http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:anthonydavidpirtle&section=today deviantART RSS for by:anthonydavidpirtle en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:34:24 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/19151765/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/19151765/ Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:41:43 PDT

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]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/15306410/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/15306410/ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:04:55 PDT
It reminds me of the halloween of '86. I was 12, and a smashing 4 1/2 foot tall version of Indiana Jones, and I was really looking forward to a night of raking in the goodies. Then the news broke. Rumors of tampered candy were sweeping the nation. Evil men and women were putting razor blades in apples and straight pins in candy bars. Now, I wasn't too concerned about the apples; I always tossed them out on the way home. But no one had better mess with my candy bars.

Hysteria built and built until, on the night of Halloween, we were instructed by authorities to take our collected goodies to the gymnasium at the high school for, get this, x-raying. Now my parents were more level headed. They didn't buy it for a second (either that or they were hoping for a few less mouths to feed). But That night the news showed lines wrapped around the school of little kids with their terrified parents trying to keep them from eating any candy until it had been screened. That's how I learned that people are, by and large, sheep.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a hoax. Indeed, just about every such claim since the 60's has been either a hoax or an older brother's idea of a great gag to pull on a younger brother. But in 2000 in Minneapolis, there was a confirmed report of a mean old man that put needles in some snickers bars and handed them out. So just to be on the safe side, kids, mail all your snickers bars to 562 Newcomb St SE apt#4, washington, DC, and I'll dispose of them properly.

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]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14929626/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14929626/ Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:19:02 PDT
Now I would have understood if she had said 15 minutes. I don't want to make the old woman run, but 45? Plus, they weren't even voting on legislation. They were voting on whether or not to uphold a motion on the reordering of the previous question regarding the amendment to some legislation. Geesh.

One funny note. As the new majority in Congress, the Democrats had their names already placed on the dais, but the republicans had to take their name plates with them. hahaha.

]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14880501/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14880501/ Tue, 02 Oct 2007 04:53:40 PDT
Next, Trent Reznor tells people that if they really want his new album, Year Zero, but can't get it, they should just download it from the internet.

Now, Radiohead has made headlines with the release of their latest album, In Rainbows, directly from its website. Radiohead is currently unsigned and doesn't feel that it needs a record label anymore. Instead of going the regular music distribution rout, Radiohead is telling fans to go to Radiohead.com, download their new album, and pay what they want for it. That's right, if you want to pay 10 pounds, you can do that. If you want to pay 2 pounds, you can do that, too. You can even pay zero pounds if you're too poor or too cheap to shell out anything.

RIAA has stated that measures like these are a disaster for the record industry, because they lower the overall market value of recorded music. No doubt this is part of Radiohead's intention. The band knows that music labels are the only ones who really make money from CDs.

So how does Radiohead intend to make money? Are they simply altruists? Are they ridiculously naive? Not a chance. Radiohead, and indeed most bands, make their money by touring, not record sales. The band is betting that the wider distribution their music gets, the better ticket sales they will reap.

I hope this works out for them. As an artist myself, I place most of my work for free on the internet. My first online gallery contained a disclaimer asking people to please download the images and have fun with them. Artists make their money by commission, or by selling paintings. I don't think I'm doing myself a favor by telling those who like my work that they can look but not touch what I post on the internet. On the thirteenth I am going to be an art show and I intend to tell everyone who likes my work to go to my website or here to DA and download what they like. Who knows, I may even make a sale.

]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14878453/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14878453/ Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:25:02 PDT
Frank Drake, an astronomer from Cornell University, with the help of legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan, came up with a simple equation to calculate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy capable of communicating with us. Here it is.

N, that is the number of intelligent civilizations within the Milky Way Galaxy equals the number of stars times the number of planets times the number of those planets that are inhabitable times the number of inhabitable planets that actually spring to life times the number of those life forms that develop intelligence times the number of those intelligent life forms that develop communications technology capable of contacting other worlds times the life span of such a civilization in relation to the lifespan of its planet.

The number of stars in the galaxy has been estimated at anywhere between 250 billion and 500 billion, but Sagan estimated 400 billion, and it makes the math easier, so we’re going with that.

Recent astronomical leaps have made the discovery of planets in other star systems a matter of routine. So many planets have been discovered that it is no longer newsworthy when a new one is sighted. It seems that they are the rule, not the exception, for Sun-like stars, and the sun is a very average star. So a conservative value for the next piece of the equation is .25, that is one quarter of the stars have planets.

