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Tag Archives: abstract expressionism
Kerry James Marshall: a 'song' of racism in multiple media
Racism and social justice are two themes often found in the works featured at the Rennie Museum (formerly Rennie Collection). Local real estate marketer, Bob Rennie has been showing works there from his collection since at least 2009 when I wrote my first commentary about it (December 4, 2009).
Kerry James Marshall, the latest artist to have his work featured (June 2 – November 3, 2018), carries on the tradition while making those artistic 'themes' his own n a breathtaking (in both its positive and negative meanings) range of styles and media.
Here's a brief description of some of the works, from an undated Rennie Museum press release,
Rennie Museum presents a survey of works by Kerry James Marshall spanning thirty-two years of the artist's career. Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works features pieces from the artist's complex body of work, which interrogates the sparse historical presence of African-Americans through painting, sculpture, drawing and other media. …
The sculptural installation Untitled (Black Power Stamps) (1998) [emphasis mine], Marshall's very first work acquired by Bob Rennie, aptly sets the tone of the exhibition. Five colossal stamps and their corresponding ink pads are dispersed over the floor of the museum's four-story high gallery space. Inscribed on each stamp, and reiterated on the walls, are phrases of power dating back to the Civil Rights Movement: 'Black is Beautiful', 'Black Power', 'We Shall Overcome', 'By Any Means Necessary', and 'Burn Baby Burn'. The sentiment reverberates through the three 18 feet (5.5 metre) wide paintings installed in the same room, respectively titled Untitled (Red) (2011), Untitled (Black) and Untitled (Green) (2012). Exhibited together for the first time in North America, the imposing paintings with their colours saluting the Pan African flag echo the form of Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967).
Commanding attention in the center of another room is Wake (2003-2005) [emphasis mine], a sculptural work that focuses on the collective trauma of slavery. Draped atop a blackened model sailboat is a web of medallions featuring portraits of descendants of the approximately twenty African slaves who first landed in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Atop a polished black base evoking the deep seas, the medallions cascade over and behind the mourning vessel in a gilded procession, cast out in the boat's wake. The work commemorates an entire lineage of people whose lives have been irrevocably affected by the traumatic history of slavery in the United States, while simultaneously celebrating the resilience and vivacity of the culture that flourished from it.
Garden Party (2004-2013) [emphasis mine] is a long-coveted painting that Marshall re-worked over the course of almost ten years. Created in a style that harkens 19th century impressionist paintings, the work depicts a scene of leisure – an array of multi-ethnic friends and neighbours casually gathered in a backyard of a social housing project. Painted on a flat canvas tarp and hung barely off the floor, the image highlights an often-overlooked perspective of the vibrant everyday life in the projects and invites its viewers to join in the gathering.
In a dimmed room is Invisible Man (1986) [emphasis mine] – a historic work and one of the first to feature Marshall's now iconic black on black tonal painting. Referencing Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel of the same title, Marshall's work literalizes the premise of black invisibility. Only distinguishable by his bright-white eyes and teeth, and the subtle warmth that delineates black body from black background, Marshall's figure, like Ellison's protagonist, subverts his own invisibility, using colour as an emblem of power rather than of submission. The work's presentation at Rennie Museum provides an opportunity for viewers to explore the full mastery with which Kerry James Marshall layers his various shades of black.
As always, you book a tour or claim a space on a tour (here) to see the latest exhibition and are guided through the gallery spaces. What follows is a series of pictures depicting the Marshall pieces in that first room (from the Rennie Museum's photographic documentation for Marshall's work), Note: There are five pages of documentation and I encourage you to look at all five,
Installation View. Courtesy:: Rennie Museum
Blot, 2014. acrylic on pvc panel 84 × 119 5/8 × 3 3/8 inches (213 × 304 × 9 cm). Courtesy: Rennie Museum
Sculpture (Ibeji), 2006. wood, fabric, beads 24 × 12 × 14 inches (61 × 30 × 36 cm) Courtesy: Rennie Museum
Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002. 3 inkjet prints on wove paper, rhinestone encrusted wooden artist's frames each: 56 5/8 × 53 3/4 inches (144 × 137 cm) Courtesy: Rennie Museum
I've placed the pieces in the order in which I viewed them. Being at the opening event on June 2, 2018 meant that rather than having a tour, we were 'invited' to look at the pieces and ask questions of various 'attendants' standing nearby. The 'Blot', with all that colour, immediate drew my attention and not having read the title of the piece, I commented on its resemblance to a Rorschach Inkblot. It was my only successful guess of the visit and I continue to bask in it.
According to the attendant, in addition to resembling said inkblot, this piece also addresses abstract expressionism and the absence of African American visual artists from the movement. In this piece as with many others, Marshall finds a way to depict absence despite the paradox (a picture of absence) in terms.
'Heirlooms and Accessories' is an example of Marshall's talent for depicting absence. At first glance the piece seems benign. There is a kind of double frame. The outermost frame is white and inside (abutting the artwork) a diamante braid has been added all around it to create a double frame. The braid is very pretty and accentuates the lockets depicted in the image. There are three white women pictured in their lockets and beneath those lockets and the white paint lay images of African Americans being lynched. The women, by the way, were complicit in the lynchings. It was deeply unsettling to learn this as my friend and I had just moments before been admiring the diamante braid.
Marshall's work seems designed to force the viewer to look beneath the surface, which means stripping away layers, which with 'Heirlooms' means that you strip away the whitewashing.
As a white woman, the show is a profoundly disturbing experience. Marshall's range of materials and mastery are breathtaking (in the positive sense) and the way he seduces the (white) viewer into coming closer and experiencing the painting, metaphorically speaking, as a mirror rather than a picture. Marshall has flipped the viewer's experience making it impossible (or very difficult) to blame racism on other people while failing to recognize your own sins.
The third piece in the room, the sculpture is a representation of a standard of beauty still not often seen in popular culture in North America. Weirdly, it reminded me of something from a December 21, 2017 posting on the LaineyGossip blog,
[downloaded from http://www.laineygossip.com/princess-michael-of-kent-racist-jewelry-greets-meghan/48728]
I don't know well you can see this, but it's an example of 'Blackamoor jewellery'. The woman wearing it is Princess Michael of Kent and at the time the picture was taken she was on her to a Christmas 2017 lunch with the Queen of England. The lunch is where she was to meet Meghan Markle who describes herself as a woman of mixed race and is now the Duchess of Sussex and married to the Queen's grandson, Harry. For anyone unfamiliar with 'Blackmoor art' here's a July 31, 2015 essay by Anneke Rautenbach for New York University,
… Blackamoors—a trope in Italian decorative art especially common in pieces of furniture, but also appearing in paintings, jewelry, and textiles. The motif emerged as an artistic response to the European encounter with the Moors—dark-skinned Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East who came to occupy various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages. Commonly fixed in positions of servitude—as footmen or waiters, for example—the figures personify fantasies of racial conquest.
I trust Princess Michael was made to remove her brooch before entering the palace.
The contrast between Marshall's sculpture emphasizing the dignity and beauty of the figure and the 'jewellery' is striking. The past, as Marshall reminds us, is always with us. From Rautenback's July 31, 2015 essay (Note: A link has been removed),
Gaudy by nature, and uncomfortably dated—a bit like the American lawn jockey, or Aunt Jemima doll— … Blackamoors are still a thriving industry, with the United States as their no. 1 importer. (In fact, the figurines are especially popular in Texas and Connecticut—search "Blackamoor" online and you'll find countless listings on eBay, Etsy, and elsewhere.) Unlike their American counterparts, which focus mostly on romanticizing scenes from the era of slavery, these European ornaments often depict black bodies as exotic noblemen. And not everyone considers them passé: As recently as September 2012, the Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana invited outrage when it included a caricatured black woman figurine on an earring as part of its spring/summer collection.
Encountering bias and (conscious or unconscious) racism in one's self is both deeply chastening and a priceless gift. It's one that comedienne Roseanne Barr seems determined to refuse (from a June 14, 2018 article by Marissa Martinelli for Slate.com (Note: Link have been removed),
Barr […] suggested on Thursday [June 14, 2018] that it is only "low IQ" people who would interpret describing a black woman as "Muslim Brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby" as racist. The real explanation is apparently much deeper:
Roseanne BarrVerified account @therealroseanne
Rod Serling wrote Planet of The Apes. It was about anti-semitism. That is what my tweet referred to-the anti semitism of the Iran deal. Low IQ ppl can think whatever they want.
8:08 PM – 13 Jun 2018
Low IQ people and Rod Serling's screenwriting join Ambien and Memorial Day on the growing list of entities that Barr has used to justify the racist tweet over the past two weeks. The one person whose name you will not find on that list of people responsible for what Roseanne Barr said is Roseanne Barr herself.
Even with such an obvious tweet, Barr can't (consistently) admit to and (consistently) apologize for her comment. It may not seem like a gift to her but it is. Facing up to one's sins and making reparation can help heal the extraordinary wounds that Marshall is making visible.
You may have noticed that I called this show 'a song of racism'. It's a reference to poetry which in ancient times was sometimes referred to as a song (Song of Solomon, anyone?). It was also a narrative instrument, i. e., used for storytelling for an active, participatory audience.
Marshall tells a story in allusive language (like poetry) and tricks/seduces you into participating.
On that note, I have one last story to tell and it's about the placement of Marshall's artworks in the first floor room. It's my story, yours and Marshall's might be different but he has inspired me and so …
The 'Blot' or Rorschach Inkblot is a test, which tells a psychologist something about you and how you apprehend the world. It's the first piece you see when you enter the Rennie Museum space and it sets the tone for all that is to come. What you see says much about you.
The women, in the sculpture and the lockets, provide contrast and, depending on your race, hold a mirror to you. What is 'other' and what is 'you'?
There was religious imagery in much of Marshall's work elsewhere and I was particularly struck with the hearts that appeared in some of his paintings. I was reminded of the 'sacred heart', a key piece of religious iconography usually associated with Roman Catholicism although other religions also use the imagery.
It is a symbol of love and compassion although I've always associated it more with guilt. (My mother favoured the version featuring the heart pierced with a crown of thorns.)
Getting back to "What is 'other' and what is 'you'?" Marshall seems to be hinting that after guilt and suffering, forgiveness is possible.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
As for Marshall, he is a thoughtful artist asking some difficult questions. I hope you'll get a chance to see his work at the Rennie Museum. As I write this, every tour through June is completely booked and first set of July tours is getting booked fast. You'd best keep an eagle eye on the Visit page.
ETA June18, 2018: Kerry James Marshall was in Vancouver and gave this talk about his work just prior to the show's opening: https://vimeo.com/274179397 (It runs for roughly 1 hr. and 49 minutes.)
This entry was posted in poetry, pop culture, Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged a song of racism, abstract expressionism, African American visual artists, African-Americans, American lawn jockey, Anneke Rautenbach, Aunt Jemima doll, Barnett Newman, black invisibility, Black is Beautiful, Black Power, Black Power Stamps (1998), Blackamoor jewellery, Blackmoor art, Blot 2014, Bob Rennie Kerry James Marshall, Burn Baby Burn, By Any Means Necessary, compassion, crown of thorns, Duchess of Sussex, Garden Party (2004-2013), guilt, Heirlooms and Accessories 2002, Invisible Man (1986), Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, Love, lynching, Marissa Martinelli, Meghan Markle, Moors, New York University, Pan African flag, Princess Michael of Kent, Queen of England, racism, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, religious iconography, Rennie Collection, Rennie Museum, Rod Serling, Roman Catholicism, Rorschach Inkblot test, Roseanne Barr, sacred heart, Sculpture (Ibeji) 2006, slavery, social justice, Song of Solomon, storytelling, Untitled (Black), Untitled (Green) (2012), Untitled (Red) (2011), Wake (2003-2005), We Shall Overcome, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967) on June 15, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Fractal imagery (from nature or from art or from mathematics) soothes
