Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts

Saturday, 13 November 2021

FREE CHEESE OR FREE BREKFAST

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 Free cheese is only in a mice trap

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                              free tomato

Saturday, 20 February 2016

“ Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel Optimism ”



As game scholar Ian Bogost writes, video games are procedural media; they fundamentally index user activity to the computer’s programmed responses to that input. They are algorithmic. And while the algorithms or set of rules that many Americans believe have governed access to the “good life” — defined as job security, a comfortable retirement, the right to be safe and secure and free from violence — have proven themselves broken, games appeal all the more because they embody this very promise. Thus, gamers’ intense attachment to games reflects the opposite of “ guilty pleasure, ” much less “time-wasting.

In a viciously neoliberal economy, gaming feels like a virtuous pleasure, for games reward player labor, while, in contrast, labor in the real world is often undervalued, often treated as surplus or even as worthless. 
Though Berlant [public worlds are affect worlds] [affects of belonging: foreclosure and flourishing - affective commons] [noone ever willingly abandons a libidinal position] [the desire for a world - a world you can trust with your non-sovereignty]  does not write about video games in her work, the period of U. S. culture she examines in Cruel Optimism overlaps with the rise of video games as a mass medium, and her description of cruel optimism describes gaming’s dynamic in interesting new ways. As she writes, “optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving”
Games make vividly visible what transformation might look like. The strict procedurality of games both satisfies and ignites desires for fairness in the context of a U.S. culture that is patently unfair, particularly for racial minorities and women. The attachment to games can be a cruel one for all players, but especially for those who are subject to even more unfair proceduralities and forms of systematic discrimination in real life. 



What can game studies learn from queer theory and critical ethnic studies as practiced by scholars such as Berlant, who do not study games but are centrally concerned with questions of nation, desire, attachment, feeling, and identity? There is much at stake in bringing this kind of work to bear on the state of video games and race, especially as moments of racial and gendered violence coalesce around the cultural debates surrounding gaming’s famously uncivil cultures. 




Sunday, 13 December 2015

skin


Maybe go out, maybe stay home, maybe call mom on the telephone



specific // PAIN products
The Federal Court of Australia said the products must be taken off Australian shelves within three months.
The products affected by the order include Nurofen Back Pain, Nurofen Period Pain, Nurofen Migraine Pain and Nurofen Tension Headache.The retail price for each of the pain-specific products was also found to be "significantly higher than that of other comparable analgesic products which also act as general pain relievers," the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACC) said.
The watchdog said the court had found each product "was formulated to treat a particular type of pain; and solely or specifically treated a particular type of pain" - but that each product contained the same active ingredient, ibuprofen lysine 342mg.
However the products were found to be "no more effective at treating the type of pain described on its packaging than any of the other Nurofen specific pain products."

Thursday, 27 November 2014

avebury // stukeley

 Burning the heretic


Just before I visited this place... the inhabitants were fallen into the custom of demolishing the stones, chiefly out of covetousness of the little area of ground, each stood on. First they dug great pits in the earth, and buried them. The expence of digging the grave, was more than 30 years purchase of the spot they possessed, when standing. After this, they found out the kanck of burning them, which has made most miserable havock of this famous temple. One Tom Robinson the Herostratus of Abury,* is particularly eminent for this kind of execution, and he very much glories in it. The method is, to dig a pit by the side of the stone, till it falls down, then to burn many loads of straw under it. They draw lines of water along it when heated, and then with smart strokes of a great sledge hammer, its prodigious bulk is divided into many lesser parts. But this Atto de fe** commonly costs thirty shillings in fire and labour, sometimes twice as much. They own too 'tis excessive hard work, for these stones are often 18 foot long, 13 broad, and 6 thick, that their weight crushes the stones in pieces, which they lay under them to make them lie hollow for burning, and for this purpose they raise them with timbers of 20 foot long, and more, by the help of twenty men, but often the timbers were rent to pieces.
Stukeley goes on to write that a single stone could provide enough pieces to build an ordinary house, but that because of the nature of the stone, such a house "is always moist and dewy in winter, which proves damp and unwholsome, and rots the furniture. The custom of thus destroying them is so late, that I could easily trace the obit of every stone; who did it, for what purpose, and when, and by what method, what house or wall was built out of it, and the like."


