The coin toss

So don't get to excited about antibody testing just yet.   You might just want to toss a coin instead. From Ed Yong, but matches other articles i have read. Pay attention to the statistics. 

"False positives are a problem. Many pinned their hopes on antibody tests, which purportedly show whether someone has been infected by the coronavirus. One such test claims to correctly identify people with those antibodies 93.8 percent of the time. By contrast, it identifies phantom antibodies in 4.4 percent of people who don’t have them. That false-positive rate sounds acceptably low. It’s not.

Let’s assume 5 percent of the U.S. has been infected so far. Among 1,000 people, the test would correctly identify antibodies in 47 of the 50 people who had them. But it would also wrongly spot antibodies in 42 of the 950 people without them. The number of true positives and false positives would be almost equal. In this scenario, if you were told you had coronavirus antibodies, your odds of actually having them would be little better than a coin toss."

My Plague Year, a48

Drive by virus testing.  Of questionable reliability. In my plague year.

From Ed Yong, but matches other articles i have read. Pay attention to the statistics. 

"Diagnostic tests for COVID-19 produce a lot of false negatives, incorrectly telling 15 to 30 percent of infected people that they’re in the clear."

Androids Commute

Terminal Destination

The train is approaching the station.  Prepare to depart.

We're exploring some new and different approaches to scaling up paintings like these.  Gallery show concoction.

My Plague Year, a47

Stay safe. In my plague year.

Bezier Encapsulated Paint Animation

One advanced feature of Studio Artist is the ability to take a series of automatic (or manual) paint action steps in a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) and automatically encapsulate the underlying painting as embedded bezier paths in the Action steps that can then be keyframe interpolated over time to construct transformative paint animations.

Image above is a screen shot from an experimental animation.  It was completely auto-generated from a folder of curated source images and a simple PASeq.  Quickly figured out there is some additional work to do to make this all work smoothly the way you would expect for paint synthesizer dynamic brush effects, so that was added to the 'to do' list for V6.

My Plague Year, a46

Give me liberty, and probably a viral infection as i pursue it.  Proud american citizens practicing their god given right to be stupid. In my plague year.

Earliest tropical depression on record in eastern pacific.

The news just keeps getting better.

Those who live in the central pacific watch what is happening in the eastern pacific with dread each summer. And summer keeps getting noticeably bigger.

My Plague Year, a45

More dynamic brush experiments. I used several subtle Ip Op processing steps to pull some more content focus into this. Just the raw dynamic brush painting is shown below. It's more abstract as you can see.

You could muck with the paint synthesizer settings on the dynamic brush to build additional detail. Or drop it out of dynamic brush and dial back the brush size and path length as you focus it on higher Texture Range path start settings. The mask messes with the face - eye - mouth detection we currently use so those path start restriction options don't really do anything.  Interest points of course always work, which is why they are so useful.

Take the unexpected path

So i started this with a very specific paint effect in mind. One i painstakingly hand edited. I was working with the Current Preset Technique option in Gallery Show. Which of course works off of the current loaded reset file in the Browser, not whatever happens to be sitting in the Editor. So when i ran gallery show things immediately veered off into something that did not look at all like what i was trying to do.

But i decided to follow where Studio Artist had taken me. As opposed to cursing and fighting that. And i ended up in an interesting place because of that. One i would not have anticipated going to.

Personally i feel the contrast is too over-exposed in how this ended up. But it gave me a cool idea for a new second generic Composite option that could totally fix that over-exposure thing created by the combination of processing effects i was working with. Which i immediately added to our SA6 to do list.

My Plague Year, a44

So apparently i now live in some 3rd rate crackpot dictatorship run by bat shit crazy.  Good to know.  In my plague year.

I'm working with temporal displacement effects in this particular image.  There are endless ways to approach stack filtering, and they all look visually different. Explore.

March of the Dead

Auto paint experiment using a super quick hand edited dynamic brush effect i made in the paint synthesizer. Also working with self-randomizing adaptive masking in this one.  Masking generated by gallery show features.  Hopefully we will be moving those features to additional outwards places within the Studio Artist interface so you can get more control over the adaptive masking options.

Geodesic beach front

It's interesting what can happen when you start messing with the propagation of a filter so that it follows a wavefront propagation trajectory throughout an image as opposed to the normal raster scan pattern.

My Plague Year, a43

Working on beefing up the auto-mutation features in gallery show. In my plague year.

Bat shit crazy

Wow. The whole disinfectant quote is even more bat shit crazy. No wonder his ratings for this new reality show are so high.