Jackson Pollock's work is often cited when fractal art is discussed. I think it's largely because he likely produced the art without knowing about the concept.
No. 5, 1948 (Jackson Pollock, downloaded from Wikipedia essay about No. 5, 1948)
Richard Taylor, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon, provides more information about how fractals affect us and how this is relevant to his work with retinal implants in a March 30, 2017 essay for The Conversation (h/t Mar. 31, 2017 news item on phys.org), Note: Links have been removed),
Humans are visual creatures. Objects we call "beautiful" or "aesthetic" are a crucial part of our humanity. Even the oldest known examples of rock and cave art served aesthetic rather than utilitarian roles. Although aesthetics is often regarded as an ill-defined vague quality, research groups like mine are using sophisticated techniques to quantify it – and its impact on the observer.
We're finding that aesthetic images can induce staggering changes to the body, including radical reductions in the observer's stress levels. Job stress alone is estimated to cost American businesses many billions of dollars annually, so studying aesthetics holds a huge potential benefit to society.
Researchers are untangling just what makes particular works of art or natural scenes visually appealing and stress-relieving – and one crucial factor is the presence of the repetitive patterns called fractals.
When it comes to aesthetics, who better to study than famous artists? They are, after all, the visual experts. My research group took this approach with Jackson Pollock, who rose to the peak of modern art in the late 1940s by pouring paint directly from a can onto horizontal canvases laid across his studio floor. Although battles raged among Pollock scholars regarding the meaning of his splattered patterns, many agreed they had an organic, natural feel to them.
My scientific curiosity was stirred when I learned that many of nature's objects are fractal, featuring patterns that repeat at increasingly fine magnifications. For example, think of a tree. First you see the big branches growing out of the trunk. Then you see smaller versions growing out of each big branch. As you keep zooming in, finer and finer branches appear, all the way down to the smallest twigs. Other examples of nature's fractals include clouds, rivers, coastlines and mountains.
In 1999, my group used computer pattern analysis techniques to show that Pollock's paintings are as fractal as patterns found in natural scenery. Since then, more than 10 different groups have performed various forms of fractal analysis on his paintings. Pollock's ability to express nature's fractal aesthetics helps explain the enduring popularity of his work.
The impact of nature's aesthetics is surprisingly powerful. In the 1980s, architects found that patients recovered more quickly from surgery when given hospital rooms with windows looking out on nature. Other studies since then have demonstrated that just looking at pictures of natural scenes can change the way a person's autonomic nervous system responds to stress.
Are fractals the secret to some soothing natural scenes? Ronan, CC BY-NC-ND
For me, this raises the same question I'd asked of Pollock: Are fractals responsible? Collaborating with psychologists and neuroscientists, we measured people's responses to fractals found in nature (using photos of natural scenes), art (Pollock's paintings) and mathematics (computer generated images) and discovered a universal effect we labeled "fractal fluency."
Through exposure to nature's fractal scenery, people's visual systems have adapted to efficiently process fractals with ease. We found that this adaptation occurs at many stages of the visual system, from the way our eyes move to which regions of the brain get activated. This fluency puts us in a comfort zone and so we enjoy looking at fractals. Crucially, we used EEG to record the brain's electrical activity and skin conductance techniques to show that this aesthetic experience is accompanied by stress reduction of 60 percent – a surprisingly large effect for a nonmedicinal treatment. This physiological change even accelerates post-surgical recovery rates.
Pollock's motivation for continually increasing the complexity of his fractal patterns became apparent recently when I studied the fractal properties of Rorschach inkblots. These abstract blots are famous because people see imaginary forms (figures and animals) in them. I explained this process in terms of the fractal fluency effect, which enhances people's pattern recognition processes. The low complexity fractal inkblots made this process trigger-happy, fooling observers into seeing images that aren't there.
Pollock disliked the idea that viewers of his paintings were distracted by such imaginary figures, which he called "extra cargo." He intuitively increased the complexity of his works to prevent this phenomenon.
Pollock's abstract expressionist colleague, Willem De Kooning, also painted fractals. When he was diagnosed with dementia, some art scholars called for his retirement amid concerns that that it would reduce the nurture component of his work. Yet, although they predicted a deterioration in his paintings, his later works conveyed a peacefulness missing from his earlier pieces. Recently, the fractal complexity of his paintings was shown to drop steadily as he slipped into dementia. The study focused on seven artists with different neurological conditions and highlighted the potential of using art works as a new tool for studying these diseases. To me, the most inspiring message is that, when fighting these diseases, artists can still create beautiful artworks.
Recognizing how looking at fractals reduces stress means it's possible to create retinal implants that mimic the mechanism. Nautilus image via www.shutterstock.com.
My main research focuses on developing retinal implants to restore vision to victims of retinal diseases. At first glance, this goal seems a long way from Pollock's art. Yet, it was his work that gave me the first clue to fractal fluency and the role nature's fractals can play in keeping people's stress levels in check. To make sure my bio-inspired implants induce the same stress reduction when looking at nature's fractals as normal eyes do, they closely mimic the retina's design.
When I started my Pollock research, I never imagined it would inform artificial eye designs. This, though, is the power of interdisciplinary endeavors – thinking "out of the box" leads to unexpected but potentially revolutionary ideas.
Fabulous essay, eh?
I have previously featured Jackson Pollock in a June 30, 2011 posting titled: Jackson Pollock's physics and and briefly mentioned him in a May 11, 2010 visual arts commentary titled: Rennie Collection's latest: Richard Jackson, Georges Seurat & Jackson Pollock, guns, the act of painting, and women (scroll down about 45% of the way).
This entry was posted in biomimcry, human enhancement, Mathematics, medicine, Visual Art and tagged abstract expressionism, bio-inspired implants, computer pattern analysis techniques, dementia, eyes, faster recovery times, fractal art, fractal fluency. Rorschach inkblots, fractals, Jackson Pollock, Jackson Pollock's physics, Nature, No. 5 (1948), Rennie Collection's latest: Richard Jackson Georges Seurat & Jackson Pollock guns the act of painting and women, retina, retinal implants, Richard Taylor, stress level reduction, Willem De Kooning on April 26, 2017 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Google Arts & Culture: an app for culture vultures
In its drive to take over single aspect of our lives in the most charming, helpful, and delightful ways possible, Google has developed its Arts & Culture app.
Here's more from a July 19, 2016 article by John Brownlee for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),
… Google has just unveiled a new app that makes it as easy to find the opening times of your local museum as it is to figure out who painted that bright purple Impressionist masterpiece you saw five years ago at the Louvre.
It's called Google Arts & Culture, and it's a tool for discovering art "from more than a thousand museums across 70 countries," Google writes on its blog. More than just an online display of art, though, it encourages viewers to parse the works and gather insight into the visual culture we rarely encounter outside the rarified world of brick-and-mortar museums.
For instance, you can browse all of Van Gogh's paintings chronologically to see how much more vibrant his work became over time. Or you can sort Monet's paintings by color for a glimpse at his nuanced use of gray.
You can also read daily stories about subjects such as stolen Nazi artworks or Bruegel's Tower of Babel. …
A July 19, 2016 post announcing the Arts & Culture app on the Google blog by Duncan Osborn provides more details,
Just as the world's precious artworks and monuments need a touch-up to look their best, the home we've built to host the world's cultural treasures online needs a lick of paint every now and then. We're ready to pull off the dust sheets and introduce the new Google Arts & Culture website and app, by the Google Cultural Institute. The app lets you explore anything from cats in art since 200 BCE to the color red in Abstract Expressionism, and everything in between.
• Search for anything, from shoes to all things gold • Scroll through art by time—see how Van Gogh's works went from gloomy to vivid • Browse by color and learn about Monet's 50 shades of gray • Find a new fascinating story to discover every day—today, it's nine powerful men in heels
You can also use this app when visiting a real life museum. For the interested, you can download it for for iOS and Android.
This entry was posted in Visual Art and tagged abstract expressionism, Bruegel's Tower of Babel, cats, Duncan Osborn, Google, Google Arts & Culture app, Monet, stolen Nazi artworks, Van Gogh on July 20, 2016 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Jackson Pollock's physics
Take a mathematician (L. Mahadevan), a physicist (Andrzej Herczynski), and an art historian (Claude Cernuschi) and you're liable to get a different perspective on Jackson Pollock*, a major figure in abstract expressionism, art. (I'm pretty sure there's a joke in there of the: "There was mathematician and a physicist in a bar when an art historian came in …" ilk. I just can't come up with it. If you can, please do leave it in the comments.)
Let's start with a picture (image downloaded from the Wikipedia essay about Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948),
In a recent paper published in Physics Today (Painting with drops, jets, and sheets, which is behind a paywall), Mahadevan, Herczynski, and Cernuschi speculate about Pollock's intuitive understanding of physics, in this case, fluid dynamics. From the June 28, 2011 news item on physorg.com,
A quantitative analysis of Pollock's streams, drips, and coils, by Harvard mathematician L. Mahadevan and collaborators at Boston College, reveals, however, that the artist had to be slow—he had to be deliberate—to exploit fluid dynamics in the way that he did.
The finding, published in Physics Today, represents a rare collision between mathematics, physics, and art history, providing new insight into the artist's method and techniques—as well as his appreciation for the beauty of natural phenomena.
"My own interest," says Mahadevan, "is in the tension between the medium—the dynamics of the fluid, and the way it is applied (written, brushed, poured…)—and the message. While the latter will eventually transcend the former, the medium can be sometimes limiting and sometimes liberating."
Pollock's signature style involved laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it in continuous, curving streams. Rather than pouring straight from the can, he applied paint from a stick or a trowel, waving his hand back and forth above the canvas and adjusting the height and angle of the trowel to make the stream of paint wider or thinner.
Simultaneously restricted and inspired by the laws of nature, Pollock took on the role of experimentalist, ceding a certain amount of control to physics in order to create new aesthetic effects.
The artist, of course, must have discovered the effects he could create through experimentation with various motions and types of paint, and perhaps some intuition and luck. But that, says Mahadevan, is the essence of science: "We are all students of nature, and so was Pollock. Often, artists and artisans are far ahead, as they push boundaries in ways that are quite similar to, and yet different from, how scientists and engineers do the same."
There's more about this study on the physorg.com site including a video illustrating fluid dynamics. You can also find a June 29, 2011 news item on Science Daily and a June 29, 2011 article in Harvard Magazine about the study. From the Harvard news article,
MODERN ART WAS NEVER more famously lampooned than when Tom Stoppard [playwright and screenwriter] said, "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
The article by expanding on Mahadevan's research gives the lie to Stoppard's quote. (I wonder if Stoppard will write a play about physics and art in the light of this new thinking about Pollock's work?)
This all brought to mind, Richard Jackson's work which was featured in 2010 at the Rennie Collection in Vancouver (my most substantive comments about Jackson's work are in my May 11, 2010 posting). Trained as both an artist and an engineer, he too works with paint and its vicosity. I still remember the piece in the gallery basement that featured three (as I recall) cans of paint apparently caught in the act of being poured. In retrospect, one of the things I liked best about the show is that a lot of Jackson's work is very much about the physical act of painting and the physicality of the materials.
One final note, the L. in Mahadevan's name stands for Lakshinarayan.
*'Pollock's' corrected to Pollock on April 27, 2017.
This entry was posted in science, science communication, Visual Art and tagged abstract expressionism, Andrzej Herczynski, art science, Claude Cernuschi, fluid dynamics, Jackson Pollock, L. Mahadevan, No. 5 (1948), physics, Rennie Collection, Richard Jackson, Tom Stoppard on June 30, 2011 by Maryse de la Giroday.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