*The term "auto da fe" (or auto de fe) means "act of faith" and refers to the Spanish Inquisition's ritual of judging and condemning heretics. The ceremony has generally been thought to include executions by burning at the stake (which is no doubt what Stukeley is alluding to), though some sources claim that the actual executions were held separately.
**Herostratus sought to make a name for himself by setting fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (Turkey) in 356 BC. He boasted proudly of his act, so the authorities not only executed him but decreed that his name should never be spoken again, on penalty of death. Obviously it didn't work, and the name "Herostratus" subsquently became associated with the idea of seeking glory through acts of destruction or violence.

http://www.avebury-web.co.uk/the_shame.htmlhttp://www.avebury-web.co.uk/the_shame.html
 ****************************

 Our Lady of Fatima

The Three Secrets

The Sun Miracle

Near the entrance to the sanctuary by the rectory is a Berlin Wall Monument, containing a 5,732-pound chunk of the wall donated by a Portuguese emigrant to Germany after it fell in 1989. He offered it as a memorial of God's intervention in bringing down Communism, as promised at Fatima.

10. Berlin Wall

At the entrance of the Sanctuary, on the south side of the Rectory, one may visit a monument of the Berlin Wall's, consisting of a concrete segment that was part of it. (The Walls construction started during the night between the 12th. and 13th. of August, 1961 and its demolition began the 9th. of November, 1989) This segment was offered by means of Virgilio Casimiro Ferreira, a Portuguese emigrant to Germany and is here placed as a grateful memorial of God's intervention for the fall of Communism as promised at Fatima. The segment weighs 2,600 kilos (5,732 lbs.) and measures 3.60 meters (11 ft. 9 in.) high by 1.20 meters (3 ft. in.) wide. The present monument was designed by the architect J. Carlos Loureiro and was inaugurated on the 13th. of August, 1994.



 ************
Claudio Colaguori in Agon Culture: Competition, Conflict and the Problem of Domination. For Colaguori, "the agon is literally the arena of competition, the scene of contest, and the locus of adversarial conflict. The philosophy of agonism affirms the idea that transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest...the concept of agonism is often understood in an affirmative sense as the generative principle of economy, society and even natural ecology and personal growth... The ambivalent character of agonism is that it is often seen as a mode of transcendence, while its instrumental relation to the mode of destruction is rarely acknowledged".

Friday, 21 November 2014

augury

Proving that some market somewhere will find a value for anything, a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking "the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings" as a possible indicator for where the country's economy might be headed.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/just-in-case-informatics.htmlhttp://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/just-in-case-informatics.html

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Oswalt’s techno-units

Tool complexity was quantified by the number of ‘techno-units’. A techno-unit was defined by Oswalt (1976, p. 38) as ‘an integrated, physically distinct and unique structural configuration that contributes to the form of a finished artefact’. Techno-unit counts are based on verbal descriptions, illustrations and photographs from the eHRAF and ranged from one techno-unit (e.g. a stick used for prying shellfish from the reef) to 16 techno-units (e.g. an untended crab trap made of a bamboo tube and baited lever); see the electronic supplementary material for an example of techno-unit coding. In contrast to Oswalt, we include decorative elements in the techno-unit counts because the production of any part of the tool may be socially learned, and thus subject to the dynamics of the cultural transmission process upon which both models are based. If a given tool was present in more than one society's tool kit, we coded that tool independently for each society where information was available. Next, we computed the mean of these techno-unit estimates. We then used the mean as the techno-unit estimate for that tool across all societies where it was present, replacing the original independent estimates. This helped to control for potential coder and/or ethnographer bias and worked against our hypotheses by decreasing variation between groups.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04/08/rspb.2010.0452.full 

