Everyone is Altered

Hollywood has always carefully guarded its vanity magic tricks. Diet pills, plastic surgery and Botox were Beverly Hills’ pretty little secrets before they were accepted as the norm. But the entertainment industry’s latest glamour miracle — a technique so effective that nearly every movie star has started using it — has stayed underground for more than a decade.

It’s called “beauty work.” It's a digital procedure of sorts, in which a handful of skilled artists use highly specialized software in the final stages of post-production to slim, de-age and enhance actors’ faces and bodies.

This is the version of on-screen stars that we, the audience, see. And if this comes as any surprise, it’s because the first rule of beauty work is: Don’t talk about beauty work.

Under strict non-disclosure agreements, Hollywood A-listers have been quietly slipping in and out of a few bland office buildings around town, many to sit in on days-long retouching sessions, directing the artists to make every frame suitable. At one such facility, young, fit up-and-comers disrobe for a handheld scanner that captures every pore and hair follicle, creating a template for future beauty work that, as a result, will appear all the more natural.

As Photoshop is to magazine photography, digital beauty has become to celebrities in motion: a potent blend of makeup, plastic surgery, muscle-sculpting, hair restoration, dental work and dermatology. Even the most flawless-in-real-life human specimens are going under the digital knife. Because they can. Because in this age of ultra-high definition, they have to.

In some cases, it's for pure vanity. In others it's because the film requires it: When a 24-year-old actress is tasked with playing a 17-year-old young-adult heroine, digital beauty becomes more like digital type-casting.

“Nobody looks like what you see on TV and in the movies. Everybody is altered,” says Claus Hansen, a beauty-work pioneer who plies his trade at Method Studios, one of the handful of shops in Los Angeles that specialize in video retouching.

After years of silence, Hansen agreed to speak with Mashable about his craft, saying he wants young people who idolize movie, TV and music stars to know that “what they see is smoke and mirrors.”

The path to Hansen’s openness, however, was long and littered with unanswered phone calls, stonewalling and refusals to comment for this story. Though a few insiders acknowledged it — “the stars/celebrities would be horrified” is a direct quote from one email rejection — nobody wanted to talk on the record.

But like all of Hollywood’s vanity magic tricks before it, the secret of digital beauty eventually sprung a leak.

The Clock Turners

Sitting at an outdoor table at Foxy’s Restaurant in Glendale on a blindingly bright spring day in 2012, an actor linked to a beloved movie character lamented over chopped salads and Diet Cokes that the years had all but deep-sixed a long-gestating sequel. But there was one last hope.

The actor, who agreed to speak only if he could remain anonymous, talked cautiously about a visit to Lola Visual Effects. Located in an unmarked office space above a clothing store in Santa Monica, the company was an otherwise garden-variety Hollywood VFX shop, but with a curious specialty: They’d figured out a way to turn back the clock.

The technique made its “out” debut when Lola aged Brad Pitt backwards for Benjamin Button in 2008. As it turned out, the most striking visual in David Fincher’s epic wasn’t Button the shriveled, elderly man-child. It came toward the end of the film, when Pitt emerged into the golden light of a dance studio as a naturally radiant, strapping 20-something — this, at a time when Pitt, in his mid-40s, was just beginning to age into his real-life role as the sexiest man alive.

Sometime after the Foxy’s waitress had collected the check, the actor said the technique had begun to spread throughout the film industry — you just didn’t know it, because they weren’t always using it to take 25 years off the onscreen talent. Instead, they were beginning to use it for subtle nip and tuck, the kind of stuff you’d never notice even if you were looking for it.

But it was expensive, and so hush-hush that it was reserved for the Pitt-level celebrities of the world. The only people who knew about digital beauty were those who practiced it, had it practiced on them, or were so high up the studio/agency food chain that they were agreeing not only pay for it, but to quietly hand the film’s finished scenes over for however long it took to get the work done, which was sometimes weeks. In the early goings, actors leveraged studios into paying for the work, but nowadays it's just a part of the budget.

