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  • Ovid

    I bit the bullet and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday. The electricity at my house went out and I called my neighbor to confirm that it wasn’t just our house.  He put his wife on the phone who wanted to ask me about getting a new computer, since for whatever reason I always get computer questions this time of year. She said “he got a new Mac Pro last year and suggested I get a Chromebook”. I asked to be put on speaker phone and I laughed out loud after I told him not to cheap out on her new computer.  Needless to say, the power outage and that conversation were just enough to spur me into action. 

    The first thing I noticed when I opened the Apple site was that they announced a $10 million dollar contribution and lawsuit against the NSO group which was just more evidence that financially supporting Apple is in my best interests. I only made a month after the M1 Pro Announcement. The model I had been looking for happened to be about the only one in stock and within driving distance. I’d been preparing for the ARM transition1 by preparing my old computers2 since purchasing an ARM tablet3. I was kinda tempted to wait until the M1Pro processors made it into the Mini because I found that I mostly work from my desk, but the power outage was a good reminder of why it’s nice to have a permanent battery backup.  I did my due diligence on the benchmarks and the M1max and 32GB are a waste unless you’re consistently working with things like rendering 3d textures or color correction in 4k.  I got a silver 16”/10core/16GB/1TB. When the gal at the Apple store asked me what I’d be using it for, I said “email” and “surfing the web”.  She sorta gave me a strange look as to why I might have gone overkill.

    I’m usually a bit of a late adopter and I’m pretty thrifty when it comes to computers. I rarely upgrade unless needed. This computer is replacing a 2013 2GHz i7 which was just now starting to have some very minor issues. Eight years is not a bad lifespan for a laptop. This is only my third personal MacBook Pro with almost eight years between each of them. I’ve now had six MacBook Pros including my work issued laptops. My first was a 2007 17” 2.33GHz Core Duo. It’s still running perfectly fine when I loaded it up last week to consolidate my backup files. After eight years on each, the only issue I ever suffered was a bit of battery swell from the constant usage and the lack of cycling the batteries properly. One was replaced for free on the 2007 model and I’ll do the repair on the 2013 model myself so I can keep it running as well. I managed to miss the touch bar, butterfly keyboard, and the non-magsafe versions. 

    Above is a screenshot of my previous machines. All of them are still running perfectly fine and one still had the date set to 2007. I hope this one last me another eight years. I’m a stickler for documentation and I’ve started some notes on the setup and transition which I’ll publish for reference6. I’m pretty particular about naming my machines6,7 and after working with this one for a bit, I’ve decided to name it Ovid. 

    First off, it’s short and easy to type with one hand per key in order, it shares the last three characters of my first name, and makes a subtle period reference to ’Covid’. But most importantly, it’s symbolic. Ovid8 ( Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō  43BC – 17AD ) authored Metamorphosis9. In it, he insists that ‘audentem Forsque Venusque iuvat’ ( Venus, like fortune, favors the bold ) elevating the role of love, belief, and chance while the other gods are ridiculed. The current macOS version, Monterey reminds me of epitome of the summer of love. I’ve tried to connect to this sorta state of mind in dealing with circumstance. “He who can believe himself well, will be well”; “Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish”;”If you are not ready today, you will be even less so tomorrow”. The reason I thought about Ovid, is that I had been recently reading a good bit about the five rivers of Hades because a local farm, originally named after the river Lethe, had been in the news9. Ovid and Virgil wrote that Lethe was the river of ‘forgetfulness’ bordered by Elysium, the resting place of the virtuous10. Lethe flowed through Hypnos, the god of sleep and that the dead drank from the river Lethe so that they forget earthly life to be reincarnated. 

    Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit
    ( All things change, nothing perishes )

    ― Ovid, Metamorphoses11
    1. Arm – https://davidwindham.com/arm/
    2. Magic – https://davidwindham.com/til/docs/computers/magic
    3. iPad – https://davidwindham.com/ipad/
    4. Late Adopter – https://davidwindham.com/late-adopter/
    5. Today I Learned / Ovid – https://davidwindham.com/til/docs/computers/ovid
    6. Dotfiles – https://code.davidawindham.com/david/dotfiles 
    7. Anthropomorphizing Machines – https://davidwindham.com/anthropomorphizing-machines/
    8. Ovid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid
    9. John De La Howe – http://schpr.sc.gov/index.php/Detail/properties/44370 
    10. Lethe – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe 
    11. Metamorphoses Ovid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses

  • Greasy Medlin

    I found these photos while browsing a directory of scans of old slides on one of my drives. That’s me on the bottom left… the little one looking not too thrilled about the whole clown thing. The only information I had on it was the date written on the box and the other slides from the same box. It was dated as May 1975. The other photos show some sort of music event which appears to have happened in Columbia, South Carolina.  Regardless to say, I started a deep dive on them and ended up learning quite a bit about early American traveling medicine shows.  The first is Julian Leonard ‘Greasy’ Medlin with the clown face. That’s DeWitt ‘Snuffy’ Jenkins with the cap and banjo behind him on stage who played alongside of Homer ‘Pappy’ Sherrill on the fiddle.  ‘Snuffy’ and ‘Pappy’ have Wikipedia pages1,2 so I started a draft for ‘Greasy’ which got me to researching for resources. One of the first resources I found is a video of my uncle introducing Snuffy playing Beaumont Rag on the washboard for a television program in 19743.

