Google Arts and Culture, Sir Thomas Browne, and More (Complaining) About Learning to Code
The painting I’m featuring in this post is by french artist Henri Edmond Cross. I found it on the Google arts and culture website, in the Museé de Orsay digital collection. I’ve been diving into a few online museum collections for the last few months, and it’s been pretty cool. Nice pictures. I guess you can’t really say much more than that without sounding like a douche. A classier way to say that is to just shrug enigmatically and say art is subjective, it lets you get off the hook with your stupid interpretations of a piece and reminds artsy people that they should shut their douche faces up and let the pleabs enjoy the pretty pictures on their museum day trip. It’s kind of like voting, or at least how that used to be, you just don’t talk about it in polite company because you’re opinion isn’t really welcome or helpful. So, if you want to see some cool art collections, go to https://artsandculture.google.com/ and check out whatever the hell you want and shut up about it after you do.
I’ve also been plowing through the Harvard Classics, and am now up to Sir Thomas Brown’s Religio Medici. So far it seems to be a tract about how even though he’s a doctor and a man of science, he doesn’t let common sense and reason (ie the devile) get in the way of believing in the bible. I like the way he writes, it flows in a way that’s very fluid and enjoyable. I looked him up a little so I know in another couple of chapters he’s going to say he believes in witchcraft and the occult, which I guess when Reason is the devil, whatever reservations you may have about spells and magic is really up in the air at that point. People say he’s the best English writer since Shakespeare, and really ham up how curious he was about everything and open to learning and curiosities of science and mysticism. He also apparently visited some hamlet at some point and very earnestly assisted an investigation of two women on trial for witchcraft. He helped them discover that the women were witches and they were sent to be burned alive or whatever while Browne floated on back to examining the patterns on flower petals or whatever. The level of absurdity people were living in medieval Europe is hard to wrap my head around. I wish I could live for 500 years to see how ridiculous the way we live now is. I bet it’s going to be hilarious for future humans to look back at us and see how we lived most of our lives with our faces smooshed up against handheld, portable computers to the point where some of us are literally walking off cliffs and into traffic.
Computers are the bane of my existence right now. Learning to code is the most demoralizing action I’ve ever taken in my own best interest. And at first I was curious, then maybe interested in maybe getting a decent job, but now. It’s personal. I’m going to learn how to code for spite, because my dumb brain isn’t going to tell me what to do anymore. And what kills me is I could learn to code, if it weren’t for the fact that I find it so boring that I keep drifting off into all kinds of way more fun thoughts, like farts, and ice cream sundaes, and putting on a cat suit and running into traffic. Why can’t coding be more like that, huh? HUH?
It’s fine, I’m just struggling to understand something really basic about taking a dictionary in Python and iterating through all the values, and then finding the maximum value I’m looking for. I’m trying not to use a built-in function, but rather use an algorithm. It’s going to take a lot of Google searches to not have to think up the answer on my own, almost as much work as just figuring it out.When I do figure it out, I’ll write about it here. Maybe it’ll help other “creatives” (space cadets) who are better at lateral thinking (getting drunk and high) than linear thinking (being an adult).