How many of those planets are inhabitable? How many planets in our own solar system are able to support some kind of life? Earth, of course, and Europa, Jupiter’s ocean moon. Mars certainly has all the ingredients necessary, and there’s been a great deal of speculation about Saturn’s moon Titan, on which the Cassini spacecraft recently discovered free flowing water, albeit slushy and mixed with ammonia. So we can feel reasonably confident that there are two candidates in every solar system capable of supporting life.

But how likely is it that life will arise? Recent fossil discoveries have shown that life arose on the earth over half a billion years earlier than first assumed, or almost immediately. On Titan, also, you find that if you take the ingredients of the atmosphere and mix them with water you get almost instant amino acids, the building blocks of life. So let’s assume that at least half of habitable worlds develop life, at least on the most basic level.

That life will become intelligent is much less certain. Mankind’s ancestors had to overcome substantial barriers to become the sentient beings that gave birth to our society. If we say that a tenth of inhabited worlds develop intelligent life, we may be too generous. But let’s go with that. Again, it does make crunching the numbers simpler.

How many intelligent civilizations develop the necessary technology to communicate with the stars? That seems like a less ambiguous question. Technological evolution is so much more sure and steady than its biological counterpart. Mankind has really only stumbled once on its road to science, and it was really only Western Civilization that succumbed to the so called Dark Age. This time we may be too conservative when we assign a value of one tenth, but perhaps it makes up for our earlier numerical largess.

Up till now the numbers look promising. If you plug the above values into the equation, you get an amount equal to one billion technologically advanced intelligent civilizations within our own Milky Way galaxy. With such a staggering number of societies chattering away at each other across the stars, it seems unlikely that we have not already picked up their hum. But there is one more variable to consider.

How long does an intelligent civilization continue before it destroys itself, or at least retreats from speculation about the stars? Drake and Sagan were very optimistic indeed when they postulated that the average lifespan of intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations capable of and willing to communicate with the stars is equal to 1 percent of the lifetime of their respective planets. This would put the number of possible contacts in the millions. But we must be more impartial.

According to mathematics, an observer of any time period has a fifty percent chance of being at least half way through such a period. If we are at the half way marker of our technological relationship with the stars, this puts the number of years mankind will be engaged in the Space Age at a little more than a century, or one forty millionth of the total age of the planet Earth. If we use this more realistic value in our equation, that puts the number of civili... ]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14835412/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14835412/ Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:11:07 PDT
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However, as it turns out, those laws are so precisely fine-tuned that if the value of even one was altered by even one percentile, the universe could not give birth to life as we know it. So some cosmologists began to question why all the laws of the universe are tuned the way they are. Could it be precisely for the benefit of our creation?

This perturbed the cosmological community because they feared that creationists and intelligent designers would run away with this question and use it to justify their own religious interpretation of the universe, so they decided to put the question aside. After all, it could have been chance.

Then the Cosmological Constant, an old theory by Albert Einstein that has come back with a vengeance as the reality of Dark Energy, was discovered. This is the force that keeps the universe from falling in upon its own mass, and in fact is responsible for causing it to accelerate rather than decelerate as it expands. This force must be set at it's particular value and not deviate by billionths of a percentile, or the entire universe goes to shit.

For all intents and purposes this eliminated chance from the equation. The only way to re-inject chance, thereby staving off the creationists, was to theorize the existence of the multiverse, an infinite number of universes, each of which would have their own set of values for the laws. Infinite number of values means chance is back in the equation and creationism is out, with the added bonus that since we will never be able to observe these other universes, it is impossible to disprove their existence.

Then a Cambridge mathematician named John Conway came up with a simple game consisting of a grid with little dots that obeyed three simple rules governing their birth, reproduction, and death. This exceedingly simple board game, when left to it's own devices, began to simulate life. the little dots on the grid began to assemble themselves into complex multi-cellular organisms that crawled across the board, pumped like a heart, even reproduced other complex organisms. In short, Conway had created a life simulator.

This was over thirty years ago. Today cosmologists can use a supercomputer to simulate the formation of not only small creatures but the entire universe. They start with a big simulated cloud of simulated hydrogen gas, and by plugging in the laws of physics and hitting the start button, they get a reasonable facsimile of our universe, with clusters of galaxies more or less right where they're supposed to be.

Getting back to the cosmologists' multiverse, if there are an infinite number of universes, then we can assume that not only is it possible for a much more advanced intelligence to exist, it must exist. Not only that, but there must, according to the laws of probability, exist a more advanced intelligence that has created a computer capable not only of simulating galaxies, but everything in those galaxies. This simulation would be so thorough as to be indecipherable from reality. Again, not only is it possible that this sort of simulation is running in one or another of the universes, but according to the laws of probability, it must at this moment be happening.

