin et al. come crashing down, burning in flames in a crypto-market apocalypse like never seen before. They really are the Dutch tulip mania of this millennium (google it, it's a fun story).

But yeah, I guess we will dip our toes in this hot pile of a mess too, for the sake of art, or something. I have rather mixed feelings about this though - is it okay to contribute to a problem, even if we do it as a social commentary (and for fun)?

CU

--

Eki

TRUMP: DICTATOR-in-waiting

Trumptler, part 2. Vector file from pixabay, flags from wikipedia.

Ruthless, seized the moment, cartoony looks, bucks to burn, 75m rock-hard base, cowed Republican party, grabs the spotlight, has an armed militia* ready-to-shoot. Trump checks all the boxes.

Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini were all of the above in spades, Trump fits the mold. A joke when he ran in 2015, now we're dead-scared he might be coronated in 2024. His pal, Viktor Orban,**** Hungary's dictator-in-chief, is rootin' for him.

A weak Dem opposition is ominous. Serious people have written serious books*** warning US about a Trump authoritarian presidency. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”, Karl Marx. 

Ha, Ha. Stay tuned.

* Oath Keepers**, Proud boys.

** Founder of OKs, Stewart Rhodes, and 11 members have been indicted for sedition against the US.

*** Tucker Carlson (Fox news' "most-watched cable-news commentator") broadcast from Hungary. He met Orban and reported Hungarians were freer than Americans.

*** PERIL, Robert Woodward and Bob Acosta

 
*** How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsy & Daniel Zitbat

Sources:  The Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post

Next week: NON FUNGIBLE TOKENs: cool TOOL or rad FAD 




Note: I thought about what to add, but there really is not much. We live in the weirdest of times.

CU

--

Eki

Gettin' OLD ain't easy

Gettin' Old Ain't Easy
written by Maggy Fellman and Baptiste Daleman
performed by Baptiste Daleman little margie productions 20©13

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure." 

HELEN KELLER 1880 - 1968 

Mortality has bugged us humans ever since we've had time to think about it.  Woody Allen (86), said he didn't mind dying, he just doesn't want to be there. Well, who does. Read about a  silicon valley scientist who said he'd found the formula to live to 1000. He, and the head of Alphabet, are aiming for a long life*. They take about 125 supplements**a day.

Advice from an old horse's mouth: waste no money on magic pills. Get a good night's sleep  - a study found going to bed between ten and eleven is best for the heart. Cut stress. Get outdoors: bike, walk, run – at least 30' a day.  Eat less meat. Pile up on fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, garlic, olive oil.  Go easy on the booze and pot. Nix on drugs, except prescribed meds.

Dump sugar – a couple of pieces of chocolate is okay, soda pop is poison. Get a job – Eki's mother Liisa, posts a diary blog, takes photographs, and publishes two books a year for the Halkka family. Have a network of pals, young, old, in-between.  DON'T SMOKE! (a no-brainer). Keep a cash-stash. Be a little bad every day. Have fun. Don't panic. We're all in the same damn*** boat.

PS: Take care of your teeth. Gum disease increases the risk of heart disease.  Before I had a knee replacement at Orton hospital, I had to have my teeth X-rayed.


* Places in the world where people live the longest: Okinawa, Japan, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Loma Linda, Ca.,  Icaria, Greece, Sardinia, Italy.

** LongLife nutritional supplements. Users must fall for the name.

*** Swearing is good for you (Health and Science section of the NYT).

Sources: Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Roberta Nelson, personal experience, Mayo Clinic,, Net

Next week:  2022 OOOPS. What's up next? 

Note: In addition to the above, though she's been a retiree for over two decades, my mom still continues her scientific work, a few weeks' worth each year. We still go out in the archipelago on a small boat, land rocky islets, and catch thousands of spittlebugs every summer. The population genetics field study has been going on for over 50 years. That's quite a time series.

She is also a dedicated geocacher, with almost a thousand finds under her belt. A hobby she started after retiring. I tag along about once a week - it's quite fun, we find interesting places near our hometown I never knew existed, get to chat about, well, everything, and get some healthy exercise on the side. We clock a few thousand steps on uneven terrain on each trip, without even noticing it much. Not in winter though - there are limits to this insanity after all ;-)

CU

--

Eki

FRANK GEHRY, 91, Tops Himself With a TOWER in Arles, France

Frank & Alvar, Little Margie Productions 20©05. Best viewed on full screen at Youtube.

Just when we began to think, what the hell happened to Frank Gehry, he pops up in the Financial Times with a boffo review* for LUMA Arles. Love it, hate it (some locals say it looks like a crushed tin can, the Shark thinks it wrecks the landscape), you can't ignore it. The front, covered in polished stainless steel siding, changes color as the day goes by. The tower sits on a giant glass drum, where most of the art is.  Smaller exhibit rooms are in the tower, seen from miles away. Frank does not do subtle.

LUMA Arles, Google Maps Street View. Click and drag to look around.