“We were seeing hundreds of thousands spent on this, anywhere from $500 to $2,500 per shot — maybe more if there’s a lot going into the scenes,” a former top-level studio executive recently told Mashable, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

“It would benefit both parties. You want your actor or actress to do the publicity for the movie, so you wanted to keep them happy.”

by Josh Dickey, Mashable |  Read more:

Image: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection

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ASMR: Softer Than Softcore

Over the past five years, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) has become the focal point of a robust community of online enthusiasts. In its protoplasmic early life on blogs and message boards, it was simply dubbed “the Unnamed Feeling”: a blissful sensation of tingling along the scalp and vertebral axis that results from a set of reliable interpersonal triggers, distinct to each participant, but often with a great deal of overlap: soft voices, kind words, a conceit of caregiving.

The group’s coalescence was spontaneous and stumbling, in a way that seems typical for Internet-based discovery. Frequenters of online comment threads began offering halting accounts of a supposedly private experience that, it turns out, was enthusiastically shared. They reported a history of such reactions trailing back to their early youth, recurrent and unexpected glimmers of joy in response to close conversation and casual touch. Awareness of the phenomenon has snowballed as this proclivity has been profiled by various media outlets, mostly in a tone of wondering confusion.

Since coming into knowledge of one another and giving themselves a name, self-styled “ASMR-tists” have put forward countless videos specifically designed to provoke this response. The content of these videos range from the silent handling of common objects like hair brushes or cotton swabs to prolonged whispered monologues to role-play scenarios of impressive audiovisual nuance. In the role-play videos, performers look straight at you for the better part of an hour, gesturing around the camera lens to suggest that you are there, an arm’s length away, being gently manipulated. Clips tend to recapitulate standard scenarios (haircuts and doctor’s visits among the most ubiquitous), but new variations emerge each month: Now you are being fitted for a suit; now you are booking a cruise; now you are surviving an apocalypse.

In explaining ASMR to those outside the community, its enthusiasts repeatedly distinguish the feeling as nonsexual, a completely innocuous satisfaction. When novices are exposed to these videos for the first time, however, they tend to react with not just confusion but embarrassment, a sense of transgression — the fresh young faces, breathy speech patterns, and tight camera angles seem to borrow from precedents set by more prurient media. These are pornographic borderlands, softer than softcore, the sweetness of the performance never quite matter of fact enough to settle the question of its potential indecency. (...)

The ASMR movement spans much more than just clinical role-play, though, and in fact seems to dovetail with other large categories of community-produced media, inscrutable at the surface but riveting for millions at a more visceral level. Consider the unboxing videos that Mireille Silcoff recently analyzed in the New York Times, in which retail items of almost any size or value are laid out before the camera and described aloud, at length, and in exquisite detail. Silcoff hypothesizes that such videos flip deep-seated emotional switches. Some of us are so conditioned to enjoy novelty and possession that virtual routines of real-life consumerism approximate its psychic rewards, just as others of us so yearn for interpersonal support that we respond to its whispered approximations. Whether these appetites are a function of starvation or gluttony is up for debate (and perhaps best addressed, as with pornography, on a case-by-case basis).

For many, watching these clips constitutes a kind of therapy. Sufferers of anxiety and insomnia seek these videos out to soothe their particular clinical afflictions while untold others, gleaning from the experience a feeling of enhanced well-being, are easing distress that’s less well defined, measurable only after it’s been shed. In accounting for the joys of unboxing videos, Silcoff invokes the idea of “neural massage,” a metaphor that recurs frequently in the ASMR community as well, not only as a performative conceit, in videos about being massaged, but also as a rhetorical figure for the relaxation provided by the pursuit as a whole. The implication of this trope is that our brains are rife with hidden knots, the release of which depends on triggers that can be pulled almost without our knowing, or understanding why. (...)

More and more, we turn to devices to help us explain the generalized tenderness of our flesh. However keenly we suffer, however cleanly that suffering fits into our common nosology, each of us is inevitably captivated by the elaborate workings of our own insides. Whether or not we strictly need this information, pleasure is built into the unveiling – the thrill of reflexive comprehension, another small truth made naked. Diagnosis as a synaptic connection doubles as an emotional one, renewing the intimacy of self-knowledge, and of being known.

ASMR and its relatives are not weighted with the baggage of conventional pornography, but the echoes in their energies are hard to ignore. One possibility is that these online performances represent a sort of virtual flirtation for the lonely set, some self-guided foreplay, offering in the comfort of one’s own home the same preludial thrill that hovers between two singles in a bar. Viewer comments on good-faith ASMR clips often winkingly remark on the performers’ physical beauty, for instance, betraying a frustrated desire for a more conventionally physical kind of caregiving.