There is a growing demand for service-delivered billing capabilities to serve a myriad of emerging subscription-based businesses and to help these companies serve their customers by processing a range of verymodular transaction types, with great speed and transparency for the end user. These systems provide billing process services to businesses deployed in the cloud, as SaaS applications or via consumer direct business models through ecommerce Web sites. They help customers manage the complete subscriber lifecycle, from customer acquisition to billing, analytics, and customer support. Not only are billing services core to the online operations of any ecommerce site, but as the market shifts from on-premise software licensing models to subscription- or demand-based pricing and billing, they are crucial to the customer monetization for SaaS and cloud software and service providers themselves.


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Q: The Diophantine equation $x^2 - 97 - 40 = 0$ I am trying to determine whether the equation below  has a solution or not
$$x^2-97y-40 =0.$$
If a solution exists, $x^2-40$ must be congruent to 0 modulo $97$.
If I could show the congruence above implies that solution exists.
Thanks for your help...

A: $\newcommand{\kron}[2]{\left( \frac{#1}{#2} \right)}$
We are interested in the value of the Legendre symbol $\kron{40}{97} = \kron{8}{97} \kron{5}{97}$. In general, $2$ behaves differently from the rest of the primes.
By what is sometimes called the second supplemental law of quadratic reciprocity, we know that $\kron{2}{p} = (-1)^{(p^2-1)/8}$, or rather that $2$ is a square mod a prime iff that prime is congruent to $\pm 1 \pmod 8$. Since $97 \equiv 1 \pmod 8$, we see that $2$ is a square mod $97$. (Proofs of the second supplemental law can be found both here on MSE and on my site, and in most elementary number theory texts).
We must still consider $\kron{5}{97}$. By quadratic reciprocity, this is the same as $\kron{97}{5} = \kron{2}{5}$. The squares mod $5$ are $1$ and $4$ (or alternatively, $5$ is not congruent to $\pm 1 \pmod 8$), so $\kron{2}{5} = -1$.
In total, we have that $\kron{40}{97} = 1 \cdot -1 = -1$, which means that $40$ is not a square mod $97$. And so this quadratic Diophantine equation has no solution. $\diamondsuit$

A: you can use legendre symbol for calculating quadratic residue.so you need to compute (40/97).
  (40/97)=(2/97).(2/97).(2/97).(5/97)

        =(2/97).(5/97)

        =(97/2).(97/5)

        =(1/2).(2/5)

       =1.(-1)=-1

so 40 is not a quadratic residue mod 97.
no solution exists.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


@MouthOfSauron Now reached Chapter 4 with Saint-Denis.
I am really tired of spending hours on this every night with no progress seemingly achieved. Going to just do all main missions now and deal with all the side content later.
Going down the leafy entranceway with the posse to burn down the Braithwaite Manor was so far the only highlight of the game. That had an atmosphere.
Also, why does the game allow me to sell individual cigarette cards but then remove them from my "picked up list". Now I need to go around picking them all up again to complete the damn side quest. Or in Saint-Denis, there is one card on a table in garden in a house. You go in, you get $15 trespassing bounty. So I run out but then 4 cops show up and shoot me down. Dead. Lost cash. Frustration. Nothing is ever simple or player friendly in this game.


Looks like the Fire Brigade came early! Ladies, make sure to evacuate that dance floor so Blake Hardy can break out his fully extended fire hose!
Versatile and ready for action, this Air Man's always keen to bring the heat!


