Quotes by Mark Twain & Carl Sagan & Upton Sinclair

Three quotes for Today. Twain and Sagan quotes are quite similar, worth mentioning them both in this day and age. These are three of my favorite quotes:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” – Mark Twain

“If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

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In Praise of FoxTrot Professional Search Software for Mac

I have sometimes struggled to comb through several decades of legal research (as well as science and philosophy research) on my iMac 4tb hard drive. I've used Apple Spotlight's multi-faceted document search function over the years and it is often quite helpful. Today, however, I learned about FoxTrot Professional Search. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to pinpoint documents, images, spreadsheets and mail in dozens of ways, including proximity searches and tailor-made search strings with exceptions. You can apply complicated search requests to multiple indices on your main HD, as well as external drives (I've got another 3+ TB of data on my external drive. I've been exploring the parameters of FoxTrot for a couple of hours now and I highly recommend it. $100 per workstation. I hope this helps somebody out there . . .

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Life After Leaf: An Artistic Celebration of Yellowstone’s Dead Trees

Are you looking to buy a unique Christmas gift for friends or family? Consider my newly published art book: Life After Leaf.

In October 2021 I traveled to Yellowstone National Park twice for the purpose of shooting images of the trees. All the images in my book were shot along high altitude hiking trails

Over the years, I have developed Photoshop artistry techniques for digitally blending my images of trees with texture images of rocks, clouds, water and many other natural objects and vignettes that I captured this year. In total, my book draws upon my collection of more than 2,000 images of trees and textures. I use Photoshop to blend the tree and texture layers. I then use additional Photoshop tools such as adjustment layers, masking, gradients, blurring, and lighting techniques to wrestle these abstract images into final form. These techniques often involve considerable trial-and-error and the end product often consists of dozens of PS layers. While working on these images, they sometimes take on a life of their own.

Life After Leaf contains 72 photos taken at Yellowstone National Park along with more than 160 works of art featuring Yellowstone’s dead trees.  The price is $45 and shipping is free. I invite you to order your copy at my Digicrylics website.

Or feel free to browse my other artwork at my two art websites, Digicrylics.com and Erichvieth.com.

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About Going and Plans

How to reconcile these two quotes?

“If a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favourable.” Seneca

But then see this:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the [Cheshire] Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

—Chapter 6, Pig and Pepper

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