Author Archives: danijel

Aliens

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There’s been lots of very weird American talk about the aliens in the last two years or so. “Weird” because usually their government seems to deny and/or suppress such “leaks”, and this time it looks very much like they’re the source. So, what’s my take on it?

When I was a kid, I thought the existence of aliens was a sure thing – all those UFO and abduction reports had to be at least partially true, the size of the Universe practically guarantees that someone is out there, and sooner or later someone would figure out a way around the limitations posed by the speed of light.

The change in my thinking happened when I researched a few things for completely unrelated reasons; I researched evolution of life and mass extinctions, and I realised that our existence is contingent upon multiple extremely unlikely things. For instance, single (non-binary) stars are extremely rare, and binary stars tend to produce solar flares of extreme strength that routinely sterilise the habitable zone. I hear it commonly claimed that our Sun is an average, ordinary star, but that’s actually very far from reality. Our Sun is extremely well behaved for a star, and that’s a necessary condition for life not having to reboot after every major solar event. Also, the solar system is very unusual in a sense that it doesn’t have gas giants closest to the star, and instead has them in the outer system. Furthermore, Earth has an extraordinarily powerful and stable magnetic field, which is the reason why it doesn’t look like its twin planet, Venus, and the smaller sibling, Mars. This magnetic field, along with axial stability, seems to have a common cause – the Theia impact in the formative phase of the solar system, where a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, and the ejecta from the impact formed the Moon. Apparently, the heavy core of that planet merged with the Earth’s core, while the lighter parts formed the Moon, leaving the Earth with twice the expected amount of heavy elements, whose radioactive decay keep the Earth’s interior liquid, and core spinning. There also seem to be some atypical things about Earth’s core that are still poorly researched, which might actually contribute to the magnetic field’s strength. Also, the Moon seems to axially lock the Earth, making it an extremely stable environment for the evolution of life.

Life itself in its most basic form seems to have come from space, and the evidence for this is that we’ve found all the basic chemicals for it on the asteroids and comets, and the earliest life on Earth seems to have formed as soon as the planet itself solidified enough. So, life had a very early start here, and yet it took an inordinate amount of time for it to form multi-cellular organisms, and the amount of luck necessary for that to happen seems to be extraordinary. I used to think that life itself is unlikely, but once you get it started, it will eventually evolve into intelligent life. However, based on what I’ve learned, the opposite seems to be the case. Life itself might actually be quite likely, and will probably start whenever the conditions are even the least bit favourable. Anything more complex than the simplest single-cell organisms without a defined nucleus and organelles, however, might be extremely uncommon and likely requires singular extremely unlikely events across billions of years.

Then we come to radiation. There’s cosmic radiation, and then there’s solar radiation. Earth has multiple layers of shielding against both – there’s the magnetic field, then the thick atmosphere, and then there’s the ozone layer. Without those, life might exist in the deep oceans, but not on land. Also, without the magnetic field, the oceans would evaporate into space, like they did on Mars, and probably on Venus as well, if they even formed in the first place.

I’m not saying that life is impossible somewhere in the atmosphere of the gas giants, or in the oceans of their satellites. I would actually be surprised if it didn’t exist there. However, I would also be extremely surprised if we found anything multi-cellular.

Our kind of life – multi-cellular, on the ground and not in a liquid or gaseous medium, complex, intelligent, and forming a civilization – has so many extremely unlikely prerequisites, that I became convinced that as large as the Universe is, it is too small for this to happen more than once. Earth indeed seems to be the centre of the Universe, if we define central in the terms of significance, because everything of significance seems to happen here. Sure, the Universe is big, and full of stars and black holes, rocks, dust and gas, but rather than being a “pale blue dot” of insignificance in the middle of nowhere, Earth seems to be the most special planet around the most special star, where extremely unlikely things occurred across time, to make everything we know possible.

My next argument against aliens is that, if they exist, they are inconsequential. We can argue back and forth as to why an alien species would come here, and produce nothing more than sightings of unexplained things, and occasional abduction testimony, but the fact remains that if the aliens are here, they are doing nothing of consequence as far as human life is concerned. If something is inconsequential, I’m certainly not going to dedicate much thought to it.

Sure, something might happen to change my mind – for instance, if aliens actually do exist and contact us, then they will cease to be inconsequential, and I will have to revise my ideas about how common our type of life is in the Universe, but so far it seems to be that the more we know, the more special Earth seems to be.

Vulgar materialism

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I had a weird experience on a photographic forum in the recent months. Essentially, I was praising the optical qualities of a cheap lens, the Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6, and someone reacted as if the very possibility of a cheap lens being as sharp as the top quality lenses was a personal insult to his pay-to-win worldview.

This is why people mischaracterise the FE 50mm f/1.8 as a “beginner lens”, something you “graduate from” to a more expensive, high quality lens. It just can’t be that a cheap lens can be good. It’s good if you don’t really have experience with the expensive stuff, but if you did, if you could afford the expensive glass, of course you would get it, right? Praising cheap lenses is certainly a coping mechanism for poor people.

FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6

I find this line of thinking extremely annoying. OK, I understand there are insecure people who are trying to turn everything into a status symbol, and it’s probably some aspect of aspirational buying characteristic for people of a materialistic worldview, who think possession of things gives them value. It’s also why sharpness became so overused in assessing picture quality; it’s measurable, and it’s also highly dependent on equipment, and as such, you can make it into a pay-to-win proposition; he who has sharpest pictures wins, and he who has the most money will be able to buy equipment that makes the sharpest pictures. So, obviously, my proposition that a 200 EUR lens can be as sharp at f/8-11 apertures as any expensive GM lens is something that is seen as so incredibly offensive to the materialistic worldview, that it needs to be rejected as outright preposterous and clearly a coping mechanism of someone who can’t afford the GM glass.

Only, I can. I have a pretty extensive collection of high grade lenses, and I do actually know what I’m talking about. As far as sharpness and resistance to flare are concerned, the cheap 28-60mm zoom really does hold its own against glass of the highest grade. This makes it ideal for some use cases. People should be happy about it – after all, if a cheap lens can do the job, they don’t have to waste money on an expensive one, right?

You would think, but that’s hardly the case. It’s as if being inexpensive automatically makes a lens suspect. Even if people are happy with the lens itself, they will “upgrade” from it as soon as possible, simply because it’s cheap and they don’t wish to be associated with cheap equipment. It’s for the beginners, for people who don’t really know.

FE 50mm f/1.8

Do you know what I did after I bought the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM lens? The best, sharpest, brightest 50mm prime? The replacement for my FE 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty”? I kept using the cheap f/1.8 whenever I needed a light, inconspicuous, versatile lens. As for the f/1.2 GM, it’s absolutely great. Completely free of the optical flaws the cheap lens manifests wide open and against the light. Autofocus is instantaneous and incredibly accurate, unlike the cheap lens, whose AF is its worst aspect. But the secret is, from f/2.8 onwards the two lenses are mostly indistinguishable. The cheap lens is optically extremely good when you use it the way you should for most things. Of course I kept using the 50mm f/1.8 for things where it’s actually better; things like keeping it light and not looking like a professional.

So, I didn’t “graduate” from a cheap 50mm lens to a professional one. I didn’t replace the cheap lens. I merely added a new high-quality tool to my arsenal. The cheap lens is still excellent and I use it when the advantages of the more expensive lens are irrelevant. For instance, if I am shooting landscapes in good light, both lenses are going to be used at f/8. Autofocus is going to lock instantly on both in this use case. Sharpness is going to be the same. However, one is going to be lighter to carry. As for the image quality, I already had situations where I looked back at the pictures and thought “ah, the f/1.2 GM is so incredibly sharp here”, only to look at the EXIF and find out that the picture was taken with the cheap 50mm f/1.8. So yes, I will have to disappoint the crowd that sees this as a pay-to-win competition where most money gets you the sharpest pictures. Sharpness is in fact one of the easiest things to achieve inexpensively. You do, however, have to know what you’re doing, which is a different matter entirely.

But if you can get sharpness at high resolution with inexpensive lenses, why did I even get all those expensive GM lenses? Because there’s sharpness, and there’s sharpness of that one single crisp detail in a sea of blurred-out colour.

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

Because I hate chromatic aberrations messing up my shots at contrasty details against the light. Because I like shooting in low light, when the colours are particularly “meaty”, and I like shooting wide open, at extreme apertures, while still retaining critical resolution in landscape shots. My photographic style is such that I can actually use those extreme optics for what they are made. I want things blurry, and yet clear and crisp at the same time.

FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM

That’s the part that’s hard to get, and I had to pay through the nose for it. It’s just what it is. If I could get away with a cheap lens, be completely sure that I would have used one. In fact, I do have a few cheap lenses that I use regularly, because they are what works the best in some cases. They are not inferior lenses – merely inexpensive because there’s a compromise that doesn’t matter for my intended use case. For instance, I have a Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, which I bought very inexpensively, but its picture quality is stellar, build quality is incredible, and it’s very small and light.

Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN

The compromise? It’s a f/3.5 lens, so aperture is limited compared to the more expensive lenses. I don’t care, because I shoot it mostly at f/8-11. It’s a wide angle lens; I don’t care to have extreme aperture on it, and I also already have one extreme aperture wideangle for the situations where I want to use it hand held with the stars visible in the sky. I need this one to be crisp, resistant to flare and light, which it is. It’s just not a bokeh monster. However, if you want optical quality, it’s absolutely top notch. It’s the lens I use when I want pictures to look as if they were taken with a smartphone, only without the stupid artefacts.

Being inexpensive, however, seems to be an unforgivable crime for some people. If a piece of gear is guilty of that crime, no amount of stellar performance can absolve it, and it needs to be avoided so that people wouldn’t suspect you of not having enough money to afford the “really good stuff”.

I’ve been thinking about this mentality a lot lately, since I keep encountering it. It’s as if some people have a desperate need of showing everybody that they have money. One would expect it to be something poor people do in order to hide their desperate financial situation, and they do. It is also, however, something very rich people do if they happened to have a really shitty financial situation earlier in life, like Andrew Tate. When he goes to a restaurant, he orders the most expensive steak. When a waiter asks him for his exact preference, it turns out that “most expensive” is his preference. One would expect a rich person to just order what he wants to eat that day, and not care about prices at all, and I am certain that most do. Some, however, always need to have the most expensive thing, so that people wouldn’t suspect them of being poor, because they were so traumatised by being poor, they started acting in the most ridiculously ostentatious manner once they got into money. I find such behaviour distasteful. If you can’t wear an excellent Seiko because of what people would think, or you can’t drive a normal car because of what people would think, you can’t have furniture from Ikea because of what people would think, and you can’t be seen with an excellent “kit zoom” on your camera because of what people would think, trust me, you have bigger problems than what people would think.

Work work…

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I ended up modifying my smtp server so that gmail would no longer bounce messages; it was easier than I thought, some simple things on the linux side and mostly DNS work. SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Sounds obscure, but very easy to do if you have a good tutorial and know how to follow the instructions. Fortunately, I kept my Linux skills sharp enough for this kind of stuff.

So, I can now again use my own mail server instead of Google’s, until someone in America again decides to adopt, modify and extinguish some existing and perfectly good open protocol. To defend the world against all kinds of evils, of course, because they’re the good guys. That’s sarcasm, BTW.

I used to be annoyed about the part of the NDE experiences where people come before the Judge and he shows them the retrospective of their life. At that time, I was going through my memories with a metaphoric magnifying glass, finding everything messed up in order to fix it, and it seemed to me that my life is basically all about fixing traumatic shit – traumatic either because it was something I did wrong, or because I was in a desperate situation. In any case, it looked like there’s almost nothing good there, and yet it’s something that’s been put on my plate and now I have to deal with it. If, after all that, someone’s first idea is to make me look into all that again, after it’s all over, I thought I’d be so annoyed I’d chase that person around Heaven with a stick.

And yet, I recently had a situation where exactly that happened; someone showed me where to look, again, with a different perspective, and my whole understanding of my childhood had changed. Not because I missed something before; I was very thorough. I did, however, inspect only myself; my role, my condition, my actions, and apparently that was not enough, because other people’s roles and actions in all of that fundamentally change the whole picture.

It’s not that my approach was wrong. It was incomplete, but not wrong. It’s like handling a medical emergency without handling the war that caused it. Necessary, and good, but doesn’t actually deal with the wider picture.

I did try to understand what’s the point. It is now pretty obvious what happened – Satan seems to have deceived me and modified my life in order to harm me in a very specific way. Why is a different question.

It certainly had consequences, and if I assume that those consequences are what he aimed for, apparently he harmed me in ways that would distort my own perception of myself and make it impossible, or at least incredibly hard, to reclaim myself here, in this body. The goal seems to be to make it impossible for me to coalesce my physical experience and person with my true, original being, because he blew so much dust in my face, I was supposed to spend the rest of this life navel gazing somewhere – trying to repent for and correct my supposed sins, which turned out to be forced errors or even someone else’s faults entirely. Basically, someone else showered me with shit and then tried to convince me it’s obviously my problem – after all, I do stink. Wouldn’t be right to run away from facts, right? Fortunately, God knows better what the facts actually are. Convincing me of them, however, seems to be an ongoing effort, but I seem to be making progress now. I would expect it’s related to the karmic processing, because it’s making me stronger. Me, as a physical being with layers of spiritual energetics of a very high order, as opposed to me as a being that actually incarnates through this.

How does that even work? I mean, I get the general idea. You attain initiation here in the physical, and this creates an energetic layer that makes it possible for you to live a deeper form of spiritual reality, and in my case incarnate more of my true being. It’s a partial incarnation until you get those energy bodies high enough and solid enough that there’s basically no difference between that and the incarnating entity. But that’s not actually something that even happens, historically. Not in this order of magnitude. I feel there’s something of unique importance going on, and I can’t figure it out yet. It has the “on Earth, as in Heaven” quality to it. For the first time, ever.

Not there yet; not quite. But I’m working on it. Apparently, I need to transform all this karmic mass in order to get there. The quantities are enormous, and I wonder what it even is, because it’s not like there are many things this big anywhere.

Developments

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I found a new (to me, at least) band to listen to.

I got the links for my watch bracelet so I can now wear it again without amputating my hand by means of vascular constriction. Although, the movement is showing signs of needing a service; after 8 years of wearing it, it’s not surprising. I think the oils have hardened. I’ll deal with it, eventually.

America and Iran are back to killing each other again, but somehow the oil price is dropping like a rock.

I’m still transforming quantities of karmic substance that are enough to ruin my day, so it’s basically the main thing I do.

It’s less hot here now that the heat wave had passed, and the dust and humidity in the air make for wonderful sunset colours.

I’m actually amazingly calm, considering what’s going on. At least, I’m calm now that the karmic load had subsided somewhat and I’m recovering from earlier today. The photo above looks very much the way I feel now.