Measuring Lithic Technology Complexity

Jump To Section...
We define technological complexity as the minimum amount of information that is needed to manufacture a product. This definition is in line with other formalized definitions of complexity (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Computer scientists, for example, have defined the complexity of an algorithm as the shortest string length, or the smallest number of bits of information, that is necessary to describe it (Chaitin 1970). This information criterion is analogous to the various measures of richness used to describe biological systems that are defined as the number of unique types of some constituent present within an aggregate group. For instance, at the level of the organism, biological complexity has been measured as the count of cell types (Bonner 1988). At the level of an ecosystem, biological complexity has been measured as the count of unique species it contains (Bonner 1988). Finally, the complexity of animal behavior has also been estimated by counting the number of elemental “building blocks” that is associated with a specific behavior or, at a larger scale, as the number of acts in a species’ behavioral repertoire (Sambrook and Whiten 1997; Whiten et al. 1999).
In the same spirit, we argue that the complexity of a technology can be measured by counting the number of elemental building blocks associated with it. We call these building blocks “procedural units.” We define procedural units as mutually exclusive manufacturing steps that make a distinct contribution to the finished form of the product of a technology. Focusing on lithic technology, the count of procedural units present in a tool reduction sequence is a measure of complexity because it reflects the minimum amount of information that is needed to carry it out to a successful end.
This procedural-unit approach to stone-tool complexity parallels Oswalt’s “techno-units” (Oswalt 1976). Oswalt assessed the complexity of food-getting technologies by counting (1) the number of tool types present in a tool kit, which he called “subsistants,” and (2) the number of integrated and physically distinct structures that contribute to the finished form of a tool, which he called “techno-units.” Oswalt’s method is powerful because it allows for the measurement of technological complexity cross-culturally. It has been applied to ethnographic data to test a wide range of hypotheses, including hypotheses about the ecological determinants of technological complexity (Collard, Kemery, and Banks 2005; Collard et al. 2011; Shott 1986; Torrence 1983, 1989, 2000) and the effect of demography on the evolution of technologies (Collard, Kemery, and Banks 2005; Collard et al. 2011; Kline and Boyd 2010; Oswalt 1976).

Measuring the Complexity of Lithic Technology

Charles Perreault, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Steven L. Kuhn, Sarah Wurz, and Xing Gao

Saturday, 30 November 2013

allagmatic

 The Greek word allagma can mean change or vicissitude, but it can also mean that which can be given or taken in exchange.

 allagmatic - theory of operations  chaine operatoire
operation - a conversion of a structure into another structure



“The true principle of individuation can neither be sought in what exists before the individuation occurs, nor in what remains after the individuation is accomplished; it is the system of energy that is individuating insofar as it realizes in the individual this internal resonance of the matter taking form and a mediation between orders of magnitude. The principle of individuation is the single way in which the internal resonance of this matter is established taking this form. The principle of individuation is an operation. With the result that a being is itself, different from all the others; it is neither its matter nor its form, but it is the operation by which its matter took form in a certain system of internal resonance. The principle of individuation of brick is not the clay, nor the mold: this heap of clay and this mold will leave other bricks than this one, each one having its own haecceity, but it is the operation by which the clay, at a given time, in an energy system which included the finest details of the mold as the smallest components of this wet dirt took form, under such pressure, thus left again, thus diffused, thus self-actualized: a moment ago when the energy was thoroughly transmitted in all directions from each molecule to all the others, from the clay to the walls and the walls to the clay: the principle of individuation is the operation that carries out an energy exchange between the matter and the form, until the unity leads to a state of equilibrium. One could say that the principle of individuation is the common allagmatic operation of the matter and form through the actualization of potential energy. This energy is energy of a system; it can produce effects in all the points of the system in an equal way, it is available and is communicated. This operation rests on the singularity or the singularities of the concrete here and now; it envelops them and amplifies them” L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique,  simondon