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Hardwired to Herd
Sept 7, 2021 | By Dr. Elesa Zehndorfer Investor Behavior Investor Insight
Many clients perceive themselves as independent thinkers, but when push comes to shove, they're likely to follow the crowd
When We Buck The Consensus, Our Amygdala Is Activated
When our amygdala is triggered, our body can release stress hormones and adrenaline in the brain. This can lead to increased heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. You may experience a racing heart, shaking, sweating, and nausea as this happens. It can even cause painful backaches and back spasms.11
Have you ever struggled to make an investing decision, simply because it seemed too different from the opinions held by your friends, even when you felt sure that it was the best decision for you to make? Don't blame yourself for second-guessing yourself—that instinct is a biological response, rooted deep in your evolutionary design.1 It reflects an evolutionarily instinct to want to run with the herd as a means of safeguarding your own survival—and it's an instinct that can make or break some of the most important decisions of your life.
We are, when it comes down to it, hardwired to herd—and when it comes to investing, it can seriously harm your clients' investments. Let's take a look at how you can help them successfully navigate these evolutionary instincts as a means of safeguarding their finances.
Running With the Herd
Legendary investor and CEO of The Baupost Group Seth Klarman once reflected on the powerful evolutionary pull of herding when he noted that "It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it."2
And he was right. In fact, many legendary investors out there—George Soros, Jim Chanos, Carl Icahn—have all made billions of dollars resisting the urge to run with the herd, instead relying on hard data to make exceptional returns. George Soros once made a $1 billion in just 1 day on September 17th, 1992, shorting the British pound.3 Chanos, as CEO of Kynikos Associates, made $500 million shorting Enron after concluding that the company was operating fraudulently.4 At the time, Enron couldn't have been a more lauded or idolized success story, so by shorting Enron stock, Chanos' move was hugely contrarian.
Warren Buffett's consistent ability to buy when everyone else is selling, similarly, has earned him a place as one of the most successful investors in history. Klarman and his peers gained their conviction from a granular knowledge of finance and courage to move at the right moment against the herd. Can we also help clients learn to resist the urge to conform as a way to maximize and safeguard their finances?
Running From the Herd
One of the reasons that Seth Klarman talks about the role of courage is because our clients' brains literally register a kind of neural discomfort when they try to stand apart from the herd.5 That discomfort might not be something that they consciously acknowledge, but it nevertheless represents a powerful driver of their decisions, leading them to unconsciously opt for a herding-based investing decision. A study found, for example, that "when people did buck the consensus, brain scans found intense firing in the amygdala" and that people "go along with the herd not because you want to, but because it hurts not to."6
The effects of running against the herd can also include explicit physical symptoms, one of which George Soros has learned to use to his benefit. Founder of the Soros Fund Management LLC, he once referred to a "joy of going against the herd." He is famous for one notable quirk—recognizing that his painful back spasms are a sudden signal to move on large contrarian (anti-herd) trades. To other investors, this is a simple eccentricity, but to a physiologist, it is not eccentric at all. Soros is known for making huge multi-million-dollar trades, so an immediate intuition that market conditions had suddenly changed would signal the need to move quickly and aggressively against the markets—and against, consequently, his evolutionary herding instincts. This would cause the neural discomfort mentioned earlier, which occurs when there's an overexposure of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline in the brain.
A hallmark symptom of cortisol and adrenaline overexposure? Painful backaches and back spasms.7
Excitation-Transfer
Clients' evolutionary drive to herd is often hugely amplified by a phenomenon known as "excitation-transfer," a biological process whereby emotions literally become contagious, leading quickly to an en masse euphoria-driven market upswing or crash. One researcher explains it in the sense that, "your dopamine system plays off my dopamine system. You buy, I buy, I worry about you, our systems become entrained."8
Clients' brains are even designed to signal a form of pleasure—recognizable as schadenfreude—when they observe a punishment of outsiders who contradict social norms.9 This plays out daily on social media, where comments that run counter to the crowd are shouted down and ridiculed. One poster's emotions quickly are mirrored by others—"excitation-transfer" in full flower.
It goes without saying, then, that there are dangers of relying on Facebook friends and communities for financial advice. The hubris, entertainment-focused and fast-paced clickbait culture of social media ramp up dopamine production in clients' brains, igniting and encouraging herding.
Swayed easily by alluring promises of easy returns, clients have an additional neural motivation to "follow the herd." You only need to look at The CNN Fear & Greed Index or the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), more commonly referred to as The Fear Index, to understand exactly how powerfully primal desires and emotions power the financial markets.
Take the case of Michael Burry, CEO of Scion Capital. Subsequently immortalized in the movie The Big Short, Burry made a fortune taking a hugely contrarian approach to investing in 2005. He made an "all-in" bet against the subprime mortgage market at the same time everyone else was still supporting it. While Burry kept his investors up to date with his strategies, their pain at being so at odds with the wider markets led them to stage a near mutiny in 2007, demanding the return of their capital. Burry refused. By 2008, he had earned them a remarkable 489% in returns.10 Even so, his investors finally got their way. And, despite such almighty returns, Burry shut down his fund in early 2008 and the "herd" got its way.
Outrunning the Herd
Clients' evolutionary desire to herd may have ensured the survival of their hunter-gatherer ancestors, but to the modern-day investor it can stoke the flames of market bubbles, and cause them to lose out, ultimately, on long-term profits. So, what can they do to resist their instinctual desire to herd? Let me offer some basic, but important guidance:
Help clients resist the urge to go with the crowd. You have the training and expertise to understand the markets and are more skilled in resisting these kinds of evolutionary, primal desires. Many financial professionals report to me that they frequently have to talk clients into and out of decisions based on the herd mentality—or sometimes, the "heard" mentality—as in "I heard from so-and-so that…" You've learned not to have the same emotional responses to market swings and can help clients manage their natural responses with some rational advice.
Suggest clients delay making a decision. Clients should let their primal urges settle down, reducing any heightened levels of dopamine and other chemicals that are driving their behavior around money. Doing something as simple as taking a 20-minute walk can make an immediate difference and moderate their evolutionary response. Turning off social media and skipping over the "comments" section on financial new articles can help, too.
Managing one's financial picture can be stressful, generating higher cortisol and adrenal levels. Knowing this about themselves—and that it cannot be stopped, only managed—is the most important step clients can take to short-circuit their hardwiring to herd.
The MIT AgeLab has identified three simple questions to help you assess how prepared your clients are to live well in retirement. What do these questions have to do with retirement planning? A lot more than you may think. They actually uncover important factors that can determine your clients' future quality of life and serve as a starting point for planning a satisfying retirement.
When it comes to retirement planning, we're inclined to focus on accumulating assets and making sure clients spend their money wisely. But while clients' biggest fears may be outliving their wealth, there's an even greater risk of:
Losing their independence due to ailing health;
Being unable to access the big and small things that make them happy, and
Facing a decline in the number of friends in their social network
Planning for these contingencies is an integral part of preparing to live longer, better. Integrate these issues into a comprehensive planning discussion to make an ambiguous retirement future—often decades away—more tangible to clients. This can help them commit to preparing for their retirement today.
Sources;
1Baddeley, M. (2010). Herding, social influence and economic decision-making: socio-psychological and neuroscientific analyses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1538), 281–290.
2Cymbalista, F. (2003). How George Soros Knows What he Knows. Towards A General Theory of Reflexivity.
3George Soros, Investopedia, 5/29/18
4The Top 10 Greatest Stock Market Trades Ever, Finance Monthly, 10/17/17. Most recent data available.
5Tatsuya Kameda, Keigo Inukai, Thomas Wisdom and Wataru Toyokawa (2015). The Concept of Herd Behaviour: Its Psychological and Neural Underpinnings. Oxford University Press.
6Zweig, J. (2007). Your Money and your Brain. Simon & Schuster.
7Easy tips to relieve stress-related neck and back pain, UT Southwestern Medical Center, 3/20/19
8Dr. Montague, as quoted in the article 'Brain Experts Now Follow the Money'. The New York Times. Blakeslee, Sandra. June 17th, 2003. Most recent data available.
9de Quervain, D.J. et al. (2004). The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science. 27;305, 5688, pp. 1254-8.
10(over the 8 years that the fund operated).
11Amygdala Hijack and the Fight or Flight Response Share Flip Email Search, very well mind, 8/18/19.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author, who is not affiliated with Hartford Funds. The information contained herein should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation of any product or service nor should it be relied upon to, replace the advice of an investor's own professional legal, tax and financial professionals
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Oxford's Finest: Interview with Endeavour's Shaun Evans
By Steve Eramo - The Morton Report
Classic cars, real English ale, opera and cryptic crossword puzzles — probably not the interests of your typical police officer, but whoever said that Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse was typical? Created by writer Colin Dexter, this often sullen-tempered but still likeable and always dependable police officer was the bane of existence of many a criminal in the city of Oxford, England.
For several years, TV audiences watched the DCI solve cases and put lawbreakers behind bars in the successful ITV crime drama Inspector Morse. In 2011, the network aired the prequel Endeavour, which followed a much younger Morse (then a Detective Constable) during his university days and early police career. When it came to casting the show's lead role, its producers set their sights on Liverpool-born actor Shaun Evans, who was both surprised and flattered to be singled out.
"I was actually out of town when my agent called me and asked how I felt about playing a young Morse," recalls Evans. "I told him that it was difficult to say having not seen a script. Also, when you go out for a job, you're generally one of several people on a list. So I said, 'Look, I'm away at the moment, but if they [the show's producer] are serious, I'll come back and we can organize it.' That's when he told me, 'Well, there is no list and it's not an open casting call. It's more or less an offer that has come out of the blue. They've essentially sought you out and want to see only you.'
"I knew very little about the Morse character, so I bought all the books and read them before I got back home. That's when my interest was piqued. I thought, 'My God, not only is this a fantastic character in his mid-to-late 50s, but how interesting would it be to get him from his mid-to-late 20s to the person that he is in the books.' In the books, Morse has a bit of an alcohol problem, he's not great socially, and he ends up dying on his own without ever being married or becoming a father. How fascinating would it be if we could capture a little of what makes him that way.
"So I came back to the UK, read the Endeavour script, and then we all got together. During that first meeting I laid all my cards on the table. I explained that I wasn't proposing to do a facsimile of what had gone before. If we were going to do this, we needed to create something new. When you say that, it's getting you off the hook then as well, because you don't arrive on set the first day with people expecting something that they aren't going to get. By the same token, I'm not going to be on set or at my place of work and feeling uncomfortable just trying to copy something else. Everyone seemed to be on the same page about it, and then we moved forward. It was really as simple and seamless as that, to be honest with you, so I was very, very fortunate."
Having quit his Oxford college prior to earning a degree, the young Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) spent a short time as a cipher clerk in the Royal Corps of Signals before joining the police in 1965. He soon becomes disenchanted with law enforcement and decides to resign, but before he can do so, Morse is sent along with other detectives to assist the Oxford City Police on a case involving a missing 15-year-old girl. His new superior officer, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, sees the potential in Morse and takes him under his wing.
With the late veteran actor John Thaw having left an indelible mark in TV history as the star of Inspector Morse, it was now up to Evans to take the role and put his own unique spin on it in the Endeavour pilot.
"Because it's the nature of creating a character and telling a story, each and every time you play a new part, it comes with its own set of very unique challenges and amazing joys as well," says the actor. "This [acting] is such a great job and it's a real privilege each time you're given the opportunity to play a new role. Each character is different and you have to find a way to make it your own.
"That was especially true for me with Endeavour because John Thaw had played him before me. I've had the good fortune, though, of working fairly regularly over the past ten years, and during that time, I've been able to play my own versions of characters. That [creative] process isn't always clearly definable, meaning what you do could be a physical thing and other times just a feeling or instinct. No matter what, though, it all helps to, again, make that character as unique as possible."
Thinking back to the Endeavour pilot, is there anything about its filming that sticks out in the actor's mind?
"It's funny, what you see onscreen is two hours of story that, in fact, we've spent five or six weeks shooting," he explains. "There's so much that goes on, and whenever you're filming, you end up locked in a very specific head space, or at least that's what I always find. So it's kind of hard to remember certain things, because all of sudden you're like, 'Oh, wow, we're all done,' and then you pick back up the pieces of your own life and move on, do you know what I mean?
"I can tell you that it was wonderful to work with Roger Allam [DI Thursday]. Also, one of the highlights was and is the type of guest actors we have coming onto the show. They're just fantastic, and that's one of the real benefits of working on a TV series like Endeavour. With each new episode, the producers bring in actors who are at the top of their game and who each bring something new to the table in terms of helping tell these stories."
Following the success of the Endeavour pilot, ITV commissioned a first season of four brand new episodes, the first of which began airing in the States two weeks ago (Sunday, July 7) on PBS's MASTERPIECE Mystery! In the season opener, "Girl," Thursday and Morse investigate the death of a secretarial student and the subsequent shooting of a doctor. Despite a keen observational eye and relentless pursuit of what he believes is the right investigative path, the road ahead proves a rocky one for our hero. Some of this professional strife can be chalked up to the arrival of Oxford City Police station's new commanding officer, Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright (Anton Lesser). Even with Thursday in his corner, Morse has a tough go of it with Bright.
"In terms of our story, or any story, really, in order for there to be something compelling to watch and for the plot to advance, each of the characters has to come with conflict," says Evans. "So what we essentially have with the character of Bright is someone who wants things done in a very particular fashion, and whilst he can admire or at least acknowledge the positives that Endeavour brings to the job, that certain way of thinking how the police force should move forward is first and foremost in his mind.
