Got access to OpenAI Search. Something is disappointing—why are the sources in Russian? Yes, I asked in Russian, but what does that have to do with the choice of sources? If you ask in English, everything is fine.
By the way, Google responds to such a query immediately with “I can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now.”
Perplexity has a much cooler UI for now. Attaching screenshots
Denis Krupchatnikov is a fantastic artist! He runs his own drawing and painting school in Moscow, “MasterDraw Studio.” If I were nearby, I would love to learn Denis’s techniques, drawing, and painting. Most of his works are just sketches made in one go, but his technique speaks so loudly about how to paint with oils that it’s hard not to hear it. Here you have perfect color mastery, an understanding of primary and secondary elements, and the creation of form through simplification. In short, it’s pure joy. Best of luck to Denis.
Remember that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, you can find all 97 (unlike Facebook, which forgets about almost half of them).
Last weekend we drove to Annapolis, which is about a 1.5-hour drive from our house. There you’ll find the Naval Academy – the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA). They train officers for the Marine Corps and officers for the U.S. Navy there.
Anyone with an ID is allowed on the grounds. They don’t photograph your documents or log them anywhere, but the area is certainly equipped with high-resolution cameras, so there’s no need for such measures. The territory includes educational buildings, dormitories, sports facilities, administrative buildings, historical monuments, and memorials. You can enter almost anywhere, and on Sundays in the summer, it’s almost deserted. You can wander around the floors of the educational buildings, see theses with formulas on the walls, almost all classrooms are open. No doubt the vigilant security is monitoring curious visitors through cameras, but still, the openness is quite striking. In total, we met at most a dozen other tourists, and this on a 137-hectare site. I don’t know whether few people know about it or everyone has already visited.
On one of the floors, for example, I found a pool for testing underwater robots. This pool, equipped with 40 surface and underwater motion capture cameras (Qualisys Oqus 7+), can pinpoint the position of the tested object 300 times a second. And there are many such laboratories there, I didn’t photograph everything (don’t know why). For instance, I discovered a planetarium in one of the rooms. A regular classroom door, and inside there’s a dome ceiling and a retractable robotic “head”.
In the courtyard, there was something happening that I jokingly called “yoga for sailors.” It was also worth recording, but somehow felt awkward to do so. On the field, a group of cadets in branded white sport suits sat in a precise grid, each with a bag and water beside them — all uniform, logos of the academy visible. The leader was shouting through a megaphone “two, three, four,” and after each count, the cadets responded “two sir! three sir! four sir!” and on each count, they synchronously did something, like jumping, or some kind of stretching. On the side stood three people with limited mobility, someone on crutches, someone in a cast, participating as best as they could.
And it’s still the summer, the campus is half-empty. Apparently, some kind of preparation for the main academic year.
The academy is waterfront, and understandably, there are many yachts around, including training ones. Sea wolves in training, so practice is essential.
Everything on the campus is impeccable. Despite the academy being state-run, every detail screams “this is a prestigious place where no expense is spared.” It’s interesting that getting into the USNA is not so straightforward.
Admission to the USNA is a complex and multi-layered process, involving several stages. Candidates must secure a nomination from a member of the U.S. Congress, the vice president, or the president. This stage involves writing essays, interviews, and extensive preparation. In addition to the standard application, it is necessary to provide SAT or ACT scores, academic grades, and recommendations. Additionally, candidates must pass a physical test (Candidate Fitness Assessment), which includes running, push-ups, pull-ups, and other exercises, plus a medical examination. In general, it’s a tough process that also involves members of the United States Congress. Fascinating.
Well, the main thing is — it’ll work on the provided test, right? Can’t wait for ChatGPT to replace programmers.
An interesting Canadian-American artist — Jennifer McChristian. I like how she finds and uses contrast and colors. During my last vacation, I took my DSLR with me (I’m gradually posting photos from the Czech Republic and Germany). In Europe, there are a lot more contrasting colors in everything, more than I see in the USA. I don’t know why this happened. One of the skills of an artist (a skill that I’m also trying to develop in myself) is to notice such contrasting scenes in life, and if they are not there but are needed, to be able to slightly embellish reality by overlaying a kind of filter where the colors become brighter and the contrast stronger. In some ways, this resembles HDR, only done in the mind (by the way, have you noticed that in the last five years at least, there’s been no talk about HDR photography at all?)
I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the ‘Art Rauf Likes’ section, all 96 posts are available (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half of them)
Walking with Yuki
Biden spoke somewhere recently
I’m thinking of creating a next-generation palette. Somehow, these aren’t available for sale.
Here’s the issue. If you leave oil paints out in the air, by the next day they start to dry out, and after a few days, you have to throw them away. If it’s a thin layer, it dries up significantly; if squeezed out from a tube, a crust forms and you still end up throwing it away after a few days because mixing the crust with the normal paint inside is subpar.