Alternatively, these videos might be conceptualized as artifacts of a post-pornographic age, in which a culture oversaturated with blunt stimulation has inspired a search for intimacy’s origins and rudiments. If we extend evidence that long-term exposure to pornography is associated with structural changes in the brain, if we argue that the ubiquity of sex in the public eye is responsible for a slow and steady corruption of our dopaminergic pathways, ASMR may represent an exhausted attempt at reassembling the pieces of our fractured psyches. After the shock has worn away, after we’ve definitively had our fill, we come to recognize the urges behind our urges, some of which are startling in their humility.

by Nitin K. Ahuja, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

Image: Imp Kerr

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LCD Soundsystem

Puff Daddy

If you're interested in cigars and want to buy and smoke them like you know what you're doing, here are 14 things to remember:

1. Does the cigar feel firm? Don't buy it. It's either packed too tightly or hasn't been stored properly and has dried out. A cigar with a firm draw will make you feel like you're trying to suck a milkshake through a drink stirrer. If it's dry, the wrapper will peel and unravel as it burns.

2. Good cigars are handmade and have three parts: long filler, a binder to hold the filler, and a different type of tobacco for the wrapper. Avoid cheap, machine-made, short-filler cigars.

3. Not all cigars are created equal. Mild, medium and full are the classifications. The full-bodied ones are the most flavorful, but they can make you feel woozy if you're not used to them.

4. Size isn't an indicator of strength, nor is the color of the tobacco leaves used as the wrapper. The lightest wrappers are double claro (light green) and claro (tan). The darkest wrappers are maduro (dark brown) and oscuro (black).

5. The bigger the ring size (circumference) of the cigar, the longer it takes to smoke. The size is measured in 64ths of an inch. So 50-ring cigars like a "Churchill" or "robusto" are 50/64ths of an inch in diameter. Extra-large cigars (larger than 50) are frowned upon as cartoonish.

6. Don't take a cigar and dip it into whatever you're drinking. All this does is taint the flavors of your cigar and your drink.

7. Cubans aren't the industry standard anymore. There are exceptional Cuban cigars—especially if they contain tobacco from the Vuelta Abajo region—but other tropical countries like the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras make great cigars, too. And, unlike Cubans, they're legal to buy in the United States.

by Ron Kaspriske, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Sam Kaplan

“Corrupt, Toxic and Sociopathic”

Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul.

It took years until the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report — which shows not only that the CIA’s torture regime was larger and more vicious than understood, but that the agency repeatedly lied about it to the White House and Congress — was finally released to the public. But it only took hours before President Obama was once again urging the nation to look forward, not back. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” read a White House statement, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” When members of the media asked whether that meant the White House considered torture to be ineffective, as the report claims, an anonymous official said Obama would not “engage” in the ongoing “debate.” On the issues of rape, waterboarding and induced hypothermia, apparently, reasonable minds can differ.

Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime critic of the war on terror, disagrees. “There’s no debate,” he told Salon. “Everything that we did,” he continued, “in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal.” Greenwald has little doubt, however, that Washington will turn torture into yet another partisan squabble. It’s the go-to move, he says, when America’s political and media elite decide they’d rather look the other way. “That’s just the ritual Washington engages in,” Greenwald said. (...)

One thing I want to establish as much as we can is who was involved in the lead-up to this release, and what role they played. So why did it take so long for this to be released?

Well, first of all, there was a major war between the Senate [Intelligence] Committee and the CIA over access to the information [the committee] wanted. That took years.

Secondly, there was a huge conflict between the committee and the White House, which, on its own, tried to stifle and suppress all kinds of vital material. In fact, there were 9,000 documents that the CIA and the White House — together, as part of the executive branch — refused to give to the committee.

So much of it was just grappling over access to information (which is ironic, since this committee is supposed to exercise oversight of the CIA …)

Also, the material was complicated. There were raw reports from all over the world, and it can take a long time to sort through that and put together a comprehensive report. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that it took this long.

And did anything in the summary surprise you? Or was it more or less what you expected after covering this for so many years?

Honestly, there wasn’t really anything that surprised me in terms of the disclosures.