"Now, that's not to say that Bright and Endeavour are enemies. Again, like I said, for things to be interesting, there needs to be conflict on every level. Internally, you need conflict when trying to find out who killed this person this week, and there also needs to be something that stops Morse from moving forward. Let's face it, if after this first case, which is a huge success, he then comes in and immediately everything is rosy in the garden, then it's going to get boring, right? So I think the relationship with Bright and Morse is an important one, and Anton Lesser, who is a fantastic actor, has created someone very real and very alive with his performance as Bright," praises the actor.
"When it comes to Thursday, it would be quite easy to say that his and Morse's relationship is much like that of a father and son, but I don't necessarily feel it is. I think Thursday represents an older generation and in some respects a dying way in which the police operated at the start and middle of the 1960's, before we had computers, cell phones, texts and so forth. Morse, on the other hand, sort of represents a new way forward that we should think about.
"So on one level they very much represent both those sides, but relationship-wise, Thursday is definitely someone who my character looks up to and is influenced by. However, one of the beauties of Endeavour is that he's very much his own man, and whilst there is a hierarchy in the police force that has to be bowed down to, I feel like my character truly believes that it's still worth the risk, even if it means alienating those closest to him, to come up with the goods, and not for anyone else's benefit, but for his own."
In the aforementioned "Girl," Morse manages to crack the case, but not without making the mistake of dismissing a key suspect. This is the final straw for Bright, and it falls to Thursday to assign the young man to general duties, at least until he takes the sergeants' exam. While he is a brilliant detective, he is not yet seen by some to be a good police officer. Morse forges on, though, and as the character surmounts each new hurdle, he grows and develops that much more.
"With these four episodes, we need to get Morse from 'A' to 'B,' and the 'B' that we need to get him to is closer to where it begins in the books," notes Evans. "There are a few specific things story-wise that, I think, the seeds of which need to be sown. The sooner we do that, the more fascinating and darker the character becomes and, in my opinion, even more interesting to watch.
"In season one of Endeavour, you can see Morse moving forward and witness the various life challenges or life beats that he's experiencing. Oftentimes that's kind of separate from the specific case that he and the other detectives are working on, but still important, as are the character's interpersonal relationships. By the end of the first season, we definitely find out more about who Morse is, and in the season finale ["Home"], he goes though another major sort of life beat. Where we end that story with him is a place of like, 'Oh, crap, now what?'" teases the actor with a chuckle.
It was back in 2002 that Evans first grabbed the attention of TV viewers playing gay French teacher John Paul Keating in season two of the comedy/drama Teachers. His other small screen credits include the made-for-TV movies The Project and Come Rain Come Shine along with the miniseries The Virgin Queen as well as guest spots in such shows as Murder City, Inspector George Gently, Ashes to Ashes and Whitechapel.
The actor also played recurring roles in The Take, Silk and The Last Weekend. His feature film work includes The Boys & Girl from County Clare, Being Julia, Sparkle, Dread and Telstar: The Joe Meek Story. He may consider himself a bit of latecomer to the acting business, but Evans has not wasted a second of any time spent honing his craft.
"I didn't really start working as an actor until I was in my early 20s, but I always felt that this was the career I was going to move towards," he says. "I'm not sure why, though, because there's no experience of it in my family. However, it's like many things in that doors can open for you and it then shows that you're kind of on the right path to some degree. I went to drama school here [London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama], and when I left I just began working. I've since had the amazing good fortune to play a wide range of roles and tell lots of different stories in a variety of mediums.
"So it's been a good progression, and, at least for me, what makes this job rewarding is the people that I get to interact with. These are people who have common interests, are more often than not at the top of their game, have something to offer and are willing to ask themselves sometimes difficult questions. I've always believed that, even from one of the very first jobs that I had. I thought, 'God, these people are incredible.' Aside from the actual work, it makes you want to be sort of the best that you can be."
Endeavour fans can look forward to seeing more of the actor's work as the young Morse when the series returns for a second season. What are his hopes for the show going into a second year?
"There's never a guarantee that you'll make more of something, you know, so at the end of Endeavour's first season it was like, 'Okay, we've had a really good run here, thanks for that. I hope it goes down well with audiences,'" says the actor. "When you're then given the opportunity to make four more episodes or take the show further, I think you have to ask a little more of yourself.
"With hindsight and with the lessons you've hopefully learnt, you have to tell even better stories and tell them in an even better way. What's the point of having done it if you haven't learnt anything about what you feel might have been better played in terms of story, performance, etc?
"I think each of these episodes builds on the prior one, and each story has its own specific style because we have fantastic directors, each of them with a very individual and slightly competitive edge. So that lends itself to trying to make the next episode better than the last one, which is great for the show, and, of course, the viewer."
'Endeavour' on Masterpiece Mystery: Morse the Younger
By Tirdad Derakhshani, Inquirer Staff Writer, Philly.com
He prefers to keep company with Mozart , Wagner, and Debussy rather than go out with the lads for a brew.
One thing the young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse most assuredly is not is a lad. Or a dude.
Awkward, socially inept Morse is the brilliant detective featured in the PBS Masterpiece Mystery entry Endeavour, a finely crafted TV series set in the ancient university town of Oxford in the mid-1960s.
The first season, which consists of four feature-length mysteries, premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday and runs on consecutive Sundays through July 28 on WHYY TV12.
Endeavour was commissioned by the ITV network after a one-off TV movie of the same title aired in 2011 to critical and popular acclaim.
Liverpudlian actor Shaun Evans, who reprises his role as Endeavour Morse, said he was pleasantly shocked that ITV picked up the show.
"I never thought it would go any further," Evans said on the phone from London. "Then I got the call that they wanted to make four more." Evans, 33, an impressive, deeply intuitive actor who has made Endeavour Morse very much his own, said a second season already had been green-lighted for next year.
The reason for Endeavour's success isn't hard to divine. It's written with meticulous care, insight, and eye for detail, and it features some of the best British actors, including Roger Allam and Anton Lesser.
But it's Endeavour's provenance makes it all the more fascinating: It's the second spinoff of one of the most beloved TV mysteries from the 1990s, Inspector Morse, which featured the inimitable John Thaw as the title character and Kevin Whately as his oft-mistreated bagman, Sergeant Robert Lewis.
Adapted from the novels by mystery writer Colin Dexter, Inspector Morse ran for 33 feature-length episodes from 1987 to 2000, ending with Morse's death from a heart attack. (Thaw, who was gravely ill during filming of the last season, died 15 months later of cancer.)
A first spinoff, Inspector Lewis, premiered in 2006 and stars Whately as Morse's replacement.
Endeavour is unique because it promises to clarify one of the greatest mysteries of the Morse character: his youth.
Morse already is in his 50s when we meet him in the Dexter novels and the show. An emotionally closed-off introvert, he reveals little about his past. He tells no one his Christian name - his lover doesn't know it, nor does his partner Lewis - until he's on his deathbed!
We know Morse was a middle-class kid from a broken home who won a scholarship to study classics and literature at Oxford. (His major is identified as "Greats.") More than capable, he nonetheless fails to complete his degree, joining the Oxford police force instead.
The middle-aged Morse lives alone and would rather bury himself in the London Times crossword puzzle than ask a woman out on a date. He is afraid of women and prone to hide his anxiety by being patronizing, even caustic.
"He's someone who seems frozen in the past," Evans said of the older Morse, "and he doesn't get people."
With few clues to go on, Evans had a hard job of reverse-engineering the character.
"What are the factors in his late 20s that would make him a heavy drinker and kind of terrible with women, yet so great at his job?" Evans says he asked himself. "Who is this person who finds solace in art and opera . . . rather than other people?"
Evans closely studied the Dexter novels, but he avoided watching Thaw's series. "I don't see the benefit of doing a facsimile of what another actor was doing. . . . I mean I could only do a [terrible] version of Thaw! And it would shortchange the audience," he said. "I thought the only way to make it good was to make it my own."
Endeavour introduces viewers to two characters later to figure large in Morse's life: pathologist Max DeBryn (James Bradshaw) and a young, naive constable named Jim Strange (Sean Rigby), who will be Morse's superior 25 years down the road.
The most important character, however, is young Morse's boss, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, played by eminent stage actor Roger Allam. Thursday is Endeavour's mentor and spiritual adviser. Allam, currently on stage as Prospero in The Tempest at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, said Thursday is the positive, encouraging father Endeavour never had.
"I think Thursday is shrewd enough to see something in young Endeavour that is very often lacking in a police station," Allam, 59, said in a phone chat. "The police often get bogged down in procedure, and what Endeavour brings is this more imaginative, instinctive way to deal with crimes."
It's an especially good talent to have in Dexter's Oxford, where the killers are, more often than not, brilliant Oxford professors who like to baffle the cops with cryptic clues, unbreakable codes, wordplay, and obscure literary allusions.
That's when Endeavour puts on his supersleuth cape.
Review: 'Endeavour' and its younger Morse are welcome company
By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
Having last year put a toe in the water with an exploratory pilot and found it fine, "Endeavour" returns to the PBS series "Masterpiece Mystery" Sunday with four new episodes. They are excellent company, even if they sometimes feel too coincidental, complicated, clever or corpse-strewn to be true.
The series is a prequel to the beloved "Inspector Morse" (1987-2000), which starred the late John Thaw as an Oxford-based police detective. (The character's first name provides the new show's title.) While Kevin Whately, who played his old number two, mans the ongoing timeline in the sequel "Inspector Lewis," "Endeavour" jumps back to the mid-'60s, when the future chief inspector was yet a mere detective constable; it keeps the character alive at the same time it feeds our not wholly exhausted taste for midcentury period drama.
As in the pilot, the backbone of the series is the relationship between young Morse (Shaun Evans) and his immediate superior, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, wonderfully played by Roger Allam, whose manner, shape and dark-stout voice (the series' pedal tone, to venture a musical metaphor) recall Michael Gambon in both "The Singing Detective" and "Maigret." And like Maigret, he has a pipe.
We get to know Thursday better this year: In one lovely scene, Morse sits down with the family at breakfast, which makes him a little uncomfortable and a little happy; we know that his own life will never look like this.
Like a milder, slightly more flexible version of his irascible later self, Morse is socially awkward and sometimes abrasive — "a bloody misfit," someone calls him. Fortunately, the character exists in a time when no one diagnoses him as "a little autistic."
He is already addicted to puzzles and opera and displaying a signature weakness for distressed damsels: "When it comes to a bird with a wing down," observes Thursday, "you've got a blind spot a mile wide." But he is also chivalrous (or shy): When one mixed-up young woman implores him, "Take me to bed," he reads her to sleep with poetry instead. (He is literary as well as musical.)
Morse knows that he's the smartest young buck in the herd, which naturally irritates his co-workers, of whom Det. Sgt. Peter Jakes (Jack Laskey) is his most immediate and vocal rival. At the same time, there is a moment in each film where he smacks his forehead and calls himself an idiot, having missed some crucial clue that has been staring him in the face all along.
Russell Lewis, who also developed "Inspector Lewis," wrote all four episodes, though different directors bring different quirks to the material. Some get a little too fancy with the framing and focus, and the staging of certain Tense Moments relied more on movie convention than the show's own aesthetic logic. (They struck me as funny in a way I am sure was not intended.) The unfussy approach that worked for "Morse" also works best for "Endeavour." Still, if there is more action than in the parent series, "more" in this case does not mean "much," and things stay mostly slow, quiet and a little mournful. Evans does not attempt a John Thaw imitation, but he sits deep in the part.
The new season adds Anton Lesser as a flinty new boss for both Thursday and Morse, who warns the station house against "breaches of procedure or Spanish practices" (a now-controversial term for workplace customs that cut labor a break); he bumps Morse back from the head of the class, to which Thursday has skipped him. Also new is Sean Rigby as friendly Police Constable Strange, who will have made chief superintendent by the time of "Inspector Morse."
Review: Reading His Suspect to Sleep
By MIKE HALE - The New York Times
In PBS's 'Endeavour,' the Detective Is a Poetry Lover
As "Endeavour" begins Sunday night on PBS's "Masterpiece Mystery!," we first glimpse the young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse singing in a choir. Those with the Morse bug, or the British mystery bug in general, will remember that the first episode of "Inspector Morse" back in 1987 began with the middle-aged detective inspector's rushing from a crime scene to a choir rehearsal. Mission accomplished.
Having started last year with a single episode, the prequel series "Endeavour" is now starting fresh with a four-episode first season. Given another opportunity to wallow, tastefully, in nostalgia for its predecessor, the new show doesn't miss a beat. A substantial audience — more than seven million viewers in Britain — is happy with that, and "Endeavour" has already been renewed for a second season.
Other viewers — those who watch mysteries for the mystery — may lose patience as the episode's overly complicated plot, involving a dead secretary, a doctor murdered in a public restroom, a series of post office robberies and a love child, is resolved haphazardly and implausibly.
So if you're looking for a solid British detective yarn, check out "DCI Banks" (Season 1 is in reruns on PBS stations, including Channel 13 in New York) or wait for "Case Histories" to return. "Endeavour" offers a different and not negligible set of pleasures: it's like a table perfectly set for afternoon tea, cress sandwiches here, clotted cream there. Sit for 90 minutes, have a cup of orange pekoe and feel satisfied.
Having just joined the Oxford police, Morse immediately makes enemies when the astute inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) chooses him as bagman, a position that should have gone to a sergeant. The references to bagman, meaning chief assistant, are part of a self-conscious effort to use language to remind us that the action is set in the early 1960s: A constable discovers a French letter (condom), and Morse remarks on a vicar's interest in cruciverbalism (crossword puzzles).
The tastes for puzzles, opera, poetry and flashy cars that the novelist Colin Dexter originally gave Morse have become an orthodoxy after nearly 40 years of books and television shows, and they're reverently invoked here. Morse reads a troubled suspect to sleep with Tennyson's poem "Lady of Shalott," best known for giving Agatha Christie the title for "The Mirror Crack'd." A larcenous character is referred to as la gazza ladra, Rossini's thieving magpie. Morse's red Jaguar Mark 2 is in the future, but he gets to drive the police force's black Mark 1's.
The lead actors do good work, even though their job, to some extent, is to make themselves part of the period décor. Shaun Evans makes Morse appealing, despite his twitchy pride, and Sean Rigby brings a vulpine grace to Constable Strange, Morse's current subordinate and future boss. Best is Mr. Allam (the original Javert in the London production of "Les Misérables") as the heroically reserved Thursday, alternately flashing his affection for, and exasperation with, Morse.
In the course of Sunday's episode Morse develops one of his patented hopeless crushes on a suspect, and it gets him busted down from bagman to general duty. You're a good detective but a poor policeman, Thursday tells him, and something similar could be said of "Endeavour": it's a poor mystery, but it's not a bad meal.


