Scenes around town (Woods Hole) Drawbridge

Foot of Little Harbor 

The drawbridge, before coloring

The drawbridge (a good scene but ugly rendering)

Cowboy Resting

 

Abstract of Green Herons

Can't find the previously posted pictures of green herons. Here was what was in mind a few days after drawing that picture:

Another post picture abstraction:

Un Poco de Gracia continues

 Mushrooms with young friends:

Picture of a bong:

Too bad the colors don't duplicate well through the camera and screen.

Waves at Stoney Beach

 

This did not turn out too well but my waves are getting better. An interesting trick is to have the waves backed by something like the jetty, to show their rise and fall, in cross-section.

I tried again a few days later, during a nor'easter:

I am getting better, slowly.

Vineyard Sound - View from Nobska Beach

 

Waterfront Views

Attempts at rendering ripples. Embarrassing really. But I am getting a bit better. 

Here a break in the clouds over the hole, from the yacht club:

Here a break in the clouds over the hole, from the MBL dock, There was a bit of chop and I hoped to have the larger waves visible, limned by the smaller ripples. Guess not.

And

Crispy Oatmeal Cookies

This is from Mel's kitchen, except I have no light brown sugar and use a bit of clear corn syrup instead. Also I make 1/2 a batch, so ingredients are 1/2 original recipe

Ingredients:

•  1/2 cup all-purpose flour
•  3/8 teaspoon baking powder
•  1/4 teaspoon baking soda
•  1/4 teaspoon salt
•  7 tablespoons butter , softened but still slightly cool
•  1/2 cup granulated sugar
•  1/8 cup packed light brown sugar
•  1/2 large egg
•  1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
•  1 1/4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats

1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line large, rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
3. In a large bowl (of a stand mixer or with a handheld electric mixer), beat the butter, granulated sugar and brown sugar together until just combined, about 20 seconds. Increase the mixer speed to medium and continue to beat until light and fluffy, about 1 minute longer. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Add the egg and vanilla and beat on medium-low until well mixed, about 30 seconds. Scrape down the sides of the bowl again. Add the flour mixture and mix until barely incorporated, 10-20 seconds. It's ok if there are a few dry spots. Gradually add the oats and mix until well-combined, about 30 seconds to 1 minutes. If needed, give the dough a final stir with a wooden spoon to ensure that no flour pockets remain and that the ingredients are evenly distributed.
4. Scoop out about 2 tablespoon-sized mounds of dough and roll them to form balls. Place the cookies about 2 1/2-inches apart on the baking sheet(s) - about 8 cookies per sheet. They will spread quite a bit. Lightly press each cookie to about 3/4-inch thickness (I found after baking one sheet of these that I didn't need to press them at all so use your best cookie judgment).
5. Bake 1 sheet of cookies at a time until the cookies are golden brown, edges are crisp, and centers are still very slightly soft, 13 to 16 minutes. Cooling the cookies completely on the baking sheet will yield crispier, more perfect cookies.

See Thin and Crispy Oatmeal Cookies | Mel's Kitchen Cafe

Modifications:

I made a couple of mistakes adding too much sugar and the cookies melted into each other. After several batches like that, with friends and family constantly sampling one version or another, the conclusion is that my "oatmeal brittle" is better than the original cookie - although not really a cookie.

So: 3/4 cups sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup clear Caro syrup. And reduce the flour, somewhere around 1/4 cup or a bit more.

I find that cooktime of 10 minutes, move bake pans, 5 minutes is enough. Before cooling the cookies, cut them apart.

To recognize is to classify - and they are both hierarchical

I can't tell if that is profound or trivial. I am basing it on the idea that recognition is a hierarchical process just as is classification Typical logical classifications are given by the subset relation, so it is a hierarchy. Eg: he is a football player, a human, a species, a living organism, etc. 

