Dots 1.0

[Chieko Boteler]

Id like to see your Exposure setting. I bet Auto Exposure is on. Like Alef Coelho said, this is most likely because the intensity of artificial lights in your scene is too exaggerated. Turn of Auto Exposure (actually, I'd advice to always keep it off if you're doing still renderings). If we're right, after turning it off your viewport will explode with overexposed brightness (with Exposure on 50%). From here, just adjust the intensity of your artificial lights. Try not to play with the Exposure % value much or at least keep it around 50% (depending on your needs).

Hello, Bumping this post. I am also having this issue out of the blue. My renderings have been just fine, and out of nowhere they began having these speckles of light which render to be tiny spots to bigger dots.

I gave my computer a restart - that didn't work. I do not have a crazy amount of lighting, and I try not to use any lights over 1,500lm. I never use auto exposure, and I wrap my entire model with an outer wall so the sun doesn't penetrate through any "cracks" or edges of geometry.

This is how it looks while it's rendering:

And this is how the final looks:

This is how it DID look, and I haven't changed much.

i had something similar happen once and it turned out that i had some very small bits in SketchUp (like pixel sized line segments) that had came into the model from a component I had downloaded. Might be worth giving that a check as stuff like this can drive you crazy.

I gave my computer a restart - that didn't work. I do not have a crazy amount of lighting, and I try not to use any lights over 1,500lm. I never use auto exposure, and I wrap my entire model with an outer wall so the sun doesn't penetrate through any "cracks" or edges of geometry.

This is how it looks while it's rendering:

And this is how the final looks:

This is how it DID look, and I haven't changed much.

You can hereby try to lower the overall "Artificial Light Brightness" (Visual Settings -> Atmosphere tab) of all self-illuminating materials at once to see if that makes a difference. If so, increasing the brightness of your artificial light sources may also help.

These 3 dots has to do with your text. There is hidden space or text that's not showing. Go to Format text and backspace and clear any hidden spaces and text. I was having the same issue and it works. I think its a bug within the software.

I live in the US and I try to replace commas with dots as a decimal delimiter in the spreadsheet which came from Spain

using LibreOffice 6.3.2. I was able to replace commas with dots in the numbers which have 0 as a single-digit e.g

0,9444 was replaced with 0.9444 using Find and Replace. But this does not work with numbers like 10,176.

Below is a part of the spreadsheet after Find and Replace.

This looks as if the figures are already meant to be English with the decimal point in 0.9972 and comma as thousands separator in 10,716. I can only guess that the first one is meant to be a decimal below 1 and the second one is meant to be integer 10716. A software must not guess this.

Text or number? This is the question since 30 years of improper use of MS Excel.

It is very easy to do all kinds of import or conversion with Calc. It is also very easy to mess it up completely when you have no clue what type of data your are dealing with.

Depending on the particular shape of your digital media ecosystem, you have likely seen or heard some version of that question being asked quite a bit in the last week or two. I found the question raised most often, and understandably so, in connection with the Chinese spy balloon fiasco and the three subsequent incidents in which an unidentified object was shot down by the American military. The question was also asked in connection with the train derailment and chemical fire in East Palestine, Ohio and a series of smaller scale incidents of a similar sort in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Florida.

All narratives generated from the Database are tenuous and subject to constant revision. They are but one possible path through the database. Everyone knows alternative paths are possible. We are all just pinning red string on the board to connect the data points.

In this light, polarization and group loyalty may also be understood as a psychic/epistemic defense mechanism, demanded by the experience of the Database. So, too, apathy, indifference, and varieties of ironic detachment.

Believing that everything will be better if only we gather more information commits us to endless searching and casting about, to one more swipe of the screen in the hope that the elusive bit of data, which will make everything clear, will suddenly present itself. In this mode, what we need seems always to lie just beyond the realm of the actual, hidden beyond the horizon of the possible. The paradoxical effect is to sink us ever deeper into indecision and anxiety because the abundance of information, especially if it is encountered as discrete bits of under-interpreted data, will only generate more uncertainty and frustration.

Even in cases where more information might be genuinely helpful, it may not be forthcoming when we need it. More importantly, some matters cannot be adequately adjudicated simply by gathering more information and plugging it into some sort of value-neutral formula. Indeed, we might even say that what we need to make is not a merely a decision but more like a commitment with all the risk, responsibility, and promise that this entails. What we might truly need, then, is not information but something else altogether: courage, patience, practical wisdom, and, perhaps most importantly, friendship. Of course, these can be harder to come by than mere information, however valuable it may be.

We might think that the digital world has, or soon will, outrun that plodding, analog, storytelling pace, and that digital information in conspiracies will connect the dots in such a way as to ruin everything with their horror narratives that take root without a care for who, or where, or why.

This is a wonderful post, Michael, thank you. The question that seems to make a difference in whether we are able to focus on the cultivation of virtues such as you point us toward--courage, patience, practical wisdom, and friendship--is whether we are able to glimpse and participate in a narrative which frames the Database. Our inadequacy to negotiate narrative constructions if we see the Database as the ultimate frame seems to me to have its roots in reaching for the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil prior to it being given, ill-equipped to adjudicate the world we thus brought upon ourselves. It is a world of death. But when that greater story is the frame for the Database, then the means of grace and hope of glory which are part of the great climax of that story points us toward the faithful Shepherd who ever lives to make intercession for us. Worship of the Lord of the database frees us from its enslavement. Jeremiah 6:16ff makes for fruitful meditation. The invitation is still before us, to walk in the ancient paths of wisdom, as you outline, but if we refuse, the judgment that will come is none other than the fruit of our devices. God bless your good work!

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. Given the usually more deliberate pacing of this newsletter, sending out two installments within 72 hours makes me feel like I\u2019m starting to spam you. This is a relatively short installment, however, written to bring together in one place a few strands of analysis about the nature of our information environment, which I first presented in a series of essays back in 2020. Most of the material beyond the introductory paragraphs is drawn from those essays. I\u2019ve assembled them here in this way because I think the approach remains helpful.

Sometimes all of these incidents where connected by those asking \u201CWhat is going on?\u201D The purported link between the aerial incidents and those on the ground has been expressed as a matter of the former being a government-contrived distraction from the latter. And, of course, there are many other interesting and diverse combinations of all of the above on offer.

Naturally, at some point along the way certain outlets began to report on how these incidents were generating a flood of online disinformation. One headline described the train derailment as a \u201Cdisaster of misinformation,\u201D which, I don\u2019t know, struck me as a touch too clever given the circumstances.

Obviously there is a great deal of misinformation/disinformation floating around. And, of course, there are those, as there have always been, who set out to maliciously distort the information ecosystem to their advantage. But I\u2019m not sure the disinformation frame is the most helpful way of understanding the phenomena in question. In my view, it mostly misses the underlying conditions and consequently becomes far too blunt as an analytical instrument. Within this perspective, there tend to be only two principle actors: the malicious agents sowing disinformation and the unfortunate rubes who fall for it. That there are those who fit into those two categories is not in doubt. What is in doubt, as far as I\u2019m concerned, is whether that is an adequate account of the experience of most people. It is telling, I think, that no one ever imagines themselves fitting into those categories, suggesting a rather impressive but also dubious degree of immunity from the dynamics of the media environment to which we are all subject, albeit to varying degrees.

3a8082e126