Silêncio

and then I see a darkness

A matter of opinion

IT WOULD be nice to believe that there is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers, but it is increasingly hard to cling to this comforting, egalitarian myth I do not believe that people on average are growing more stupid, but I really do believe they are being trained to ask stupid questions
What prompts this observation is that over the past few months I have seen more and more people asking for instruction books to help them do tasks that must surely be self-evident The question is normally phrased in terms of, I need an instruction book for a camera I have just inherited/ been given/bought on eBay I don't care how little you know about photography it is not hard to work out the controls on any conventional, basic, manual camera The wind-on lever? Hardly incomprehensible The rewind? Likewise The shutter release? Undemanding The focusing ring how much difficulty can that present? And Where's the difficulty with the shutter-speed setting, whether it's a dial or a ring around a leaf shutter? If there's a rangefinder, look through the eyepiece and twiddle the focusing ring You'll soon see what happens Of course, there can be unexpected problems Seasoned photographers are regularly fooled by such tricks as the wind-on on a Werra (concentric with the lens) or the rewind clutch on a Zorki-4K (concentric with the shutter release), and it's a fair question, if the camera needs a battery and doesn't come with a dead one so you can ask for one of these, please, to ask what sort of battery it takes
But these difficulties are not on a par with such questions as, 'Will my camera continue to work if I take the battery out?' If you are too stupid to try this for yourself, will you understand the answer if someone tries to tell you? Or 'Has
it got a meter?' Are there any little needles that look as if they might move over scales? Or anything that looks like an LED that might light up? Has it got a battery compartment or a selenium cell? If not, well, it probably hasn't got a meter unless it's really old and has an extinction meter.
As I say, I don't think people are growing more stupid, but I do think they are being trained to ask stupid questions, especially by the instruction books for the vast majority of modern cameras, with digital cameras the worst offenders
Most begin with the sort of injunctions that only a cretin or a very young child would need advice on a par with 'do not stick your fingers in the electric wall socket when attempting to recharge the battery' or 'do not attempt to change film underwater' or 'do not beat people to death with this camera' Get past the first five or ten pages of this sort of drivel, which is presumably there to satisfy American lawyers, and you are into the meat of the thing.
This is where you learn that there are 84 metering modes, 38 of which are indistinguishable from one another, 27 different autofocus programs, at least 19 of which are worthless, and the names of the 32 buttons, knobs, switches, dials and levers that are supposed to control the camera They don't, however, mention that if you press the wrong pair of buttons at the same time you will have a camera that only takes pictures on alternate Tuesdays during Lent, unless you have inadvertently pressed a third button which further restricts it to leap years but autobrackets when it does.
If you like that sort of camera, then the very best of luck to you However, not all cameras are like that They don't have to be And, interestingly enough, an awful lot of the best cameras ever made are not like that An Alpa or a Gandolfi doesn't have any metering modes at all Or autofocus Or indeed anything else much, including instruction books Anyone of average intelligence, who has ever seen a camera and knows more or less what they do (focus light onto film or a sensor, and open and close a shutter) should be able to work out just about everything from first principles.
Admittedly, crazed instruction-book writers (and readers) are not the only problem The other is that for far too many people, the internet forum has replaced the evening down the pub with friends, the trip to the camera club, even the trip to take pictures People don't see each other's cameras any more, only their own And even then they can't figure out how to use them.

Roger Hicks @ Amateur Photographer

Ideia de Direito

Bom... vamos então aplicar uma gota de ácido à ideia de direito. Mesmo entre os antigos, havia alguns mais maduros que sabiam ser a força a fonte do direito, ser o direito uma função de força. Suponhamos dois pratos duma balança. Num está um grama, noutro está uma tonelada; naquele, Nós; neste, o Estado Único. Não é nítida a ideia de eu ter alguns direitos em relação ao Estado e a ideia de um grama poder contrabalançar uma tonelada; não é nítido que essas duas ideias se reduzam à mesma única ideia. Há que distinguir: os direitos para a tonelada, os deveres para o grama, e o percurso natural para se passar da nulidade à grandeza é esquecermo-nos de que somos um grama e sentirmos que somos a milionésima parte duma tonelada.

Zamiatine, in Nós
tradução de Manuel João Gomes, Antígona

Prazeres

falar de nada

Pois só há uma maneira de falar de nada, é falar de nada como se fosse alguma coisa, tal como só há uma maneira de falar de Deus, é falar dele como se fosse um homem, o que, é claro, ele foi, em certo sentido, por uns tempos, e só há uma maneira de falar do homem, e isso até os nossos antropólogos perceberam, é falar dele como se fosse uma térmita.

Samuel Beckett, in Watt

tradução de Manuel Resende