With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – TLS Philosophy editor Tim Crane grapples with the mind-body problem and "what it means to be the kind of creatures we are", plus the year that brightened Nietzsche's outlook, and Biscuit the dog's self-consciousness; Korean American author Min Jin Lee on how Korean literature approaches the difficult dream of reunification and what a new collection of stories, The Accusation by the pseudonymous author "Bandi", "the first work of fiction written by a North Korean author presumed still to be alive and living in the country”, tells us about life in that deeply mysterious land; finally, the great Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark, reads "From Vers Doré by Gérard de Nerval", a new work first published in this week's TLS.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Michel Foucault was so fascinated by lettres de cachet – pre-Revolutionary requests made by citizens to the lieutenant of police calling for the imprisonment without trial of a troublesome family member or neighbour – that he co-edited a little-known compendium of them: Biancamaria Fontana joins us to explain; Was the "plunder of black life" the driving force in making America great? Stephanie McCurry weighs in on a recent book, Slavery's Capitalism: A new history of American economic development; finally, in light of the Oxford Companion to Cheese, Paul Levy considers the politics of cheese and makes the case for a good strong Cheddar.
I was idling in our IRC chat room earlier when @Morgan_Hardwood wished us all a “Happy Discuss Anniversary”.
Wouldn’t you know it, another year slipped right by!
(Surely there’s no way it could already be a year since the last birthday post?
Where does the time go?)
We’ve had a bunch of neat things happen in the community over the past year!
Let’s look at some of the highlights.
I want to start with this topic because it’s the perfect opportunity to recognize some folks who have been supporting the community financially…
When I started all of this I decided that I definitely didn’t want ads to be on the site anywhere.
I had gotten enough donations from my old blog and GIMP tutorials that I could cover costs for a while entirely from those funds (I also re-did my personal blog recently and removed all ads from there as well).
I don’t like ads.
You don’t like ads.
We’re a big enough community that we can keep things going without having to bring those crappy things into our lives.
So to reiterate, we’re not going to run ads on the site.
We are hosting the main website on Stablehost, the forums (discuss) are on a VPS at Digital Ocean, and our file storage for discuss is out on Amazon S3(see below).
All told our costs are about $30 per month.
Not so bad!
Even so, we have had some folks who have donated to help us offset these costs and I want to take a moment to recognize their generosity and graciousness!
Dimitrios Psychogios has been a supporter of the site since the beginning.
This past year he covered (more than) our hosting costs for the entire year, and for that I am infinitely grateful (yes, I have infinite gratitude).
It also helps that based on his postings on G+ our musical tastes are very similarly aligned.
As soon as I get the supporters page up you’re going to the top of the list!
Thank you, Dimitrios, for your support of the community!
Jonas Wagner (@Jonas_Wagner) and McCap (@McCap) both donated this past year as well.
Which is doubly-awesome because they are both active in the community and have written some great content for everyone as well (@McCap is the author of the article A Masashi Wakui look with GIMP, and has been active in the community since the beginning as well).
Mica (@paperdigits) and Luka are both recurring donators which I am particularly grateful for.
It really helps for planning to know we have some recurring support like that.
I have a bunch of donations where the donators didn’t leave me a name to use for attribution and I don’t want to just assume it’s ok. If you know you donated and see your first name in the list below (and are ok with me using your full name and a link if you want) then please let me know and I’ll update this post (and for the donators page later).
These are the folks who are really making a difference by taking the time and being gracious enough to support us.
Even if you don’t want your full name out here, I know who you are and am very, very grateful and humbled by your generosity and kindness. Thank you all so much!
Marc W. (you rock!)
Ulrich P.
Luc V.
Ben E.
Keith A.
Philipp H.
Christian M.
Matthieu M.
Christian M.
Christian K.
Maria J.
Kevin P.
Maciej D.
Christian K.
Egbert G.
Michael H.
Jörn H.
Boris H.
Norman S.
David O.
Walfrido C.
Philip S.
David S.
Keith B.
Andrea V.
Stephan R.
David M.
Bastian H.
Chance J.
Luka S.
Nathanael S.
Sven K.
Pepijn V.
Benjamin W.
Jörg W.
Patrick B.
Joop K.
Alain V.
Egor S.
Samuel S.
On that note.
If anyone wanted to join the folks above in supporting what we’re up to, we have a page specifically for that:
I wasn’t able to attend LGM this year, being held down in Rio (but the GIMP team did).