There’s obviously new details about some of the more brutal interrogations; there are details and lots of corroborating pieces of evidence about the extent to which the CIA just outright lied, publicly, and to Congress. Part of what surprised me was how overt and unflinching the report was about essentially accusing people like [former CIA head] Gen. Hayden of being pathological liars.

But the broad strokes of the program and what the CIA did have long been known — for years — and I think what was more important about Tuesday was the ritual of official Washington finally admitting it.

Yeah, what’s striking to me about the lying is just how clearly it shows that the CIA in many ways is operating outside the system of democratic accountability. It’d be wrong to say it’s like the CIA runs the country, since there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t really care about besides intelligence and so forth, but it certainly looks like they don’t really answer to anyone.

The CIA cares about a lot more than just intelligence. They care a lot about private contracts (because so many of their colleagues work at those very lucrative private contracting jobs where a lot of them hope to go when they leave the CIA); they care about militarism and the assertion of force in the world (they run the drone program); they do all kinds of military activities beyond just the gather of intelligence. But you’re obviously right that the CIA exists beyond democratic accountability — and has for decades.

If I had to identify one key point from Tuesday, the thing that bothered me most about the narrative: Yes, the CIA goes off on its own and does things that political officials don’t know about; and yes, they mislead and lie to the committees that oversee them; and they do all these horrible things, the details of which are sometimes unknown to the political branches — but that’s how Washington wants it.

They’ve always wanted it that way. That’s what the CIA does. The CIA does the dirty work of the political branches of Washington and when they get caught, publicly, the ritual is that official Washington pretends that it was just these rogue CIA officers doing this without anyone’s knowledge or approval. It’s exactly what happened in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was ordered at the highest levels of the White House by President Reagan … but when they got caught, they said: Oh, it was Oliver North and these rogue CIA officers who were doing this without our knowledge!

That’s just the ritual Washington engages in; the CIA is kind of like their wild pit bull that they purposely let off leash. They don’t want to see the mauling but they know that it’s happening, and pretend they don’t know. And when it gets reported, they pretend that they’re horrified.

by Elias Isquith, Salon | Read more:
Image: Silvia Izquierdo/AP

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Feist

America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane Is Going Back Into Battle

For more than 30 years, the A-10 Thunderbolt II—better known as the Warthog because it’s so ugly—has performed a crucial role: attacking hostile targets that threaten troops on the ground, a task called close air support. The plane, designed for the Cold War, is old. It’s slow. And it’s about as sophisticated as a hammer. But it is heavily armored and wickedly armed, making it a ruthlessly effective weapon. And that is why, despite ongoing efforts by Defense Department brass to kill it, the Warthog is headed back into battle to help in the fight against ISIS.

An undisclosed number of Warthogs, part of the “Blacksnakes” 163rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron based at Fort Wayne, Indiana, have been deployed to Middle Eastern airbases to provide air cover to troops fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

That makes the A-10 something of a zombie—it refuses to die. The Air Force wants to scuttle the 238 A-10s still in service, a move that would save $3.7 billion over five years—and make way for more sophisticated planes like the new F-35 Lightning II. But given the crucial role it plays providing close air support, something particularly helpful against enemies in a place like Iraq, the A-10 has many staunch defenders, including Senator John McCain.

Close air support is a vital job that, when properly executed, can mean the difference between life and death for soldiers. It’s highly dangerous, because it requires flying at altitudes low enough to discern friend from foe, leaving the plane particularly vulnerable to ground-based anti-aircraft fire. The A-10, little more than a flying tank, is perfectly suited to the task and beloved by pilots and troops alike.

“It’s a game-changer,” Gen. John F. Campbell, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told The Washington Post earlier this year. “It’s ugly. It’s loud, but when it comes in and you hear that pffffff [of the cannon], it just makes a difference.” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it “the ugliest, most beautiful aircraft on the planet.”

What makes the plane’s continued relevance so impressive is the fact it was designed more than 40 years ago, and a new one hasn’t been built since 1984.

The Fairchild Republic A-10 was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, even as American helicopters were being shot down in Vietnam with frightening regularity. It was the first airplane designed specifically for close air support, with the goal of defending soldiers against artillery, tanks and other weapons.

It was basically designed to “take apart a Soviet tank,” says Jeffery S. Underwood, a historian at the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. To that end, the A-10 typically is equipped with the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile and is capable of carrying many other armaments, including AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.