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text:
Monday Briefing: US and Turkey face S-400 confrontation
Shale oil and the illusion of US energy independence
The Songkok and Raouf Rifai's Darwiche: A Cultural Dialogue Between the Middle East and Southeast Asia
Assaad W. Razzouk
Raouf Rifai, a doyen of Lebanese and Arab painters, introduced the Darwiche as the point of departure for his art in 2008. Rifai's Darwiche is a folk character created by the artist and representing the common man ("darwiche" in Arabic means a simple and simple-minded person). Rifai's common man also encompasses ― through the name the artist chose ― the dervish, or Sufi mystic, thus imbuing a spiritual and physical duality to the character.
Rifai's Darwiches are many and varied, a cultural icon in the making through the deliberate, obsessive application of the artist over the past six years, an application which doesn't show any signs of abating. Rifai has painted the Darwiche in many guises, all of which share somecommon characteristics, foremost the fact that they are all rooted in human existence: They have weaknesses and flaws, a myriad of expressions, attitudes and emotions; they are secular and spiritual; they are handsome and ugly; they are stupid yet at the same time wiser than everyone around them; they are full of worries or playful; they cry yet derive humor from everyday tasks. In short, we recognize ourselves in them: they are us. Rifai's Darwiches are almost always accompanied by a rich array of explicit and implicit Middle Eastern symbols, including a fez (or tarboush), a Damscene sabot, Egyptian peasant dresses and many others.
Darwiche also often wears a Songkok, the cap or hat widely worn in Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand, mostly among Muslim nd originating from the Ottoman fez. Often, the Darwiche is represented as a folkloric character such as Juha (better known outside the Arab world as Nasreddin), Abu Zayd al-Hilali (an 11th-century Arab leader featured often in Arab folklore), Abu El Abed (a Lebanese fictional character who is the centrepiece of jokes in Lebanon) and others from the rich history of the Middle East. Darwiche is also portrayed as a common man, a Sheikh, a woman, a drag queen, a Pope. Inspired by Nasreddin, Rifai's Darwiche wants to be popular across the entire Arab Middle East, and his stories almost invariably take the form of humorous anecdotes.
The Darwiche stories told in each painting can be understood at many levels including as a joke, as a morality tale and as a political statement ― and usually deal with timeless concepts, purveying folk wisdom that triumph over all trials and tribulations. Rifai's body of work is so confident, symbolic and persistent that we feel the Darwiche turning ― in front of our eyes ― into the Middle East 's Mickey Mouse, Superman, Archie Bunker, Asterix, a cultural icon standing steadfast alongside and against what the artist refers to as "the Mickey Mouse invasion," i.e. the perception that Western culture is overwhelming Eastern culture.
With a strong stylistic wink to the Egyptian style prevalent in the Middle East for several thousands of years (based not on how we see a particular scene but on what we know belongs there), his paintings have an unmistakable Oriental personality though he excels in piling up Middle Eastern symbols which are so well travelled that some of his art could be mistaken for being South East Asian or South Asian. Through the simple device of often illustrating Darwiche wearing a Singkok, or having Asian traits, Rifai's art seamlessly travels to Southeast Asia and integrates in its cultural scene. Darwich is barging in on Malaysia's Kampung Boy Lat, Indonesia's legendary prince Panji, Singapore's Mr. Kiasu. He wants to be their friend and ally in promoting and protecting local folklore and folkloric wisdom, in a regional cultural front facing up to Mickey Mouse. More broadly, Darwiche is conversing with Southeast Asia, leveraging common cultural roots to highlight how art can transcend the particular and speak to the universal, portraying and negotiating the neuroses of society with wit, depth and passion.
"Carnaval of Darwiches," an exhibition by Raouf Rifai, is showing at Singapore's Sana Gallery. The exhibition was curated by Assaad W. Razzouk. Paintings top to bottom: " Egyptian Darwiche," Acrylic on Canvas, 150 x 150 (2011); "Zen Darwich," Acrylic on Canvas, 140x180 (2012); and "Popular Icons 1," Acrylic on Canvas," 180 x 230 (2012).]
Related By Issue
Vibrant art scene inspires cooperation, competition in Gulf
Wided Rihana Khadraoui
Nadia el-Fani: a soldier of secularism fights on
Hadani Ditmars
An Interview with Ziad Doueiri, Director of The Insult
Joseph Fahim
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text:
RSpec.describe Nib::CheckForUpdate do
  subject { described_class }