That’s not to say that we didn’t have folks from the community there: Farid (@frd) from Estúdio Gunga was there!
I was able to help coordinate a presentation by Robin Mills (@clanmills) about the state (and future) of Exiv2.
They’re looking for a maintainer to join the project, as Robin will be stepping down at the end of the year for studies.
If you think you’d be interested in helping out, please get in touch with Robin on the forums and let him know!
I also put together (quickly) a few slides on the community that were included in the “State of the Libre Graphics” presentation that kicks off the meeting (presented this year by GIMPer Simon Budig):
This was just a short overview of the community and I think it makes sense to include it here was well.
Since we stood the forum up two years ago we’ve seen about 3.2 million pageviews and have just under 1,400 users in the community.
Which is just awesome to me.
@LebedevRI was also going to be mad if I didn’t take the time to at least let folks know about raw.pixls.us, where we currently have 693 raw files across 477 cameras.
Please, take a moment to check raw.pixls.us and see if we are missing (or need better) files from a camera you may have, and get us samples for testing!
We set up raw.pixls.us so we can gather camera raw samples for regression testing of rawspeed as well to have a place for any other project that might need raw files to test with.
As we blogged about previously, the new site is also a replacement for the now defunct rawsamples.ch website.
Stop in and see if we’re missing a sample you can provide, or if you can provide a better (or better licensed) version for your camera.
We’re focusing specifically on CC0 contributions.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, we learned that the digiKam team was looking for a new webmaster through a post on discuss.
@Andrius posted a heads up on the digiKam 5.5.0 release in this thread.
Needless to say, less than a month or so later, @paperdigits had already finished up a nice new website for them!
This is something we’re really trying to help out the community with and are super glad to be able to help out the digiKam team with this.
The less time they have to worry about web infrastructure and security for it, the more time they can spend on awesome new features for their project and users.
Yes, we used a static site generator (Hugo in this case), and we were also able to move their commenting system to use discuss as its back-end!
This is the same way we’re doing comments for PIXLS.US right now (scroll to the bottom of this post).
They’ve got their own category on discuss for both general digiKam discussion as well as their linked comments from their website.
Speaking of using discourse as a commenting system…
We’ve been using discourse as our forum software from the beginning.
It’s a modern, open, and full-featured forum software that I think works incredibly well as a modern web application.
The ability to embed comments in a website that are part of the forum was one of the main reasons I went with it.
I didn’t want to expose users to unnecessary privacy concerns by embedding a third-party commenting system (cough, disqus, cough).
If I was going to go through the trouble of setting up a way to comment on things, I wanted to homogenize it with a full community-building effort.
This past year they (the discourse devs) added the ability to embed comments in multiple hosts (it was only one host when we first stood things up).
This means that we can now manage the comments for anyone else thay may need them!
Of course, building out a new website for digiKam meant that this was a perfect time to test things.
It all works beautifully, with one minor nitpick.
The ability to style the embedded comments was limited to a single style for all the places that they might be embedded.
This may be fine if all of the sites look similar, but if you visit www.digikam.org and compare it to here, you can see they are a little bit different…
(we’re on white, digikam.org is on a dark background).
We needed a way to isolate the styling on a per-host basis, which after much help from @darix (yet again :)) I was able to finally hack something together that worked and get it pushed upstream (and merged finally)!
When RawTherapee migrated their official forums over to pixls they brought something really fun with them: Play Raw.
They would share a single raw file amongst the community and then have everyone process and share their results (including their processing steps and associated .pp3 settings file).
If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve had quite a few Play Raw posts over the past year with all sorts of wonderful images to practice on and share!
There are portraits, children, dogs, cats, landscapes, HDR, and phở!
There’s over 19 different raw files being shared right now, so come try your hand at processing (or even share a file of your own)!
We are a photography forum, so it only made sense that we made it as easy as possible for community members to upload and share images (raw files, and more).
It’s one of the things I love about discourse that it’s so easy to add these things to your posts (simply drag-and-drop into the post editor) and upload them.
While this is easy to do, it does mean that we have to store all of this data.
The VPS we use from Digital Ocean only has a 40GB SSD and it has to include all of the main forum running on it.
We did have a little space for a while, but to help alleviate the local storage as a possible problem down the line, I moved our file storage out to Amazon S3.
This means that we can upload all we want and won’t really hit a wall with actual available storage space.
