The missed convergence ...

 

10PM August, 2025

Yours truly has a Sony A7SIII, the monster of low light, but you, my loyal readers, already know that. Why is this being discussed as the 7SIII has been out for over 4 years and is due for an update but I digress as this blurb is not about just the camera but also about a missed opportunity of Lytro not talking to Sony about light field tech being integrated with the 7SIII.

Lytro was a US company based in Palo Alto, which launched the world’s first consumer LightField camera in 2011. The second generation camera, the Lytro Illum, was released in 2014. The company subsequently shifted their focus from consumer electronics to the high-end Virtual Reality and Movie sector, before closing down in 2018.

The tech is astounding ...

Software Refocus

One of the most prominently marketed features of light field photography is the possibility to change the focus after the picture is taken. Knowledge of the direction of light rays in a recording allows us to reconstruct different versions of a photo with infinitely adjustable focus:

Post-capture software refocus animation

Synthetic Aperture and Variable Depth of Field

The information contained in a 4D light field volume includes a 3D model of the captured scene, as well as the direction of all light rays arriving at the sensor. Using this rich information, we can use complex mathematics to change optical parameters which, in conventional photography, would be fixed when the image is recorded. One of these parameters is aperture, which determines the depth of field. This makes it possible to produce images with very shallow depth of field (e.g. a very blurry background), or infinite depth of field (where everything is in focus), from the same recording.

But ... It's a light hog.

Enter the missed convergence of the Sony A7SIII and Lytro, courtesy Gemini with minor edits. :)

When analyzing the failure of the consumer Lytro camera, the tech industry often points to a market that "wasn't ready" for 3D volumetric files. While true, the 232 Architecture reveals a much more fundamental mechanical failure: Lytro failed to understand the physics of  light.

They built brilliant optical plumbing but connected it to a proprietary form factor ignoring the established professional ecosystem.

The Thermodynamic Cost of the lack of light

To capture a light field, you place a Micro-Lens Array (MLA) in front of the sensor. This physical Lattice of micro lenses, similar to a dragon fly's compound eye, splits the incoming light rays to map their angular trajectory.

But this optical calculation carries a heavy thermodynamic cost. By splitting the light to record depth, the micro-lenses inherently reduce the intensity of the light hitting the sensor. Plenoptic cameras are notoriously light-hungry. In anything other than bright daylight, the image starves, generating massive digital noise as the sensor struggles to process the fragmented wave.

The A7S III Sensor

The ultimate solution was right in front of them, sitting in the Sony ecosystem.

If Lytro had abandoned their proprietary tubular camera bodies and licensed their micro-lens array to sit directly on top of the Sony A7S III sensor, they would have built a system for the ages.

The A7S III is a legendary piece of hardware specifically because it has a 12-megapixel full-frame sensor.

By keeping the megapixel count relatively low, Sony made the individual pixels massive. The sensor is essentially a frictionless vacuum for light, capable of rendering clean images in near-total darkness.

11 PM

We do not have to theorize about this capability; The A7SIII delivers.

Look at the above image  captured directly by yours truly on the A7S III. This is an extreme low-light environment—just ambient moonlight illuminating a road at 11:00PM

A standard, high-megapixel RGB sensor would choke on this scene, generating massive thermal and digital noise as it struggles to resolve the deep shadows. But the massive pixels of the A7S III effortlessly inhale the limited light, rendering the smooth gradient of the sky with little noise to mar the image.

If a Lytro plenoptic matrix had been placed over this specific sensor, it would have possessed the sheer light-gathering horsepower required to calculate the 3D volumetric depth of the road in one optical snap.

Conclusion: Balancing the Optical Ledger

Fusing Lytro's MLA with the A7S III sensor is the perfect solution of the low light problem. 

The micro-lens array demands a massive toll on incoming light to calculate the 3D void. The A7S III sensor possesses the extreme sensitivity required to pay that toll without generating thermal noise. The Sony sensor would act as the perfect, frictionless receiver for the plenoptic matrix. It is the ultimate missed convergence in modern optical engineering.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

How much longer?

Smoke from the massive wildfires has cast an orange haze over New York City
Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

How much longer?

US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada after hundreds of wildfires have left much of the northern US covered by a blanket of smoke.

