Can a work of art’s quality be numerically measured?

Tags

Measuring aesthetic, measuring pain, Quantifying art works

I argue with some of my artist friends about creating a numerical measure for the quality of a work of art. They claim that artworks are too individual to be quantified. I have been creating a chart for measuring beauty based on specific qualities that I feel are measurable, and then each of the qualities will be given a numerical value. When that is done the various works may be measured and weighted and the whole group may be added together. That will give a single numerical value. It sounds a bit contrived, but after a large number of items have been subjected to this treatment I suspect that there will arise a generally agreed-upon belief that there is an aesthetic core beneath artworks for humans. It would differ for other species. There are aesthetic judgments being made by birds like the Bower birds of New Guinea, and by bees, here in Bend, when choosing flowers to inspect.

I will show a shortlist of the artistic qualities that can be measured, but first here is a chart I created for measuring Pain. It gives a much better measure than what you have probably encountered in a medical doctor’s office because it gives objective things that can be observed and quantified

Pain Scale – For measuring the intensity of human pain; click to enlarge.

Aesthetic beauty has more dimensions than physical pain and therefore will have a longer columnar list of qualities. For example, the aesthetic sub-quality SKILL can be measured as going from a work filled with wobbly mistakes measured as an ESTH~1 on to one filled with masterful strokes, ESTH~14. PERSEVERANCE can be measured as a partially begun work that was abandoned, ESTH~1, to a work that required many strokes and filled the space to the point where everything is perfectly used to completion. That might be measured as an ESTH~14.

I have been working on a list of qualities that include, EMOTION, THOUGHT, INVENTIVE, ARTISTICALLY AGGRESSIVE, RISKY, CLEAR, DISTINCT, CULTURALLY ASTUTE, MOTIVATIONAL, RARITY, SALES VALUE.

There will be other qualities on the final list and then these can be judged down to a more workable list and standardized. Retch, everyone reading this will say, probably in a loud voice.

And yet, this chart when completed will help artists create better works, because it will be easier for them to judge where they might place additional effort.

This blog will be a talking point one of these days.

 

 

Perhaps we’ve just begun to think.

Tags

Creation of new ideas, Evolution of ideas, Look at things anew, research, Search again

When reading the various science news materials it feels like new things are being discovered every day, and yet the individual things seem so insignificant, and yet again, often these new things are combined with other things, even very old things, and suddenly everyone has something totally new. Light bulbs that are a hundred times better than the ones that made Thomas Edison rich and famous are now commonplace.

A mundane activity like flipping a wall switch and electricity finds its way through some pure copper wires through a twisty century-old screw base adapter into the modern LED bulb, and the light nearly always comes on. I suspect and expect that the future will bring us many other things that after a few uses will seem as ordinary as these modern light bulbs.

Occasionally back in Berkeley, where I lived for fifty-one years, I would hand a friend a blank piece of paper and a pencil and ask them to change the world. As far as I know, no one of them ever did change the world with what they wrote on the piece of paper I gave them, but some of them did change the world somehow.

It is impossible to know what will come from what appears to be a simple idea, a foolish idea, an obviously stupid idea! Perhaps, the more peculiar an idea seems at first mention, the more potential it has for generating unique thoughts, but the idea must fall into minds that are in a condition to explore it with their own view of reality. This idea-bouncing process seems to work best with a small group of people who are searching for an answer to a seemingly impossible problem. Sometimes this process is called brainstorming, and here is a site that presents 19 techniques to brainstorm a problem.

Several years ago, in 2013, I wrote about obvious things that are hidden from us behind veils, such as various kind of camouflage that evolved to disguise certain species, and there are kinds of non-living natural things that act as veils, like time, space, distance and mixes of these things. But probably the most important thing that prevents us from seeing truly new ideas is that no one has thought of them, combined with those who did think of something new, but didn’t present it to others, or presented it in such a way that no one understood its significance.

I suspect that as you walk through your day there will be many things you see but do not comprehend their potential uses. Talk about these things!

This is not an advertisement.

Tags

Argan Oil

This afternoon I encountered a friend M in one of my coffee shops. We both were meeting other people but chatted for five minutes until they arrived. After a brief catch-up conversation, we somehow got on to the subject of skin oils. I hadn’t been paying any particular attention to my forearm skin for the last several months because there were other issues in my life which had distracted me. But …

Several months ago I purchased some Shiny Leaf Organic Argan oil in response to something or other, or someone or other, which I have forgotten, that recommended it. I was using it on my hair because it was looking dry and brittle. That’s not an uncommon problem for an 84-year-old head of hair. It’s remarkable that I have any hair at all, as most of my cohort are looking awfully sparse in that area.

My procedure was to put about three drops of this very light oil on my left palm, to rub it vigorously between my two palms and then rub my palms over the top of my head for a few seconds. My hair looked more normal, and then I rubbed my still slightly oily palms on the back of my hands and on the back of my forearms. Occasionally I put a few more drops on my palms and from there a little more on my forearms. I have done this every couple of days without really looking carefully at my arms.

Boring! Except! During my conversation with M, I looked at carefully at my arms and was astonished at how good they looked. He had to go, and I was sitting there looking at my arms and wondering what happened. Other than the argan oil, the only unusual thing is the hormone treatments I’m taking to suppress a reoccurrence of my prostate cancer. That cancer is also a more than common problem for a male of my age.

Did argan oil and hormone treatments make my eighty-four year old hands and forearms look like a twenty-year-old’s?

I’ve been playing with my blood pressure

Tags

Chocolate and blood pressure, Does chocolate lower blood pressure?, Experimenting with chocolate, Playing with blood pressure

This evening I tried to drop my blood pressure by eating three 72% chocolate squares from a slab. It has been reported that dark chocolate will give as much as a ten-point drop in systolic pressure. I gave it a try. What could go wrong?

I use the OMRON blood pressure monitor model BP786N, which I bought last month to replace my manual hand-pumped blood pressure cuff device. Because this OMRON is more automated and links to my cell phone, it is easy to track the details of what’s going on with blood pressure. I have it set on the triple measure which does three measure about a minute apart and then averages them and displays the result in big numbers on the screen. Okay, that works well enough, but when I put my cell phone beside the device and turn them on and off, it transfers all of that data to a much better display on my cell phone. And it displays all three of the recordings separately. That is great because when I relax, the numbers usually drop a few points from the first reading to the third one.

The chocolate experiment started at 9:40 PM with 125 sys /62 dia 55 bpm when I ate 3 of 40 Trader Joe’s Pound Plus 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate chunks. That’s 3/40 of 500 grams or 37.5 grams of chocolate. That equals 1.3234 ounces of chocolate. At 10:49 PM my blood pressure was 118 sys /55 dia 52 bpm. That’s a drop of 7 sys / 7 dia 3 bpm that might be related to eating the chocolate or maybe not.

That was a single experiment, and as such doesn’t mean much, but it was promising,  and thus I will try it several more times. Perhaps it would be better to do this experiment in the mid-afternoon, when my body has the opportunity to digest and use it for something better than gaining weight.

Like I said, what could go wrong with eating chocolate late in the evening?

Your skin’s microbiome needs your help!

Tags

Killing bad bacteria, Killing bad microbiomes, Killing microbes, Saving good microbes, Saving good microbiomes, Survival of skin

The various microbes living inside of you and on your skin are too small to see, but their effects in your gut and on your skin are what keep you healthy and in some cases alive. There thousands of species of microbes but the most famous at the moment is C. diff, which is a contraction of the scientific name Clostridium difficile. It is a deadly microbe because it overruns the intestinal tract and prevents the hundreds of other species of essential intestinal microbes from establishing a home in a person’s gut. Standard antibiotic treatments often aggravate the disease because they kill the good microbes along with the C. diff and it becomes impossible to digest food. If that isn’t corrected, the person dies. One of the most successful treatments is to find another human with a healthy intestinal microbiome and transfer some of their partially digested intestinal contents to the sick person’s intestinal tract. In this case, eating healthy shit is a very healthy thing to do. My solution is to save some of your own poop when you are healthy in a freezer and reintroduce it if you get C. diff. Okay, that sounds yucky, but it will probably save your life if you are in that horrid condition.

The skin is a wholly different situation. It is the surface material on the outside of you, whereas the gut lining is the skin on the inside of you from your mouth to your anus. In some ways, the outside is much easier to cope with because it is visible and you can sometimes correct its problems by caring for its microbiome. Yes, you are covered with living microbes, and they keep you healthy, but when those good microbes are overwhelmed by the bad microbes your skin gets sick. Every tiny bit of your skin is a battleground between these good microbes and the bad ones. The moral overtones are an overlay of our conscious wishes. The microbes’ goals are to survive and reproduce, and they do that by eating stuff on your skin, which has nothing to do with our human morality of goodness and badness. They are just making a living as best they can.

What makes sense to me is to treat my outside in a way that takes into account the experience of the medical profession with the insides. That means to not totally kill off the bacteria residing on the outside of my skin by using strong antimicrobial killing agents on healthy skin. When that is done internally it can result in C. diff overwhelming the internal microbiome and if not corrected the death of the human involved. That same result can happen if the external microbiome is destroyed and the skin is then left exposed to whatever microbes are in the environment. Some of those are deadly! Normally, a person’s skin is covered with a living community of microbes that protect it from those others that want to eat your skin. It is claimed by microbiologists that over ninety percent of the DNA of our living bodies isn’t our human DNA but these microbial beings, and they make up about one percent of our weight. They are tiny but there are lots of them.

The method I propose here is to kill the bad microbes and replace them with good microbes. The way to do that is to … First put an antimicrobial agent, like Hibiclens, directly on to the bad patches of skin with a fingertip, gently rub it with the fingertip for a few seconds, and then rinse it with running water for several seconds. Do that procedure for each of the problem areas. Second, rub vigorously for a few seconds some healthy areas of your skin with the palm of your hand, and then with that hand now laden with invisible microbes rub over the sick areas you have just cleaned. It will help with the distribution of the microbes to first smear a few drops of Argan Oil on your palms.

The intent of this procedure is to kill the bad microbes infesting a sick portion of skin and repopulate it with healthy microbes that have been living on the healthy parts of your skin.

I have no relationship with Hibiclens, but it is the Antiseptic/Antimicrobial Skin Cleanser recommended to me by my doctor for cleaning my skin before minor surgery. There might be other products that are okay. A good idea always begins with a single person but it takes a lot of double-blind trials before a procedure becomes scientifically accepted.

Replacing unhealthy skin microbes with health-promoting ones worked for me.

Saying goodbye to the tipping point

Tags

survival

I am a cheerful person most of the time and I have been trying for decades to add a little cheer to those whom I encounter. I remember the exact moment and place where that happened. Not the date, but the thoughts and feelings of being depressed about things in general as I approached the Med, my coffee rendezvous for decades. I wasn’t going to visit my gloom upon my friends and decided to be cheerful. I was able to maintain that false cheer for a few minutes, until the conversation became interesting, which it always did, and I forgot to be cheerful and returned to my anxious gloom. Each on the next several days I remade the promise to myself to be cheerful toward my friends and every day the same result. I forgot myself and returned to my gloomy state and proceeded to pull the happy discussions down a notch.

The next experiment was not trying to be cheerful but to watch my friends behavior and try and help them to become cheerful. That worked a lot better because it is easier to watch another person’s expressions than to watch one’s self. I cultivated some habits around that simple strategy for not being gloomy and by helping my interlocutors to be happier I became happier too. I have long given up doing these experiments intentionally, but the habits are still with me, and often when a group as I was today, I notice that people are laughing along with me as I develop my arguments on whatever it is that we are all chewing on.

With that nonsense exposed it is time to face a simple and obvious fact of current reality. The population of the world is still exploding and the resources of the world are about to become too difficult to retrieve. Malthus said that two hundred years ago and was wrong because he didn’t factor in the energy reserves provided by coal and oil and a few smaller energy sources, and the creativity of humanity to develop ways to exploit our planetary resources. Paul Ehrlich brought this to the modern world in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, but once again the creativity of the unified human species was able to delay the onset of population collapse. The bad luck that those two predicted is about to run out because of the infinite capacity of living organisms to reproduce, it doesn’t even have to be a logarithmic growth a simple tiny growth will do if it is infinite it will consume all of the resources available to its species. We are still in a fortunate condition for enjoying the good life the Earth is still providing to us. But, even us geriatrics may witness the tipping point, and young adults will have an increasingly difficult time, and it brings tears to my eyes sometimes when I see happy children and realize that they are unlikely to live to my age without experiencing a wrenching suffering of humanity.

But, I’ve run out of time again and once again my advice is to enjoy yourself.

Near ideal blood pressure is 105/70.

Tags

Blood pressure, Blood pressure is 105/70, Ideal blood pressure, survival, What is the ideal blood pressure

Perhaps trying to figure out what ideal blood pressure is, is a fool’s search, but I am such a fool. When I read about health recommendations on such things as personal weight, or BMI, or exercise, or what to eat, there is a massive amount of documented information, and most of it is directly contradicted by some other well-documented information. The same problem applies to blood pressure.

Until as recently as 1977, when the first official guidelines were formulated for blood pressure, doctors were saying systolic blood pressure should be 100 plus your age. Then the accepted goal was changed to 140/90 but just this March 2019 the new goal, based on research using new drugs, was declared to be below 120/80. One might wonder who paid for that research based on manipulating blood pressure with drugs?

About twenty years ago, when I occasionally drove a 96-year-old friend of mine to visit her doctor, she came out one day saying everything was fine because her blood pressure was 196 which she was told was just perfect for her age.

That sounded ridiculous to me, but what am I to do? What’s any ordinary person to do, when a doctor makes a statement, but submit? What I did do with this present post is to find what appear to be sources of authoritative information, choose those with boundaries and then pick the middle number between the boundaries. That’s how the title of this blog post was created. That method generates an exact number.

However, it is obvious that every one of the 7.7 billion people on the planet at this time, or any time, will have unique qualities that will push their needs away from any fixed ideal number. The problem is no one knows what their ideal number really is, and furthermore, that number changes every minute because the demands on one’s body change every minute depending on the exact thing that it is encountering. That new situation constantly requires an adjustment, which the body was designed to optimize by the process of survival and reproduction of the generally best adapted of one’s ancestors.

Our clearly human ancestors have been around for a hundred thousand years, or five million years if we include chimps, or half a billion years if we include those with blood flow systems. Thus, there has been plenty of time for what became our species to experiment with optimizing their DNA and to genetically load our living DNA with what works, and to let get weeded out what didn’t work as well. The shortened idea of that line of reasoning is that if you are alive now, and reading this, you are a survivor of that process. Yippee.

Unfortunately, no matter who you are and how perfect, or imperfect, you appear to yourself, or to other people, your body is trying to move toward what it considers to be perfect. The myriad processes that got you here have programmed you to strive for that better place. Thus, there are something like 7.7 billion people right now trying to adapt to what their body thinks is ideal.

Perhaps you see the problem with such a bounty of bodies seeking perfection, and yet there is no clear published ideal of perfection to be aimed for with our voluntary lifestyle, only … below 120/80. There is no statement of how far below that recently declared upper level. Below systolic of 95 can be an indicator the person is dying, if their pressure is usually much higher, and that’s close to my stated near ideal systolic. Hmm? However, there can be generated a central point for a very healthy person that is probably close to an ideal and which would rarely be far enough away from their genetically perfected ideal to create a problem.

Using that line of inquiry, the Ideal blood pressure for someone who has recently walked, but is now sitting and rested for five minutes is 105/70. Adding or subtracting 5 points from those numbers would mean that 110/70 to 100/70, or 105/75 to 105/65 would be so close to the unknowable ideal as to be undetectable and insignificant. Strangely, this method of choosing an ideal would mean by the pre-1977 rule of thumb, 100 plus your age that our ideal would be the blood pressure of children.

Even with this broad definition of what is acceptably close enough to an ideal blood pressure to be called near-ideal, there don’t seem to be many Americans who presently qualify. A year ago I squeezed into that zone occasionally and did so more consistently when I weighed ten pounds less than what I presently weigh. That becomes a motivation for me to get seriously back into line with my intermittent fasting way of life. That is easy to do. I just limit all eating to a six-hour window. After staying within those time limits for a week my body is not hungry and is perfectly comfortable all the time.

105/70 may not be the ideal blood pressure, but it is close enough to be called near ideal blood pressure.

An obvious invention for olive oil stability

The Monday afternoon group challenged me seven weeks ago to invent something every day. They probably thought I would be stymied by the next week’s meeting to come up with anything, and they would have a quiet little laugh at my expense. Unfortunately for them, I have been presenting them with seven new inventions every week, and they are quite bored with the game.

Anyway, … the centenarian crowd has convinced me that olive oil is a good ingredient for long life and for what is now called healthspan. On page 101 of Borrowed Time by Sue Armstrong, there is a report on the recent findings on healthspan compared to lifespan:

“Thus, on average, the proportion of their lives spent with serious incapacity was 9.4 percent for those who died in the late nineties; 9 percent for those who died between the ages of 100 and 104 years; 8.9 percent among those who died aged 105-109; and only 5.2 percent for the oldest old, those who died between the ages of 110 and 119. In fact, 10 of the 104 supercentenarians escaped serious disease right up until the last three months of their lives. By contrast, the controls whose lifespans were not considered exceptional suffered chronic ill health on average for 17.9 percent of their lives.”

It is common knowledge that olive oil, a significant component of the Mediterranean diet, is associated with living to be 100 years old. Since I am now eighty-three and three-quarters years old it is time to pay attention to my health and stop flying Air Force jets around, and hanging around the center of Berkeley radical activists and being pursued out of third story windows by police. Now my physical problem is avoiding the crazy activities of old people here in Bend, Oregon. Mountain bike riding, which brought a friend huge bruises on his chest; riding bikes on winter ice which brought on a dislocated shoulder and elbow; canoeing down a river rapid which led to serious bruises and the death of the other occupant; … skateboarding through traffic, freestyle-rock-climbing Smith Rock, looping an airplane starting at ground level which didn’t work out well at all. I didn’t do that back when I was flying T-28s, but did do some nearly as risky stuff, and many more such things I don’t do anymore. So, now I’m moving on to an olive oil-enriched diet.

It turns out to be important that the olive oil is kept fresh to maintain its effectiveness for generating centenarians. Part of the maintenance in storage and in the retail sales bottle is keeping the olive oil in total darkness. Apparently, even a little direct sunlight on a bottle of olive oil begins its life of ruin.

So what’s my problem? The olive oil is sold in bottles. The bottles are made of glass and glass is transparent to light. Therefore, the olive oil industry packages their olive oil in dark green bottles which will cut down the intensity of the light hitting the olive oil and apparently helps to ease the rate of deterioration. That’s probably okay, but a further fix would bring the olive oil into near total darkness and would cost nothing whatsoever except for the artwork on the label and reprinting the labels.

Print wraparound labels made of the kind of metallic coating found on almost every packaged item these days. I have held some of these up to the sun, and they are perfectly opaque. Wrapping the olive oil bottles all the way around the bottle the way some other products are already being treated would solve the problem. A small vertical opening between the edges of the wrapping could be left so the height of the contents could be seen. A shoulder cap could be added to the top of the bottle, for further protection, and it would look cute.

This post is proof I can get a long story out of almost nothing.

My challenge to invent something every day stumbled

Tags

A spillproof box., Accepting stupid challenges, Evolution of a box, Inventing new stuff, Thinking about boxes

For three weeks I have been successful in coming up with an invention every day. I was challenged with inventing something every day by my Monday afternoon book discussion group. I immediately refused to accept, saying that even Thomas Edison wouldn’t accept such a monstrous challenge. But they wouldn’t relent. I was bullied into it after three refusals. The only way such a challenge could be sustained for very long was to solve some of the really tiny problems that are ubiquitous.

One of the ones I brought in for their viewing last Monday was a small box used in restaurants for leftovers.  The box I had been given the day before had a tendency to pop open, so I worked on that problem for a while and cut out of the cardboard lid a little hook that would catch the side of the slot opening. It worked better than the original box and didn’t accidentally pop open as easily.

However, one of the guys said that sometimes food leaked out the top corners when a box was tipped on its side even if it didn’t spring open. Tonight, when I should have been thinking about the new paradigms for the Unitarian Universalist fellowships, I was trying to solve the box problem. I was thinking inside of the box, when I should have been thinking outside of the box, and my thinking and writing time was used up. I stumbled upon a simple, obvious once you see it, solution to that problem.

Perhaps, someday you will get to use one of my new boxes in a restaurant.

Each day contradicts the earlier ones

Tags

Contradictions, My struggle with contradictions, UU Affirm and promote

One contradiction after another. Even the smallest insignificant things seem to require adjustment the next day. Yesterday, on my morning walk with Debbie, we saw a dandelion with 64 blossomed stalks and thought that was amazing and far beyond the bounds of normal reality. Today, primed to look at dandelions, we found one and counted 113 blossomed stalks. And, further along our path, there was a long stalked one that I picked, carried home, and tossed out onto my garden, so I’m going to break off this for a moment and go fetch it. … I’m back, and it measures 2 feet 3 inches. Some dandelions we saw in people’s lawns don’t appear to have any stalks. None!

I bring up this trivial measure of contradiction because I have been rewriting some documents of Unitarian Universalist favored beliefs. It is for my own pleasure, as I have absolutely no authority to be changing those things. My problem is easy to see if you have been following this blog for the last few days. What seems okay, even good, one day seems flawed the next day. What seemed like a clarification yesterday appears as fog today. The word pettifogger pops into my mind. That’s a term of derision applied to all of those unscrupulous lawyers representing the other side of a legal question with silly unrelated arguments. How many times must I rewrite my restatement of We affirm and promote, before I am willing to affirm and promote that short proclamation?

If even my simplest reality is changing every day, I will always be anxious, and that’s a worry, but I will also be entertained, and that’s a pleasure.