    Snuffy and Pappy started playing together in the late 1930s as the Hillbillies and changed their name to The Hired Hands around 1950. Greasy played in the Aristocratic Pigs in the 30s and joined the Hired Hands in the 40s.  The majority of this was documented by Pat Ahrens in the book Carolina Bluegrass: A High Lonesome History4.  Greasy also worked as a country and western sideman for Hank Williams5 ,was possibly Cherokee Indian, and is featured in the film Free Show Tonight the Last of the Medicine Show by Academy award winning filmmaker Paul Wagner and folklorist Steve Zeitlin. It’s narrated by Roy Acuff6 and available online7. One of the last medicine show practitioners, Peg Leg Sam8, was also from South Carolina. A documentary that was made about him that was featured in the film Amelie9. Other early performers from South Carolina like the Reverend Gary Davis10, Pinky Anderson11, Drink Small12, and Joshua White13 also had close ties to early American traveling medicine shows and revivals.

    Traveling medicine shows began in the Dark Ages after Rome was sacked and when the Roman Catholic church succeeded in banning circuses and theatre in 568 AD. Many authors cite Tabarin14, an early Parisian street Charlatan as inspiration. Tabarin became and eponym for any street performer and the origins of Minstrel Shows, Charlatans, Blackface, Burlesques, Cabaret, and Vaudeville can be traced similarly. P.T. Barnum’s Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome15 was obviously inspired. The Ziegfeld Follies16 alongside of almost all of the most famous early American entertainers like Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton, Fred Astaire, Pearl Bailey, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Will Rodgers, Josephine Baker, Bob Hope, and Harry Houdini.  I don’t think I’ll ever see Burl Ives the same way now that I know he travelled as a vagabond musician during the 30’s playing banjo and used the song The Wayfaring Stranger17 as the title of his 40’s radio show popularizing traditional folk songs.

    Another aspect of the early American traveling medicine shows that I find interesting is the ‘medicine’ pitch and how that too has had a very lasting impact on our culture. The elixirs and tonics peddled between the entertainment seldom treated illness but instead relied on the pleasurable effects of alcohol, opium, and cocaine. By 1900, the patent medicine industry was an $80 million dollar business.  Coca-Cola was based on Vin Mariani and originally called Pemberton’s French Wine Cola by a morphine addict who had suffered a sword injury in the civil war.18  It was only made non-alcoholic after the temperance movement. Asa Griggs Candler, who bought and marketing the recipe, father had served in the of South Carolina Legislature. One of the last traveling medicine shows was organized by Louisiana state Senator Dudley LeBlanc for his patent medicine Hadacol19. The Hadacol Caravan featured many of the early vaudeville celebrities, blues, and country musicians. There is a small part of me that really likes the circus tradition and I think I’d be best suited as a pitch man for the medicine. I’ve contemplated my own brand of tonics in the past like opening a micro-distillery. I also recently learned that Groucho Marx once owned the largest apple orchard in America in South Carolina20 and have considered the idea of making and marketing an infused cider using the iconic ‘Groucho glasses”21. 

    “That’s the way a carnival man is. He don’t give them anything, yet he gives them something– entertainment, experience, or amusement for the chicken feed he takes away from them at his rack or wheel or ring board. And if he has a run of “mud-luck,” he always finds a way to get out somehow, raise a stake, and climb back into the game. You don’t see any genuine old-time carnival birds working the street for a dime, or picking up crumbs from a kitchen back door. They’re independent; and even if they’re down to the last two bits, you’d never know it by looking at them, or hear it from their own lips. They might do a lot of cussing in private, but never a hard-luck story to outsiders. They’ve always got some kind of idea tucked back in their head that they can pull out and turn into ham-and-egg money somehow.”

    – interview by Earl Bowmand of the Federal Writers Project, New York City22

    Snuffy, Pappy, and Greasy recorded two albums on the Rounder label. Crazy Water Barn Dance was published in 76 and it took me a bit to figure out where the title came.  At the age of 13, Greasy joined Dr. H.E. Foxworth’s Medicine Show to travel. Foxworth was from Dallas, TX and the Crazy Water Crystals Company23 was just right outside of Dallas in Mineral Wells. That company was known during the great depression to sponsor many ‘hillbilly’ music programs. Crazy Water Crystals claimed to aid in the treatment of a variety of disorders resulting from ‘faulty elimination’. The company had sponsored them to play across the country until the FDA cracked down on their advertising claims in the which lead to their decline.  They were long time sponsors of same titled radio program on WBT in Charlotte in the 30s where Snuffy got his start. 

    Take a close look at what’s going on today with whatever is being peddled by various other ‘info’ or ‘enter’-tainers and you can spot the similarities. Everything is essentially something pitched alongside of some form of entertainment to make you feel better, sleep better, look better, ad infinitum. If you want a quick skit on the travelling medicine show, the Paul McCartney and Micheal Jackson 1983 music video for Say Say Say24 is an homage to it. Jackson must have enjoyed it enough to purchase the property on which it was filmed to convert it to the Neverland Ranch. This deep dive on Greasy as turned into a lesson on how much our current advertising, entertainment, and even pharmaceutical businesses were inspired by the traditions of the early American traveling medicine show.  

    So I’ve got a wikipedia draft started for Julian ‘Greasy’ Medlin for perpetuity. Snuffy sold cars for a while in Columbia during the late 60s, died in 1990, and there is now a NC music festival in his honor. Greasy died in Columbia, SC in 1982. I looked up the Lexington address listed in Greasy’s obituary25 and it’s now a McDonalds. In a way, isn’t a clown pitching fried potatoes and cola-cola more of a medicine show than we might ever acknowledge.  

    Here’s a playlist I made while writing this post:
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuffy_Jenkins
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pappy_Sherrill
    3. Picken Time WIS-TV https://www.knowitall.org/video/beaumont-rag-digital-traditions
    4. Carolina Bluegrass: A High Lonesome History –https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467118248
    5. Greasy Meadlin – https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=63180
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Acuff
    7. Free Show Tonight – https://www.folkstreams.net/films/free-show-tonite
    8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_Leg_Sam
    9. https://www.folkstreams.net/films/born-for-hard-luck
    10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverend_Gary_Davis
    11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson
    12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_Small
    13. Joshua White – https://davidwindham.com/joshua-white/
    14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabarin
    15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
    16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegfeld_Follies
    17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayfaring_Stranger_(song)
    18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
    19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadacol
    20. Horseshoe Lake Farms – https://visitoconeesc.com/long-creek-place-to-visit/
    21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses
    22. First Person America – https://books.google.com/books?id=yUXgCgAAQBAJ
    23. Crazy Water Crystals – https://drinkcrazywater.com/cw/crazy-water-history/
    24. Say Say Say – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLEhh_XpJ-0
    25. Greasy Medlin obituary- https://www.findagrave.com/photos/2013/24/23638441_135915345659.jpg

  • Keowee

    Keowee – “place of the mullberries”

    I took a trip up to lake Keowee1 with the better half last weekend.

    1. Lake Keowee – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee

  • COVID-19

    I became a statistic as a break-through case because I got a positive test result back last week. I’ll share my experience and opinions on it for anyone interested. I’ve been more than cautious for well over a year. And when I say cautious… We took delivery groceries and skipped anything social until we were vaccinated. I’ve continued to wear a mask almost anywhere I’m indoors with others. I had the J&J vaccine back in late March. I’m in good health and I exercise regularly. I get my flu shot annually and I very rarely get sick. This last weekend, I felt pretty bad after a tennis match. I play tennis multiple times a week and this wasn’t a particularly grueling match. Checked my temp and was running a low grade fever. Took a cold shower. Got out and felt short of breath and knew something wasn’t right. What really tipped me off was when I went to take a leak and opened the door to the trashcan below the sink instead of the commode lid. As much as that sounds funny, that was the real indication that it was something serious. 

    I informed the better half, had some dinner and started coughing later that evening. It was dry choking sorta cough. I woke up in the middle of the night and took my temp again. Now I’m up to 101, I’m sweating, and I’m coughing every other minute. I drown it with NyQuil and we head over to a drive through COVID-19 testing site at my local hospital first thing in the morning. At the opening bell, we still have wait in line for about an hour and there are 30 plus cars lined up behinds us.  The swab up the nose really wasn’t that bad. I take copious amounts of Advil and decongestant and lie down for the rest of the day. I fall asleep a couple of times while the fever wains off and on for the rest of the day. Still coughing and it’s starting to hurt my neck and head when I do. I’m up on and off throughout the next night. 

    24 hours go by and I’m logging into check my test results. Nada. So now I feel miserable and I’m a bit worried because I’m still running a solid fever. I message my doctors office to let em know I’m awaiting results and not feeling well. I lay out of a meeting and some tennis matches. My wife calls in for a sick day. I get an email saying I have a new message. 

    SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA is DETECTED. The patient is considered infected with the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus and presumed to be contagious.

    What the hell… where did I get it? I likely got it 4-5 days before the onset of any symptoms1. Now I’m isolating from my wife and my pets. I also have a new symptom called pissed-off-ed-ness. I text or email anyone I’ve been in contact with over the last week. That’s always fun because everyone is supportive and has their own various recommendations to share. I get a phone call from the healthcare system asking me to isolate for the next 10 days and I get a message from my doctor that I don’t meet the requirements for the monoclonal antibody treatment due to my good health and age. He informs me that the symptoms will last 7-14 days and suggest treating them with cough syrup, Tylenol, and a Vitamin D supplement. I trust my doctor. He’s a pretty wholistic sorta fella and I always inspect his cart when I see him in the grocery store. I saw him just a couple weeks ago and we spoke. He asked what I’ve been up to and I told him I was on contract with a university where’d I’d already finished the work and mostly just been playing tennis. He smiled and asked me if I could get him a job. 

    I start dosing vitamins and measuring my blood oxygen levels. I’m consistently reading in around 94% for blood oxygen which is pretty poor for someone in my shape. I lost almost all of my sense of smell and taste. Mostly I just feel completely congested and tired. I used to smoke cigarettes and that’s part of the reason I’ve been so cautious about COVID. My doc and I have previously discussed my low HDL as possibly mixed hyperlipidemia2 which is basically an inherited lipid disorder that means my bad cholesterol is high, my good cholesterol is low, and my Triglycerides are high. Basically just bad chemistry for your cardiovascular system. It’s a main part of the reason I try to eat healthy with and exercise regularly. It certainly gives me pause for concern about possible complications. 

    For the most part, I just ham’ed it up, laying around watching old Simpsons episodes and complaining about being tired. The better half thinks I actually started coughing a couple days prior to me running the fever but I don’t remember it. There are three places I think I could have been exposed to the virus.  I help coach a high school tennis team and several players were on quarantine in the week prior. I stay six feet from them outdoors and don’t fist-bump or any of that.  I won’t even use the restroom at the club. I played tennis with an out of town group of fellas earlier in the week. Same deal there though. I went to a meeting inside our neighborhood clubhouse with a couple others and I either had a mask on or tried to stay a pretty good distance from everyone. I went to the grocery store and wore a mask the whole time.  I think I got it from my dentist office…  as if people aren’t already sour enough at dentists. I could go on a length here about it, but I’ll just say that my hygienist wasn’t my usual. As I sat below her in the chair mouth wide open, I could see her ill fitting surgical mask was mostly falling below her nose as she expressed doubt in the case numbers complaining that they weren’t testing for the flu and that her trips to Israel had been cancelled. I had jokingly asked her if she had any symptoms before I took my mask off. Perhaps I just made her nervous from my sense of humor and frankness. I called the office to inform them that I had tested positive and they said “I hope you fell better”. I said “do you want to know my name or what day I was there?”

    I can’t really accurately blame anyone for catching COVID and nor should anyone else. It’s not like we have a good tracking system in place. And therein lies the issue which I believe is central to a lot of the bullshit going on that’s now spread to creating contentious local school board and municipal meetings. Blame…. China made it as a bioweapon, immigrants are bringing it across the border, African Americans are primary carriers, demons are using it to drive fear, it’s a ‘plandemic’ designed to create a ‘new world order’….  I recently watched several people accuse the Mayor of Charleston of being evil during a recent city council meeting discussing masks.  All of this sorta nonsense is plain out bullshit. It’s amazing how stupid people can be. Here’s a little video compilation I made of some selected comments from local board meetings3:

    South Carolina is now leading the nation in per capita COVID-19 infections with just under half of the population vaccinated. It’s rampant around these parts.  I’ve known a couple folks who have died from it and I know quite a few folks who don’t do the masks or vaccines. I think it’s mostly a weird ‘don’t mess with my freedoms’ sorta non-sense because they’re not necessarily uneducated or dumb people. I think that ironically, it’s a fear of the unknown which is a powerful motivator for both sides of the argument. I also think that part of that fear has been created by the simultaneous information overload and wasteland that our modern communications can be.  I can empathize with both sides even though I’m squarely behind the science. At this pace, It’s going to be around for a while.  

    The COVID-19 pandemic, like other historical pandemics, has created a rash of fear and conflict.  I could go on here, but I have a tendency to think that we’re the invasive pests carrying the virus. I believe that the world is full of randomness and that’s part of what makes it so magical. A little bat virus from the other half of the globe mutating as it carried around the world and making it into my lungs is pretty amazing despite it’s consequences on human life. This shirt of mine has become my favorite recently. I got it from McSweeny’s who recently published a pretty interesting take on vaccines4. 

    My symptoms cleared out after nine or ten days. That’s a pretty long time. Little virus was pretty nasty and trying to hang in there. My better half tested positive a week later and I think my cats and dog got it too.  I’m still taking vitamins and a low aspirin dose daily. I’ve been working in the yard a good bit to stay active and I haven’t noticed any profound tiredness or soreness.  I haven’t really noticed any other lingering symptoms although I am well aware that there is evidence of it having lasting effects on the body.  I’m just happy that we were vaccinated before we caught it. I also am glad that we didn’t spread it by being idiots. We’re back to having groceries delivered and we’ll make sure we wait out the 14 day isolation before we go anywhere.  Even when I do, I’ll still wear a mask indoors until the numbers are back down. I’m just really looking forward to when we can all put this behind us and I hope that somehow we can all learn something from it. 

    1. CDC Interim Clinical Guidance for Management of Patients with Confirmed Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html
    2. Hyperlipidemia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlipidemia
    3. Video compilation sources: Aug 23rd Lexington Richland District 5 Board Meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw0Vkxs95XI , Aug 21st Charleston City Council Meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcXh3XepoWs , Aug 23rd Greenville School District Board meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBoJVI1fEWE.  
    4. McSweeny’s – https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/oh-my-fucking-god-get-the-fucking-vaccine-already-you-fucking-fucks 

  • Our Offices

    I think the home office is here to stay. I told those who shifted to telecommute1 that I had been practicing on it for years having quit a job that stopped allowing it. The better half has been doing more work out of the house and I finally convinced her of the benefits of that having some additional screen space. We got her a matching monitor setup and we’ve each got a little over eleven thousand horizontal pixels to work with. I think it was my demo of working on another screen while ignoring a teleconference meeting that sold it. And having our offices next door to one another means I can slowly sneak into her camera view while she’s having class or a meeting until she or her cohorts notice me in the background.

    1. Telecommuting – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommuting

  • Lisa

    tomato drawing

    The sketch above is my first attempt at using Adobe Fresco on my new iPad. It’s mostly just two ‘oil brushes’ and ‘pencil’ traced from a photo of a tomato I grew last year thinking about this years garden. It took me about four hours while listening to Smartless1. I mostly just wanted to show off my drawing but I’ve also been thinking about the iPad itself. I had explained the reasoning for buying it in my last two posts2,3 ,but I also got it because my better half is working long hours on a doctorate which means that I’m now avoiding the television in the evenings and I’m keeping myself occupied by drawing while listing to podcasts and audiobooks. I named her ‘lisa’ for a couple reasons. It’s a reference to the 1983 Apple computer4, Leonardo’s Mona5, and The Simpson6 since I’ve been watching all of the episodes again.

    Once again, Apple managed to hit my bank account again all while AAPL stock has gone down in the last couple months. The 12.9″ model costs about the same as my last 13″ Macbook pro. I joked with the staff when I picked it up that I now like to make matching company contributions to AAPL stock anytime I buy a device from them. I’m old enough to remember the Apple Newton and I remember watching Steve Jobs preview both the first iPod and iPhone. I never had a Newton or an iPod, but I jumped on version 1 of the iPhone because I recognized the potential and was neck deep in web development at the time. I got also got the first version of the iPad when it was released. I wasn’t really impressed. I felt like Apple was just expanding the novelty of the hand held touch devices in a larger format. We’ve had several versions of iPad since, but it’s never really felt like an integral part of my workflow excepting for anything other than a browsing device lying around the house. This one feels a bit different, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

    The Magic keyboard and Apple pencil should be required accessories. Apple should just package them together. I also added a unique screen covering called Paperlike7 after reading some reviews from illustrators on using the iPad. It gives a little bit of friction to the surface making the pencil strokes much more natural. It doesn’t interfere with anything else aside from adding a bit more anti-reflective quality to the screen. The screen is crazy good mainly because it’s borrowing the same mini LED technology from their five thousand dollar Liquid Retina XDR display. Only drawback of the display I’ve found thus far is that I’m now extremely disappointed with my current monitor setup and I’ve been digging through specs on getting a new monitor while trying to avoid the bill on the XDR8. My favorite monitors ever where the 27″ backlit Apple Cinema displays, but I’ve been wanting to ditch my dual monitors. Dear Apple, please make monitors again… preferably a 38+” 4K with the mini-LED sans the XDR price tag. The camera is also just straight up powerful when coupled with the display. I generally use my FujiFilm X-T3 if I’m ever out hunting photos, but it really makes me want to dongle the iPad display to the camera if I ever had to shoot seriously. I’ve really come to appreciate working with images on it and I can see where it’d fit in nicely to a photographer or videographer’s workflow.

    It’s not just the display, camera, pencil or keyboard… it’s mainly the horsepower. I can get the spinning beachball of death9 bouncing with just a couple hundred layers of brushstrokes in Photoshop or Illustrator on my current 16GB i9 Macbook pro. Import those into After Affects and it’s a beach ball party. Although the iPad has the same amount of memory, it’s both theoretically limited by iOS while the software has been optimized for iOS. I haven’t seen a glitch yet, but I’m sure I will once I get lost in a five hour session. I’m planning on switching my desktop and laptop out to ARM later this year. Needless to say, tablet computers and ARM are here to stay. I just published this web post using the iPad and I hope it inspires me to do some more illustrations. Quite frankly, I’m impressed that it’s working on nicely for both work and play. I hope the latter doesn’t take precedence, because I’ve been enjoying it more than the writing code. I came into development through the design door and that’ll likely be my exit too.

    1. Smartless Podcast – https://smartless.simplecast.com/
    2. ARM – https://davidwindham.com/arm/
    3. Age 50 – https://davidwindham.com/age-50/
    4. Apple Lisa – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
    5. Mona Lisa – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa
    6. Lisa Simpson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Simpson
    7. Paperlike – https://paperlike.com/
    8. Apple Pro Display XDR – https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/
    9. Spinning pinwheel – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel

  • ARM

    I’m a bit of a late adopter1 so I generally let the dust settle before diving in.  I just got my first Apple M12 device last week but I’ve been following the ARM architecture3 move relatively closely because I’m curious and my workflow depends on it. I bought an M1 iPad pro and I’m planning on switching out my main development computers this year after Apple releases a higher powered ARM chip now that the Linux Kernel v5.13 is fully supported. At this point, the higher powered chips are rumored to have between 10 and 32 core GPU options. I’d prefer to see a higher powered Mac Mini over a lower powered smaller form Mac Pro. My guess is that they’ll do both only offering the higher GPU core options on the later. 

    I always used one desktop and one laptop for my work. I’ve found myself a bit more tied to the desktop simply due to the monitor real estate and the laptop has been mostly reserved for the couch and travel. It’s important that I can replicate my develop environments across multiple devices and servers. Aside from graphics software, the vast majority of my work only depends on a couple text editors, several programming languages, some open source databases, a terminal, and a package manager.  All of which are now officially supported by the ARM architecture in the M1 Macs. I’m looking forward to making the switch on both my local machines and my servers. Both Debian and Ubuntu now support 64-bit AArch ARM versions. The primary reason I got the iPad pro was for the touch screen and apple pencil knowing that the M1 now has enough power to handle the graphics software efficiently.  Now that I’m not tied to a peripheral touch screen device strapped to my desk,  I can do the graphics work wherever. Although I’ve bemoaned the iOS system for a while, I’ve started to include the iPad as a working device not only for graphics, but also communications, messages, emails, and documents. The magic keypad is backlit, so it’s perfect for lounging on the couch or in bed.  I’ve come to really appreciate the simplified app versions of many applications while working on the iPad. The Adobe Suite products perform equally as well as their desktop versions running on my Intel i7 and i9 machines. Overall, the experience of working on the new M1 iPad is superb because of the weight, display, pencil, and performance. 

    Anyone who’s taken note of the performance benchmarks or has used an M1 device knows exactly how energy efficient and performant they are. In the early 90’s I remember considering a Sun Microsystem ARM based desktop over an Intel Mac. I can’t remember why I was drawn to the SPARC system because I certainly didn’t understand ARM then. The M1 Mac Mini only draws 39 Watts at maximum load and I haven’t once felt my new iPad turn into a lap warmer.  I’ve always just kinda suspected that ARM knew what they were doing simply because they were based in Cambridge. The old days of ARM just being in your Nokia phone or Nintendo Switch are over. Nvidia knows the deal. They spent $40 billion to acquire ARM Ltd last year4. ARM architecture now powers the worlds fastest super computer, the Japanese Fujitsu Fugaku running AAarch64 at 415 PetaFLOPs. It’s 2.8 times as fast as IBM Summit, it’s nearest competitor5.  It all started with the rise in mobile computing, but it certainly helped when ARM opened up the instruction set a couple of years ago. I think Intel and other companies will eventually adopt the the open-source RISC-V chip standard developed at the University of California at Berkeley6. 

    A friend of mine who teaches statistics at a regional university told me one time that he’s avoided technology based on advice he received that it’s a continuous learning curve verses a relatively static field of knowledge. I like to point out that his field of expertise is now dominated by programming.  For some reason, people just assume I know ALL technology and are always asking me tech questions that I have absolutely no clue about.  Mostly relatives asking me why their phone battery is dead or which printer to buy. I usually just search for answers and pass it off as expertise. Some folks recently ask me for some advice about investing in technology companies recently to which I simple answered ‘ARM’. I think the energy efficiency and performance will expand the usage in almost every area of computing. R.I.P. x86, but please don’t short Intel or buy Fujitsu based on my take here. 

    So for now, I’m watching out to make sure all of my software dependencies are available for ARM. First to market is not always best and I’d prefer to be a bit of a late adopter and not adjust any of my workflow. MySQL beat MariaDB and RHEL beat Ubuntu to it. I’m prodding my favorite hosting company for adoption. Oracle just released hosted ARM powered servers based on Ampere chips7 and Amazon’s is using Neoverse cores for it’s ARM powered servers8. The video below is from a fella who happens to be in Charleston, South Carolina this week… because well, he lives mostly on a boat. You can follow him and his wife along over at https://mvdirona.com/9. In it he explains how much of the software on his boat is powered by ARM processors.

    Although I understand much of the fundamentals, I’m still just searching up the references and passing it off as expertise. As long as my computers, software, servers, and web applications are performing well for cheap, I’m content on not digging any deeper into the fundamentals of CISC10 vs. RISC11. I’d guess that my new ARM lineup should last me about ten years. Perhaps chips will move from silicon to graphene by then. According to Moore’s law, obsolescence will eventually push us up against the limits to growth12 . Americans throw away out 400,000 phones daily13. We should consider the consequences. Personally, I think technology has the ability to create as many, if not more problems than it actually helps solve. I also don’t think we humans have the capacity to come up with any problems that will require 128-bit computing, so we’re certainly nearing those limits. 

    1. Late Adopter – David A. Windham – https://davidwindham.com/late-adopter/ 
    2. Apple M1 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1 
    3. ARM architecture – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
    4. Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion, Creating World’s Premier Computing Company for the Age of AI. – https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai/
    5. Fujistu Fugaku – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Arm_supercomputers 
    6. RISC-V – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
    7. ARM-based cloud computing is the next big thing: Introducing Arm on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/arm-based-cloud-computing-is-the-next-big-thing-introducing-arm-on-oci
    8. AWS Graviton Processor – https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
    9. Dirona Around the World – James Hamilton – https://mvdirona.com/
    10. CISC – Complex Instruction Set Computer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_instruction_set_computer 
    11. RISC – Reduced Instruction Set Computer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computer
    12. Moore’s Law – Consequences – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Consequences 
    13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Cleaning up Electronic Waste – https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/cleaning-electronic-waste-e-waste

  • Age 50

    Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg: Ages of Man

    For some time now, I’ve just been telling folks I’m “almost 50”. I’ve always wanted to be older for some reason. Perhaps it’s because I feel like age seems to equal respect. I’m particularly fond of saying to high school kids when I’m playing tennis against them. I’ve still got a couple years to go but needless to say, my age is catching up with me just like everyone else. My eyesight is starting to suffer from the screens and my doctor scheduled my first colonoscopy. Evidently, they’ve moved the first screening recommendation back to age 45 and It’s likely because we were talking about Crohn’s disease because we both had family members affected.  I likely started writing this due to the fact that it’s the only thing on my mind.  I can’t eat anything today and I’m already hungry even though I’m trying to distract myself with other work this morning. I’m certainly not looking forward to the next 24 hours. 

    I was kinda thinking about backing out of the screening, but after talking with a number for folks, I heard too many stories about missed diagnosis of family members.  My dad said he liked to stay awake and watch the camera in action, but I’m opting to be put out. I did some other research and watched a live stream of a colonoscopy from UC Irvine1.  I talked with some others who’ve had the procedure…. etc.  Fast Forward post procedure: All turned out well. The doc put me on the ten year schedule because he said I had a ‘good looking’ colon. Well good on me I suppose because I’m scheduled for the next one in ten years. I’ll take any medical screening my insurance will pay for. I’d have a full CT Scan and a complete diagnostic blood test done annually. I’ve asked my gastroenterologist for a copy of the video to post here because… why not. Who doesn’t want to see the inside of my colon?  In all seriousness, I think it’s everyone’s individual responsibility to manage their own health and records. I’ve been told “doctors and lawyers: always get a second opinion” and my own doctor cited that her father had “perfect health at age 84 because he never sees doctors”. 

    I think the real takeaway from the whole shindig is having to consider my own health and mortality. I’ve always thought that I had a decent take on mortality for whatever reason. I commonly use the expression that “we’re all in the process of dying”.  Two thirds of people die from age related causes2. Regardless, I’d like to delay that as long as possible with diet, exercise, and lifestyle. I do my best there even thought I’ve got a little bit of a logical fatalist3 spirit that regularly reminds me of the countless cases of causal determinism4 and to which I can easily blame my propensity to add chocolate ice cream to the shopping cart somewhat regularly. There is something inherently natural about that approach and I’ve found that the punchline in comedy often revolves around those types of truths. Aristophanes, who’s regarded as the “father of comedy” wrote5 ”How many are the things that vex my heart! Pleasures are few, so very few — just four – But stressful things are manys and thousands and heaps!” I visited my dad recently for his 71st birthday who shared a joke he had shared privately amongst several others at at a relatives funeral. My uncle Jack died to which he exclaimed… “hey y’all… Jack in a box”. Even though it got repeated by his brother and folks got mad at him, it makes me smile just thinking about it and I’ll remember that about my father long after he’s gone. 

    Research suggests that people who appreciate dark humor show lower aggression, have higher IQs, and resist negative feelings more effectively6.  I’ve had a great time joking about the colonoscopy with others. It’s a great way of dealing with reality. Perhaps Sigmund Freud had it spot on when he wrote in Der Humor “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer”7.  The Nike slogan “Just Do It” was actually inspired by the last words of Gary Gilmore before he was executed8. As was the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song. André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor9 is a good starting point on the subject. I gravitate towards it. Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut, Warren Zevon, Thomas Pynchon, etc. Do realize that when you watch Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, that Sacha Baron Cohen graduated with honours from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a degree in history10. Artists, writers, filmmakers, philosophers and that ilk have been using comedy to enlighten us for eons. 

    I’m sincerely grateful that I came back with positive results having heard of so many missed diagnosis from acquaintances. The colon probe left me with two important findings in that I think it’s equally important to be proactive with your health and to mock your own mortality. Even though my take on it is just a defense mechanism, the fact of the matter is I’m still several years away from age 50. And as much as I bemoaned the whole process, I have a tendency to hang the carrot out in front of me when I’m trying to accomplish something. In this case, I decided to go pick up a new iPad pro and schedule an eye appointment as a reward. So now the whole procedure is costing me a little bit more.  As my 92 year old grandmother in-law put it so eloquently over the phone “what they were really looking for sticking a camera in your bum is money”.  Here’s to 50 more years and cheers to all of you in the process of dying. 

    1. UC Irvine Live Colonoscopy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNYQvifia6g
    2. Aging – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing 
    3. Logical Fatalism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalism 
    4. Causal Determinism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Causal_determinism 
    5. Aristophanes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes#cite_note-74 
    6. Cognitive and emotional demands of black humor processing: the role of intelligence, aggressiveness, and mood. – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5383683/ 
    7. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/ 
    8. The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words – New York Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/business/media/20adco.html
    9. Anthology of Black Humor – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthology_of_Black_Humor
    10. Sacha Baron Cohen – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacha_Baron_Cohen

  • Bill Evans

    Bill Evans – Milano 1969 (photo by Roberto Polillo)

    On occasion, something will strike me and I’ll do what I like to call a ‘deep dive distraction’ on it, which is how the majority of these posts get started. I listen to a lot of music when I’m in front of the machines. I’ve been keeping tabs on my listening habits for the last ten years and my most played musician is Bill Evans1. This last week, I had From Left to Right2on repeat and I’m listening to it again as I’m writing this. I think it’s the interplay of the Fender Rhodes3 and Steinway pianos and it’s likely where the title came from with the album cover image of him playing each instrument on each hand even though he didn’t like electric instruments. 

    Part of the reason he’s topping my charts is that I’ve listened to The Complete Fantasy Recordings more times than I’d like to count. It was originally a 9-CD box set. I’m not even sure about why I like his music because I don’t have enough of a comprehension of music theory to explain. I think that this fact is something Bill would appreciate and understand.  The primary motivation for this essay was watching an interview last week between him and his brother in the 1966 documentary film entitled the Universal Mind of Bill Evans4where he explains: 

    “In fact, I would often rely more on the judgement of a sensitive layman than that of a professional, since the professional, because of his constant involvement with the mechanics of music, must fight to preserve the naivety that the layman already possesses.”

    This really struck a chord with me.  For many years, I went without knowing anything about Bill Evans life. I just listened to it because I enjoyed it. I’ve learned that he had an instrumental influence on two other albums I’m a fan of: Miles Davis Kind of Blue and Chet Baker Chet. ( Ha… that’s twice I’ve had a play on words related to music ‘struck a chord’ and ‘instrumental’ ) Needless to say,  I’m a bit more in the know now and I’m not going to rehash anything you can’t read online.  I’ll link to them below in my references. The most interesting resource I’ve found is now a document published by Matt Evans, who I’m guessing has some relation. It’s entitled The Two Brothers As I Knew Them – Harry and Bill Evans6 and written by Pat Evans the wife of Harry Evans. In it, she details a bit of personal influence on Bill by Rollo May7. May also had a sibling diagnosed with schizophrenia like Bill and I can better understand the influence.

    “It’s more the mind that thinks jazz than the instrument that plays jazz that interests me. “

    Bill Evans life is poignant and tragic. I prefer the hero myth, but I’m very sympathetic to the other. Here are some interesting items that stand out to me:  He is closely tied to Baton Rouge which is near the heart of the origins of Jazz in New Orleans, but I think his style is still a bit distinctive from other roots Jazz artists because I hear more classical influence. Photographs of Bill Evans remind me of both Glen Gould8 and Dimitri Shostakovich9.  It’s something about the pensive gaze the the spectacles. Perhaps I’m just associating the piano virtuosity, but you can compare them at various ages and see the similarities. Bill Evans mother, Mary Soroka Evans was from Ukrainian decent often played Russian music in the house while the brothers were studying piano. Bill’s Ukrainian grandmother lived with them. His father was an alcoholic Welshman who ran a golf course and liked to gamble. Harry Evans, his brother who was an accomplice musical theorist and was deployed to Nagasaki after the atomic bomb which may have had an effect on his later suicide and schizophrenia. Bill Evans was an avid reader of books on philosophy and religion. It was he who introduced John Coltrane to eastern religions. Evans also liked to paint and draw and was a good golfer. In his later years, his conversational style, hair, and tinted glasses even reminded me a bit of the comedian Mitch Hedberg who also died at the hands of cocaine and heroin. 

    Irregardless of his personal life, and although I don’t believe you can separate the art from the artist, it’s just something about his music. One quote about his musical style really stood out to me about his musical style because it referenced two of the other artist rounding out my top five most listened to artist: Ahmad Jamal10 and Errol Garner11. “One of Evan’s distinctive harmonic traits is excluding the root in his chords, just leaving the left implied. Thus Evans created a self-sufficient language for the left hand that allowed the transition from one chord to the next while hardly having to move the hand. I’ve become quite the fan of that which has been left undone or unsaid as a style in every art form because I think it requires a much more comprehensive understanding. I think that we have an innate understanding of the aesthetics of the world around us.  For Bill Evans, the tone, color, and harmonics of his work is just natural. Watch some of the interviews and listen very closely to the music because there is something very distinctively pure about the innocent naivety and deep understanding in it.

    References:

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Left_to_Right 
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_piano 
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans_discography
    5. Universal Mind of Bill Evans – https://youtube.comwatch?v=QwXAqIaUahI
    6. https://www.harryevanstrio.com/The_Two_Brothers.pdf
    7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollo_May 
    8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould
    9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Shostakovich
    10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Jamal
    11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erroll_Garner 

    See Also:

  • The Metaverse of Non-Fungible Tokens

    Beeple ( Mike Winkelman )1 sold a collage of jpegs for $69 Million and it is the the third most expensive artwork ever by a living artist.  I say nice work Mike. I’m also a fan of Jeff Koons and David Hockney who hold the top two spots2,3. And although the talking heads do what they do, there seems to be a crowd of naysayers out there crying foul.  I’m not in that camp, but the idea did get me to thinking about it this afternoon. 