But its primary weapon is a seven-barrel GAU-8 Avenger Gatling cannon. It measures 9 feet long and fires 30mm armor-piercing shells which are held in a drum not quite six feet in diameter. It can spit them out at a rate of 3,900 rounds per minute, and accounts for some 16 percent of the plane’s unladen weight. The gun is so large and so integral to the A-10, that the airplane is effectively built around it. In fact, when the gun is removed for maintenance, the tail of the plane must be supported to keep it from falling over.

But all that firepower is useless if the plane can be easily shot down. “Close air support means you’re close to people,” says Underwood. That means you’re flying low, too — often just a few hundred feet up. Easy prey for anyone with bad intentions. The cockpit sits in what amounts to a 1,200-pound titanium tub, specifically designed to withstand fire from 23mm anti-aircraft shells at close range. The A-10 can take a ton of abuse, and continue flying if it’s lost an engine, a tail or even half of a wing.

by Jordan Golson, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Greg L. Davis
h/t Scott

Two Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.

Informally speaking, the crux of this idea is that “things fall apart,” but more formally, it is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which Boltzmann helped devise. The law states that in any closed system (like the universe itself), entropy—disorder—can only increase. Increasing entropy is a cosmic certainty because there are always a great many more disordered states than orderly ones for any given system, similar to how there are many more ways to scatter papers across a desk than to stack them neatly in a single pile.

The thermodynamic arrow of time suggests our observable universe began in an exceptionally special state of high order and low entropy, like a pristine cosmic egg materializing at the beginning of time to be broken and scrambled for all eternity. From Boltzmann’s era onward, scientists allergic to the notion of such an immaculate conception have been grappling with this conundrum.

Boltzmann, believing the universe to be eternal in accordance with Newton’s laws, thought that eternity could explain a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow. Given enough time—endless time, in fact—anything that can happen will happen, including the emergence of a large region of very low entropy as a statistical fluctuation from an ageless, high-entropy universe in a state of near-equilibrium. Boltzmann mused that we might live in such an improbable region, with an arrow of time set by the region’s long, slow entropic slide back into equilibrium. (...)

Many of the modern explanations for a low-entropy arrow of time involve a theory called inflation—the idea that a strange burst of antigravity ballooned the primordial universe to an astronomically larger size, smoothing it out into what corresponds to a very low-entropy state from which subsequent cosmic structures could emerge. But explaining inflation itself seems to require even more fine-tuning. One of the problems is that once begun, inflation tends to continue unstoppably. This “eternal inflation” would spawn infinitudes of baby universes about which predictions and observations are, at best, elusive. Whether this is an undesirable bug or a wonderful feature of the theory is a matter of fierce debate; for the time being it seems that inflation’s extreme flexibility and explanatory power are both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

For all these reasons, some scientists seeking a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow find explanations relying on inflation slightly unsatisfying. “There are many researchers now trying to show in some natural way why it’s reasonable to expect the initial entropy of the universe to be very low,” says David Albert, a philosopher and physicist at Columbia University. “There are even some who think that the entropy being low at the beginning of the universe should just be added as a new law of physics.”

That latter idea is tantamount to despairing cosmologists simply throwing in the towel. Fortunately, there may be another way.

Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

The team’s conclusions come from studying an exceedingly simple proxy for our universe, a computer simulation of 1,000 pointlike particles interacting under the influence of Newtonian gravity. They investigated the dynamic behavior of the system using a measure of its "complexity," which corresponds to the ratio of the distance between the system’s closest pair of particles and the distance between the most widely separated particle pair. The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team’s analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. Thus, the sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow, all without any delicate fine-tuning to first establish a low-entropy initial condition.

From that low-complexity state, the system of particles then expands outward in bothtemporal directions, creating two distinct, symmetric and opposite arrows of time. Along each of the two temporal paths, gravity then pulls the particles into larger, more ordered and complex structures—the model’s equivalent of galaxy clusters, stars and planetary systems. From there, the standard thermodynamic passage of time can manifest and unfold on each of the two divergent paths. In other words, the model has one past but two futures. As hinted by the time-indifferent laws of physics, time’s arrow may in a sense move in two directions, although any observer can only see and experience one. “It is the nature of gravity to pull the universe out of its primordial chaos and create structure, order and complexity,” Mercati says. “All the solutions break into two epochs, which go on forever in the two time directions, divided by this central state which has very characteristic properties.”