The threat follows complaints by US lawmakers over the wildfires and Ontario's premier Doug Ford asking the US to send support to fight the fires, rather than complain.

"The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air," Trump said, threatening to impose new levies over Canada's "willful negligence".

Again ... How much longer???

From Analog to Digital

Convergence V

The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings.”

— Through the Looking-Glass

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish - Stewart Brand

From Analog to Digital

Robert E. Moran

This history is dedicated to 5 extraordinary people

Phil Mittleman, Gideon Gartner, Beryl B

Billy Sunshine and Steve Forbes

Computer History - Convergence V

Notes from Underground/Rev 1

 Title page of Russian-language 1866 edition

Unlike Fyodor Dostoevsk's , The Underground Man attacking contemporary Russian philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?[5] as Dosteovsk's work can be viewed as an attack on determinism: the idea that everything, including the human personality and will, can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics.[6] but rather to the mysteries of quantum and how it applies
to a cochear implant.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

Said system is NOT TURNED ON. It just resides in the skull but your truly hears croutons crunching on both sides of the head and finger snaps at less loudness but it's there though the audio nerve is cut and voices are totally gone. Ditto tinnitus! Why is this? Quantum? Analog, who knows but asking the doc about this and he said it happens all the time.

Aside from the fact the VA was an 11!!! in every way possible!, the fact remains, is it quantum and Orch-or, the microtubule notion of intelligence happening as we speak as they are everywhere.

Microtubule

One never knows, do one?- Fats Waller? :)

Boots on the ground?

President Trump at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., on Wednesday. 

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

 Bone Spurs is contemplating the unthinkable, boots on the ground. Let's think about this, I'd rather not because if this happens, the Levant is gone as is the economy. This cannot happen or could it? 

As bad as Nixon was, this kind of insanity would not even be contemplated.

WASHINGTON—President Trump is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides, U.S. officials said. Options include stepping up airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site that could be used for covert nuclear work.

Trump hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.

The discussion was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days with senior officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.

The U.S. military said it launched two waves of airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s ability to threaten vessels transiting the strait. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” Trump said at an industry event shortly after the second wave of attacks began.

Under the thumb of Bibi and the Zionist oligarchs applies.

Grief & the island of the Lotus-eaters ...

Courtesy of Great Curve Films

Grief, something all intelligent animals experience when a close friend or family member dies, has become yet another money maker thanks to greed and AI, something most disquieting to say the least.

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.

In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.

As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.

These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.

The island of the Lotus-eaters beckons

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters

I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.[4] - Odysseus

Collateral damage ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock

The pout, the tough guy personified, the one not knowing anything real about tech as he's a philo guy, not a geek, is hated by his employees. What a surprise. In a previous post, yours truly talked about tough guys, Navy SEALS in particular as both of my brothers were on the teams. One as UDT, the other as SEAL. To me, that's toughness, not Karp, by any stretch of the imagination.

As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in
deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.

That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of
“strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting
the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.

While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.

Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”

Per the employee, a debate quickly overtook the company’s internal messaging channels, where workers reportedly expressed their outrage out in the open.

“You had people being like: ‘my customer is a children’s hospital — how am I
supposed to explain this to them?'” the staffer recalled.

It’s not the first time the company’s leadership has alienated its rank and file.
Earlier this year, Palantir workers registered their disgust with the company’s collaboration
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After the murder of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, one employee took to Palantir’s message boards to declare that “in my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this.”

Sound familiar?

The Odyssey ...

The Odyssey: The Guardian

Excellent to a fault, The Guardian explores the Odyssey with consummate grace and respect, showing Homer's genius in depicting a story detailing the first modern man dealing with the vagaries of reality at deep level.

I have a feeling that the bard’s performance in this dark hall might have been a more thrilling and overwhelming experience even than that created by Nolan’s cinematic imagination. Had we been there, in that shadowy hall, we might now be weeping together at the emotional force of the stories of the bard. I think this is the case because within the Odyssey – a poem that is so knowing and alert about its own status as an artwork that, at times, it can feel more postmodern than ancient – there are several scenes in which bards in palace halls tell stories, and these stories are sometimes stitched seamlessly into the epic itself. And, hearing these stories, the listeners-in-the-poem weep to hear their own experiences – or experiences they fear, or long, to have – turned into song.