It costs more each month than trying to store it all on local storage for the site, but then we don’t have to worry about expansion (or migration) later.
Plus our current upload size limit per file is 100MB!
As you can see, we’re only looking at about $5USD/month on average in storage and transfer costs for the site with Amazon.
We’re also averaging about $22usd/month in hosting costs with Digital Ocean, so we’re still only about $27/month in total hosting costs.
Maybe $30 if we include the hosting for the main website which is at Stablehost.
We’ve had an IRC room for a long time (longer than discuss I think), but I only just got around to including a link on the site for folks to be able to join through a nice web client (Kiwi IRC).
It was included as part of an oft-requested set of links to get back to various parts of the main site from the forums.
I also added these links in the menu for the site as well (the header links are hidden when on mobile, so this way you can still access the links from whatever device you’re using):
If you have your own IRC client then you can reach us on irc.freenode.net #pixls.us.
Come and join us in the chat room!
If you’re not there you are definitely missing out on a ton of stimulating conversation and enlightening discussions!
With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas. Sudhir Hazareesingh gives his analysis of the French election and the rise of Macron; Toby Lichtig (sic) helps us tackle genre fiction, including our tips for the greatest ever historical novel; and Hal Jensen celebrates an 8-hour play about American identity.
On April 30, at London's Southbank Centre, an extraordinary cast of readers – including Philippe Sands, Tom Stoppard, Niklas Frank, whose father was Adolf Hitler's lawyer, and Susan Pollack, who survived the camp – gathered to mark 70 years since the publication of this seminal account of humanity at its most brutal. Across five episodes, in collaboration with the Southbank Centre, we bring you the full, live recording of the event, part of the Belief and Beyond Belief festival, exploring what it means to be human. This performance was directed by Nina Brazier with music directed by Tomo Keller and performed by Raphael Wallfisch, Tomo Keller, Robert Smissen, Simon Wallfisch and Lada Valesova; the event was devised by A. L. Kennedy and Philippe Sands, in collaboration with Ted Hodgkinson, Senior Programmer for Literature and Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre. You'll find all episodes on the-tls.co.ukChapters 1–3 read by: human-rights lawyer Philippe Sands QC; author A. L. Kennedy; actors Samuel West...
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Frances Wilson on how Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions of 1789 laid the foundations for the messy modern memoir; TLS commissioning editor Mika Ross-Southall on a strange new exhibition of Picasso's work that examines his career-long engagement with minotaurs and matadors; Lorna Scott Fox rediscovers Leonora Carrington, an almost-forgotten radical artist-thinker for our fragile times.
One of the goals we have here at PIXLS.US is to help Free Software projects however we can, and one of those ways is to focus on things that we can do well that might help make things easier for the projects.
It may not be much fun for project developers to deal with websites or community outreach necessarily.
This is something I think we can help with, and recently we had an opportunity to do just that with the awesome folks over at the photo management project digiKam.
As part of a post announcing the release of digiKam 5.5.0 on discuss. we learned that they were in need of a new webmaster, and they needed something soon to migrate away from Drupal 6 for security reasons.
They had a rudimentary Drupal 7 theme setup, but it was severely lacking (non-responsive and not adapted to the existing content).
The previous digiKam website, running on Drupal 6.
The new digiKam website! Great work Mica!
Mica (@paperdigits) reached out to Gilles Caulier and the digiKam community and offered our help, which they accepted!
At that point Mica gathered requirements from them and found in the end that a static website would be more than sufficient for their needs.
We coordinated with the KDE folks to get a git repo setup for the new website, and rolled up our sleeves to start building!
Mica chose to use the Hugo static-site generator to build the site with.
This was something new for us, but turned out to be quite fast and fun to work with (it generates the entire digiKam site in just about 5 seconds).
Coupled with a version of the Foundation 6 blog theme we were able to get a base site framework up and running fairly quickly.
We scraped all of the old site content to make sure that we could port everything as well as make sure we didn’t break any urls along the way.
We iterated some design stuff along the way, ported all of the old posts to markdown files, hacked at the theme a bit, and finally included comments that are now hosted on discuss.
What’s wild is that we managed to pull the entire thing together in about 6 weeks total (of part-time working on it).
The digiKam team seems happy with the results so far, and we’re looking forward to continue helping them by managing this infrastructure for them.
A big kudos to Mica for driving the new site and getting everything up and running.
