Color Names

Finding good names for colors is a vital skill for paint companies, but it's hard.  

I understand that, years ago, the endless torment of trying to decide whether to call that beige-y pink "Baby's Face Pink" or "Seashell Blush" drove one company to throw up its hands.  (Corporations are legally people, people generally have hands, ergo corporations have hands.)  They decided to just give colors numbers!  Briefly.  Because, turns out, #346-A7 doesn't sell as well as "Rhapsodic Red."

It's a problem.

Well, check out this post at Ars Technica on using artificial intelligence to take over the job...   HERE  Humans ain't outa work yet.

My favorite AI generated names might be "Cremper Viulet" or "Kold Of Tale" - which would make great fairy tale character names.  "Blue Child" (a pink) is a another favorite.  But "Copper Panty?" ...bet that name sells!

Believed public domain image - found HERE with others!

On the subject of corporations as people... one of my trusty art and set dressing supply sources, Hobby Lobby, has just been caught illegally buying Iraqi antiquities, with the money possibly funding Islamic terrorists.  This confused me because, um, why?  New selections in Home Decor?  Or in... Ceramics?  But it seems they're starting a Biblical museum.

Sigh.

I've been trying to overlook Hobby Lobby's no-workers-here-get-birth-control-'cause-religion stand on the theory that workers can quit (theoretically) if that offends them.  But I feel pretty strongly about knowingly fueling the stolen art market.  Plus, you know, terrorists.

So... 

Guess Michaels will be getting most of my business now.  

(Can't believe this, but I just took time to read Michaels' "Code of Business Conduct and Ethics" and to check their Better Business rating!  They sound good.  In fact, their "Code" seems admirable in content, presentation, and concrete examples.  I'll hope they follow it.) 

Theater doesn't just talk about ethics, it requires 'em.

Film Fest - Battlestar Galactica Finale

The end of 70+ episodes.  An operatic, epic of a television journey.  Battlestar Galactica has been an incredible ride.

I watched the last three episodes at one sitting (recommended) and even the next day feel breathless.  There was controversy over the series' ending with many fans disappointed, but I don't feel that way: I think this is an appropriately science-fictional ending.  The central story-line is wrapped up and main characters given resolution and a hope, but the larger historical scheme seems to continue - in our imaginations - and the philosophical questions remain unanswered...  Such questions never can be answered.  Galactica is, at its best, a thought provoking show; it seems fitting that its end should leave us thinking.

Hard to write about this without Spoiling...  I just want to add two points that strike me:

1)  That hopeful ending for the characters.  Anyone familiar with the history of early American settlements or stories of castaways will realize that a group of exiles walking off across the savanna with just a knapsack each is - however pretty the photography of waving grasses and brave the sound-track music - in for a hungry winter. Urbanized, high-tech settlers setting off to become hunters, herders, and farmers with limited bullets and, as far as I can see, not a single shovel...  Well.

Great Rift Valley, Africa, public domain

2)  The epilogue repeats some of the show's themes and (a little heavy-handedly) underlines the beware-technology idea.  I have to disagree: I don't think technology is the problem, I think the problem is human nature.  How we use technology and what technology we seek...?  Very human.

Consider the first technology, the pointed stick.  This tool probably happened by accident and was first used, as chimps or gorillas still do use it, to poke at things.  (Little boys instinctively understand this.)  Chimps have been seen using a stick to break open ant mounds.  Spearing prey animals had to follow, along with jabbing at attacking predators, and so must - such is our nature - threatening others of our own species.  Using that stick to make planting holes for seeds seems to have come later.  Using the stick to draw or write in the dirt came later still.

The best you can say for modern human nature is that little boys often choose to draw in the dirt with a stick before they think to jab a buddy with it.

That said, Galactica's cautionary tale is timely and important: it asks us to think about creating another intelligent creature - Cylon, cyborg, robot, artificial intelligence....  Maybe the right label is Golem - a living creature made by man, but powered by the word of God in its head.  (Remind you of any Cylons you know?)  We need to think hard about creating a thinking (living?) species as slaves.  This timely story asks an ethical  question we do need to ponder.

I find it encouraging that the scientists, engineers, and designers exploring this new technological frontier must surely have Battlestar Galactica in their knapsacks.

The Ethics and Morals of Theater

Theater has historically gotten a bad rap... and a bad rep.  Actors, actresses, the Stage in general have been thought depraved, immoral, flat-out sinful.  Here's a quote from Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential 1869 book, The American Woman's Home (which, no kiddin' I happened to read right before watching Five Women Wearing the Same Dress):

"Another rule which has been extensively adopted in the religious world is, to avoid those amusements which experience has shown to be so exciting, and connected with so many temptations, as to be pernicious in tendency, both to the individual and to the community...  So with theaters.  The enacting of characters and the amusement thus afforded in themselves may be harmless; and possibly, in certain cases, might be useful; but experience has shown so many evils to result from this source, that it has been deemed wrong to patronize it...  Horse-races might be so managed as not to involve cruelty, gambling, drunkenness, and other vices.  And so might theaters.  And if serious and intelligent persons undertook to patronize these, in order to regulate them, perhaps they would be somewhat raised from the depths to which they have sunk."

There you have it, theater = pernicious.  And yet...

At the Opening party I got to chat with theater buddies.  There's generally some Drama going on somewhere to discuss, but last night's was a doozy:  a local actor (different show) refused to perform because the audience was, he deemed, too small.  General shock and horror.  FaceBook outrage.  And I truly was shocked, because the famous "the show must go on" really is bedrock ethics in this community.  The rest of the world may think theater people immoral, but that is untrue, their moral code is just different...  What was Beecher Stowe's list:  "cruelty, gambling, drunkenness, and other vices"?  Sounds like a good party!  (BTW She missed, or was too prudish to mention, licentiousness.)

But never let the show or audience down.  That's unethical.

I doubt that actor will be cast in many shows after this - the directors are all in an uproar.  And the audience happened to be a critic so... word will spread.  As Cassius from Othello puts it:

"Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!"

illustration from Othello courtesy of Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (Public Domain)