From the start of his career, Frank has caused a stir. When he couldn't get work he did a crazy makeover of his own house. It got him a lot of press, but no big commissions. His career took off when the movers and shakers in  Bilbao, Spain commissioned him to design the Guggenheim museum. It saved the town - a  huge draw for tourists and new business.  LUMA  Arles had a different mission – to make a 21st-century statement in an ancient Romanesque city.  

Vincent Van Gogh lived in Arles. His work, at the time, was panned. He painted the knock-out Starry Night in a mental hospital nearby. Vincent is yelling from his grave, 'Fuck the naysayers FRANK!”

* Review by Edwin Heathcote

PS: Frank's favorite architect is Alvar Aalto. Little Margie produced "Frank & Alvar" in 2006 (Eki has updated the video  - it looks brand new. He'll tell how he did it.)

Sources: Financial Times, personal experience

Next week: Gettin' OLD Ain't Easy



Note: As Maggy said, the above Youtube link is to a new version of our 15-year old documentary, Frank & Alvar. A lot has happened in digital imaging since then. In 2005 when we shot this documentary (released in 2006), the television cameras were big, extremely expensive, and looked rather impressive too. The image quality was great considering the period but in 2021, it looks like crap.

The Standard Definition (SD) of digital widescreen television in Europe, and most countries outside the USA, was anamorphic D1 PAL 50i, 720*576 pixels.

This standard squeezed the 16:9 widescreen image down horizontally by roughly a third to fit the old 4:3 television signal (that's the anamorphic part). The standard also called for 50 fields per second crammed in 25 interlaced (i) frames. This gave a smooth motion, the distinct "TV look" (as opposed to "film look").

For each frame, the image was divided into odd and even rows of "pixels", or TV lines. The odd row was captured and shown first, then the even one. This way the distinct motion steps could be doubled, at the expense of halving the vertical resolution of moving objects.

The "film look" was and still is something a lot of filmmakers wanted - we'd usually rather have our content look like a movie than like a soap opera. So, we would deliberately toss out one of these two TV fields, to get a more movie-like cadence: 25 frames per second instead of 50 fields per second (films are shot 24 frames per second).

This could be done somewhat intelligently, using the full image for static objects, but interpolating the image from just one field for moving objects. It looked pretty good but had the unfortunate side effect of further reducing the resolution of the image anywhere where there was motion.

So, in the end, the file that was broadcast was at a resolution that was 720*576 pixels for static portions of the image, but only 720*288 pixels for any areas that had motion. The motion detecting algorithm was not perfect, so some errors where both fields show in moving areas remained, but that was unnoticeable on a TV set. On a computer screen, which shows the whole image at once, those errors can be visible.

To sum it up, the resolution was abysmally bad compared to what we are used to nowadays: 1920*1080 full HD, or better*.  Simply scaling the SD image up just enlarges all the errors, mushiness and softness of the image. That's also why old TV shows look so horrible on Youtube.

The "zoom in and enhance" trope in movies has always been the laughing stock of anyone who works in the industry. You simply cannot do that - you cannot magically introduce new detail to where there is none. 

Well, that used to be the case. But it's not anymore. There's a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently, and this is one of the best practical use cases of AI in action**.

Zoom in and enhance actually works now. And that's pretty wild.

The way the AI is trained is rather ingenious. You take millions of high-resolution images and make low-resolution copies of them. Then the AI tries to figure out what kind of patterns (often just a few pixels) in the small image correspond to the actual details in the big image. The cool part is, that there's another AI that keeps a score of how well the scaling AI works, how successful it is in reproducing the original large image. Bad guesses get weeded out, good guesses are kept.

Right-click to open image in a new tab. Compare the AI-enhanced image on the top to the old-style upscaling on the bottom. Also notice how small the original image was.

No human knows what exactly the AI does, it is way too complex for that. After enough training, you just have a "black box" that knows what needs to be done in order to make a decent big image out of a small image. And it works. Not perfectly, but surprisingly well, even in this first generation of AI image enhancers.

In the case of Frank & Alvar, i used Topaz Video Enhance AI, which is the first commercial software package to use this technology, as far as i know. I actually got better results after scaling the 720*576 image further down a little, to 720*408 16:9 aspect ratio before feeding it to the AI. This reduced the interlacing artifacts i mentioned earlier.

The resulting image quality is surprisingly good. There are places where the AI did some pretty weird choices, making for some surreal imagery when closely examined, but these usually go unnoticed in the moving video. And there also are some shots that could be easily mistaken for a modern HD camera. 

Color me impressed.

CU

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Eki


* Even most new phones have cameras that do 4K (Ultra HD, UHD) video, which is an even higher resolution. SD is about 0.5 megapixels, HD is about 2 megapixels, and UHD is about 8 megapixels. That's 16 times more resolution than SD television had.

** AI image processing can do some rather cool other stuff too - from imagining new frames between the actual ones for a pretty convincing slow motion to creating believable digital humans, landscapes, and other images to making your photos look like Van Gogh paintings. And we're still just starting, scratching the surface of what is possible. And then there are all the other use cases - AI has replaced journalists for some simple reporting, and it can even excel on comedy: https://arr.am/2020/07/17/jerry-seinfeld-and-eddie-murphy-talk-shit-about-san-francisco-by-gpt-3/