Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

Finally Finding the “Evidence”

When I was in college I remember reading a review of a photography book called “Evidence.” I vaguely recall seeing an image or two from the book that made an impression on me. At that time I didn’t photograph, didn’t own a camera that I can recall and certainly wasn’t particularly interested in the art of photography. It was a few years later that I started taking images, using my graduate lab’s darkroom for developing and printing and learning exposure techniques. But I never “Evidence” in a book store. To this day, when in a large used book store, looking through the photography selection, at some level I hope to see that elusive volume.I was suprised then when on the 2point8 weblog, I found a reference to it, complete with authors and a link to Amazon. The book apparently was almost impossible to find, having been a limited edition, but has now been reprinted.

2point8 » Sultan Does Landis, Matter of Factly:Two great things about Sultan’s work. First, his collaborative book “Evidence” of found gov’t photos was the first book that showed me how art might be developed through editing and selection, and that great pictures are everywhere, it just depends on who’s looking (both at the moment of capture, and later on, with a new frame of reference, perhaps).

Will it turn out that my artwork has also been chasing this conceptual work of art this past year? The internet may not be changing much of our lives, but it certainly is providing connections we would otherwise miss.

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_DSC5091, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Science of Magic – New York Times: Dr. Van Gulick had come to the conference to talk about qualia, the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

It troubles us deeply to consider our physical nature when we have to reconcile it with our higher qualities of thought, ethics and free will. Bringing together magic and cognitive science is a great idea. How better to demonstrate that our experience is not physical, but made of something else entirely, an emergent phenomenon from the activity of neural elements in networks. It’s not seamless and continuous like the physical world, but rather a confusing, contingent, shifting probabilistic experience. Like other complex, emergent phenomena, its likely to forever remain obscure in its relationship to the elements that produce it.

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_DSC5100.NEF, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Summer is winding down. I’ve picked up the Nikon D80 to take advantage of the cooler, overcast weather. It’s nice lighting for these kinds of images even in the middle of the day. Intermittent rain and mist bring out the colors in the asphalt and gravel.

Theories of Emergence in Alleys



31050013, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

When I review these Leica M6 images, I’m always taken by the modeling I get in the images. It pulls me away from the flatter images that I tend to shoot with the Nikon D80 as the third dimension becomes compelling.

Two More

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The iPhone worked very well while I was in London. It roamed on several local networks and data was nearly the equal as in the US. I got a little paranoid about how much roaming data I was using, fearing the per kb cost, so I kept usage down, turning off background mail updates. There were virtually no open WiFi networks in London, but in the hotels it was nice to have what really works as a pocket tablet computer for web access.

The top image is a grove of birch trees just outside the Tate Modern in London. I walked along the Thames to the Tate Britain to see their first ever major photography exhibition. While the focus was historical and social, it’s always a thrill to see real photographs rather than just web representations. There were a number of modern prints of old negatives and one or two prints from “scans” of original prints.

It’s been said many times, but it can’t be said too often. Subject matter always trumps technical quality, unless the subject matter is itself technical quality. I always leave photography exhibits looking for photographs with better “subjects” and more “meaning” in the image. There’s a limit to the value of formal asthetics in photographs.

Light and Lines on the London Streets



London 282, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I had a quick trip to London and brought the Leica M6ttl and C41 process black and white film. I just got the scans back today and have to say that this time I’m a little disappointed in the scan quality. It may be that the light was a little harsher or I created denser negatives by rating the film at ISO 320 instead of 400. Certainly I pushed the grain level down compared to the last set, but the contrast seems very high for unprocessed jpegs.

What the iPhone Saw on the Lawn



Suburban Landscape 9, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

After all of my protesting and rationalizing about how I would not buy an iPhone for now, I went ahead and bought one. I’ll use it as my business phone, with the Blackberry supporting with rapid corporate email, calendar and EVDO modem support.