This was really all due to his hard work and drive.
This is the same category that news posts from the website will post in, so feel free to drop in and say hello or share some neat things you may be working on with digiKam!
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The graphic artist Nicola Streeten discusses two new exhibitions, in Paris and London, linking comics to trauma theory, radical politics and feminism; Alexander van Tulleken on a new book by two "rock star professors" that purports to provide a bold new solution to the refugee crisis; a crackly clip just a few minutes long is all we have left of Virginia Woolf's voice – Emily Kopley fills us in on the fraught context behind "Craftsmanship", a talk broadcast by the BBC 80 years ago
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Philippe Sands discusses his forthcoming project which assembles an international cast of actors, writers, musicians and politicians to read Primo Levi's seminal account of survival in Auschwitz, seventy years after its publication; as part of our Shakespeare edition this week, TLS Commissioning Editor Michael "The Doctor" Caines considers how protective we should be of the man and the work; Rebecca Spang wades through the murky matter of money, the growth of "off shore" finance and the bewildering sexualization of monetary metaphors.Discover more at www.the-tls.co.uk.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – TLS editor James Campbell, Baldwin's biographer and friend, on the writer's complex presence and legacy on and off screen; Michael Rosen on the "disappearance" of Émile Zola and the long, dappled shadow of the Dreyfus Affair; Jane Yager on a sensational and problematic investigation into mass rapes committed by allied soldiers in Germany in the wake of the Second World War, and how attitudes have – and haven't – changed.Discover more at www.the-tls.co.uk
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Rory Waterman on the "uses" of poetry and Stephen Burt's admirable, if rather vexing, new collection The Poem is You: 60 contemporary American poems and how to read them; Barbara J. King on the cannibals in our midst (note: fragile-stomached listeners and lovers of banana slugs be warned); When did modern philosophy begin? And who is its godfather? – TLS Philosophy Editor Tim Crane tackles a new book by A. C. Grayling which seeks answers to these thorny questions.Discover more at www.the-tls.co.uk.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Libby Purves on the stranger-than-fiction life of Aimée Crocker, a nineteenth-century heiress with proto-PC views and an affection for boa constrictors; Gabriel Josipovici on a magisterial but contentious study of two of the greatest figures in European art history, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder; and finally, the novelist and poet Colm Tóibín discusses his forthcoming novel, set in ancient Greece, and reads five new poems, published for the first time in this week's TLS Discover more at www.the-tls.co.uk.
This years Libre Graphics Meeting (2017) is going to be held in the lovely city seen above, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil!
This is an important meeting for so many people in the Free/Libre art community as it’s one of the only times they have an opportunity to meet face to face.
We’ve had some folks attending the past LGM’s (Leipzig and London) and it’s a wonderful opportunity to spend some time with friends. (Also, @frd from the community will be there!)
The GIMP team will be in attendance this year. I happen to have a fondness for them so I’m asking anyone reading this to please head over and donate to the project.
That link is for the GNOME PayPal account, but there are other ways to donate as well.
This is one of the few times that the GIMP team gets a chance to meet in person.
They use the time to hack at GIMP and to manage internal business.
The time they get to spend together is invaluable to the project and by extension everyone that uses GIMP.
Just look at these faces!
Surely this (Brady) Bunch of folks is worth helping to get a better GIMP?
Left to right, top to bottom: Ville, Mitch, Øyvind, Simon, Liam, João, Aryeom, Jehan, Michael
Besides @frd I’m not sure who else from the community might be attending, so if I’ve missed you I apologize!
Please feel free to use this topic to communicate and coordinate if you’d like.
It appears that personally I’m on a biennial schedule with attending LGM - so I’m looking forward to next year to be able to catch up with everyone!
Modern digital sensors (with a few exceptions) use an arrangement of RGB filters over a square grid of photosites. For a given 2x2 square of photosites the filters are designed to allow two green, and one each red and blue colors through to the photosite. These are arranged on a grid:
The pattern is known as a Bayer pattern (after the creator Bryce Bayer of Eastman Kodak). The resulting pattern shows how each RGB is offset into the grid.
Each of the pixel sites captures a single color. In order to produce a full color representation at each pixel, the other color values need to be interpolated from the surrounding grid. This interpolation and methods for calculating it are referred to as demosaicing. The methods for accomplishing this vary across different algorithms.
The final RGB value for the initially Red pixel needs to be interpolated from the surrounding Blue and Green pixels.