To preserve them, there are special tubes where you can scrape off the paint and put it in the freezer. It’s tedious, I don’t do that. But there are special palettes with airtight lids. I believe only Masterson makes them, and I have one such palette. But even then, the paint dries out because there is a lot of space under the lid, and that’s enough. So essentially, if you take a break for a week — you might as well clean the entire palette and squeeze out new paint.
Well, the paint isn’t cheap either. One large tube of a single color costs about $25, and I have about 25 tubes of different colors. True, they’ve lasted me a year already, and they’re still going because I don’t apply them thickly with a palette knife. Obviously, the white paint runs out faster.
Additionally, the palette from Masterson is sold as just an empty plastic box, which is difficult to clean from dried paint. Any scraper would scratch the plastic. I insert a piece of glass in it, and under the glass, a sheet of gray paper. One piece of the right size glass sells for $36, but you could buy a picture frame and use the glass from it — which ends up three times cheaper. A scraper for glass works great – it cleanly removes even the most dried-up paint. It’s sold in hardware stores — practically eternal. And you need gray paper under the glass, which is sold everywhere.
But back to drying. Here’s what I think – what if we could integrate a pump in the lid that sucks out the air? You press a button — and the air is evacuated, the lid presses even tighter, and it seems like then the paints could stay fresh practically forever.
An artist almost buys a palette once in a lifetime. What’s gonna break there, anyway? At least now there would be something to… no, but seriously, paying an extra $20-30 for such a “feature” wouldn’t be a problem at all. They could even sell the glass, scraper, and gray paper as a kit, so you wouldn’t have to buy all this separately, and in different stores.
Ordered a pump for $9, let’s give it a try.
Sometimes, in museums, you can find some very interesting exhibits. Here’s one lying on the floor at the Schwarzenberský palác museum in Prague. I snapped a photo right away, and did a bit of research upon returning home.
This device is a product of Soundlazer, a company that launched on Kickstarter back in 2012 by Richard Haberkern. The device is a speaker that focuses an audio “beam” in a special way. As you can see in the picture, it consists of an array of tiny speakers, each of which is ultrasonic, meaning they emit sound beyond the audio spectrum audible to us. These ultrasonic waves interfere with each other, and as a result, we hear sound within the audible spectrum. Interestingly, you can create this interference at a certain spot in space, so that only there will the input to this device be clearly audible. In practice, this means you hear sound only in specific spots in a room where the device is directed. And if you reflect the sound off the walls… it can well be used to effectively voice hauntings, because the sound seems to come “out of nowhere” 🙂 Or in a museum, it could make a guide that speaks about a sculpture only to a person standing in front of it, while someone only a meter away hears almost nothing. I haven’t tested, but I suspect there must be some high-frequency whistling sound. Does anyone know?
It’s particularly intriguing that such a device can be assembled at home for just a few tens of dollars. It’s really very simple in its minimal form. However, if you think about buying it – I have disappointing news: Soundlazer has long been closed, and a company called Audio Spotlight by Holosonics sells their devices at very high prices, starting at $500. Devices from Ultrasonic-Audio are also quite expensive. VideoTel’s HSS 3000 speakers cost $1275. There are also good solutions from Brown Innovations. But all these are very costly.
Soundlazer was cheap and, interestingly, open source. Although, as we see in the picture, it also used cheap piezoelectric elements to generate sound at frequencies of 40-45 kHz, which probably compromised the sound quality. But it should have been suitable for museums! And interestingly, there is no direct replacement. The cost of a Soundlazer kit ranged from $170 to $200! According to videos, the sound quality was pretty good.
I’ll post a link to the video in the comments.
Yesterday we rode our bikes along a trail in Temple Hills, MD. Surprisingly, even in 2024, racial contrasts are still preserved in neighborhoods that are generally quite prosperous. People prefer to live in areas where their neighbors resemble them in culture and skin color, which makes sense. But the figures astounded me. According to the Census, there are only 2% White; the remaining 98% is divided among Black/African Americans (82%) and predominantly Hispanic (13%). Along the trail, we came across a great sports complex with a skating rink and plenty of courts in perfect condition, featuring free outdoor yoga and the like. However, during the two hours, we only encountered two other cyclists, and probably needless to mention, we were the only white people among everyone we ran into at all. Still, the area has no wealthy homes, but everything is neat and (at least during the day) very safe and peaceful.
Interestingly, I noticed that many people in the 95-degree heat were walking around in autumn jackets and jeans. This correlated quite well with my recent photo about autumn (though sadly, nobody passed by when I was shooting). I did a bit of Googling, and it seems, at least for Mexicans, this is normal. Clearly, shorts are not even considered (culturally; shorts equal low status), but apparently wearing T-shirts isn’t common either. Plus, they protect their skin from the sun as best they can (the reasons are unclear to me; they mention cancer risk, but darn it, for dark skin…).
Across the bridge is Alexandria, where the percentage of the Black population is 20% (In my city, in Leesburg, it’s even half that, 10%, but it’s still a 40-minute drive west from there).
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 