Tag: Michelangelo

See You Later

 

The Department of Energy is proposing to change a rule implemented late in the Obama administration that mandated energy guidelines for light bulbs which would have effectively removed all but Light Emitting Diode (LED) bulbs and Compact Fluorescent (CFL) bulbs from the market in January 2020. Since manufacturers are phasing out CFLs, LEDs would have the market to themselves shortly. Even though manufacturers are turning out more LEDs to replace incandescent bulbs, making the old style bulbs less significant in the market with each passing year, they still apparently chafe at the rule and are behind the push to get it changed.

 

There’s no question LEDs save energy over incandescent bulbs, which waste a lot of energy producing heat instead of light. LEDs also last far longer than incandescents. While the retail price for LEDs had been around ten times higher than the price of incandescents, the price has fallen significantly in the past few years as LEDs flood the market. Unlike the light given off by CFLs, the quality of the light given off by LEDs is every bit as good as that from incandescents, and because there are many options for changing the light from LEDs they are better overall. If Americans are serious about saving energy, it’s difficult to imagine a good reason for not switching over to LEDs sooner rather than later.

First Day of Creation
Separation of Light from Darkness, a 1512 fresco by Michelangelo (1475-1564), painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. The Vatican recently completed an eight year project to install LED bulbs and fixtures throughout its facilities, including the Sistine Chapel, cutting their energy use for lighting by 90 percent.

Energy savings from the indoor market for LED bulbs probably will pan out as scientists predict since people will use about as much lighting as they’ve used before, only they will have switched out the type of bulbs they use. Municipal outdoor lighting, on the other hand, has not proved to save energy when switching to LEDs because officials tend to have more of the new lights installed, negating energy savings as well as increasing light pollution. There are compelling reasons for municipalities to increase outdoor lighting, such as fighting crime, but still it seems a terrible waste of resources that may have more to do with bureaucrats defending their turf from budget cuts which might ensue after energy savings. Luckily, private citizens don’t usually control their own budgets in a similarly wasteful manner.

About outdoor lighting at home, it should be noted that scientists don’t know exactly what type of light is most attractive to insects, or to what extent the heat given off by bulbs is a factor. Some types of light are more attractive than others to some kinds of insects and not to others, and most insects are drawn to heat, but not all of them. There is no truth to the rumor that all LEDs, even bright whites, are not attractive to insects. To avoid drawing insects, the best kind of bulb is still an orange one, usually marketed specifically as a “bug light”, though of course it would more accurately be described as a “no bug light” or a “fewer bugs light”. The LED will be more effective than the incandescent because it also takes much of the attractive heat out of the equation. The absolute worst kind of outdoor lighting to get is marketed as a “bug zapper”, for a number of reasons. There are now bug zappers available which use LEDs as their light source, and that makes the least sense of all, except perhaps to someone who with unwarranted satisfaction feels better about saving energy while unnecessarily luring to their deaths any and all bugs.
— Techly

 

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The Artist’s Rendering

 

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
— Words of Jesus Christ quoted in Matthew 22:21, King James Version of the Bible.

Mona Lisa moustache
Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) Mona Lisa, with digitally added mustache. Derivative work by Perhelion.

 

This past Friday evening at a Sotheby’s art auction in London, the English graffiti artist Banksy remotely activated a shredder hidden within the frame of his painting Girl With Balloon moments after it had sold for one million British pounds. The lower half of the painting shredded, and there is some question now about the status of the sale and whether Banksy’s vandalizing of his own painting will render an even greater value for it.

Discussion of an artwork’s value outside of its aesthetic appeal is a reminder that for the rich who can afford to pay tremendous prices for art the value lies more in other, equally idiosyncratic, considerations than in its aesthetics. For the rich, art is an investment and a step on the ladder of social climbing. They may not find a particular piece they buy aesthetically appealing whatsoever. The essential thing is that enough other important people find an artwork appealing so that its value is driven up, checking off the boxes for high return on investment and an increase in high society credentials for its new owner. The artwork itself may languish in a warehouse after sale rather than go on private or public display.

 

The investment value of an artwork is, like money itself, largely artificial and sustained by the beliefs of the people who hold it or wish to hold it. No one can eat art, any more than they can eat money, nor can they grow food on it like they could on land, nor withdraw food from it as they might withdraw fish from the sea. It has no monetary value unless enough people believe it does. Aesthetic value, on the other hand, is almost entirely in the eye of the beholder, though some people may in their appreciation of art be too dependent on the opinions of “experts”. For an extreme case of wishful thinking brought on by peer pressure, look to the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Titian - The Tribute Money - Google Art Project
The Tribute Money, a painting by Titian (1490-1576).

