非情 === 無心 ? ? ? (no mind in Soseki)

もう半世紀以上も前に読んだいい加減な気憶なのだが、夏目漱石の小説、門の中で僧侶が主人公に「禅の悟りとは非情なり」と説く場面がある。「非情とは道ばたで腸を晒して倒れている事すら平気でいられる心のことだ」と続ける。（これが正確な言い回しであったか自信は無いが）－－－この僧の言う非情とは俗に言ぅ無心の事だろうが（どこかの宗派では非情と訳しているのか？ あるいは漢訳のどこかの教典に「情に非らず」といった表現が有ったのか？）

どうも我々とかく表面的な見かけ、字面の印象、その固定観念でだまされる。非常に多くの仏敎由来の単語が俗語化して日常的に使われているがしばしば元々の悥味からずれてしまっている。諦めるも観念するも明確に理解すると言う元々の意味を離れ、希望を捨て目前の不運を受容する事と意味が変ってしまった。で、情動の関与なくと言う深意で使った非情と言う単語が酷薄無情と誤解されると「禅とは、仏教とはなんと非人間的なものか」と曲解され参禅者は“どう瞑想したらこの理解に至るのか”と混乱する。

(禅は、黙々と続ける行、あるいは日常の作業の間に己れが全く自己の意識無しに自動的に、無私無心に動いている事実に覚醒し、己れを動かしているのが外ならぬダルマである事を学びます。己れが実にダルマとともに在るのを自覚する事こそが悟りです。）

しかし、はたして漱石はどんな禅を教ったのであろうか？？？　　

(仮にでかい寺で参禅し、その場の雰囲気に圧倒されたとしても別に無心になれたり悟りに近付ける訳ではない。もし無心などと言うものを予め聞きかじっていたとしても座りながら「無心、無心」と考え続けるのが関の山。＝つまり、座っていても禅にはならない。で、昔バナシを色々読んで耳歳増になっていく。ーーーまァ、漱石が禅に熱心であったとは聞かないが）（笑）

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Norman the evil AI

With a commonsense, we think that the word or notion “Scientific” is a synonym to “Rational” and often (quite opportunistically) think its nature IS virtuous, while forgetting a lots of evil science like atomic bomb.  And believe that the ultimate intelligence / AI could solve all the problem of human being.  Though, same to the Great Nature, the Science and the Rationalism is value-free.  To see or use it for good or evil is completely up to us.  Now the Australian is desperately  wanting a stormy rain, even though it has been killing thousand of people in India.  The rain itself was caused and acting completely out of poor human emotion = simply, too much moisture in the air has to come down in any manner.  Even AI wouldn’t change this.  (May give better weather forecast though)  😀

AI or Artificial Intelligence will work based on the all the information and all the ideas or theories known to the human society (that’s what they says).  Then use all those data to generate the answer to the question.  (It’s a famous story, when a Chinese institute asked AI about their country,  the AI answered “You are silly to live in this country. Emigrate to Canada” — Chinese authority shut down the institute.)  So, people think that like the all-known God the AI can give the best and ultimate answer to human —– but it was found to be not necessary true. —– Like a poor human, even AI can not necessary be rational and virtuous = it could be fatally biased by the first information like us misjudge by the wrong first impression.

AI-Powered Psychopath — Report by MIT

We present you Norman, world’s first psychopath AI. Norman is born from the fact that the data that is used to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior. So when people talk about AI algorithms being biased and unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it. The same method can see very different things in an image, even sick things, if trained on the wrong (or, the right!) data set. Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit, and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms.

Norman is an AI that is trained to perform image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit (the name is redacted due to its graphic content) that is dedicated to document and observe the disturbing reality of death. Then, we compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network (trained on MSCOCO dataset) on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders.

Note: Due to the ethical concerns, we only introduced bias in terms of image captions from the subreddit which are later matched with randomly generated inkblots (therefore, no image of a real person dying was utilized in this experiment).

 

Browse what Norman sees, or help Norman to fix himself by taking our survey.

