Immanent Domain

All About Typefaces & Fonts

Know your italics from your obliques, and your cap from your x heights. I learned a lot putting together this presentation.

Saturated Colors

The book Real World Color Management (whose imagery I shamelessly recreated in my illustration at left) helpfully defines saturation as "the purity of a color, or how far it is from neutral gray. If hue is the perceived dominant wavelength, saturation is the extent to which that dominant wavelength seems contaminated by other wavelengths." (35) As penance for my illustration, let me recommend the book as the best on the market about it's topic.

On the color cylinder below, the outside rim  of the cylinder has fully saturated colors. As one moves in toward the center, colors begin to cancel one another out, resulting in neutral grays. 

Beside the cylinder is a screen shot of Adobe's Color Picker. In the Color Picker, it's as if we sliced the cylinder from the center to the red part of its outside rim.

If we move the Color Picker's slider up and down the spectrum, it's as if it slices a different part of the cylinder. Each slice has a fully saturated color (be it green, magenta, or whatever) on the outside edge and neutral grays along the inside edge.

 

Color Vision

Humans and many primates have more sophisticated color vision than most other mammals. Yet many, many other animals have us beat when it comes to how they perceive color. This presentation explains it all. Not to mention primary colors, the color wheel, and other fun topics.

Just What the Sam Hill IS Going On

After listening to just these two episodes of This American Life, I actually feel like I understand what is going on with the economy. Have a listen yourself and then nod knowingly when you hear terms like Credit Default Swap and Stock Injection.

The Giant Pool of Money

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Men, Violence, Firearms: A Depressing Configuration

When I was in graduate school in Durham, North Carolina, my most important learning experience didn’t happen on campus.  Instead, it came out of my work as a counselor with men who battered their wives or girlfriends. These are difficult programs to work for, mainly because it’s hard to know how effective they are. But while I was often pessimistic about how much of a difference the social workers and I were making with the men, I learned a lot about men, and—more uncomfortably—myself.  Sadly, I’ve had to do some thinking about men, domestic violence, and guns lately. But at least I have some useful things to say about the topic.  Here are some key factors:

Factor One: Men’s Pervasive Fear of Victimization.
Michael Kimmel, a sociologist who writes about masculinity, maintains that few people understand (or, if they are male, admit to themselves) how much of men’s behavior is driven by a fear of being victimized. Or humiliated, which most men experience as victimization.

The men I encountered in the domestic violence program bore this out. Nine out of ten of them felt that they were the ones who were the real victims, or would have been victimized if they had not become violent. I’d read them the police reports—the women’s broken arms, the concussions, the guy who dragged a woman down the street with her arm trapped in the car door. The men’s initial response was almost always the same: “yeah, but she did or said this. She provoked me.” In their mind, she was the one at fault.

How can this be? That brings me to the second factor.

Factor Two: Codes & Breaking Points
You see it in almost every Western: after a long series of insults, the villain or villains finally go to far. At that point the hero is green-lighted to respond violently. Often what sets the hero off is something done to someone close to the protagonist: his sidekick is killed or his wife is assaulted.

The particulars change, but the plot structure remains the same: villain goes too far, hero or those close to him are victimized (or threatened with victimization), hero responds with violent force. Even a fine film like Unforgiven, wonderfully at odds with traditional Westerns in so many ways, ultimately falls into this pattern.

The points are that A> these narratives are everywhere in our culture, and B> men who batter usually see themselves as the heroes in them, the men who “get pushed too far.”

Factor Three: Guns as the Great Equalizer
What makes things so scary when firearms are injected into the equation is another fantasy you often see in Westerns: a belief that gun ownership somehow levels all playing fields.

In Westerns, it doesn’t matter how much money, how many head of cattle, how much culture, how much of anything another man has. If you are armed, you are just as much of a man as he is. You are just as much of a man as he is because you can never be victimized or humiliated. You may be outdrawn or shot, but you will die with your manhood intact.

Writing about school shootings, the sociologist Katherine S. Newman maintains that “the feeling of ... needing a ‘manly’ exit from an unbearable situation is common to many of them. … What the shooters want is to end their torment in a way that reclaims their social standing.” (Rampage: the Social Roots of School Shootings, 248).

School Shootings are different from domestic violence, but the underlying beliefs about violence, masculinity, and respect are the same: that humiliation is equivalent to victimization, that this is somehow unbearable, and that violence will restore one’s masculine standing.