So given that this sort of simulated universe exists, cosmologists began to wonder if we were not actually inside that simulated universe. They wondered if our reality were nothing more than a really big program running in some alien's lab for some unknown purpose. In fact, wouldn't this explain the perfect synchronization of all the laws of the universe to benefit our particular creation? If indeed the whole purpose of science is to discover the most rational explanation for something, then the most rational explanation for our existence is that we do not exist at all except as bits of data in a computer. Hence, the matrix.

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]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14749828/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14749828/ Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:37:52 PDT
An administrator has relocated one of your deviations from digitalart > paintings > people > portraits to digitalart > misc > people.
The administrator also said the following:
Images created via the use of filters over photographs should be placed in the proper Digital Art > Miscellaneous Gallery

The work in question is Celestial Bed, and like most of my other images it was hand drawn and colored using paint.net (I say most because some of my images are hand painted as well). If the administrator had bothered to send me a note inquiring as to whether Celestial Bed was a photo manipulation as opposed to a digital painting, I would have been happy to set him straight and even flattered by his or her assumption. Instead my work was arbitrarily relocated.

This may seem like a stupid issue to get riled up over, but it goes to deviantART's business model. They provide space for artists to post their work in order to create an environment appealing to advertisers (such as Volkswagen, who is trying to sell me a car at the top of this web page). In other words, they make money off of us. It would seem important, therefore, to have a good working relationship with the talent, as it were.

I have sent an inquiry to the help desk in order to secure permission to have my work placed back in its original category. Stay tuned for the response. I will also post the original pencil and ink sketch on which the work was based. That way the administrators will be able to verify my claim.

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On October 13th there will be an art show entitled, "Outsider Art Inside the Beltway." I have submitted two paintings for consideration, so cross your fingers for me.

]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14485041/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14485041/ Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:59:27 PDT
Today is Bridge the Economic Gap Day. If your town is holding a rally, you should show. Most people don't realize that America is, by and large, a nation of poor people working two or three jobs to afford an apartment for their families. Here in DC you'd have to make $24.73 an hour to afford a two bedroom apartment at 1/3 of your income (what is considered fair market rent).

Anyway, enough preaching. Enjoy your week.

]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14464987/ http://anthonydavidpirtle.deviantart.com/journal/14464987/ Mon, 03 Sep 2007 02:15:16 PDT
Tragically, not one relative remembered my birthday. It's true that until February they thought I was dead, so maybe they are out of practice. Oh well. My mother's birthday is in a week. I think I'll get her an especially big gift (not to make her feel bad, but because I love her...).

Today is Labor Day here in the States, and since I am on sabbatical I will spend it on my duff watching movies and drawing. My vacation is well into it's second week, and I am officially bored out of my skull. The first week I was sick as a dog (I wonder why we say that...my dog was never sick) so now that I am pretty much over it I feel that I should do something with all this free time.

I think I will stay on vacation until the middle of the month. That's when I am slated to speak in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It promises to be an interesting trip; apart from us they are bringing a man who will talk about "encountering poor people in Africa," and some sort of biblical magician. Look kids, water into wine! Amen.

I shouldn't razz them, because it's for a good cause.

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I went on painting in my spare time until 2004 when I developed schizoaffective disorder and became homeless for a couple years. During this time I tried to work on my technique, but let's face it: when you live on a steam grate you don't have a lot of opportunities to be creative.

I didn't start painting seriously again until the middle of 2006. I was taking medication and living in a shelter for the first time. I was sitting in a soup kitchen waiting for a haircut, when a volunteer told me that while I was waiting I should avail myself of the arts and crafts activity she was hosting in the corner.

Reluctantly I sat and painted a small wooden birdhouse that she had provided. The simple act of picking up a brush awakened a long dormant desire to paint again. However, I found myself unable to draw out the vivid colors and imaginative characters of my earlier work.

John Nash, perhaps the most famous schizophrenic thanks to A Beautiful Mind, once said that the insanity came from the same place as all his wondrous formulas. I fear that it is much the same with me: the medications that temper my symptoms also seem to dull my creativity.

So I found myself shirking color altogether and working in a much more minimalist style. I'm not sure if I like it, but it's where my work is going.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by, and enjoy my artwork.

]]> ~anthonydavidpirtle