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, it sounds interesting to me.”

Bringing light inside

Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder, LordEmperor and Majestic Creature just suggested getting rid of coronavirus by bringing"light inside the body" ... "either through the skin or in some other way", or by perhaps using disinfectant "is there a way you can use something like that by injection or some other way."

So maybe a disinfectant enema? The team is on it.

My Plague Year, a42

Adding a lot of new geodesic image processing code to Studio Artist. In my plague year.

Changing Viewpoints

My Plague Year, a41

I think you could take the 'art strategy' idea behind how this was made, and steer it in a much more cubist direction. Something to think about. In my plague year.

Current events Graffiti Wall

Working with some mad concoction in Gallery Show to generate this off of curated topical news imagery.

My Plague Year, a40

Life goes on. In my plague year.

America revealed

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dys­func­tional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. Interesting read in The Atlantic today.

My Plague Year, a39

Gallery show auto-masked mutated vectorizer effects Technique overlaid in a series of different GS cycles.  Water wash favorites preset category was used for start cycle processing (start cycle - technique - end cycle = 1GS cycle). Source is randomly selected from a folder of curated topical current event imagery.

Soothing Procedurals

Let's put MSG (Modular Synthesized Graphics) to work in Studio Artist V5 to create some calming procedural art imagery. Far away from the noise of today's news.

My Plague Year, a38

Experiments with geodesic extrapolation. In my plague year.

Beach Exercise Ban

Governor essentially closed down all beaches in Hawaii except if you are traveling to get in the water or to get out of the water.  Here we see someone i know (i think, still waiting for confirmation on that) being greeted by the police as she pulls her kayak out of the water.

I'm still experimenting with a new Geodesic idea for generating paint effects in this image. Working from the skeleton core of the objects in the image and then expanding out. I figured out a cool iterative approach to generating the fill structure.

It would be amazing if we could provide a generic way to do it in Studio Artist as a single effect that runs 2 different ip op effects in multiple cycles to run the iterative algorithm. Yes please says the V6 feature list.

The other thing that needs to be integrated into this is an additional displacement mapping off of procedural noise to add micro-textures to the geodesic fill spread.  That and maybe try orientation modulated Chamfers (it's there in MSG to experiment with if you are curious).

Ghost Town

Working out some new approaches. This kind of thing is based on working with Color Edge Ip Op effect. Successively changing the sensitivity of the curve generator while decreasing the thickness of the vector lines it is drawing. I then use a Geodesic effect to extrapolate color from the laid down edge paint strokes into the remaining unpainted canvas.

My Plague Year, a37

Another gallery show setup that auto-randomizes Vectorizer effects that also adaptively auto-mask themselves. Image derived from running multiple GS cycles that randomly select different source images in a curated image folder. The auto-masked overlays into the canvas build up over time.

Adding energy into the system

Most Wise and Wondrous Nice Smelling Lord Emperor began on friday to openly encourage right wing protests of social distancing restrictions in states where groups of His Most Loyal One's Supporters have been violating their stay at home orders.

Sunny skies melting, melting

New findings, published Thursday in The Cryosphere, show that last summer’s record melt wasn’t just the result of extreme heat that turned the ice sheet liquid. Instead, bizarrely sunny skies actually locked in over the island.

In an interesting coincidence, that sounds exactly like the weather in Haiku on Maui in summer 2019. Which should maybe concern you as well since it's supposed to be essentially rain forest climate here on this part of the island.

My Plague Year, a36

Working with gallery show using a randomizing vectorizer technique, randomized adaptive selection masking, and a set randomized water wash paint preset placed in the current favorites category. Each cycle a new source image is randomly selected from my coronavirus database. It takes multiple gallery show cycles to eventually get to something interesting you want to keep. At that point i switch to manual Ip Op effects to beef up the image structure.

The greatest emergancy is the lack of emergancy.

This thesis does not mean that a crisis such as the coronavirus is not a fundamental emergency that we must confront at all levels. It simply suggests the greatest emergency are the ones we do not confront. These include, among others, economic inequality, refugee crises, and climate change. Despite the warnings of scientists and activists since the 1970s, climate change is responsible for the death of seven million human beings every year because of air pollution. We can only hope climate change might also become an “emergency,” fought with the same unified purpose by many people as is now.

The biological split

Our continued descent into utter stupidity. What exactly does the confederate flag have to do with a stay at home order? Yes, indeed. From my morning slog.

