The greatest film of all time is ...

 

Agreed ...

What is the Sight and Sound poll? It’s a survey that the British magazine Sight and Sound conducts every 10 years and is greatly respected in the film world, though as you can imagine any subjective list of the best films ever is bound to be controversial. In 2012, the poll made news when “Vertigo,” by Alfred Hitchcock, took over No. 1 from “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles), which had held the spot for 50 years.

Citizen Kane (1941)

Just learned about this awesome film resource today. Awesome to a fault. :)

I like what they did this year. It's about time ...

Such a sudden shake-up at the top of Sight and Sound’s ten-yearly poll! Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) heads the 2022 list. No other film made by a woman has ever even reached the top ten. In the first instance, this is unsurprising: women film directors have always, obviously, been few and far between; equally obviously, the contributing critics have been predominantly male. It was when Sight and Sound expanded the critics’ pool in 2012 that Jeanne Dielman first entered the list, at number 35; its rise to the top now is a triumph for women’s cinema!

Saw the trailer. Have to see this without question.

The Mandate of Heaven

Chinese students protesting the repressive Covid policies.Credit...Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

The Mandate of Heaven, the guide to how to rule in China, centers on wisdom, vision and care. If a ruler does not abide by these essentials, chaos and removal of said ruler will follow. 

To whit

Intrinsic to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler. 

Seem Xi doesn't get it as he's losing his people as we speak.

Last weekend, in several cities across the country, from cosmopolitan Shanghai to far-western Xinjiang, ordinary people took to the streets to denounce the government’s stifling Covid-19 suppression policy and in some cases call for democracy and freedom of speech.

The sudden release of nearly three years of pent-up frustration over the excessive Covid measures — which have disrupted lives, separated families and crippled the economy — is the largest anti-government outburst since the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square. Again, the odds are against the protesters. The Chinese Communist Party, which completely controls the country, has moved quickly to suppress it.

But the Chinese people have reached a tipping point. The brutal crackdown in 1989 left China’s people depoliticized and intimidated into the social contract that has governed life for three decades: Leave politics to the party in return for some economic freedom. A new generation, pushed to the brink by the government’s zero-Covid obsession, has discovered its voice.

Seems China, like Iran, wants a different future. One can only hope.

A brief flow chart depicting the flow of auctoritas in the transfer of the 

Mandate of Heaven at the transition of dynastic cycles.

It's all wormholes ...

It's all wormholes if the Quanta Magazine piece titled Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer proves out to be true.

To whit. 

Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.

The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.

The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel “wormhole teleportation protocol” using Google’s quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California. With this first-of-its-kind “quantum gravity experiment on a chip,” as Spiropulu described it, she and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.

Seth Lloyd is right ...

In his book, Programming the Universe, Lloyd contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well.

And so it goes ... K. Vonnegut

A-rhymic

Channeling Brazilian rhythms using Garage Band as the weapon of choice was the start point for doing this video. :)

Undercurrent

Working with stills and effects, a little dash of music seemed apropos. Enjoy

Equipoise

Another foray into sounds, stills & a touch of video. :)

Convergence ...

Convergence

This small image, generated by yours truly on, sadly, no longer existing 3D fractal software, is not AI enhanced nor should it be as there's a time and place appropriate for the melding of AI to art, something I've done for over 50 years in various genres from music composition and writing to the visual including painting, graphics, photography and video with some degree of competency. With this in mind, the long Wired Kevin Kelly piece titled Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips gives one pause as there is inevitable cost in doing anything thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics.

The word assume yet again.

Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is the stunning, field-changing, world-altering rearrangement that a major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, the discovery of DNA, or Picasso’s Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special, and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way, far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.

To connect with a human deeply will always require a Creative human in the loop. This high creativity, however, should not be confused with the creativity that most human artists, designers, and inventors produce day to day. Mundane, ordinary, lowercase creativity is what we get with a great new logo design or a cool book cover, a nifty digital wearable or the latest must-have fashion, or the set design for our favorite sci-fi serial. Most human art, past and present, is lowercase. And lowercase creativity is exactly what the AI generators deliver.

But this is huge. For the first time in history, humans can conjure up everyday acts of creativity on demand, in real time, at scale, for cheap. Synthetic creativity is a commodity now. Ancient philosophers will turn in their graves, but it turns out that to make creativity—to generate something new—all you need is the right code. We can insert it into tiny devices that are presently inert, or we can apply creativity to large statistical models, or embed creativity in drug discovery routines. What else can we use synthetic creativity for? We may feel a little bit like medieval peasants who are being asked, “What would you do if you had the power of 250 horses at your fingertips?” We dunno. It’s an extraordinary gift. What we do know is we now have easy engines of creativity, which we can aim into stale corners that have never seen novelty, innovation, or the wow of creative change. Against the background of everything that breaks down, this superpower can help us extend the wow indefinitely. Used properly, we can make a small dent in the universe.

Kelly is right about the emergent power of AI but Scholars of creativity??? 

What the hell is that? 

Creativity 101:

1. The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water. 
2. The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)
3. Creativity starts with the asking of a question: Why is this the way it is?
4. Question everything - Einstein
5. The ability to see relationships is key because everything is connected as reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.
6. Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is essential.
7. Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.
8. Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.
9. The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act is anything but as it can be explained after the fact without issue.
10. Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition are key.
11. The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at universal scale, is.
12. Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.
13. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)

AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master? A good question to ask is it not?

Dividing line ...

45 minutes ...

A binaural torso for spatial recording inside the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories. 

Credit...Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

The quietest place yours truly ever experienced was early morning Death Valley where I did hear my body percolate at grand scale as the air stood still and no wildlife moved about to break the silence. This happened many years ago, prior to the age of tinnitus and deafness "enjoyed" by this rube as we speak. When reading the NYTimes piece titled Can I Survive the 'Quietest Place on Earth'? longer than 45 minutes, considered to be the absolute limit one can tolerate being in the room before going crazy as bandied about by social media without the need to vet said statement, the answer is yes given the intense tinnitus nature has bestowed upon me 24/7 as said condition masks bodily burbles and noises to a large extent without question. 

It would be cool to experience this sense of total silence yet again as the time spent in Death Valley veered close to being mystical as the sound our bodies produce 24/7 is both remarkable and disconcerting at the same time. 

To whit.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

“You’ll hear your heart beating,” Orfield was quoted as saying. And: “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.” The experience was so “disconcerting,” The Daily Mail reported, that no one had ever “survived” a visit of longer than 45 minutes. In the decade since, the legend has been propagated, and sometimes further embellished with details about room-induced hallucinations, in outlets from Smithsonian Magazine (the official journal of the Smithsonian Institution) to UberFacts (an online trivia font with 13.6 million Twitter followers, no connection to the ride-sharing app and a tenuous one to facts).

Remember ...

The body is only totally still — totally silent — in death.

Happy T-Day. :)

The scientists Edward R. Myrbeck and Arthur A. Janszen testing a loudspeaker in Harvard’s anechoic chamber in 1948.Credit...Harvard University Archives

Winter's coming ... No. 4200

Channel Crossing ...

Winter's coming, the season of elemental simplicity, the fabric of reality becoming easier to see for all willing to take the time it requires to understand why this is so. 

Any questions? :)

 “The smarter we make the A.I., the less it wants to do our jobs.” Cartoon by Paul Noth

Any questions? :)