This same kind of epic scope lies in Joyce's Ulysses,
especially with Molly Bloom's soliloquy of lust, heartbreak and longing.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Picture of first edition of Joyce's Ulysses. Public Domain.

Everything spins/Rev II

Floquet-based rotation and rotational super-radiance.

Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10725-y

Roy Kerr was right. Black holes spin and now, researchers are proving, yet again, everything spins. :)

Roy Patrick Kerr CNZM FRS FRSNZ (/kɜːr/; born 16 May 1934) is a New Zealand mathematician who discovered the Kerr geometry, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity. His solution models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, including a rotating black hole.[1][2] His solution to Einstein's equations predicted spinning black holes before they were discovered.[3][4]

More than half a century ago, Sir Roger Penrose envisioned a scenario in which energy could be extracted from a black hole spinning at extreme speeds. He proposed that a particle entering its ergosphere—a region of space dragged around by a rotating black hole—could split into two. One part could fall into the black hole while the other escaped carrying more energy than the original particle. Building on this theory, physicist Yakov Zel'dovich later predicted that a wave interacting with a sufficiently fast, rotating object could extract energy from it and become amplified.

Inspired by this theoretical construct, researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) have published a paper in Nature demonstrating a new approach to wave amplification through interaction with rotating bodies. Rather than mechanically rotating matter, however, the team engineered a radio-frequency device with properties modulated in space and time to mimic spinning. The device creates a synthetic form of ultrafast rotation that enables access to rotational speeds far beyond what can be achieved mechanically, allowing researchers to overcome limitations that have long hindered experimental studies of ultrafast rotational dynamics.

Nature finds a way, always.

Experimental observation of Floquet-based extreme Doppler shift.
Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10725-y

Click here for the paper. 

Mirror world, kinda :)

Titan is the only world besides Earth with rivers, rain and seas on its surface, though the liquid is methane and ethane and the bedrock is water ice. Representative image. Photo: Zelch Csaba / Pexels.

If man wants to colonize the solar system, the place to go is Titan. Why? It's atmosphere is 1.5 times denser than earth's, the hydrocarbons are endless in terms of easy access to energy and gravity's 14% of Earth's. Compare this to Mars, virtually no atmosphere, which means radiation from the sun becomes dangerous. The pressure suits must not only protect the explorer from radiation but also must be pressurized, complete with air supply and heat, due to the lack of a viable and safe atmosphere. With Titan, no need to pressurize, just heat and air supply are the requirements. In terms of costs, a no brainer. Self sustaining applies and, you don't have to be underground in order to survive on Titan while on Mars, you do. Downside. It's far away.

Titan's orbit (highlighted in red) among the other large inner moons of Saturn.
The moons outside its orbit are (from the outside to the inside) Iapetus and Hyperion;
those inside are Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, and Mimas.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only place besides Earth known to have standing liquid on its surface, and with it rivers, rain, clouds, lakes and seas fed by a weather cycle that runs much like our own. The catch is in what the ingredients are. The rain and the rivers are liquid methane and ethane, and the ground they cut through is water ice, frozen so hard at Titan’s temperatures that it behaves like rock.

It is the closest thing in the solar system to a working copy of Earth’s landscape, built from a completely different set of materials.

Vertical diagram of Titan's atmosphere

Most of what we know came from the Cassini-Huygens mission, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Titan’s thick, hazy atmosphere hides its surface from ordinary cameras, so Cassini mapped the ground with radar from orbit over more than a decade.

The closest look came on 14 January 2005, when the European Huygens probe parachuted down through the haze and landed, the first and so far only landing in the outer solar system. On the way down it photographed branching networks that looked unmistakably like river valleys draining into a darker, flatter plain. It came to rest on a surface strewn with rounded cobbles of water ice, smoothed as if they had been tumbled along by a flowing liquid. The landing site had the look of a dry streambed.

Earth image derived from DSCOVR/EPIC. Titan image derived from Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera (NAC). The relative sizes are calibrated using the known distances to each target at the time of image acquisition and the angular resolution of the respective instruments. Titan’s apparent size includes its extended atmospheric haze.

Structure of Titan's icy crust

Cassini, gone but not forgotten