...explicitly to the manual creation of a material culture that is extracorporal. Gesture paralleled speech as a form of expression of mind and language. This notion of ges­ ture is closely linked to a key theoretical and methodological concept, that of the chaine operatoire, or "operational sequence." Leroi-Gourhan makes it clear that apart from humans the behavior of many animals is characterized by such deeply embedded operational sequences. But only with humans do we see these opera­tional sequences take material form and become more-or-Iess permanent constit­uents of the human environment.
For Leroi-Gourhan such operational sequences constitute the building blocks of technology, indeed of culture. They are culturally or ethnically conditioned and highly structured but through repetition and conditioning at a young age become more-or-Iess subconscious. Whether these operational sequences structure the fab­rication of stone tools, the manufacture of personal ornaments, or the creation of painted and engraved underground sanctuaries, they are the focus of analysis. For archaeologists they represent an accessible entry to social organization and cos­mology. But these operational sequences often remain unverbalized and unrecog­nized by those who practice them. That is why Leroi-Gourhan can claim to have recognized basic binary oppositions in the organization/structure of painted caves while explicitly stating that the meaning of specific images remains unknown and probably unknowable.

Because operational sequences are culturally/ethnically derived, they are the fundamental basis for what ethnologists, archaeologists, and art historians recognize as "style":
The technical life of the hunter, and later of the farmer and the artisan, involves a large number of sequences that correspond to the many actions needed for their material survival. These sequences are empir­ ical, borrowed from a collective tradition that one generation passes down to the next. Their principal trait, for all the unity of their broad out­ lines and their extension over vast polyethnic territories, is their strongly marked local and individual character. (infra: 253)
...
It rendered possible the externalization of memory and hence mythological narrative.

Figurative behavior cannot be dissociated from language: It forms part of the same human aptitude, that of reflecting reality in verbal or gestural symbols or in material form as figures.Just as the emergence of language is connected with that of hand tools, figurative representation cannot be separated from the common source from which all making and all rep­ resentation spring. Therefore we should not be surprised to discover a close parallelism in paleontological development and, in particular, to note a swift and profound change in materials at the moment Homo sa­
piens emerges from the last Palaeoanthropian stage. (infra: 363)

The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by spe­ cies adaptation. The most striking material fact is certainly the "freeing" of tools, but the fundamental fact is really the freeing of the word and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside our­ selves. (infra: 235)
 Leroi-Gourhan// Gesture & Speech


Sunday, 27 October 2013

beads < - >shells< - > stones

beads<  -  >shells< - > stones

Gifford states that such small pieces of calcite or aragonite could not definitely be classed as "money stone." They may actually be shell, he says, as the formation of calcite and aragonite occur in both inorganic and organic forms.

Mmbul, Gaw, Fe' or Rai, Yar, and Reng

Two Chiefs of Yap Island Western Caroline Islands
with three perforated stones

Rai, or stone money, are large, circular stone disks carved out of limestone formed from aragonite and calcite crystals. Rai stones were mined in Palau and transported for use to the island of Yap. They have been used in trade by the locals and are described by some observers as a form of currency.
There are five major types of rai stone monies:Mmbul, Gaw, Fe' or Rai, Yar, and Reng.
The considered value of a specific stone is based on its size and craftsmanship and also on the history of the stone. If many people—or no one at all—died when the specific stone was transported, or a famous sailor brought it in, the value of the rai stone increases. Rai stones were and still are used in rare, important social transactions such as marriage, inheritance, political deals, sign of an alliance, ransom of the battle dead or, rarely, in exchange for food. Many of them are placed in front of meeting houses or along pathways.
Ownership is transferred without physically relocating the stones.
- See more at: http://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/gilbertIslands.html#sthash.vEhsXQWS.dpuf
Two Chiefs of Yap Island Western Caroline Islands 
with three perforated stones

Rai, or stone money, are large, circular stone disks carved out of limestone formed from aragonite and calcite crystals. Rai stones were mined in Palau and transported for use to the island of Yap. They have been used in trade by the locals and are described by some observers as a form of currency.
There are five major types of rai stone monies: Mmbul, Gaw, Fe' or Rai, Yar, and Reng.
The considered value of a specific stone is based on its size and craftsmanship and also on the history of the stone. If many people—or no one at all—died when the specific stone was transported, or a famous sailor brought it in, the value of the rai stone increases. Rai stones were and still are used in rare, important social transactions such as marriage, inheritance, political deals, sign of an alliance, ransom of the battle dead or, rarely, in exchange for food. Many of them are placed in front of meeting houses or along pathways.
Ownership is transferred without physically relocating the stones.