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror
Like many men, my initial attitude about men who batter was that “someone should beat the living shit out of them.” But I found that this belief was simply a variation on the system of ideas I outlined above: the notion that someone who crosses a line, in this case men who batter, should be dealt with violently. I went into the program geared up to confront the beliefs of men who batter. During my time as a counselor, I remained focused on doing that. But I also ended up having to reexamine my own beliefs, which was just as hard.

One of the major rules in the program, which was under the direction of the local coalition for battered women, was “don’t let the men go home angry,” because this would endanger the women in the men's lives. So we faced the difficult task of holding the men accountable and trying to challenge their underlying beliefs, but without getting sucked into to thinking of ourselves as heroes, bravely punishing men who had crossed the line. One of the social workers I was often paired with put it this way: “it’s like judo: you have to take the underlying energy of the men’s beliefs and move them someplace they don’t expect to end up.”

At our best moments, I hope we succeeded at this. I can say with certainty, however, that the program had the same effect on me that we hoped it would have on the men: I ended up someplace some place far from where I expected. I went in prepared to challenge the “scripts” men who batter carry around in their heads. But I became aware, often uncomfortably, that I was sometimes reading from the same cue card.

Residual, Dominant & Emergent Cultures

I did this handout a few years ago about how the culture of humanities departments have not yet caught up with the economic changes that affect them:

Download Academic residual culture

I also did this handout on dominant, residual, and emergent culture and the Ashland Elks Lodge. It is considerably less of a downer than the previous handout:

Download Elksculture

Triumph of the Wheel

I needed an image of a color cylinder for a Digital Media course. There are plenty that I could have grabbed off the web, but if possible I like to make things myself. Thing is, it turned out to be a mind-bender (for me, at least).

To make the image at left, I ended up doing a lot of switch hitting between illustrator (which handles gradients well) and photoshop (which handles continuous tones and transparency). There is probably some smart way to produce the image using only one of the programs. But I think I learned more moving back and forth.

Won't bore people with the play-by-play, but I did use these processes, though perhaps not in this order: Spectrum gradients in illustrator, shift to polar coordinates in photoshop. Cutting into a circle, and various graidents from a solid color to transparency in photoshop. Mapping part of a spectrum on to a 3D rendered cylinder in illustrator. Blurring some color transistions that were too sharp in photoshop.

All in all, I surprised myself, because I started with no idea of how to do this, and many of my initial steps (like using blending modes in photoshop) were dead wrong.

Mysteries of Human Perception

I've been working on an animation about how human eyes see color, but keep getting sidetracked. First by another animation of a mechanism Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari proposed as a portrait of Kant's thought. It's fun, but has me researching things like cam and crankshafts. Then sidetracked by the world of non-human color perception.

So this is pretty good, but will be better once I export some of the animated scenes to a larger Keynote, then send the whole thing back to Quicktime for posting on the web.

Immortality, but without self

Various NOVA and Discovery Channel specials have impressed upon me that at some point, even just a few generations down the line, vastly longer lives, and even life without inevitable death might be possible.

Now most science fiction stories about this slide into some sort of fable or morality tale to reconcile us, those who will die, to our fate. I suppose this story idea doesn't elide that tendency entirely, but it's still cool enough to me that I might write it up into a proper narrative.

The story idea has two parts. One: the weakest link in extending life would be our brains. Specifically, our ability to store memories for more than a normal lifetime. So that's premise one, that our brains aren't well adapted to storing over, say, a hundred and thirty years worth of memories. Premise two would extrapolate from some recent speculation that sleep is key to consolidating our memories. Some scientists are wondering if the reason mammals sleep so much is that it allows our brain to form and maintain memories.

In the sci fi story, people in the medically advanced, longevity enhanced future would have to negotiate between two extremes: remembering who they are and most of what has happened in their lives, but at the price of sleeping almost all the time; or spending a normal amount of time asleep and awake, but forgetting most of their past (beyond the span of a normal lifetime).

I think Buddhism would likely be the religion of choice for most of the people who gravitate toward the second extreme. In fact Asian countries could hold an advantage over Western ones because so many Westerners choose to hold on to their past lives by spending so much time asleep. Now we're getting into the plot and character issues that could make it a fun story aside from the premises. Maybe I'll give it a crack.

More fun avenues: could some cognitive breakthroughs occur if you had, say, three hundred years of memories? Maybe a character (probably with a philosophical bent) who has been mostly asleep for thirty or more years, working on a single issue, gathering her thoughts about something no prior human being has had that long to think about.

Push n Pull

Sometimes the problems are, in fact, beyond my control. Once I get things worked out with the posting service, this nifty handout on Photoshop tips will be available to all DMF students. In the meantime, here it is on my own, oh-so-unofficial site:

Download photoshop_tools.pdf