Although the model is crude, and does not incorporate either quantum mechanics or general relativity, its potential implications are vast. If it holds true for our actual universe, then the big bang could no longer be considered a cosmic beginning but rather only a phase in an effectively timeless and eternal universe. More prosaically, a two-branched arrow of time would lead to curious incongruities for observers on opposite sides. “This two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,” Barbour says. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

by Lee Billings, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch

John William Godward, A Congenial Task (Detail) 1915.
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Three-Point Lighting

Three-point lighting is a standard method used in visual media such as theatre, video, film, still photography and computer-generated imagery.  By using three separate positions, the photographer can illuminate the shot's subject (such as a person) however desired, while also controlling (or eliminating entirely) the shading and shadows produced by direct lighting.

The key light, as the name suggests, shines directly upon the subject and serves as its principal illuminator; more than anything else, the strength, color and angle of the key determines the shot's overall lighting design.

In indoor shots, the key is commonly a specialized lamp, or a camera's flash. In outdoor daytime shots, the Sun often serves as the key light. In this case, of course, the photographer cannot set the light in the exact position he or she wants, so instead arranges it to best capture the sunlight, perhaps after waiting for the sun to position itself just right.

The fill light also shines on the subject, but from a side angle relative to the key and is often placed at a lower position than the key (about at the level of the subject's face). It balances the key by illuminating shaded surfaces, and lessening or eliminating chiaroscuro effects, such as the shadow cast by a person's nose upon the rest of the face. It is usually softer and less bright than the key light (up to half), and more to a flood. Not using a fill at all can result in stark contrasts (due to shadows) across the subject's surface, depending upon the key light's harshness. Sometimes, as in low-key lighting, this is a deliberate effect, but shots intended to look more natural and less stylistic require a fill.

In some situations a photographer can use a reflector (such as a piece of white cardstock mounted off-camera, or even a white-painted wall) as a fill light instead of an actual lamp. Reflecting and redirecting the key light's rays back upon the subject from a different angle can cause a softer, subtler effect than using another lamp.

The back light (a.k.a. the rim, hair, or shoulder light) shines on the subject from behind, often (but not necessarily) to one side or the other. It gives the subject a rim of light, serving to separate the subject from the background and highlighting contours.

Back light or rim light is different from a kick in that a kick (or kicker) contributes to a portion of the shading on the visible surface of the subject, while a rim light only creates a thin outline around the subject without necessarily hitting the front (visible) surface of the subject at all.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: James Jeffrey

The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

[ed. When I left Alaska after 35 years I decided to take only two kinds of things: 1) stuff that was essential to what I needed going forward; and 2) things that were of  long-term sentimental value. I can't tell you how liberating the process was. When I put my garage sale together I found I had 12 pairs of hip boots. Eight coolers. Sixteen fishing rods. Seven pairs of skis. Two battery chargers. A boat I hadn't used for 10 years. Two hundred+ books. And enough dishes and cookware to feed a White House diplomatic dinner. Now I've got just a few things that connect me to my past, things that make me happy, and I have no desire to acquire anything else (eh, except for maybe a motorcycle). I'd recommend this for anyone. Do you really want to tote all that junk around when you move, store it somewhere, or leave it for your kids to have to deal with when you're gone? (You know it's all going to end up in Goodwill anyway, right?).] 

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing explores how putting your space in order causes “correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective.” Marie Kondo, the author, recommends that you defy conventional wisdom and start by discarding and only then thoroughly organize your space in one go.

All of this seems more relevant than ever. We’re surrounded by things only to buy more things. We have no idea what we have or what we need. Worse, most of these things are not things that we love. Getting rid of things and simplifying your life sounds easier than it is. In part because when we get down to it, we just don’t know how to make those decisions between what to keep and what to throw away.

Her approach is not a simple technique. It addresses why most people fail to stay tidy.

The act of tidying is a series of simple actions in which objects are moved from one place to another. It involves putting things away where they belong. This seems so simple that even a six-year-old should be able to do it. Yet most people can’t. A short time after tidying, their space is a disorganized mess. The cause is not lack of skills but rather lack of awareness and the inability to make tidying a regular habit. In other words, the root of the problem lies in the mind. Success is 90 percent dependent on our mind-set.

