Arquivo para February, 2019

Virtual reality, vision and clearing

28 Feb

Mankind has always used shadows to make paintings and to open glades other than for its contemporaries, at least for future generations and for their fellows, the cave paintings, now with the Cavern of Chauvet dates back to 32 thousand BC, can demonstrate this. There are a few ways of writing, and some new ones have been thought by Vilém Flusser, who wrote while speaking of the masks: “The software artist’s mask has not been available for a long time. There may be different levels of creativity. Maybe being a writer will be different from being a software expert, and then perhaps inventing the writer. In this respect, we have prejudices with which to break.” (Flusser, 2014, p.191).

Since Plato’s Myth, the idea of ​​a clearing was theorized by mankind, it is different from cave man because it involves a level of intentionality and creativity as Flusser wants, and more recently the Enlightenment is nothing more than this quest. Heidegger drew attention to the world view, the Weltanchauuun, a set of cultural values ​​that build our vision. The central problem of the clearing is that it can be linked to the senses, so it was for the empiricists, but the fourth dimension (already proven) and other superior ones (that may be) give a new dimension of what this vision is now, with virtual realities, increased and mixed this may be even higher.

There will be no lack of fatalistic and apocalyptic, lacking Flusser’s humility, but immersion is already under way with mixed reality, for which various environments are available to the conventional public, since the word lay can be misinterpreted, 3D viewers and software for creation are available in environments made available by tablet and smartphone manufacturers.

It’s true that just as the new media: internet, web, chats, Pinterest and videos have changed our vision of how to see things, does not mean that changed the world view, but seeing beyond what the senses see we are at least expanding our “sensations,” as Marshall McLuhan wished, in explaining the passage of circular houses, explains by giving an aid to anthropologists: “In the same way, the visualist may not see much difference between the TV film, between a Corvair and a Volkswagen, because the difference lies not between two visual spaces, but between a tactile space and a visual.” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 145).

Flusser, V. (2014) Comunicologia: reflexões sobre o futuro. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding media: the extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. 

The same thing happens now with virtual reality, the augmented and the mixed, nor the moment with the greatest potential to become popular, because what changes is not the field of vision, but the empathic relationship that these media possess, adults may not understand, but to young people this is immediate. An entrepreneur and virtual reality expert explains this empathy, Thong Nguyen’s TEDx is very interesting:




Statocentric policies and social networks

27 Feb

Yes, the word does not exist, but this was the great idealistic and liberal revolution promotes this concept, the idea that the state is the provider of all social guarantees, which may be above the cultures, the roots of the population and the original societies, that is, with their cosmological and eschatological visions.
The idea of social welfare, providence state or social state, vary in politics, degree and tonalities, but essentially it is the idea that it is the state of social promotion, organizer of economy and culture, which is more worrying and statocentric.
The idea that this was born during the Great Depression is not true, again it is the ignorance of what we call history-knowledge, it was the economist Joseph Schumpeter who developed the concept of social value in the years 1907-1907, as shown in his article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics
There is no idea of society as a living body, the citizen as the possessor of rights (only the one that the state establishes, the rest is illegal), and for this we emphasize in the previous post the idea of a free press, but now it expands to social media, society has always been a network, although the state generally does not see it as such.
The fact that there are media that can vitalize the enzymatic functions of the social fabric should lead to policies that contemplate these ideas, for example, it is common in Portugal to speak of neighborhood (bairrismo in Portuguese), not in the pejorative sense that exists in Brazil, but in the sense of social coexistence and to create nuclei and social spaces for this convivial, a cultural Portuguese characteristic.
The concept may seem too technical to some extent, but Levy Strauss, who researched social cultural roots, said: “Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. (LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1987, p.10).
Borgatti and Jones (1998), known for developing the powerful social networking tool Pajek, describes the term social capital, retrieving the term “group” from Wellmann and Bartram, but recalls that Putnam (1995) also develops the idea as a facet of good collective, still found in Coleman (1988, 1990) and Bourdieu (1886) and recalls that the classic tradition of authors such as Adam Smith and Alexis Tocqueville did not use the term directly but would do so today.
A measure of neighborhood, which are several, can be seen as “degrees” of proximity (figure), it is important to know by how many steps a node (or a person) can “reach” in a social network.
The concept may seem theoretical only, but this video shows how it becomes real, a video show this.

BORGATTI, S.P. & JONES, C. Network Measures of Social Capital. Carroll School of Management, Boston College Martin G. Everett University of Greenwich, CONNECTIONS 21(2):27-36, 1998.

LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. Mito e significado. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1987.