http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/HistoryTechnology/pdf_hi/SSHT-0023.pdf

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Island Money, by Michael F. Bryan: 
Consider the case of the Irish American David O’Keefe from Savannah, Georgia, who, after being shipwrecked on Yap in the late nineteenth century, returned to the island with a sailing vessel and proceeded to import a large number of stones in return for a bounty of Yapese copra (coconut meat). The arrival of O’Keefe (and other Western traders) increased the number and size of the stones being brought back to the island, and by one accounting, Yap stones went from being “very rare” in 1840 to being plentiful—more than 13,000 were to be found on the island by 1929. No longer restricted by shell tools and canoes, the largest stones arriving grew from four feet in diameter to the colossal 12-foot stones that are now a part of monetary folklore. Yet the great infusion of stones did not inflate away their value. Since the stones of Captain O’Keefe were obviously more easily obtained, they traded on the island at an appropriately reduced value relative to the older stones gotten at much greater cost. In essence, O’Keefe and other Westerners were bringing in large numbers of “debased” stones that could easily be identified by the Yapese.

The following portion of the history of the stone money is agreed upon.

a. Urun and Tamangiro, from Af Village, in Tamil Munici- pality, went to the Palau Islands and obtained three pieces of stone money. They gave the larger piece to the people of Af Village. By agreement between them, Urun retained one of the smaller ones and Tamangiro the other smaller one. The piece in question in this action is the one retained by Urun in this division.

b. Urun's house burned down and the people of Af Village helped him rebuild it. In payment of this assistance, Urun gave the stone money now in question to the people of Af Village.

c. During a "tarn" celebration given by Af Village, the people of Dechumui Village put on a dance about people going on a trip and, in appreciation for this dance, the people of Af Village gave the stone money in question, among other things, to the people of Dechumur Village and the stone money was removed to Dechumur Village and remained there until about January 15, 1960.

d. Some people from Dechumur Village made a trip to Palau and brought more stone money of various sizes. The piece brought in on this trip by Tamag was the same size as that given by Af Village to Dechumur Village, and this piece brought in by Tamag was given to Af Village and the piece now in question given to Tamag in exchange for the one he brought in.

e. Tamag gave the piece now in question to his brother Fazagol when the latter was about to build a house. Fazagol gave this stone money to Puguu in payment for some tin roofing for the house.

f.    On or about January 15, 1960, the defendant Pong, with a group of men gathered by him, removed the stone money in question from Dechumur Village over the protests of the plaintiff Choo who was present during part of the removal, protested that the stone money belonged to him, and told them not to remove it. Later, on Pong's authorization, the stone money was shipped to the Money Museum of the National Bank of Detroit, Michigan, in accordance with the agreement of sale with Pong under which he received $125.00 for the stone money.

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Fernand Deligny


.....Writing here is possibly an expression of the innate, and is thus not about “making” sense but is merely the innate ritual of “acting”, the mode of the Arachnean. It is what Deligny would call “a-conscious”, outside the conscious or subconscious. As the Brazilian philosopher and Deligny scholar, Peter Pàl Pelbart states,
“Deligny refers to the turtle traced by the aborigine in a tree’s bark, then abandoned–the essential there is the tracing, the movements of the hand that come and go, not being this “his” hand, just as the web is not this one spider’s…and our emotion comes from the fact that this drawing is common; a sense common to us, human, since the human has for common the hand in motion. Common, communism. When conscience is eclipsed it is worth looking, as if at a lunar eclipse, and what is seen, even if it is not visible, are the traces of the Arachnean.
.....
It is within “acting” in an innate, unattached manner, keeping a distance from one another, that the network was spun
“[…] anyone who came from one of the distant collectives and passed by the silk farm would place, lettuce, blackberries or cheeses on the stone which were from another collective, and then would take back with them whatever had been placed by someone else on their own collective’s stone. For the most part, all of this took place without anyone else being present besides the passerby from the collective.”
A profound detachment to naming and to others at once proximate and distant...