To acquire the right mindset, she argues, we need the right technique. There is a fundamental misconception that the ability to tidy comes from experience. Most of us tidy up a little bit at a time. We should however tidy up in one shot. This brings visible results.

A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits. … 

When people revert to clutter no matter how much they tidy, it is not their room or their belongings but their way of thinking that is at fault. Even if they are initially inspired, they can’t stay motivated and their efforts peter out. The root cause lies in the fact that they can’t see the results or feel the effects. This is precisely why success depends on experiencing tangible results immediately. If you use the right method and concentrate your efforts on eliminating clutter thoroughly and completely within a short span of time, you’ll see instant results that will empower you to keep your space in order ever after.

What is Tidying?

She breaks down the physical act of tidying into two aspects: “deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it.” Tidying is a tool, not an end. “The true goal,” she writes, “should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.”

There is a saying that “a messy room equals a messy mind.”

When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.

Why Storage Experts are not the Answer

We all want the quick solution: organize my junk better. But this does nothing to get rid of clutter.

What is the first problem that comes to mind when you think of tidying? For many, the answer is storage. My clients often want me to teach them what to put where. Believe me, I can relate, but unfortunately, this is not the real issue. A booby trap lies within the term “storage.” Features on how to organize and store your belongings and convenient storage products are always accompanied by stock phrases that make it sound simple, such as “organize your space in no time” or “make tidying fast and easy.” It’s human nature to take the easy route, and most people leap at storage methods that promise quick and convenient ways to remove visible clutter.
[…]

Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.

Why Tidying by Location is a Fatal Mistake

Kondo exposes why tidying by location doesn’t address the problem and recommends a way to avoid this common pitfall.

The root of the problem lies in the fact that people often store the same type of item in more than one place. When we tidy each place separately, we fail to see that we’re repeating the same work in many locations and become locked into a vicious circle of tidying. To avoid this, I recommend tidying by category. For example, instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothes today, books tomorrow.” One reason so many of us never succeed at tidying is because we have too much stuff. This excess is caused by our ignorance of how much we actually own. When we disperse storage of a particular item throughout the house and tidy one place at a time, we can never grasp the overall volume and therefore can never finish. To escape this negative spiral, tidy by category, not by place. (...)

Start by Discarding

The secret to success is to “tidy in one shot, as quickly and completely as possible, and to start by discarding.”

Do not even think of putting your things away until you have finished the process of discarding. Failure to follow this order is one reason many people never make permanent progress. In the middle of discarding, they start thinking about where to put things. As soon as they think, “I wonder if it will fit in this drawer,” the work of discarding comes to a halt. You can think about where to put things when you’ve finished getting rid of everything you don’t need.

Deciding what to discard

This is where people often have the most trouble. Until reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I focused on how to throw things away, not why.

Kondo, however, totally changed my perspective on this.

There are several common patterns when it comes to discarding. One is to discard things when they cease being functional— for example, when something breaks down beyond repair or when part of a set is broken. Another is to discard things that are out of date, such as clothes that are no longer in fashion or things related to an event that has passed. It’s easy to get rid of things when there is an obvious reason for doing so. It’s much more difficult when there is no compelling reason. Various experts have proposed yardsticks for discarding things people find hard to part with. These include such rules as “discard anything you haven’t used for a year,” and “if you can’t decide, pack those items away in a box and look at them again six months later.” However, the moment you start focusing on how to choose what to throw away, you have actually veered significantly off course.

A better approach is to choose what you keep, not what you dispose of.

I had been so focused on what to discard, on attacking the unwanted obstacles around me, that I had forgotten to cherish the things that I loved, the things I wanted to keep. Through this experience, I came to the conclusion that the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.

You may wonder about the effectiveness of such a vague criteria, but the trick is to handle each item. Don’t just open up your closet and decide after a cursory glance that everything in it gives you a thrill. You must take each outfit in your hand. When you touch a piece of clothing, your body reacts. Its response to each item is different. Trust me and try it.
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Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest. By doing this, you can reset your life and embark on a new lifestyle.

by Shane Parrish, Farnam Street |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Risky Medicine

Misunderstanding risk factors has led to massive overtreatment of diseases people don’t have and probably never will.

Most health-conscious people are familiar with the concept of risk factors for disease. We’re too familiar, in fact. A risk factor is like the guest that nobody invited to the party, a spoiler. Though we might feel fine now, our individual risk for (fill in the blank) tells us that our wellbeing might not last. That vague and remote prospect of a stroke or a tumour has taken on a sharply numerical precision, thanks to screening tests that expose and quantify our risk factors.