To leave the twentieth century

26 Feb

When many speak of the education of the twenty-first century, we must know if we leave the twentieth century, thinking, paradigms, the form of education are all frozen in the twentieth century, has little to do with digital age, in his 1981 book, the internet was nascent, Morin already said that the future depended on how to educate for the new century.
He said that with all the “progress” he warned that the danger of war continued to prowl humanity, poverty still persists on a large scale and nature is increasingly shaken by the predatory action of man in this transformation.
He affirmed, contrary to today’s confused thoughts, that it was precisely the means of communication, through which we knew what was happening in various parts of the world, through instantaneous communication, social events on the entire planet.
Of course I warned that there are negative points in this communication, that men know the world only by virtual videos and images (which are not unreal), without being in the world, and therefore the hermeneutic-ontological discourse makes sense, it can create a limited consciousness , but it is also limited those based on ideologies and religions, which use a limited and partial worldview (Weltanschauung).
This being in the world, being absent, is well described by the Polish factionalist Jerzy Kosinski in his modern parable O Vidiota, 1979, on the limit of images, videos and reports.
Edgar Morin clarifies that the news since that time (was 1981), already distorted and hid the real, stating “Information in a totalitarian system is not only a government information; it is, above all, a totalitarian governmental information “, and it is important see any ranking for free journalism.

It is happens not only in the known dictatorships, but in present-day Bulgaria, there are numerous complaints that the press is not free, occupies the 111th rank, where Brazil is at 102, Paraguay at 107 , Bolivia at 110, Colombia at 130, Venezuela at 143, China at 176, a point above Syria, and North Korea at 180.
You can notice in the images that are the darkest regions, the closest to conflicts and wars, therefore, it is not necessary to use the fact that there is subinformation to censor the press, because it is that we can through the denunciation of facts to help society to adjust.
Morin’s book may seem conservative, it has never been, although it has been written for a long time, it can still help us out of the twentieth century and enter into the real problems and situations of the 21st century.
Edgar Morin’s book To Come Out of the Twentieth Century, at first glance, may seem full of reactionary theses. However, I read carefully, it is perceived as a series of serious considerations, based on concrete facts, thus contributing to a truly more progressive and current vision of the contemporary world.
Morin, E. Pour sortir du siècle XX, 1981.

See the Morin´s thiking about actual crisis:


Winners of the 2019

25 Feb

Oscar Green Book: the guide, took the best film, and Peter Farelly on receiving the statuette said, “we know how to love each other, despite the differences,” Rome’s Mexican Alfonso Cuarón took three statues and film about the band Queen was the biggest winner of the night, with four awards.
A Rhapsody plus Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor with Mahershala Ali, Best Actor Rami Malek who played Freddie Mercury.
Spike Lee won his first real Oscar since he received an honorary award in 2006, was the original screenplay in “BlacKkKlaman”.
“Black Panther” took 3 technical awards, with two unpublished ones, plus soundtrack, won best costumes (1st for black professional) and best art direction (1st for a black woman).
Lady Gaga was not the Best Actress, but took Best Music for “Shallow”, it was Olivia Colman from “A Favorite”, who on apologies apologized to Glenn Close (“The Wife”) who was the favorite indeed.
Fleeing from the restricted circle of Hollywood with foreign actors and directors, the magic also seems to change, the Green Book and Rome move to tell autobiographies, as well as the “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the magic was for Black Panther.
There are other prizes of course, but the hype has stayed in this line.
Green Book (Trailer)

Roma (Trailer)


The Empires counterattack

22 Feb

Russia and the United States seem to rekindle the cold War, now statements about missiles from Europe, the Venezuelan crisis and the Arab conflicts, finally the world returns to appear more insecure than it is normally, in Europe the elections of the Parliament shake countries.
What happened, are the network media communications? It seems an easy answer, neither McLuhan nor Flusser would say this, and they wrote half a century ago, says Flusser when setting the Zoon Politikon (social animal, because Aristotle spoke about Polis): “He is an idiot (in the origin of the Palava hills a private person: Privatperson) if not has learned to serve the instruments of communication, such as language. ” (Flusser, 2017). but whose essays date back to the 60 decade the same as McLuhan.
The fact that we misuse communication and the media to accomplish has to do with our virtues and proper use properties depends on a correct appropriation.
The deeper understanding of the reality we live in requires not only knowing the story, but a knowledge-history that helps interpret facts and cultures, so I think it appropriate for the current crisis to read an Islamic and an American, inserted in the context Of these worlds, of course there are other interpreters, I think that Tariq Ali for the Islamic world and Noam Chomsky for the American world can bring good elements to this dialogue.
I step into a a library and see the works of Tariq Ali: Islamic Quintet: The Sultan and the cartographer (Lisbon: Europe-America, 2006) and Noam Chomski: Who runs the World (São Paulo: Planeta, 2017), the temptation to buy was great, but it will be for later, now there Work priorities.
These two contemporary thinkers both Noam Chomski, who in addition to activist has a huge contribution to contemporary linguistics influencing even the computer world, and, Tariq Ali a Pakistani besides writing for the Guardian has a Opinion on the advanced and current Islamic world.
It is possible for enemies to give hands, it is possible, means the Christian maxim: “To love the enemies”.
The interview is 2012, a bit outdated, but is the only one that puts the two together:


AI will help fight fires

21 Feb

The famous US Department of Defense (DoD), which is also on the internet, has launched a program to use artificial intelligence (AI) for drone data analysis to improve how forest attacks are fought, the news is on Wall Street Journal this week.
The project uses algorithms that evaluate photos and videos, being themselves the ways of forest fuels and improving efforts to contain them, data on resources in helicopters, but also using drones and other cyberspace data on the administrative functions of as part of efforts to improve its efficiency.
A program to monitor and attack forests in California and other parts of the country is one of two pilot projects the Pentagon released on Tuesday.
The program, solved the Pentagon, oriented strategies to establish new innovation strategy of artificial govern, that must to work performance with the academy and the industry for better to advanced information management and data application.
The reason for the fires is clear, also in the Portuguese rhodians, which are a combination of vulnerabilities in the work plans of children can issue fires, such as the serious happened at Camp Fire in 2018 in California, see CNBC vídeo:


Even waves can go to AI

20 Feb

The OpenAI project, although it is said to be “non-profit” and is really open, just enter the blog of the project to check the progress and the possibilities, in fact even pointed the experts when publishing a system that writes news / texts, theoretically fictions, but that can be classified as fake, or as they are being called: faketexts.  Also the code is open and available on the GitHub site for developers. 
Natural language processing systems can perform tasks such as answering questions, machine conversion, reading comprehension, and text summarization, which are already typically addressed with supervised learning in task-specific data sets, but text search in GPT2 is wider in quantity.
GPT2, the successor to the GPT that was just a producer of texts from basic texts, can now read up to 40 GB of existing text on the Web, and what it has produced frightens a little, for clarity, depth and worst of all, pure fiction or more clearly: fakes.
Among its syntactic characteristics, it is superior to others of the sort, writing passages that make sense with the previous text and maintains the style, without getting lost in long sentences. The problem is that it can generate fakenews that can now be longer, becoming faketexts, a report from The Guardian shows the novelty and the problems:


Line art, 3D and tesseract

19 Feb

The fact that contemporary culture is based on a science, an art and also an ethical and aesthetic dimension based on geometry has built an ideal model of nature, man and society, which is purely ideal and unrealizable to man.
It seems a post-humanism, since contemporary humanism is that of the Kantian categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action should become, through your will, a universal law”, sometimes the ” through his will, “but the imperious fact remains there, to become a model for others, narcissism and pre-humanism.
All this came from the idealism and absolutism of mathematical geometric ideas, it is not abstractionism since this current in both art and mathematics itself has in fact become much more revolutionary than it seems, the Hausdorff dimension and the fractals, as well as the mathematical and physical hypotheses about entropy prove this importance.
Physics in discovering the fourth dimension refers human thought and adventure to an unthinkable space, the intergalactic voyages, begins to draw the history of the universe itself, how supernovae form, what are black holes and black matter, finally a threshold of a new time, born of quantum physics and the fourth dimension.
What this has to do with art, with technology, absolutely everything, since the human vision and sensation widen, while many get into dogmatic holes, some even redeclarate the flat earth, the dimension of the infinite, the cosmogonies and the fourth dimension emerge
All this seems theoretical, but it was Carl Sagan in his famous Cosmos series, now available online, which explained all this in a simple and accessible way to all, follows a piece of your video in which explains this: 


An immersive digital exhibition

18 Feb






Disenchantment and hope

15 Feb

Not only a conservatism that returns in the US, Brazil, now in Europe as well, but also na impotence of change expressed in outdated speeches, without any appeal although there are fanatics, as in Venezuela or even in Russia, everything seems stagnant.
There is little hope for those who are hungry, who live in inequality or social intolerance, it is also the cry of minorities, it is worth remembering that no dictatorship gives them rights, where can come hopes and paths?
Mia Couto: “The greatest misfortune of a poor nation is that instead of producing wealth, it produces riches,” he and the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli speak and insist on re-enchantment, it is possible amid setbacks looking to the future.
Both talk about looking at what is already young again, it is disenchantment to perceive only the negative, we repeat what we did not accept in our parents: not accept the new of the young.
I remember the long hair, the faded pants, the “loud music” at the beginning of the Rolling Stones, then Black Sabbath when I was young I watched the movie The Last Waltz (picture) I thought: will I start to grow old.
The film included Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison,
Bobby Charles, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, and others, spoke of a Canadian band, which ended in a good, no-nonsense and
no-scandal, made this last concert, in a film directed by Martin Scorcese (1978), but I was still very young, what then?
It began a disenchantment, yes, he saw that the thought he thought revolutionary was not so much, and that the changes he anticipated would not happen, in the middle of 90 begins Grasnost (transparency in Russian) and then the Perestroika, the world of fact has changed.
But there is still the concentration of income, violence against nature and a society more and more tiredness, will there be in re-enchantment?
We must have hope, says the Bible reading (Luke 6:21): “Blessed are you who are hungry now, because you will be satisfied! Blessed are you who now weep, for you shall laugh! “. 

There will be a restructuration and the forces of change will reappear, is possible a pacific changing of world.