Unfortunately, this can often result in problems.
There can be chromatic aliasing problems resulting in odd color fringing and roughness on edges or a loss of detail and sharpness.
Pixel Shift
Pentax‘s Pixel Shift (Available on the K-1, K-3 II, KP, K-70) attempts to alleviate some of these problems through a novel approach of capturing four images quickly in succession and by moving the entire camera sensor a single pixel for each shot. This has the effect of capturing a full RGB value at each pixel location:
Pixel Shift shifts the sensor by one pixel in each direction to be able to generate a full set of RGB values at each photosite.
This means a full RGB value for a pixel location can be created without having to interpolate from neighboring values.
Advantages
Less Noise
If you look carefully at the Bayer pattern, you’ll notice that when shifting to adjacent pixels there will always be two green values captured per pixel. The average of these green values helps to suppress noise that may have been interpolated and spread through a normal, single-shot raw file.
Top: single raw frame, Bottom: Pixel Shift
Less Moiré
Avoiding the interpolation of pixel colors from surrounding photosites helps to reduce the appearance of Moiré in the final result:
Top: single raw frame, Bottom: Pixel Shift
Increased Resolution
This method is similar in concept to what was previously seen when Olympus announced their “High Resolution” mode for the OMD E-M5mkII camera (or manually as we previously described in this blog post).
In that case they combine 8 frames moved by sub-pixel amounts to increase the overall resolution.
The difference here is that Olympus generates a single, combined raw file from the results, while Pixel Shift gets you access to each of the four raw files before they’re combined.
In each case, a higher resolution image can be created from the results:
Top: single raw frame, Bottom: Pixel Shift
Disadvantages
Movement
As with most approaches for capturing multiple images and combining them, a particularly problematic area is when there are objects in motion between the frames being captured.
This is a common problem when stitching panoramic photography, when creating image stacks for noise reduction, and when combining images using methods such as Pixel Shift.
Although…
The RawTherapee Approach
Simply combining four static frames together is really trivial, and is something that all the other Pixel Shift-capable software can do without issue. The real world is not often so accommodating as a studio setup, and that is where the recent work done by @Ingo and @Ilias on RawTherapee really begins to shine.
What they’ve been working on in RawTherapee is to improve the detection of movement in a scene. There are several types of movement possible:
Objects showing at different places in a scene such as fast moving cars.
Partly moving objects like foliage in the wind.
Moving objects reflecting light onto static objects in the scene
Changing illumination conditions such as long exposures at sunset.
All of these types of movement need to be detected to avoid the artifacts they may cause in the final shot.
One of the key features of Pixel Shift movement detection in RawTherapee is that it allows you to show the movement mask, so you get feedback on which regions of the image are detected as movement and which are static. For the regions with movement RawTherapee will then use the demosaiced frame of your choice to fill it in, and for regions without movement it will use the Pixel Shift combined image with more detail and less noise.
Unique to RawTherapee is the option to export the resulting motion mask (for those that may want to do further blending/processing manually).
The accuracy of movement detection in RawTherapee leads to much better handling of motion artifacts that works well in places where proprietary solutions fall short.
For most cases the Automatic motion correction mode works well, but you can also fine tune the parameters in custom mode to correctly detect motion in high ISO shots.
Besides being the only option (barring dcrawps possibly) to process Pixel Shift files in Linux, RawTherapee has some other neat options that aren’t found in other solutions. One of them is the ability to export the actual movement mask separate from the image. This will let users generate separate outputs from RT, and to combine them later using the movement mask. Another option is the ability to choose which of the other frames to use for filling in the movement areas on the image.
Pixel Shift Support in Other Software
Pentax’s own Digital Camera Utility (a rebranded version of SilkyPix) naturally supports Pixel Shift, but as with most vendor-bundled software it can be slow, unwieldy, and a little buggy sometimes. Having said that, the results do look good, and at least the “Motion Correction” is able to be utilized with this software.
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) got support for Pixel Shift files in version 9.5.1 (but doesn’t utilize the “Motion Correction”). In fact, ACR didn’t have support at the time that DPReview.com looked at the feature last year, causing them to retract the article and re-post when they had a chance to use a version of ACR with support.
We’re going to look at some 100% crops from that article and compare them to the results available using RawTherapee (the latest development version, to be released as 5.1 in April).
The RawTherapee versions were set to the most neutral settings with only an exposure adjustment to match other samples better.
