Rubbish

 "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants!"

~Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1943)

Yet does not believe it dogmatically

 "The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another.

That is what people find so unpleasant about it."

- Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others, Volume Il: American Essays 1931-1935, On Orthodoxies (1933) p. 58. Image: Bertrand Russell, 1935.

Comment

Sounds like Eric Hoffer's description of The True Believer

I Blame The Editors

I blame the editors, I have for many years -- the ones who edit out our failings, our embarrassments, the faltering in the portrayal of our perfection. The result is that we don't want to look.

Looking at the arc of history, we have become (at least in our own minds) individuals without community, relying on our own judgement in a sea of competing narratives. At the same time, we are filling up the world, beguiled by comfort, and rather than venturing off somewhere when we can't stand one another, we have nowhere to go except to bump into one another on the path to cooperation or destruction. 

Shamati 206

 One will never ask about pleasure, "What is the purpose of this pleasure?" If even the smallest thought about its purpose appears in one's mind, it is a sign that this is not true pleasure, since pleasure fills all the empty places, and then of course there is no vacant place in the mind to ask about its purpose. If one does ask about its purpose, it is a sign that the pleasure is incomplete, since it has not filled all he places.

So it is with faith. Faith should fill all the places of knowing. Hence, we should imagine what it would be like if we had knowledge, and to that very extent there should be faith.

One Night Or Two Nights

 Passover (Pesach) is on the 15th night of the month of Nisan, which is the night of a full moon. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar - months go by the phases of the moon around the Earth and years go by the orbit of the Earth around the Sun.

Nowadays, when everyone knows the time wherever they are on the planet, Pesach could be celebrated on one night everywhere. But in the days when people weren't sure what date it was, priests in Jerusalem would judge the date and send out the official news of the night of the new moon to the provinces, and people outside the capital celebrated two nights to be more sure they celebrated on the correct night.

UK Coal From Japan

 The United Kingdom imports coal products from Japan, specifically coke and semi-coke. In 2023, the UK imported approximately 616,000 metric tons of these materials from Japan, valued at over $250 million . 

Coke and semi-coke are processed forms of coal primarily used in industrial applications like steelmaking and chemical processing. While the UK has significantly reduced its reliance on coal for electricity generation - culminating in the planned closure of its last coal-fired power station in 2024 - it continues to import coal-derived products for industrial purposes. 

Salgado Interview

Question:

What was the biggest problem you had in your life?

Salgado

I had a big problem to come to digital, because all the ways of my life I worked with negatives. In digital for me, I was the first guy to fight against the digital. Till the moment that it became very complicated for me to work with negatives, with the number of x-rays in the airport. Boy, I was with hell. And each time that I crossed an x-ray, that affected a little bit of you. Not a lot, but when you cross a lot of x-rays, your film loses the grain. You look at the structure of the grain of the film, the film becomes nothing.

And more and more, it started to become complicated. The film started to become not more good, because the amount of silver inside the film is much less than they were before. In reality, I was working in a base of a product that had no more investment on it. The investment was being taken out from this product and being put inside another that was digital. And it was necessary for me to split, to change, jump from one choice to the other. And I started to work in digital.

And Canon, I had a contact, someone presented me to the professional department of Canon. And Canon landed me two US-1 Mark III to try. I tried the cameras. I bring my medium format cameras. I was with medium 645 Pentax. I went to the Chanel Coast French side for one week. Two tripods, one tripod, one camera, one tripod. I made exactly the same picture, using about the same lens, because the rapport was not exactly the same, but it was photographed about the same. We developed, we made the tests. We take the digital and we compare the things. The quality was amazing. I said, "Well, I can go."

The problem for me was the grain. All my life long, I had worked with one film, it's the Tri-X. Sometimes I worked with the Max 3200 when I had no light, but this was not a good film. Too grainy, too grey, very complicated film. But always, it's the only one that I had at work in this sensibility. But at 99% I didn't try it. It was necessary to me to have my grain back, because digital was too flat for me. With my team here, and with a small company in France, we work   to get my grain, and introduce inside the digital archive and get exactly the same texture. This guy is working for me, the grain of Tri-X 200SA, 400SA, 800, 1200, in order to have exactly the same texture that I always work with all my life. That was the solution for the problem.