Before the Renaissance, art was for decoration of public spaces and the homes of the rich, and for religious instruction in places of worship since most people were illiterate and did not receive their education from books. The names of very few medieval and ancient artists have come down to us along with their works. That changed with the Renaissance, when artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael acquired reputations beyond their immediate patrons among the rich and powerful. Note how we have come to know all three by single names, as if they were modern day celebrities. And it was the widening of cultural influence beyond the insularity of any one city-state’s walls during the Renaissance that allowed artists to break out of anonymity.

The international renown of a few popular artists such as Rembrandt was slow to build at first, and their artworks commanded modest prices by today’s standards. It is the international culture of today and the concentration of great wealth among an ever smaller percentage of the population that has enabled the explosion in high prices for the artworks of a relatively small number of well known artists. The last great jump in prices was roughly during the Gilded Age around the turn of the twentieth century, when a great concentration of wealth created a new aristocracy of capitalists.

In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, wealthy newspaper publisher and art collector Charles Foster Kane, modeled on tycoon William Randolph Hearst and played by Orson Welles, discusses his changing economic circumstances with his banker Mr. Thatcher, played by George Coulouris, and his longtime assistant Mr. Bernstein, played by Everett Sloane.

Now there is another concentration of wealth occurring, this time on a worldwide scale rather than limited to Europe and North America. Nothing has changed, of course: as always, the rich get richer. It’s the scale of wealth accumulation that has changed, and when artworks are selling for hundreds of millions of British pounds or American dollars, a mere million for a painting by anti-establishment artist Banksy is entry level stuff. The rich people sitting on mountains of the wealth of the world would not flinch at shredding a million pounds, and the irony of one artist’s rendering matters not at all to them as long as the artist’s growing fame increases their return on investment.
— Vita

10/8/2018 Update: Since last Friday, when Banksy’s Girl With Balloon partially shredded after being sold at auction for about £1,000,000, its value has increased by at least 50%, and may have doubled.

 

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The Fickle Fingerprint of Fate

In May of 2016, Department of Justice officials wrote a memorandum seeking a warrant to search a Lancaster, California, premises and to force the occupants to unlock any phones or electronic devices with their fingerprints if the devices were equipped with that technology. This amounted to a fishing expedition to circumvent previous court rulings which held that law enforcement could not compel a criminal suspect to unlock an electronic device with their pass code because that would be a violation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination. It is unclear whether the DoJ ultimately received the warrant they sought because not all documents related to the case are publicly available.

Creation of Adam (Michelangelo) Detail
“Creation of Adam,” by Michelangelo

Why is compelling a suspect to unlock a device with their fingerprint also not a violation of the Fifth Amendment? Because of a 2014 ruling in a Virginia Circuit Court which stated that fingerprints and other bodily attributes are not protected, while handing over a pass code to law enforcement is divulging of information, which is protected. Law enforcement has long been able to use a suspect’s physical characteristics to incriminate him or her, but has not been allowed to compel a suspect to give up information. The problem now is that technology has leaped ahead of current law, and judges and prosecutors are falling back on anachronistic case law to cope with the use of biometrics like fingerprints and iris scans to lock personal electronic devices. Case law going back one hundred years and more treats fingerprints as a way of determining a suspect’s culpability at a crime scene, not as a key to a suspect’s possessions which may or may not contain evidence. It is obtuse to claim that a fingerprint or any other biometric is not the same as a pass code when it is being used for the same purpose.

All seeing eye
“All seeing eye,” from U.S. currency

The use of biometrics is springing up not only in consumer devices, but in technology used by the military and law enforcement. The 2002 film, Minority Report, depicts a dystopian future when law enforcement and advertisers make great use of biometrics, and those predictions are proving more accurate with each passing year. The Department of Justice already uses facial recognition technology for surveillance of people in public spaces, and as we have seen with the National Security Agency, the ability of modern digital storage to accumulate massive amounts of data encourages the practice of scooping up everything indiscriminately. Like a fishing trawler using a drift net, law enforcement intends to collect everything now, store it, and sort it all out later. They think they are being efficient and better safe than sorry. But people are not fish subject to by-catch, which ought to be obvious enough, and to be sure the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution make the distinction clear.
– Techly

Randolph County Veterans Memorial Park Bill of Rights marker
Randolph County, Georgia, Veterans Memorial Park Bill of Rights marker;
photo by Michael Rivera

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