Photoshop: Export Images to PDF at 72DPI

Exporting PSDs to PDF via PDF Presentation in Photoshop CS3 results in blurry images because all the presets created PDFs with a higher resolution, and images get upsampled to preserve their dimensions. I created a PDF preset that creates images at 72 DPI:

Download: 72dpi.joboptions

Copy this to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Settings and it should become available as a preset in PDF Presentation.

Do you want a name for this world?

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a firm, iron magnitude of force which does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; no something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming which knows no saiety, no disgust no weariness: this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil”, without goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, most intrepid, most midnightly men–This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!

The universal is part of my identity

The universal is part of my identity in so far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack — that is, in so far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution. The universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining it, but as an incomplete horizon suturing a dislocated particular identity.

– Laclau

Quotes

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

Humans beings living in and through structures become structures living in and through human beings.

Robert Irwin?

New Atheism’s Moral Blinders

Jonathan Haidt wrote a kind of rebuttal to the “New Atheists” — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc. The basic argument is this: The new atheists evaluate religion according to two moral criteria: protecting individual rights/justice (Lawrence Kohlberg) and avoiding harm/providing care (Carol Gilligan). But Haidt says that these are not complete descriptions of morality, we also have to include three other aspects of morality: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity, which are more prevalent among traditional ideas of morality and religious groups. This is effectively an accusation of cultural imperialism, that the new atheists privilege the Western individualistic moral paradigm over the Durkheimian view of morality as that which binds a group into a collective.

I more or less agree with Haidt here, but with a couple of caveats. First, I think its perfectly reasonable to locate ingroup/loyalty within Gilligan’s framework, and authority/respect within Kohlberg’s, because on the most basic level, Gillian is concerned with who we are connected to, who we are, in some sense, the same as, and who we therefore owe care and loyalty towards. Kohlberg is concerned with how we are distinct beings with separate interests that don’t coincide, and how we must recognize the individual’s rights. In fact, authority is nothing less than the recognition of a right. Where Kohlberg sees us as distinct, Gilligan sees us as connected, but since both theories were developed in the West, Giligan does not go far enough to free itself of bias toward individualism, and what we have is in fact a hybrid that only partially describes collective moral thinking.

Kohlberg has suggested that the two are actually two sides of the same coin, and following that logic, we can repair Haidt’s thesis. Its not that the new atheists are in engaging in cultural imperialism, but that they have, to some degree, failed to fully articulate a collectivist moral logic for opposing religion. For example, that the faithful do not fully recognize their ingroup/loyalty obligation to people of other religions. Its arguable whether or not the new atheists have focused exclusively on individualistic moral concerns — perhaps some have — but it should be fairly clear that atheism is widely viewed as antagonistic to collectivist ones. I’m tempted to claim that it is because of this antagonism and the corresponding absence of any truly collectivist/atheistic movements that religion has yet to be truly supplanted in the West, particularly in the United States, where we aren’t bound together by shared culture and language as European countries are.

Book Review: Man & His Symbols

Some books I read, I feel like what the author is saying completely obvious, and anyone could have told me the same things. Sometimes this is because the book is just not very original, and other times, its because the book is quite old. Its ideas have had such an impact, that anyone born since has never known a world where such ideas were not common knowledge. They seeped into the ground water, and now you find them in our TV shows, movies, song lyrics and novels. This is what I think happened with Carl Jung.

Man and His Symbols was published in the 60s, and was intended to introduce the lay reader to Carl Jung’s psychological theory. I’m not sure quite sure what’s happened since then, but reading this book is the total opposite of a light going off in my head. It’s as if someone has simply pointed out that the light is on. Whether or not you subscribe to his theories, nearly everyone is familiar with them. Most people have heard of the idea that dreams have deep significance, and know of dream interpretation books, and have probably heard of the unconscious. Of course, some of this is due to Freud’s influence as well, but what is fascinating about both of their ideas in 2007 is how everyone seems to have heard of them, but no-one really makes use of them. Outside of a few fringe groups, they survive as plot points on Frasier or Woody Allen movies.

What happened? Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis went from a respected theory to little more than a punchline in 40 years and I’m tempted to say that no truly useful idea would be discarded so quickly. On the other hand, maybe they were simply ineffective; its far more efficient, after all, to obtain mental health at the local pharmacy. But, we’re finding that approach has its flaws, like when people report that they don’t like the drugs because it makes them feel like they aren’t themselves, or perhaps not feel at all. I don’t know what this means exactly, but apparently feeling like oneself and feeling in general are important? This echoes Brad in the movie I Heart Huckabees, repeating the words, “How am I not myself?”

So now we are back to turning inward, and Jung and Freud might have something to say about that. Either way, the idea of the fragmented self persists, and seems to have taken over from the previous soul-based orientation to the self. You know: I think, therefore I am — a thing, a single entity, a “unitary executive”. At the same time, we know a lot more about the brain, about psychology and about how culture works than we did when Jung was first formulating his theories. The Jungian analysts of the 60s seemed to believe that their perspective was more fundamental than other perspective, and viewed every problem through that lens, so I’m hoping to find some modern Jungians with a less exclusive stance.

Get Beatport Label & Artist Feeds

Update: Now you can search for artists too.

Just finished Beatport label feeds. Search for the label you are interested in following and grab the RSS feed!

Beatport Link to Release

I updated the RSS feeds so that it links to the release instead of the artist’s home page. Sometimes it doesn’t work and gives you an error page, but if you type ‘www.beatport.com’ into your address bar on that page, you get taken to the correct page. Yeah, it’s weird, but I figure its probably better than going to the artist page. I could be convinced to change it back though, but right now I’m hoping this weirdness will magically go away, because there’s nothing I can do about it.

Technical details:

I poked around Beatportal and found that they are linking directly to releases like this:

https://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/release/detail/67089/heater

67089 is the release ID, and ‘heater’ is the release name, stripped of punctuation and with underscores for spaces. Except you can put any arbitrary string there, and it fills in the right one. Weird, right? So I just used an underscore.

Update: I think I figured it out. Switching to https://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/track/detail/trackId/_ seems to work more reliably.

Everywhere at Home

Philosophy is really homesickness – the desire to be everywhere at home.

– Novalis

Tech House Feed Was Broke

But I fixed it. (RSS)