The problem for me was to have my negatives, because I like my prints in silver. The quality of a silver print is very different from the quality of a inkjet. The silver paper gives you something that the other don't give. It was necessary for us to work on a negative. We took about two years to arrive at the quality of a negative that was nice. But when we arrived, we were having a solid quality. Today, my negatives that come from a digital archive are much better than the medium format negatives when I shoot directly with a negative.

Canon has these new cameras. I just made a test now with the 5DS R. It's amazing to have this quantity in a 35mm camera. I tell you, the quantity that I have now from this camera is about the same quality that the photographers had 30 years ago, photographed with an 18cm by 24cm negative. It's fabulous.

When I started Genesis, it was necessary to me to carry a bag with 600 rolls of 220 wide film. That was about 30kg. And to carry with me inside the plane, because if I put this bag down, the X-ray comes with, my film was killed. It was necessary to take my hands, put it in the plane. And it was complicated to fight against the companies to allow me to put this film inside. Because you had to put up, to get a place inside the plane to store it, just for me during the trip. And I had my camera, if I had the camera in medium format, I had a big box that we set down ,the camera. We get a way to transport it there.

And but today, I have the correspondence of 600 rolls of film in 600 grams of digital cards. And the cameras now is light enough that I can carry with me inside the plane. And my life is 10 times more easy for a quality that is much better than I had before. That means we are in a total evolution of the cameras.

The cameras that I will photograph is the 1DX. The US 1DX. Because it's a solid camera, it's a camera that I participate a little bit in the evolution of this camera with Canon. I remember when the camera was in evolution, the people of Canon gave me these cameras. I made all my comments in the camera for the evolution of the camera. And I love very much the camera. The 1DX is fabulous to work with. And it's a very fast camera. The quality of the pixels are very good that allow you to work against the light and give you a lot of details against the light that I did add before with the generation before.

But there is a limit. It's not a very powerful in number of pixels. It's 18 million pixels. And when you do a big enlargement, and I do sometimes big ones, you see the deficit of the camera. And now with the 5D, it's amazing. It's very good.

But the 5D has a problem. It's not a tropicalized camera. I cannot go inside the Amazon Forrest with this camera. When you are working with 100% of humidity, working on the rain 5, 6 days of rain, the material suffers a lot. And in this mode, it started to be a problem. And with the 1DX, the 1DX is a camera that can be done non-stop. I did a lot of work with the 1DX. It's a very recent camera, but I did a lot of trips in Aamazones. Last year, I did a climb in a mountain in Amazones with three 1DX with non-stop rain, very difficult and so forth. Huge amount of humidity. In the end, very cold because we climbed a lot. And not a problem at all. The cameras are real and amazing. Well done, well constructed. And I have a big hope that we can have an evolution of these cameras, more for more pixels on it.

But in between, I work with the 5D where it's possible. I did just the new tests with this 5DRS. And it is real and amazing quality with a 50 million pixel card. It's another difference. The quality that we can have today from this new camera, the 5D RS 50 million pixel, is amazing. You see, this picture is a normal size. And here we enlarged just the center of the image. And that corresponds exactly when we made 1.5 meter by 2 meter long. This image was a 2 meter long. And when you go inside and we see the quality that we can have, it's about the quality of the big negative cameras. That was one, I don't know each, but it was 18 centimeters by 24 centimeters.

You see, before, the calculation of lens was handmade, it was not possible to calculate all the variables that compose all the curves of the movement of a lens. And today with these computers, these mega computers, the quality of this zoom lens is not too different. Or, say, is not different from a fixed lens. I work a lot with the 25mm 1.4, the 35mm, the 50mm 1.2, and the macro 100mm. I work a lot in general with this lens, amazing good lens.

But today, there are two new zooms that I'm working. That is the 24-70, the new 24-70. Because, you see, sometimes there are a lot of pictures in movement. When we are a group of people inside a forest, they are moving. You cannot go beyond 125 speed with people in movement. You have a stabilizer that added so much. In this case, I must come to use the 24-105. That's a good lens, but it's not as good as the 24-70. And I'm using now one 70-300, the new generation of lens, that has an amazing quality. It's not a too big lens. It's much smaller than the 70-200. And it is a very, very good lens. And I have these lenses that are very practical that I use them a lot.

But always, I carry with me my fixed lens. When I have the opportunity, for example, to walk inside to do portraits, where I can really concentrate, I come to the fixed lens. It's the 24, 35, the 50, and the macro. That's it.