Looking first at an area of foliage with motion, the places where there are issues becomes apparent.
For reference, here is the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) version of a single frame from a Pixel Shift file:
The results with Pixel Shift on, and motion correction on, from straight-out-of-camera (SOOC), Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), SilkyPix, and RawTherapee (RT) are decidedly mixed. In all but the RT version, there’s a very clear problem with effective blending and masking of the frames in areas with motion:
Things look much worse for Adobe Camera Raw when looking at high-motion areas like the water spray at the foot of the waterfall, though SilkyPix does a much better job here.
The ACR version of a single frame for reference:
Both the SOOC and SilkyPix versions handle all of the movement well here. RawTherapee also does a great job blending the frames despite all of the movement. Adobe Camera Raw is not doing well at all…
Finally, in a frame full of movement, such as the surface of the water.
The ACR version of a single frame for reference:
In a frame full of movement the SOOC, ACR, and SilkyPix processing all struggle to combine a clean set of frames. They exhibit a pixel pattern from the processing, and the ACR version begins to introduce odd colors:
As mentioned earlier, a unique feature of RawTherapee is the ability to show the motion mask. Here is an example of the motion mask for this image
The motion mask generated by RawTherapee for the above image.
Also worth mentioning is the “Smooth Transitions” feature in RawTherapee.
When there are regions with and without motion, the regions with motion are masked and filled in with data from a demosaiced frame of your choice.
The other regions are taken from the Pixel Shift combined image.
This can occasionally lead to harsh transitions between the two.
For instance, a transition as processed in SilkyPix:
RawTherapee’s “Smooth Transitions” feature does a much better job handling the transition:
In Conclusion
In another example of the power and community of Free/Libre and Open Source Software we have a great enhancement to a project based on feedback and input from the users. In this case, it all started with a post on the RawTherapee forums.
Thanks to the hard work of @Ingo and @Ilias Pentax shooters now have a Pixel Shift capable software that is not only FLOSS but also produces better results than the proprietary solutions!
Not so coincidentally, community member @nosle gave permission to use one of his PS files for everyone to try processing on the Play pixelshift thread.
If you’d like to practice consider heading over to get his file and feedback from others!
Pixel Shift is currently in the development branch of RawTherapee and is slated for release with version 5.1.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Henry K. Miller on the cinematic progress of Christopher Isherwood, a novelist who wanted nothing more than to be a filmmaker; Lamorna Ash on All This Panic, a dreamy documentary about seven girls stumbling towards womanhood in Brooklyn; Richard Fortey tells the story of the British landscape, a sweeping tale spanning several millennia, from the retreat of the ice caps in 9700 BC to the crowded island of today.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Sudhir Hazareesingh on the seemingly unstoppable rise of Emmanuel Macron, the only politician now standing between the far-Right Marine Le Pen and the French presidency; Claude Rawson on the complex rage of Jonathan Swift, and why we should resist all attempts to sanitise Gulliver's Travels; Diane Purkiss delves into the murky history of alchemy, a slippery amalgam of science and the make-believe of great importance to our ancestors – and which we would do better than to scoff at.Discover more at www.the-tls.co.uk.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – In these science fictional times, Jonathan Barnes considers the importance of sci-fi, plus a new sequel to H. G. Wells's satirical masterpiece The War of the Worlds; Thea reports from a new exhibition of Pop Art and print work at the British Museum, which showcases six decade's worth of American dreaming; Fiction Editor Toby Lichtig discusses George Saunders's new novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a humorous, moving and formally inventive account of President Lincoln's grief following the death of his son.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – D. J. Taylor on the bookish sensibilities of Paul Weller's post-punk romanticism (including a bizarre medley of Orwell's 1984 and Wind in the Willows); Stephen Brown considers a clutch of books about practising, playing and listening to music, how to think about Mahler, and the perfect aphorisms of Michael Hampe (“Develop a feeling for greatness. It protects against stupidity”)
The Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 15x is returning to the Pasadena Convention Center on March 2-5, 2017. SCaLE is one of the largest community-organized conferences in North America, with some 3,500 attendees last year.
If you’re attending the conference this year, find me, @paperdigits and lets talk shop or grab a meal!
Don’t judge me, it was the morning.
You can ping me on the forum, on twitter, or on Matrix/riot.im at @paperdigits:matrix.org.
If meeting isn’t enough for you, I’ll have stickers!
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