If you live in the city of Detroit, which is currently overwhelmed by the virus' corpses, you will think the protesters have completely lost contact with reality; if you are not in the city, you will see the protesters as heroes, as Tea People, as men and women who are fighting for the freedom "to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another." This division is getting real.

My Plague Year, a35

And the days go by. And the beat rolls on.

I'm experimenting with some new approaches to create this image. Using the extensive gallery show features for creating intelligent auto-mutating art processes to prototype the processing. Hope it leads to a new Temporal Ip Op effect in the end. Probably 40-50 different source images were gobbled up and analyzed by gallery show to generate the painted image above.

The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back

As always, David Wallace-Wells offers insightful (if somewhat frightening) analysis.  There is a lot to digest in this one. A few zingers below:

The self-reported false-negative rate of the tests used in China is 30 percent, and many of the test kits being used now elsewhere in the world were manufactured there.

Public officials in China are “cracking down” on those academics trying to study the origin of the disease, vetting and deleting academic work and imposing new restrictions on research on the subject.

No one, at this point, is looking to the United States, indeed to any nation in the West, as a model for how to respond to COVID-19, or any pandemic.

America’s economy is now widely expected to shrink by a quarter. That is as much as during the Great Depression. But whereas the contraction after 1929 stretched over a four-year period, the coronavirus implosion will happen over the next three months. It is no longer unimaginable that the overall unemployment rate could reach 30 percent by the summer.

Reality is shifting

At a fundamental level, physical reality defies our most basic intuitions about causality and locality, which is to say about time and space. Our senses and perceptions evolved to evade tigers and catch food, not to understand the properties of photons and subatomic particles. Despite more than 100 years of effort by the world’s leading physicists and philosophers, the quantum realm remains incomprehensibly bizarre. The fact that we cannot comprehend it is a form of environmental mismatch.

We may face a similar type of conceptual difficulty in grappling with a pandemic. Our brains may not be naturally suited to dealing with problems of this scale or nature. Even our language, our concepts, are inapt tools, artifacts of our previous reality.

From a good discussion of current events by Charles Yu in The Atlantic.

My Plague Year, a34

Tried the temporal slit scan tracker on the corona virus database. The one that keeps growing every day. Composited in a little MSG procedural imagery to flesh out the borders a little bit.

Stare into the void

More experiments with abstract procedural art generation using MSG (modular synthesized graphics) in Studio Artist 5. Worked in the Evolution Editor to get to this point.

Florida declares WWE essential business

At a press conference on Monday, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings walked reporters through Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s recent decision to categorize WWE as an “essential business,” a term most of us have come to associate with health-care workers, grocery store employees, and those working in public transportation.

My Plague Year, a33

What a show says the Guardian. And boy did His Most Gracious and Wise One Lord Emporer burst forth with proclamations.  Years of accreted grievance and resentment towards the media came gushing out in a torrent. He ranted, he raved, he melted down and he blew up the internet with one of the most jaw-dropping performances of his reign.

Cleansing the Palette

Thought i'd take a break on the kind of intense current events artwork for a second and generate some procedural art imagery. I started with a Cellular Automata MSG preset and then started working with swap mutations in the Evolution Editor.

Our fall from grace

Erratic behavior, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.

To a watching world, the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralized coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.

That’s a title the US appears on course to lose – a fall from grace that may prove irreversible. The domestic debacle unleashed by the pandemic, and global perceptions of American selfishness and incompetence, could change everything.

In local news that mirrors above, local mail service here has now reached third world status as USPS refuses to deliver packages, insisting people instead must break quarantine, drive to post office, and transport the packages themselves. Or pay them a bribe?

The Niagara of misinformation

“¡Abajo la inteligencia! ¡Viva la muerte!” “Down with intelligence! Long live death!”

Let us not lose sight of something more fundamental that is going on. Today’s chaotic and bumbling response to this emergency is no accident, but deeply rooted and systemic, the direct result of a pattern of callow benightedness that verges on the criminal.

My Plague Year, a32

SBA small business loans are mysteriously shrinking, shrinking. In my plague year.

America is a terrible place to be stupid

Modern-day capitalism in America is to flatten the risk curve for people who already have money by borrowing from future generations with debt-fueled bailouts for companies. Rugged individualism and capitalism on the way up, privatizing the gains — and then socialism/cronyism — on the way down, as we socialize the losses with bailouts.

Interesting read in New York Magazine today by Scott Galloway.

The terrible thing about crises is they always happen. The wonderful thing is they always end.

A Beautiful Time

The churches will be packed, and Easter will be a beautiful time?