The proposition in the title implies that each new branch point in the current classification hierarchy is associated to a specific "recognition measurement". Hence, as you make the sequence of sub-classifications bringing you to a final class, you will have made the same number of recognitions. Top down. Hence:

To know it is to store it

This was brought back to mind by watching a YouTube video from asapSCIENCE about how the Greeks could not see blue - or rather had no word for it. For the Greeks, blue was just another species of "dark" along with what we call "black". The video makes the point that it was in later languages that "blue" became separated from the more general "dark". This is, I believe, a point made by Worf - that you cannot really perceive blue as different from black if you do not have the vocabulary. It also implies some nasty realities about racism.

Also of interest to me is the long term question about how to build a recognition/classification hierarchy. I spoke about Sphinxmoth: forced completion and how the concept tried to describe the moment during learning when a single class in the classification is sub-divided. It seems to me this is what happened, after the Greeks, when a language did start using the word "blue". 

To avoid being a pseudo intellectual, let me mention "Best Models" classification. What it says is that you have to factor out scale, then fit a (factor-parameterized) model to the given. This gets at the deeper relation between patterns and scale. That is missing from the above discussion. These "recognition measurements" are somehow orthogonal to scale. And I don't get it yet.

Chappaquoit - favorite view

 

It is interesting to see the original scene. In this case, it was more inspirational than I could handle:

Latest art

 Black geese at Falmouth Harbor

View from behind the Landfall

Hierarchies

This clown Jordan Peterson thinks the world is organized in terms of hierarchies. Rather, the mind likes to organize the world around it using hierarchies. I am an idealist not a realist. Anyway, the beauty of my article about Conversational Context is that it shows how a hierarchical structure can be populated from sequential incoming information. Also worth mentioning is that as we grow and structure the world around as a hierarchy, this is essentially a linguistic development.

Nobska Mood

 

Oyster Pond and Fragmites

 

Water below the ferry dock

Pumpkins for 2020

La piece to resistance:

Migrating Scoters - Carey Lane

 

Foggy at Chappaquoit

 

Boy have I had a hard time finding how to mix this pale green. Use lots of white, a little blue, a tiny amount of yellow. Then add green to darken.

Earlier I did this, with no fog:

Town Dock

 

The Woods Hole Album continues - a foggy day

 Nobska Light House

Woods Hole Yacht Club

Barb Waksman circa 2016

Horse Pipe - Minnesota Pipestone

 This is from when I was in my twenties and the horse's legs incorporate my PhD thesis:

The four leg positions represent the different positions of a needle moving around the sides of an acute angle.

Cicada Pipe - Minnesota Pipestone

 

Et ensuite

 

J'aime fair voir les desins etc.

 

Chomsky and missing the forest for the trees

 You start to hear about Chomsky's ideas of language long before you listen to him lecture (on YouTube) or read his writings (I didn't, much) and it seems to me that Chomsky started by articulating a profound idea: that language is built into the architecture of our minds. That seemed very sensible to me as I always thought language was more or less built into our physical anatomy. 

But then, learning more about Chomsky's idea of grammar as the basis for language - thus supporting a physical metaphor - the more you start to sink into pointless details that are a distraction. Consider

  noun verb noun

This cannot be a basis for language, as it is a statement of grammar not of meaning. The language version is

  thing acts on thing

This describes a meaning, independent of grammar. 

Since Chomsky and his disciples are such nerds, they mistake a statement of grammar for a statement of meaning  - everything that is childish and naïve about those MIT/Harvard linguists. They are never going to get it and they are unqualified to talk about their Worf-Sapir bugaboo. 

And while I am critiquing them, two things to follow up are: (1) so what is grammar?; and (2) what is the physical metaphor for meaning, if not grammar?

I think grammar is just making it sound good and I think the physical metaphor is that words are stored anatomically and relationships exist "just-in-time" through a narrative infrastructure that is cortical and closely related to visual and auditory areas and their perceptions.

There are an infinite number of exciting pictures to render.

But they are hard to find

More Scenes around Woods Hole

 Falmouth Marina and 3 swans:

Nobska Point View:

I think this has some character.

Joe and I paint the eel pond

 Mine

Joe's

Sunflowers

Always seems as if the potential is prettier than the actual

It is hard doing sunflowers, which are magnificent, without being imitative.

This digital photo is better than the original because it is luminous. The original is overpainted and dark.