The Online Photographer

A plea: I don't usually beat my drum too hard, but desperate times call for...no, I'm just riffing, I'm not desperate. But, if you are going to buy stuff this Christmas / Hanukkah (they overlap this year), would you please consider doing some shopping through my links? It helps out a lot. To get to B&H Photo you can click on any link to them (and I'll put links at the bottom of every post from now till Christmas break), and they're lenient—you don't have to do anything special for them to give me credit for it. For the big A-word, I put links on specific products, for example, recently, Kodachrome Memories or the new deluxe edition of Los Angeles Spring. After using any of those links, you can buy anything from any department, but you have to both put it into your cart and also complete the order on the same visit. If you put something in your cart or on your Wish List, then return at a later time to purchase it, they don't give me credit for it—even if both visits originated from TOP links.

A thanksgiving, small t: And thanks to all of you who help with this little enterprise in any way: by donating monthly through Patreon, by using my links, by sending cash gifts, by sending gifts in kind, by taking the time to write comments, by sending tips privately, by advising me, or simply by visiting and reading. You are the reason I have done this for 19 years, and you are also the reason I've been able to keep going.

A reminder—if you're signing up for Patreon, don't do it through the Apple Store's Patreon app. If you do, they will take 30%, because, well, where does a bear sleep in the woods? Answer: anywhere it wants to. If you use the Android app or go directly to the website, the bear's surcharge won't affect your contribution.

Thanksgiving, capital T: I don't know if you'll be able to read this through whatever paywall is in force, but I really like Ellen Cushing's idea, in The Atlantic: she proposes that we in the USA should emulate our Canadian neighbors by moving Thanksgiving to October. She proposes the Thursday before Canadian Thanksgiving. In addition to all the sensible reasons she cites, I think it would also help preserve Thanksgiving, which is being swamped by Christmas. It used to be that retail businesses gave their employees Thanksgiving off so they could feast with their families in peace; no longer. It used to be that Christmas decorating and Christmas shopping didn't start until the day after Thanksgiving, eventually named "Black Friday" because it was the day that businesses went from the red (negative earnings for the year) to black (positive profit for the year), at least symbolically. That isn't observed any more either. Traditionally, Black Friday was actually on that one specific Friday instead of smothering many days and even weeks surrounding it. I say we should reinstate those traditions but also give businesses what they want by allowing the Christmas run-up to start earlier—they're doing it anyway, and it's not like we can stop them.

Big history: I have two video recommendations for your consideration. The first is is a tiny kernal of dense information that expands hugely in only 18 minutes—David Christian's "The history of our world in 18 minutes." The picture from the perspectives of physics might not be the final world—we continue to learn—but it suitably blows my mind every time I'm given a glimpse of it. The Big Bang still seems improbable. Curious that nothing in the video or the description tells us who David Christian is.

Kenneth Tanaka, Chicago, June 2024

The second one is more on topic: Beau Lotto's demonstration of how we evolved to see in context, "Optical illusions show how we see." Again, nothing about the presenter, and this one, although it seems to originate from TED, has a strange unrelated little tail about traffic appended to the end—why? I don't pretend to know the mysterious ways of YouTubery. This one sent me off down a long trail of meditating on just how many contextual illusions we rely on to render glimpses of the visual world on two-dimensional little rectangles of paper or glowing video screens. It's very sophisticated when you think about it, and yet we're insanely good at it. It's amazing that in photographs we can so readily see traces of the four-dimensional real world in such detail, and relate it to the storehouse of sights in our real experience. Fun video, at the very least.

Happy Thanksgiving! I will be posting tomorrow too, since it's also The Online Photographer's 19th birthday.

Mike

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Zyni: "I liked the David Christian video.

"You are right that the big bang seems implausible. One way to see how weird it is is to think of another implausible thing: in the 1960s, Roger Penrose showed a remarkable thing: that the collapse of stars to form black holes was inevitable, and that this collapse continues until...well, really until the laws of physics we understand no longer hold in the incredibly fierce conditions. This was a truly remarkable result, and I think very unexpected: before this people had assumed that black holes were just a toy thing that never really would happen.

"Well, Stephen Hawking then did a brilliant trick: he took Penrose's theorem and showed that you could make a modified version of it which works backwards, and applies to the whole universe (this does not mean the universe is a black hole run backwards: it is more subtle than this). So if you run the whole universe backwards you inevitably get to a point where things become so fierce that the laws of physics we understand no longer work. Which is the big bang.

"We physicists like to pretend that this was 'obvious' but that is not true: it seems deeply implausible...but we have learned that God does not care about what we humans think is implausible, merely what must be.

"(David Christian makes one small [but actually very big] error: he says the universe was initially very small ('smaller than an atom'). This is not what we currently think most likely. As best we can tell the universe is infinite in space: we are mot certain of this but measurements we can do show that is at least very close to the conditions needed for it to be infinite. Is a slight get-out here: it could be finite but wrapped around on itself. This case seems unlikely but people do look for evidence that it might be true.

"If the universe is infinite in space it was infinite in space right back to the big bang. This becomes almost impossible to visualise! However, what is true is that the great majority of this infinite space is 'outside our past light cone' and the part of the universe we can see the history of was indeed very small close to the big bang.)"