This is my first cell phone camera, so on my run today I brought the iPhone and stopped a few times to grab some shots. I can’t say that I expect to produce work with it, but as a sketch book, as here, it works well enough. No problems with auto white balance or exposure. I understand it’s fixed focus, so it’s interesting how the foreground tree is well detailed but the background woodpile here doesn’t hold up as an object. This may be due to the low pixel count.

My biggest complaint is that phone number recognition needs improvement. The Blackberry translates foreign numbers perfectly, allowing me to dial numbers wherever they appear- email, calendar appointments, web pages. The iPhone recognizes US numbers on web pages or in mail messages. There’s no recognition in the Calendar App. That means that when I have a telecon, I need to write the number down from the appointment and switch to the phone and dial. Or I can get the web view of my calendar from the Outlook Web Access site and click on the number to dial. If it’s US, but not if it’s international.

Of course this is related to the lack of copy and paste capability. With a simple copy function, I’d be able to move the number into the phone app. I loved the Newton’s clipboard- you’d highlight text and drag it over to the side of the screen where it stuck until you dragged it back in to use it.

But it’s a 1.0 product, and I trust these refinements will come soon enough.

alec soth – blog » Blog Archive » That 70’s Show

alec soth – blog » Blog Archive » That 70’s Show

Szarkowski included a large selection of this ‘synthetic’ photography in the book. But anyone looking at this work now, 28 years after its publication, will likely agree that much of it appears ‘flimsy’ and dated. All of that solarization just looks silly.

I believe that it’s always been this way. When one looks back on contemporary accounts of art, maybe of most cultural endeavors, most of it looks dated and unimportant. Out of each large movement only a small number of workers, and a small number of their works will be “remembered”. These works will be cited over and over as “important and representative of the time”.

Of course, one reason for this is that much of the derivative work is re-expression or simple repetition of the insights of the few. That’s the way culture works. Some times the “important work” is the best repetition, not the original thought which may have been a less clear example of the culture of the time.

The other important reason is that cultural memory, like human memory, is limited. We summarize our own stories into personal myths and incidents. We summarize cultural history into key events and seminal works.

What’s been fascinating to me is that very often the important works recognized years, decades and centuries later are often unimportant when they are created. While some great artists and thinkers achieve recognition during their lifetimes, many others labor in obscurity. And poverty unless they have a good day job.

Memory is retrospective and explanatory. It tells the story of how we got here and rationalizes what we’re doing now. That means that the events and works in the past that seemed important before may turn out to be, at least for now irrelevant. They may be forgotten forever. Other events or works, that seemed trivial or mysterious at the time, become very important in retrospect when used to explain the now. It’s odd that history should change as we change if you assume a linear progression of events and ideas. When you see the world as a complex network stretching into the past, the unpredictability of the past is no different than the uncertainty of the future.

Winning the War One Week at a Time

Micro Persuasion: Turn Your iPhone into a Mobile Nerve Center

However, the iPhone doesn’t go far enough by itself. You can make it go even further with these free undocumented techniques I have implemented over the past few days. It will turn your iPhone into a mobile nerve center that allows you to keep essential information at your fingertips. These tips can be used by themselves or in conjunction with the GMail Nerve Center techniques I wrote about in February.

I’ve won another week of the war against buying an iPhone. I’ve gained a bit of appreciation for the Blackberry as I’ve looked at how far I can push it’s functionality toward that of iPhone. At this point my mental equipoise is at waiting for my Verizon contracts to expire in Feb/March and keep the Blackberry on Verizon for business mail and EVDO modem use and move calls over to AT&T and the iPhone. The iPhone “ecosystem” seems to be developing rapidly, but I can’t see giving up push email and full on the go highspeed internet access. Perhaps, as John Gruber suggests, my next iPod will serve as my iPhone. The multimedia and wi-fi browsing without the cellular service. A nice complement to the Blackberry.

Sad to be writing about this so much and to even be wasting so much mental energy on it, but there must be many others who like me are committed Blackberry users who want the phone and browsing interface of the iPhone.