(Or, if you like to read the original article Google it ” norman-ai.mit.ac ” )

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平常心（対話から）

これは友人とのメールのやり取りの抜粋です（青字は友人）

ーーー で、かつての人生の思い出、その追憶の駒々はどんな栄光や贅沢よりも、私にとってのかけがいのない宝物なのだ。それが宝物かガラクタかは、ひとりひとりのホンネで決める、というより、決まってしまう事だ。

そんな個人ごとの宝物を死ぬまで保持することがいかに大切かを共感する人々は、決して少なくはない。

この心理をわかってくれるときが来れば嬉しい。そして、先輩が意図していること とは無関係に、このホンネの欲求に先輩のピンホール写真が寄り添ってくれるから、ありがたい。

あのピンホール写真にやすらぎを覚えるのは、私の場合、心が覚えていて、時空を超えて再現したい、あるいは、せめて心の中にだけでも再現し再体験したい愛しき何かへの入り口を感じさせてくれるからだ。

　　おたくはものすごい思ぃ入れと追憶の中で生きていて、おそらく禅も同様に思ぃ入れ、思念の形だと考えていると思う。しかし僕の禅には思い込みの部分は無く現にやっている事、そこでの無心が僕にとっての禅であり解脱なのだ。つまり、何か特別な思い方とか観念が禅なのではなく、何の思いも無いのが褝なのだ。

何の思念、知的作意なく発想された事は、実は潜在意識、情念の深層からの呼びかけに外ならない。で、それを黙々と追求していくうちに針金彫刻やA７Rに付いたベス単なんて物が出来上った。これが僕の禅であり自在だ。

同様に何故かボケた映像に引っかかる。待てよ、これどっかで見たぞ。いつだったかは解らない遠い昔、ひよっとしたら夢の中だったかも。－－－で、ツァィスレンズの向うにそれを発見して以来、僕のレンズ行脚が始った。ピンホールはその一駒だ。

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　　執着を捨てることを良しとする賢人は古来多かれど、「自分に正直に生きる」「嘘をつかずに生きる」ことではじめて安らぎを得る人も多い。しかし現実には本音をいつわり、偽の自分を生きて幸せを装う程、器用に振る舞えない人のひとりであることをさんざん自覚させられてきた。

　　正直も否も、欲や執着と言った感情どころか、そもそもアタシはあまり自己である意識が無いので思いつくまま 勝手に生きさせていただいております。これが禅で言う自在。

で、自在についてもう少し書くと＝これは孔子サマの言う「己れの欲する所に従えども距を超えず」と同様なもので、己れ、己れの生きざま、思考、撰択の全てが一致しているなら、つまり己れとして生れたそのもの、つまりカルマ、ダルマに沿ったものであるなら、それがー如であり、それが正しい。

　　正直であるの無いの云々と考えているお宅はまだ正直の外側をうろうろしているだけで正直になり切っていない。(本当に正直なら、それについて考える事はない）

『俺以外の誰でもない俺は、俺である事を考える必要はない』

だから禅は考えないし（無心）自己である意識の必要も無い（無私）。只生きるだけ。－－－で、これが自在でありその心を平常心と呼ぶ。

お宅がごちゃごちゃ悩んでいるとしたら、お宅は悩むように生れたのかも知れぬ＝それがお宅のカルマであるなら、そう生きるのが正しい。

（禅とは冷いもんです　😀）___/\___　

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Mug shot (1)

I’m not having any project or mission with my Mag lens still, I’ve been carrying around this lens the most.  Because this one is probably the most typical of my fuzzy homemade lens, together with a good capability of close-up shot (since its used be a magnifier.)  And to explain what and why this lens, often I demonstrate the effect of the lens by taking picture of the person.   Naturally I got a collection of portrait of those people I met in the town.

 

The closer the subject, the better the image quality, still it keeps fuzziness.  So, where ever I click, the product showed my fingerprint. =  That’s I like. —– When people take picture, the result looks all same.  Since, shoot same subject and use more or less the same camera = inevitably the result became same.  That is not a kind I was born to do.  = If I make something, its got to be totally unique, and nobody ever conceived kind (so, it should come to the top of google list, such as “yoshi Zappa” “Art figure St.lucia” etc ) —– (Why people are eager to sell their name is, nothing other than the name makes the difference of the work.) —– it’s hard to be an artist.

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Vest Pocket Lens on A7R

On here, the images of Vest Pocket lens from the field test.  (Give a close eyes to this photo and see how the details and rich tones are there ! —– by the way, the image looks a bit more greenish on iPad screen.)

—– If the image looks fuzzy, the lens was fully open (F6.6).  (But mind you, the original Vest Pocket camera’s image was 6×9, therefore we are only seeing its cropped center here.)

(They are the sample)   Left = F6.6 / Right = F11) — Pantograph was fully extended for close up.