Drew S. Burk



 Cartes et lignes d’erre, 1969-1978  

Thursday, 6 June 2013

transactional information

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access.

guardian article

Saturday, 1 December 2012

phantasmagoria up west



The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land

A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England  Gerrard Winstanley

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Pierce Penniless's Supplication to the Devil


thomas nashe /// wyndham lewis /// marshall mcluhan //  trivium font

" The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." - Socrates

Sunday, 14 October 2012

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

lake of the ingots of gold


One of the most singular things that we have been told about the island of Zabaj, is that which concerns one of its former kings. This king was called the Maharaja. His palace faced onto a thalaj which emanates from the sea; one means by thalaj an estuary resembling those which the Tigris forms when it passes by Baghdad and Basra, an estuary which the salt water of the sea invades at high tide and which is fresh at low tide. This water formed a small lagoon adjoining the palace of the king. Every morning the steward is brought before the king and offers him an ingot of gold in the form of a brick. Each brick weighs a certain number of mann, the amount of which is not known to me. Next, in the presence of the king, the steward throws this brick into the lagoon. At high tide, the water covers this brick and all the other bricks which are piled there, so that they cannot be seen, and when the water goes down, the bricks appear and shine in the sun. When the king gives an audience he sits in a room which overlooks the lake with his face turned towards the water. This custom must never be interrupted: every day a golden brick is thrown into this lake and as long as the king lives, the bricks are not touched.
At his death, however, his successor extracts the bricks without leaving any. They are counted and melted down, and the gold is distributed to the princes of the royal family, both men and women, to their children, their officers and their eunuchs, in proportion to their rank and the prerogatives attached to their various functions. Any which remains is given to the poor and the sick. They take care to make a record of the golden bricks and their total weight. It is written down that so and so, the king, had reigned so many years, and they had thrown so many bricks into the royal lake, and weighing so much; and that after his death these bricks had been divided up amongst the court and the royal family. lt was a great honour for the king who had reigned the greatest number of years and had amassed the greatest number of golden bricks. 



Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold [where] they fine [it].

Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass [is] molten [out of] the stone.

He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death.

The flood breaketh out from the inhabitant; [even the waters] forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.

[As for] the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it were fire.

The stones of it [are] the place of sapphires: and it hath dust of gold.

[There is] a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen:

The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.

He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots.

He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing.

He bindeth the floods from overflowing; and [the thing that is] hid bringeth he forth to light.
But where shall wisdom be found? and where [is] the place of understanding?

Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living.

The depth saith, It [is] not in me: and the sea saith, [It is] not with me.

It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed [for] the price thereof.

It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire.

The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it [shall not be for] jewels of fine gold.

No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom [is] above rubies.

The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold.

Whence then cometh wisdom? and where [is] the place of understanding?

Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.

Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears.

God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof.

For he looketh to the ends of the earth, [and] seeth under the whole heaven;

To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.

When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder:

Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out.

And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that [is] wisdom; and to depart from evil [is] understanding.

Sunday, 13 May 2012

The Chronocyclegraph

The technique was developed by Frank Gilbreth and his wife, Lillian in the early 20th century to improve work methods. The couple employed time-lapse photography to reduce a complete work cycle to the shortest and most efficient sequence of gestures.
To look for this optimal "relationship of human effort to the volume of work that the effort accomplishes", they attached a camera to a timing device and photographed workers performing various tasks. The motion paths were traced by small lamps fastened to the worker's hands or fingers.

From image verso: "Left hand of drill press operator 'Positioning after transportation' (this study resulted in cutting the time in halves)." Machinist with light showing hand movements, circa 1915. Collection: Frank B. Gilbreth Motion Study Photographs (1913-1917). Repository: The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives