Month: January 2023

Only a shadow remains of the Lee and Jackson Confederate monument. In 2017, all such monuments in Baltimore were demolished following the clash between nationalists and antifascists in Charlottesville.

It turned out, she wasn’t reloading a rifle

Theodore Robinson, The Young Violinist, 1889

I feel that these friends in Jacob Lawrence’s Chess Players (1954) do not know how to play chess. Do you see any logical set of moves that could have led to such an arrangement? I see an illogical one, but perhaps I am mistaken.

More from contemporary art: “Dirty Mirror” which is a painting of a mirror with disgusting leftover cocaine type leavings smeared uglily across it.

A sign three meters away from the mirror, so at first, I didn’t even realize that it was a piece of art.

Marguerite Gérard, An Architect and His Family, 1787. Am I correct in thinking that Madame Marguerite, 250 years ago, transferred lens distortion onto the canvas? 😉 The children’s faces at the edges are oddly wide

The Baltimore Museum is one of the best. An absolute must-see. But sometimes, amid the rooms, you encounter something odd from the contemporary. What is that, snot between her fingers? Elle Pérez, Pull

Walking through the Baltimore Museum of Art. I see—Venice, familiar places. Decided to compare how it looks today with what it was like in 1750. Especially since we remember these places—we were there six months ago.

Having breakfast in an interesting cafe in Baltimore. Their menu includes behavior rules 😉 no screaming kids, no strollers, tables are for at least two people, groups should gather outside before entering, a minimum spend of $15 per person, sharing a plate with a neighbor is allowed, but costs extra, and balloons must be parked outside the cafe.

Currently rereading Sapiens by Harari and was surprised to learn for myself that Cunei Form is cuneiform. I always thought that the name of the once-popular OCR system from the Russian company Cognitive, CuneiForm, a competitor to FineReader, was just nonsensical gibberish. And it turns out, it’s cuneiform.

Went to Google what’s up with Cognitive.

Since its foundation in 1990, a lot has happened with Cognitive Technologies. They developed text recognition algorithms, which in 1992-93 were integrated into Lotus Organizer, the graphic editor CorelDRAW, the business card scanning system BCR, and the bank form scanning software of Electronic Data Systems, while the CuneiForm application was sold through retail networks and bundled with popular scanners (Epson, HP, Xerox, and others).

Today, nothing is left of that business. Around 2014, the focus shifted to autonomous vehicles, and for a while, Olga Uskova was sharing achievements in the field of self-driving harvesters in my news feed. Essentially, this is a completely new startup, even though the name Cognitive remains the same as before.

Cognitive Technologies’ competitor, ABBYY, has long been erasing all traces of its past business in Russia, and is now headquartered in Charlotte, NC. I don’t know how they are doing, but David Yan’s company is one of the few IT companies born in the nineties that entered the global market, made a name for themselves, and are still somewhat alive to this day. The rest are either dead or nearly dead. Among them, for instance, is Kaspersky Lab, which has been losing the market rapidly for many years, not to mention as of 2023.

I have 25 outlets in my hotel room.