(Amazingly sharp image together with nice halation of spherical aberration from the F6.6 Vest Pocket lens ! )

(This photo above, look the cobbles and see their blurred pattern —– but, on the small contact print of card-size image, who would notice it ? )

Well, Vest Pocket lens on the Sony A7R was the camera who took those photos though, behind of those, there were many more minutely blurred photos, seemed to be caused by the wobbly lens structure.  Otherwise, some photos were amazingly sharp, considering that they came from such old single glass lens !  (And it would rise a very serious question, that is, the great effort the manufacturer spending to create 10, 20 elements lenses using ED glass etc, what sort of practical significance was made ? —– of course, unless otherwise, there couldn’t be such as 14mm F1.8 lens or 18mm~400mm Zoom etc etc still, —– ? )     In reality, often, those expensive technical samples were made for demonstration purpose and made only 100 or so to display in their showroom.  In contrast to the millions of  18~55mm plastic kit lens.  Funny fact was, even after the people was made to believe that “the Larger the Better” myth suddenly changed into iPhone camera. —– It indicates that, so-called fine sharp image might be just a formality nobody actually bother. )

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Gloomy London = Seen by Mag Lens

Some pictures of the London = According to the Mag Lens view.

When the image is murky and dark, it will be seen as Gloomy, and this is it.   And it happen to be quite close to my own view as well. (Zennists are not so optimists though they are not necessary having a gloomy life = simply it is just not funny.  —– I can’t understand why people excite about kicking the ball or the ball on the line ?  —– What that ball to do with the person ?   We are nothing to do with the ball, do we ?    😀 )

Mag Lens doesn’t necessary make the things gloomy.  The image was just murky = hence if it was dark days, it become awfully gloomy. (I’ll show you the opposite case in the next post.)   😀

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Zeiss Ikonta is this ?

After Brownie camera and its 90mm lens, Ebay sent me quite few Junk (they say vintage) camera’s AD = then,  £10  Zeiss Ikonta  caught my eyes. — When I was young and interested in to such as 6×9 format camera, I envied the Zeiss Super Ikonta 531/2 of which quite few professional photographer was using for their daily work. (such as taking picture of Kabuki dancer for their stage photo = because those old camera’s shutter makes almost no noise and unlike modern camera, no noise of moving mirror or even film winding noise = essential to the live theater environment)    So that, a second-hand 6×9 Super Ikonta was traded with the price much more than a Nikon F camera then. (No way I could afford.   I settled with an old Mamiya Press and modified it for macro work.) 

So, I bought one of them from Ebay—– without knowing what I’ve actually bought.   😀    ( and it arrived in a large box)

Then, with my utter amazement, what I got out of the box was —– a really tiny Zeiss camera !    Till this moment I didn’t anticipate to see such a tiny camera. (I found, it was nicknamed Baby-Ikonta)  Especially under the name of Zeiss Ikon.   (The funny things was, as I’ve found a description on the lens  ” Nover-Anastigmart  1:4.5  F5cm”  which suggests that the format (or the size) of the picture is about the 35mm image —– yet still I didn’t think of the 4×4 (in fact 4×3 on this camera) size, using 127 film —– which was not mentioned on the Ebay AD)

This tiny camera was in a well used condition, and on top of that, the winding knob was missing. (see a cotton bud stick on the picture)  And the view-finder was not an original, etc = not possible to test this camera with a film = its mean, only a positive use could be, to test the lens on a 35mm DSLR for a fun !

(Photo right = Top left, M42 extension ring, M42 to NEX adapter. Middle left, M42 to M39 adapter, ring to fix the lens bottom, a spacer, panel ring I made to mount the lens to M42 Extension ring, The bottom, the back of the lens = fixing was 18mm )

I took the lens, out of the old body and mounted it on the Sony A7R = while making a metal panel to screw the lens on, and mount the lens in the exact position by adjusting the minute shift of M42-M39 ring. = One rotation of this ring shift the lens 1mm forward or backward  (—– this lens has front focus design = only 1mm shift of the front lens makes Infinity to 1m adjustment, which makes the distance of the lens to censor very critical) —– It took me a while to find the exact position.   😀

They are the test shot on far subject. And the enlarged center of F11 and F4.5 (right photo) —– Not so much difference between the F11 and F4.5.