  before do
    allow(described_class).to receive(:latest).and_return(latest)
  end

  context 'current' do
    let(:latest) { Nib::VERSION }

    it 'does not output a message' do
      expect($stdout).to_not receive(:puts)

      subject.execute(nil, nil)
    end
  end

  context 'outdated' do
    let(:latest) { '100.0.0' }

    it 'does not output a message' do
      expect($stdout).to receive(:puts).with(/An update.*#{latest}/)

      subject.execute(nil, nil)
    end
  end
end


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Comfortable, wider seating with cup holders – not a bad seat in the house!
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text:
3rd April 1970, Page 34
Page 34, 3rd April 1970
Tribunal Decides On Bloodstock Cross
• In a written decision the Transport Tribunal has dismissed the "bloodstock—is it livestock?" appeal by W. G. Cook and Sons (Transport) Ltd. The Tribunal avoided basing its......
No To Welsh Low-loader
• An application by Port Talbot Plant Ltd for a low-loader, on B-licence, to carry plant machinery was refused by the South Wales LA, Mr R. R. Jackson, in Cardiff on March 25.......
Subsidization Defended
• Speaking in respect of the Cardiff to Merthyr Tydfil bus service recently, Mr R. R. Jackson, chairman of the South Wales Traffic Commissioners stated: "We consider that it is......


Do you like to get stuff done? Have you started pet projects several times and then never finished them? Have you been working on the same personal project for a couple of years? Are you planning to start a side project in your free time?
Memcached is often threated as a zero-configuration system. This isn't quite true. Proper configuration to the hardware and client application's behavior can significantly improve overall performance.


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Beach, Nautical & Coastal Pottery Collection | M.A. Hadley Pottery to enter the 100% Hadley Pet Photo Contest!
The blues and greens of the Hadley beach and nautical themed pottery are reminiscent of relaxing, quiet times near the water. This coastal stoneware collection is perfect for seaside homes or cottages along the coasts, for everyday beach tableware or as nautical decor accents on walls or in cupboards. Mix and match beach and nautical scenes for a true coastal cottage look on your table and throughout your home. With personalized pottery, a special location, name or date, the beach pottery can be a reminder of a special experience.
Know she collects Beach tableware or Nautical decor pieces, or has a Coastal Cottage decorating scheme, but not sure what she has, wants, or needs? Consider a Hadley Pottery Gift Certificate!


VENTE AUX ENCHERES SANS PRIX DE RESERVE D'INFORMATIQUE, ELECTRONIQUE ET DE MOBILIER DESIGN.
CANAPE A GARNITURE DE TISSUS COLORI ROUGE. 4 PLACES. REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN MEYAL LAQUE GRIS. SALISSURE. 2 UNITES A VENDRE A L'UNITE AVEC FACULTE DE REUNION. 70 X 218 X 84 CM.
CHAISE HAUTE ASSISE COQUE COLORI NOIR REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN BOIS FUSELE. 116 X 58 X 59 CM. 2 UNITES A VENDRE A L'UNITE AVEC FACULTE DE REUNION.
FAUTEUIL EDITION TACCHINI GARNITURE CUIR COLORI CREME DOSSIER GARNI D'UNE PLAQUE D EMETAL BROSSE. 73 X 80 X 47 CM. 4 UNITES A VENDRE A L'UNITE AVCE FACULTE DE REUNION.
FAUTEUIL EDITION TACCHINI GARNITURE CUIR COLORI BLEU MARINE DOSSIER GARNI D'UNE PLAQUE D EMETAL BROSSE. 73 X 80 X 47 CM. 4 UNITES A VENDRE A L'UNITE AVCE FACULTE DE REUNION.
CHAISE A GARNITURE DE LAINE BOUILLIE COLORI GRIS REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN BOIS NATUREL FUSELE.
CANAPE 2 PLACES A GARNITURE DE TISSUS GRIS CLAIRE DOSSIER CAPITONE DE BOUTONS GARNITS DE TISSUS COLORES. REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN BOIS LAQUE. 2 PLACES. 84 X 140 X 73 CM.
CANAPE D'ANGLE EDITION IKEA A GARNITURE DE TISSUS BLEU GRIS FONCE REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN METAL, 5 PLACES, 6 COUSSIN DE DOSSIER. SALISSURE. 70 X 220 X 220 CM.
TABLE BASSE DANS LE GOUT SCANDINAVE EN BOIS NATURE A PLATEAU TRIANGULAIRE REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT FUSELE. 39 X 110 X 110 CM.
TAPIS EN LAINE A MOTIF GEOMETRIQUES COLORI BLANC ET NOIR. 166 X 225 CM.
FAUTEUIL A GARNITURE COLORI BLEU ROI. REPOSANT SUR PIETEMENT EN BOIS. 2 UNITES A VENDRE A L'UNITE AVEC FACULTE DE REUNION.


Reserve Bank keeps interest rates at record low of 1.5% as economy strengthens.
The Reserve Bank today announced it was keeping the official cash rate at 1.5% stating that the low level of interest rates is "continuing to support the Australian economy".
This decision came as no surprise. While economic conditions are improving, the RBA will want to see wage growth and inflation improve before raising interest rates. This will take time and we don't foresee a rise in rates any time soon.
The other underlying issue is low inflation. Although the RBA forecasts a gradual increase in inflation (to just above 2% in 2018), until it does rates will remain low.
Well, it makes it a great time to revisit your mortgage and make sure you are getting the best deal for you. You may be able to refinance with your lender or even switch to a new lender and save yourself money. Contact us for a home loan health check today.
Low interest rates also make property investment a smart choice for the savvy investor. RBA's concerns over the housing market have eased as prices have cool slightly and supply increased. With the cost of borrowing at historic lows and the market looking solid, it is a good time to think about investing in property. We can help you work out your borrowing options as you build your property portfolio.
So, in short, home loan rates are set to remain low for some time yet. Take advantage of the market and Contact Us to do a home loan health check today.


text:
Thanks to initiatives launched by the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association, innovations are letting businesses like 100 Mile House's Imperial Motel emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
Cariboo tourism shows resiliency to emerge stronger than ever
It's no surprise that when the pandemic hit, one of the industries most affected is also one of the province's biggest: tourism.
But thanks to initiatives launched by the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association, innovations are also letting businesses like 100 Mile House's Imperial Motel emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
Imperial Motel owner, Lucky Pannu was new to the tourism industry and the motel business too, and the resources available to her through the CCTTA helped to "create a brand new website which has proved to be a big help for our business!" she says. An online presence was important before the pandemic, but during it and for the future, it has become even more significant.
Customized solutions made all the difference to Pannu, who got help with phone lines and advice on booking platforms, and even help with finding insurance when some providers bailed out on smaller operations.
Working together to go beyond recovery
Thanks to help from the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Resiliency Program, tourism operators like Pannu are turning what might have become a disaster, into an opportunity to expand and grow. The Tourism Resiliency Program focuses on supporting tourism businesses through providing meaningful one-on-one support to navigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, while adapting and working towards building long-term resiliency. Working together across the province, the BC Regional Tourism Secretariat is leading the BC Tourism Resiliency Network. Together, the program has helped more than 1,900 tourism businesses across the province with generous support from Western Diversification Trust and the Ministry of Tourism Arts and Culture.
The Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association is a non-profit, stakeholder-based Regional Destination Management Organization that leads tourism in development and marketing in conjunction with the Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture, Destination British Columbia, Destination Canada and industry partners in the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Region to help foster responsible growth of tourism and empowering a resilient visitor economy. Under this umbrella, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism leads development, sustainability, and consumer marketing. The organization provides leadership and stewardship for tourism, supply and demand for an industry that puts businesses first with the tourism industry, residents, and communities at the heart of all efforts.
Better than before
Lucky Pannu is looking forward the future thanks to the help of the Tourism Resiliency Program and personalized support. The Imperial Motel's new-and-improved online presence is already attracting attention. She makes it clear that "the TRP has brought us through to the other side of the pandemic and we don't know what we would have done or where we'd be without the CCCTA or the program."
Learn more about the Imperial Motel here. Call at 250-395-2471 or email at imperialmotel100@gmail.com.
Business owners can learn more here about the CCCTA.
To learn more and sign up for support through the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Resiliency Program, visit their website at www.tourismresiliency.ca/ccctrp
HotelsTourismtravel


by Chris Thilk.In A Brief Digression, Employment Journey.
There's been… a lot…that's happened in 2017. Even more so than 2016, when I was let go from my last full-time job and began what might generously be called an "unexpected" career path, this year has been one of learnings, new beginnings, shedding of old notions and much more.
I don't want to overstate things. No one got married. No one died. There were no great "milestones" as they're commonly defined. Instead what 2017 contained was a steady progression in a number of directions that were unusual and far different from the model I thought my life would be going down.
Yes, it's an excuse to use my favorite Spaceballs GIF once more. But the reality is that it wasn't until the middle of the year that I stopped waiting for things to return to normal and began accepting that this is the new normal. I felt a weight lift when I realized that there was no use in continuing to expect a reversion to what had come before. The reality, as of now, is that I'm a full-time freelancer/contractor who also works part-time retail. That's not a situation I'm waiting out, it's one I'm embracing and making the most of.
That being said, finding new freelance opportunities has been at times a struggle. I've worked consistently over the last several months, but adding clients and projects isn't easy. The job boards and other sources of work have turned up a number of things, but most of my best gigs have come from referrals from friends and colleagues. Looking for work is as much of a job as the work itself, something I'm slowly becoming savvier at.
It's never been easy to start a blog from the ground up, even back in the halcyon days of RSS and comments and such. It takes hard work, focus and dedication. That's exactly what I've been doing over at Cinematic Slant, which is still a work in progress but which has been growing month to month, which is encouraging. It's still going to take a while before it achieves any sort of critical mass but that's alright, I'm having fun with a dedicated outlet for my movie writing. And it's been great to see the audience build over the first six months of its existence.
If you've been reading this blog or Cinematic Slant you've likely seen a number of features come and go. I start out writing some ongoing feature with the best of intentions but for one reason or another many either fall by the wayside or morph into something different. I know that has the potential to create a little audience whiplash, but I also hope it's clear that I'm experimenting in public and that those who are truly interested have been following along. I don't want to make promises for 2018, but I'm working to plan some things a bit more clearly and consistently to settle down the back and forth.
I'd never really written about my own writing style, practices or thoughts before this year. That changed when I started doing so first on this blog and then on Medium. And I really believe doing so has made me a better writer, especially when combined with various freelance editors and clients. While writing about writing can come off a bit self-indulgent at times, it's also accomplishing exactly what writing in general has always done for me; Allowed me to think out loud and, in doing so, organize my thoughts a bit more.
At one point in the last year I went deep in the paint on various tactics commonly appearing on lists of good ideas for content marketing, tactics I've used from time to time on one client program or another. That is what I'm trying to do, after all: Market myself through content publishing. What I found, as is often the case, is that those aren't universal. Resurfacing old blog posts did nothing for my stats or leads. Being super-timely and trying to draft off current trends didn't work. It was a good reminder that no matter how many consultants might try to convince you they know the keys to success, one solution almost never fits all.
The biggest lesson of the year is that there's been any change at all. I've moved so far outside my comfort zone on any number of topics it's hard to know what that location felt like at all. It turns out you can make anything work for a year. That's especially true if you know you have the love and support of your wife and children as well as your extended family. A healthy dose of German Lutheran "Well, that's what needs to be done" attitude helps, too. But that love and support…that's the big one. It allows you to be fearless and dedicated.
2017 is coming to a close. 2018 is just around the corner. There are new adventures around the corner that haven't been planned for or contemplated. They'll be met and handled and adjusted to. Next year will likely have plenty of big surprises and twists, just as the last two years have.


Rising sea levels resulting from global warming have not been adequately prepared for in waterfront developments, including Docklands area warns ex-Victorian planning and environment minister, Tom Roper.
A minister from 1987-1990 and now a board member of the Climate Institute in Washington, Mr Roper made the comments during the recent World Sustainable Building Conference held in Melbourne at which he was also a guest speaker.
Until recently most studies on the impact of sea level rises were predicted to be up to one metre by 2100, but according to Mr Roper, "The best European and US research has now made it clear that the estimates in most of these reports are underestimates ... most recent research now predicts two metres by the end of the century, and of course, it will keep on coming after that.
As with most coastal cities including New York and London, Mr Roper believes we need to prepare for climate change and sea level rises now.
"It will affect all our coast line, and we're seeing the changes now," he said.
"Although Port Phillip Bay doesn't get the same level of storm activity as say Queensland, in April there were some big storms and there are predictions that there will be a significant increase in hailstorms... we've got to look at how future systems operate and our infrastructure. Governments all around the world are starting to pay attention," said Mr Roper.


text:
What the iPhone 6S camera could mean for photographers
By Rod Lawton 2015-09-06T04:00:00.248Z
Apple built its reputation on image quality, not megapixels
As always, Apple is giving nothing away in advance of the launch of the new iPhone 6S.
But all the rumors so far point toward two key new features for photographers in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus: a new 12-megapixel (MP) sensor and 4K video recording capability.
iPhone 6S sensor
Just 12MP doesn't sound much of an increase when the Sony Xperia Z5 camera packs 23 million pixels and the LG G4 has 16MP. But, like the song says, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
There is a very specific problem with cramming lots of pixels on to a sensor small enough to fit in a smartphone. More pixels means smaller photosites (the individual light receptors).
Small photosites are less sensitive and more prone to noise and it's pretty obvious from the compact camera market that there comes a tipping point where the theoretical resolution goes up but the all-round picture quality goes down. You get more data points, but worse data.
This iPhone 6 Plus shot is packed with contrast, saturation and detail
The current iPhone camera might have just 8 million pixels, but it's popular with photographers because, despite its modest resolution compared to rival smartphones, it punches well above its weight for picture quality. Its images are bright, contrasty and sharp from edge to edge, and the chromatic aberration (color fringing) that's the curse of cheap cameras is absent – either because the iPhone lens is particularly good, or because it's processed out by the software.
And the thing is that, while an 8MP sensor doesn't sound much, it wasn't that long ago that 8MP was pretty solid for a mid-range DSLR. To put this in perspective, a good quality, full-bleed 300dpi photographic print needs about 9 megapixels, and a full-bleed image in a magazine needs rather less.
If you just look at the numbers, a hike in resolution from 8 megapixels to 12 sounds like too little too late. But if it increases the resolution of the images by 50% without any loss in sensitivity or extra noise, then it will make a lot of photographers very happy.
If Apple uses a 12Mp sensor in the iPhone 6S, this will attract scorn from other smartphone users but maybe nods of approval from photographers.
iPhone 6S 4K video
This is the other rumor, that the maximum resolution of the iPhone 6S movie mode will jump from 1,920 x 1,080 full HD in the current iPhone 6 to 4K resolution – possibly 3,840 x 2,160.
In principle, this is a Good Thing, but a lot depends on how well the iPhone's hardware copes with the extra workload.
For a start, if the iPhone can't shoot 4K at 30 frames per second, then it's not worth having. Nikon took a risk with its Nikon 1 J5 compact system by headlining its 4K video capability, even though it can only do this at a jerky 15 frames per second – but it seems unlikely Apple would make a similar mistake.
But video quality isn't just about resolution and frame rate – it's about how well the image stabilization works, how well the camera handles movement and how badly it's affected by compression artifacts.
The 1,920 x 1,080 video output on the current iPhone is really good, so any 4K mode would have a tough act to follow.
If the rumors are true, the camera upgrade on the iPhone 6S will be modest and conservative – but the iPhone's reputation as a photographic tool is built in the quality of its results, not the size of the numbers, so that's no bad thing.
These are the best mirrorless cameras around