The Negligence Prophecy

“Those who consider the inessential to be essential 

And see the essential as inessential, 

Don't reach the essential, 

Living in the field of wrong intention.” 

― Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada

Uploaded to YouTube by Majestic Casual on 9 January 2017

Skip the peace sign – Security researcher cautions against striking Japan’s favorite picture pose

10 JANUARY 2017       ROCKETNEWS24        CASEY BASEEL

(IT Media/Sankei Shimbun) -- ... Isao Echizen, a professor at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, has no problem with the selfie phenomenon. However, if you’re using one hand to take the picture, he says it’s wise to keep the fingertips of the other out of frame. That’s because consumer camera technology and image quality has now progressed to the level, Echizen says, where your fingerprint data can be derived from a photo of your fingertips.

In an experiment, Echizen was able to obtain fingerprint data from photos taken as much as three meters (9.8 feet) away from the subject’s exposed fingertips. That’s a distance far greater than even the tallest person’s arm, and so the results suggest that if you’re taking a selfie while giving a peace sign with your off-hand, you’re putting your fingerprint data at risk. Read More

Democrats slam Trump amid ethics fears

10 JANUARY 2017       THE JAPAN NEWS       

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AFP-Jiji) — The top Democrat in the U.S. Congress blasted Donald Trump on Monday for seeking hasty confirmation of cabinet nominees without sufficient ethics and security vetting, as the president-elect expressed confidence that “they’ll all pass.”

The confirmation hearings for Trump’s top picks were emerging as flash points between the incoming administration and critics including minority Democrats in Congress who want more time to thoroughly study and vet the nominees. 

Trump’s choice for U.S. attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, will be in the hot seat beginning Tuesday, as will homeland security secretary designate John Kelly, a retired Marine general. 

Four more hearings begin on Wednesday, including that of secretary of state pick Rex Tillerson. The Republican-led Senate coordinated with the Trump team to cram in nine confirmation hearings this week despite Democrats’ calls to slow the process. 

“Confirmation is going great,” Trump told reporters in an unexpected appearance Monday in the lobby of his New York building. 

But the rush has drawn flak from ethics officials. 

“The announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” Walter Shaub Jr, director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. 

The schedule has created “undue pressure” to rush the reviews, he said, noting that several nominees had “potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues” as they headed into their hearings. Read More

Jochen Lempert: The photographic seer

10 JANUARY 2017       JAPAN TIMES       JOHN L TRAN

Jochen Lempert’s exhibition “Fieldwork” at the Izu Photo Museum has an ageless feel to it. The intentionally low contrast pictures of wildlife and natural phenomena almost look like they could be archive photos unearthed from the mid-19th century. However, they also have the cool nonchalance of 1970s conceptual art. This ability to straddle and connect the seemingly disparate is a key point in Lempert’s work, and is possible through a careful attention to the details of presentation.

... Allusions to evolution abound throughout the exhibition, and these are not limited to biological development, but also to the changing practices of photography. As well as looking back to the 19th century, Lempert references the early 20th-century work of the German new objectivity movement, particularly the plant images of Karl Blossfeldt, as well as the postwar rigorous typological format of Bernd and Hilla Becher. By unambiguously quoting other artists, Lempert takes us up to the self-referentiality of late 20th to early 21st-century postmodernism. As an exercise in the observation of evolution and correspondence, the form of Lempert’s exhibition neatly follows function. 

Fluency in the language of photography can add to the enjoyment of “Fieldwork”, but it’s not essential. The exhibition works on an intuitive and sensorial level, too. It’s possible to skim through the exhibition without being drawn in deeply by any single photo but notice, for example, that a starfish has five appendages like Japanese finger socks, that the bi-coloration of a salamander’s feet can be seen on the handgrip of a bicycle or that the pattern of the concrete wall of the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe resembles the structure of a spider’s web. There may or may not be a deep significance to these observations, which vary in their degree of subtlety and to some extent are free-floating associations, but there is pleasure in the discovery. 

The esoteric art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) pioneered the investigation of images with images in his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” and Lempert’s work, with its purely pictorical discourse, was used to help celebrate Warburg’s 150th birthday anniversary in 2016 when it was included in a commemorative exhibition at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. Warburg compared paintings, sculpture and photographic documentation from across history and cultures in order to gain a greater understanding of the passions and fears of the human animal. Lempert extends this form of research to all animals, and this is a particularly interesting proposition to consider in Japan, where the pantheism of Shinto has trickled down through the centuries to become the often-repeated narrative that “Japanese people love nature.” Read More