The term stems from the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948. Ever since, researchers have measured the variables that contribute to cardiovascular disease in multiple generations of residents of the town of Framingham in Massachusetts. The participants did not have cardiovascular disease when they enrolled, but researchers routinely recorded factors suspected in disease onset, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and whether or not the person smoked.

Since no single factor was able to predict the heart attacks that occurred in Framingham, the study designers thought to combine half a dozen of them in what became the first numerical risk calculator, called the Framingham Risk Score. The researchers figured the relative importance of each risk factor after examining thousands of health histories. The combined risk score enabled doctors to make predictions that were borne out in future patients as the study proceeded.

Dozens of risk calculators are in service today, covering all medical specialties and organ systems. But since Framingham, risk factors have acquired an unwarranted power. Doctors try to manage them as if they’re the disease itself and, as a result, patients are subjected not only to undue worry but also to the harmful side effects of preventive medications and testing.

What’s more, in medicine’s version of mission-creep, the thresholds for many risk factors have been lowered so as to encompass ever larger pools of patients. People who believed they were normal in a particular health category abruptly learn that they are not – and that they probably need treatment. That they lack symptoms is misleading. Today’s patient is declared to be in good health not because she feels well, but because her latest scan or blood work indicates no abnormalities.

Robert Aronowitz, a historian of medicine and medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that when drug companies are able to treat people who might become sick, as opposed to patients with symptoms, the market is a lot larger. Once put into the at-risk category, they might be taking medication for the rest of their lives. Aronowitz gives hypertension (high blood pressure) as an example: a risk factor for heart disease and stroke, it makes the arteries more prone to blockage and rupture. The first drugs developed for hypertension were used to treat people showing obvious signs of spiking pressure, such as shortness of breath and nosebleeds. Next, the medications were extended to people without symptoms who nonetheless had hypertension upon measurement – a systolic pressure (when the heart is pumping) of below 140, and a diastolic pressure (when the heart is at rest) of below 90. These patients, a much larger population, numbering in the tens of millions, had to be screened to be identified.

The threshold of what constituted a safe level of blood pressure ‘was gradually lowered’, writes Aronowitz. ‘And finally a new disorder, prehypertension, was defined and promoted, such that another segment of the population could be screened, labelled, and treated.’ ‘Prehypertension’ represents a systolic pressure of between 120 and 140, and a diastolic pressure of 80 to 90. Those ranges used to be considered normal, but not anymore.

Recently, the American Heart Association (AHA) recognised that things had gone too far. Since studies had shown that blood-pressure medication was of no benefit to those with prehypertension, the AHA raised the level at which people aged 60 and over should start taking drugs. Now the recommended trigger is a systolic pressure of 150 or higher. With the change, some 7 million Americans, more than half of whom were taking medication, were moved out of the at-risk column. It’s unlikely that 3‑4 million people will drop their medications, however. Once launched, a medical regimen of that magnitude is hard to turn around.

There’s a more fundamental issue. Risk factors and risk calculators are reminders that medical science does not completely understand the mechanisms of disease. Risk factors are associations; they don’t represent cause-and-effect relationships unless the connection to the disease is especially strong, like the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Risk factors are based on averages taken from large groups, and consequently the individual patient can’t know his or her true probability of contracting the condition. For any population, the calculator could accurately forecast the number of, say, heart attacks over a 10-year period, but the algorithm can’t identify who will succumb and who will be spared.

Thus the AHA, in releasing its latest risk calculator for heart attack and stroke, admitted that ‘no one has 10 per cent or 20 per cent of a heart attack during a 10-year period. Individuals with the same estimated risk will either have or not have the event of interest, and only those patients who are destined to have an event can have their event prevented by therapy.’ Which is to say that the majority of patients are going to dodge a bullet whether or not they use preventive therapy. The doctors, for their part, plead that they are only being conservative. Unsure of the basic biology of the disease, they overtreat the many in order to help the few.

by Jeff Wheelwright, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Phoebe Wahl, "Night Lullaby" 2013
via:

Feist

[ed. Feist love. Expand screen for full effects.]

Fantastic Flops

Working the refs in style:

via: here and here