    First off, you might be asking yourself what the hell is a non-fungible token4. You’ll need to understand what a blockchain5 is first. It’s as simple as this… a blockchain is just a digital ledger. It’s what powers cryptocurrencies by enabling them to authenticate every transaction.  So a non-fungible token is just a unit on that ledger just like a cryptocurrency. What’s powerful about them is that it allows something that is easily reproducible in our copy/paste world like digital images to have an authenticated producer and owner. In that regard, it’s similar to copyright but the work can still be replicated and the creator can retain both copyright and the original.

    What about the work deserved $69 million?  It’s not exactly as scarce as an original Picasso or as rare as Fabergé egg.  I have a degrees in studio art and art history and even trying to explain the art world at a family get together is still somewhat tricky. I like to explain along the lines of why LeBron James or Tom Hanks get paid so well. Those folks are just top of their game. The art world is very similar in that it’s just a little luck and a lot of skill.  Mike Winkleman has it in a genre that is evermore coming to define the information age… digital artifacts and creations. The piece is entitled Everydays: the First 5000 Days6,7because it literally took him 5000 days to create. It’s 5000 individual digital artworks created with software.  I can assure you that those can be just as time consuming as creating an oil painting.  This espresso machine took me at least 10 hours and I’ve completed oil paintings in less.  I looked through a good chunk of the individual pieces and the majority of them thoughtful, provocative, funny, timely, and well crafted. 

    There are tens of thousands of folks who do the whole essay, drawing, or whatever ‘a day’ sorta things and post them online. Beeple has a following though so fame is certainly a consideration, just like Tom Hanks. It’s true in every profession. You’ve gotta be respected and well liked or hated to come out on top. The record sales price certainly didn’t hurt his standings.  You’ve also gotta be in tune with the collective consciousness and his work certainly touches a unifying nerve there. I remember when I had first gotten back into computers during college and an art professor mocking me for doing a stop frame animation of my work in progress. Poor fella is dead now, but I’d really enjoy showing him the thousands of videos of folks doing just that. I’ve never really craved the sort of attention that social media provides because I find it shallow.  But it doesn’t mean that I don’t respect those who do and Beeple is on the money with it. Literally. 

    There’s also the consideration that the buyer made his money with cryptocurrencies and blockchain.  The buyer even had has own digital identity Metakovan or Mumbai Metakovan.  His real name is Vignesh Sundaresan8, now a Singapore based blockchain entrepreneur.  He cofounded several bitcoin and cryptocurrency related businesses and explained his background in a post yesterday at https://metapurser.substack.com/p/nfts-the-first-5000-beeples 9. It’s a decent read about how a couple of coder kids from Tamil Nadu India made is big in cryptocurrencies.  I’ve been to Tamil Nadu and again, I say good on them. And although some have speculated that it’s a promotional buy for his business, don’t you think that it’s comparable to when a broker has an original artwork in his apartment to impress. There’s an element to that in the art business. It’s the second largest unregulated market in the world right behind drugs and it’s full of the same sort of money laundering and crazy hijinks. 

    The word that really comes to mind about all of this is Metaverse10 and it’s what got me to thinking about it today.  I remember when I was still idealistic about the internet or when I thought Second Life was destined to take over interactions. I set up a teleconferencing in our living room about eight years ago because I was convinced that everyone would just be making video ‘calls’ to each others living rooms. Dad still mentions to me that I told him that the internet, radio, and tv would be in the palm of you hand even though this was post iPhone version 1. Mom laughed when I said I was building internet widgets11 because she associated it with a slanderous term for someone hustling. Our parents pleaded us to stop wasting our time playing the original Zelda video game even though video gaming now outgrossing many other industries. 

    The word metaverse really encompasses what the art is all about.  Much of the work involves rendering real objects into 3d worlds and the subject matter is often virtual in nature involving animated characters from film, pop culture and video games. The majority of the work has an ethereal otherworldly effect. You can see the actual progress in style based on the early series which started with drawings and photography and moved to Cinema 4D12 which is the software powering the majority of the creations and was built for 3d modeling. The software itself is based on ray tracing13 which is s technique for generating images by tracing light into pixels in an image plane simulating virtual objects. Ray tracing simulates the optical effects of lighting, was invented by the artist Albrecht Dürer14 in the 16th century, and tracks the development of computer hardware. So in a way, the art reflects the ability of computers to simulate reality. The combination of virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet is the metaverse in which the art exist. The existence as a non-fungible token on a blockchain just further exemplifies that metaverse as a perceived virtual universe. 

    I’ve come to be a bit more realistic about the timelines in which these things occur, but I still think that we are on the cusp on the information age. With it comes a whole Metaverse of collective virtual space be it in currency, art, video games or otherwise.  Although the price tag is what made the headlines, the idea that virtual reproducible items have intrinsic worth is what is truly notable. I’m still building widgets to help connect us. After all, the term widget is just an abstract unit of production. And once we’re all truly connected in real time alongside all of the existing information, I’d be willing to speculate my own cryptocurrency that the very tangible dirt, air, food, and water will be where non-artificial scarcity occurs. I’ll likely be dead by then and some kid I knew can remember back when he was trying to tell me about the latest virtual metaverse. 

    1. Mike Winkelmann – https://www.beeple-crap.com/everydays 
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(Koons) 
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_an_Artist_(Pool_with_Two_Figures)
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain 
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everydays:_the_First_5000_Days 
    7. https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/first-open-beeple/beeple-b-1981-1/112924
    8. https://twitter.com/vigsun
    9. https://metapurser.substack.com/p/nfts-the-first-5000-beeples 
    10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
    11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(economics)
    12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_4D
    13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) 
    14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer