Need to Up My Game on Photoshop

I've dabbled with Photoshop over the years, but I have decided to (as Stephen Covey suggested) "sharpen the saw."  In other words, I want to incorporate new tools so that I can get things done better and more efficiently when I use Photoshop.  Shane Parrish of Farnham Street would identify this as "Compounding," which is a really cool concept, especially when applied to things other than earning interest on money.

And what a better time to learn tips on using photoshop than modern times, when you can attend Youtube University or pay a bit from many other online instructors?  I've already incorporated one change when compositing, something I should have done years ago: Instead of trimming a the top image with the eraser tool, I've started making use of layer masks.  That, and use of the "x" key to switch colors from black to white (black conceals, white reveals), has made it a joy to display only what I want on the top layer.  Whenever you make a mistake, it's non-destructive and hitting the "x" key lets you bring back what you accidentally took away.  What you'll see below is an image I created using the layer mask to display precisely what I wanted in my own body (I'm the guy on top).   I'll paste in the FB commentary so you can experience the joke too:

Last night I spotted my buddy Eddie White at the Southside YMCA. Eddie is active duty U.S. Army and I think his military exercise routine requires him to bench press a house. I was happy to serve as his weight-lifting partner.





My body looks pretty tidy, but it took a long time (about 45 min) to get it looking good. I kept zooming in deep to make the cuts precisely and I was using a mouse. My next step in my education is to learn to use the Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphics Drawing Tablet that I just purchased. There's going to be a learning curve, but I've seen a lot of testimonials from people who learn it and love it so much that you couldn't take it back unless you pried it out of their cold dead hands. So that's my next step in my education, my quest to do more than simply "dabble" with Photoshop.

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WTSocial: Alternative to Facebook is Announced by Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia



Jimmy Wales' (founder of Wikipedia) has a new project, WTSocial  

I'm going to presumptively speak for "the World" here:  The World is ready for an alternative social gathering spot that respects users' privacy, discourages acrimony and tamps down hard on misinformation. I'm an early financial supporter because I really want this project to take off. This will be a fundamentally different business model than Facebook in that it will be funded through user donations. Here's are a few excerpts from a Financial Times article about WTSocial:

“It won’t be massively profitable but it will be sustainable,” [Wales] said . . . Wales said he believes the time is now right for a new venue that is free from what he calls “clickbait nonsense”. “People are feeling fed up with all the junk that’s around,” Mr Wales said.

Regarding his goals for numbers of users, Wale stated: “Obviously the ambition is not 50,000 or 500,000 but 50m and 500m.”

Photo Credit:  Photograph: ed g2s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15707

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Waitress Reports: Families no longer having conversations over dinner

My daughters and I ate at a local diner tonight. Our waitress has been doing this work for 45 years, since she was 15. She said one of the striking changes in her business is how people no longer engage in conversations while eating. She estimated that 8 out of 10 groups of people barely talk. Instead, they are mostly looking at their phones while they eat at the restaurant. She is dismayed about this and said that she sees this in her own family; it is difficult to have conversation with her own children because they are glued to their phones. Apparently, Phubbing is the new normal.

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Moore’s Law: Alive and Well.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. It's still going strong 52 years later, ever since 1965, when Gordon Moore made his prediction. That this law has has held for more than 50 years is amazing, almost miraculous-seeming. It reminds me of the wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains), a mathematical problem expressed this way:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

In the chessboard example the final number is a whopping 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (the 64th Mersenne number). Wikipedia reports this commentary:

In April 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that "In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times. As we progress from 14 nanometer technology to 10 nanometer and plan for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well".[25] In January 2017, he declared that "I've heard the death of Moore's law more times than anything else in my career ... And I'm here today to really show you and tell you that Moore's Law is alive and well and flourishing.

 

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