And they are on the minimum distance = 1m.    Left was at F4.5 and the right was F11.   F11 image is pretty good, and fully opened F4.5 image shows almost iconic Zeiss softness. Since the lens has no coating, the halation is inevitable, still the lens made 80, 90 years ago showed this quality IS remarkable. (Though, to get this quality needed to pay so much attention.  The focus needed to have A7R’s critical focus peeking and use heavier tripod with remote trigger )   There must be the hundreds of the Anastigmat lens design, yet still, the Carl Zeiss able to keep this “Softness character” over the years, there must be an established policy or philosophy behind. —– (of which, the rumor said that non of the Japanese lens could manage to copy)  That IS what we call “The Tradition”or even “German Spirit”

(To make the point clear, I show you the comparison, the images made by the latest Zeiss lens for Sony E-mount = FE 1.8 / 55 ZA.  The photo above left was F1.8 and the right was F8 — at F1.8, the image showed slight chromatic aberration (blue edge) — still, this is the today’s standard of the image quality (away from the traditional softness). (Above photos may need to compare with Zeiss Planer 55mm   somewhere in the other post)

(What I found so far was, that this old lens still makes good images as long as the focus was correctly given and the camera was rocksteady.) —– Now I may need to go out for a  walk with this Lens.    😀

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Kodak Brownie camera and 620 Film (B)

At last, I got 620 film from the Net and some more 120 film to play with Brownie camera.  😀

And I perfected the knack to use 120 film on the Brownie camera (by enlarge the holes of 120 film spool, etc.    With much annoyance of the purists over there.  I guess.

And now I’m ready to do a dark-room work since I got the chemicals, thermometer etc.   I wish I’m still maintaining the skill to wind the film on to a developing reel without leaving my finger-print on the film, in a total darkness.

Though, the room temperature these days are 27, 28 degree = rather hard to keep the developer’s temperature in the tank to 20 degree constant —– on a dry-run test, start with the developer which has been kept in a fridge and 18 degree (after 9, 10 minuets process, it would end-up to 23 degree) may be acceptable. — (have a water-bath with ice-cube, is the another approach though I’m a lazy man and I don’t have ice-cube tray — as they have been used to keep elec’ components.)

So, to see the images in a developed film (color transparency needs to go to a lab) would be a fun.    😀

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Short Walk (B)

Those photos were another product of the same Short Walk (A), hence using the same homemade lenses Helicoid (A) and (B) on the Sony A7R.     While walking through the park, finding which flower is really a chance encounter, and how to capture it, while seeing the character of the optics and the shape of the flower, how to compose it, in which angle and the distance IS what all about the Photography.  In certain extent, it is a game or the match between the two personalities.  In Zen Buddhist term, we are living on the moment to moment life.   And to deal with the Person (subject just encountered) as if there is nothing else exists and nothing else to do is, so-called Mindfulness, and in this mind-set, there is no Ego.   So, this situation is a proof of the No-self or Anatman.   Yet still, in other stance, to see a subject as a subject might be seen as yet another Ego, therefore not aim the subject but to see everything as the everything may be a right view.   Though, in practice, the image of an ultra-wide angle lens clicked random is just a mess —– so, the question is, whether the Zen needs a nice answer ?    Or such answer itself is not Zen ? ? ?  —– Good question.   What a nice day ! —– Ha ha ha,  😀  

Helicoid (A) lens happen to have an Iris, so that, by the depth of field control, flower showed a bit more details, still, take the image of Helicoid (B) (photo right) is a matter of the taste.

Both (A) and (B) lenses, its center of close-up images are amazingly good.

Those two pictures were given a shake when the shutter was opened. (Don’t ask me what for — it’s only for a fun)

I realized that I don’t have many photos of the Blue Bell.  May be their flower is too common, yet only in a short period.  Still, why it makes the difference to the Cherry ? —– M m m ?  —– I might have an unconscious notion, that the Cherry is the Japanese but the Blue Bell is English.   But why ? ? ? —– May be because, I didn’t grow up with Blue Bell but with Cherry.   As the photography is a way of the Self expression, it became a kind of a biography.

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Short Walk (A)

In deed, I haven’t have done a photo-walk a while. —– without a reason = IS a problem = just getting lazy.   So, bashing myself and went out with a camera and two lenses. (still, all in one pocket = that’s a beauty of the small homemade lenses. = Helicoid (A) and (B) lenses with Sony A7R)

You may wonder what was a point to have those two lenses.   Ha ha ha, you are right.  Both of them are equally fuzzy lenses.  The differences were, —– if the fuzzy surrounding has Coma bokeh, it was the (A) lens.  And if it was with Astigmatism bokeh, it was the (B) lens.   Both for the sake of painterly effect which I like very much.

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