Breakdown Of A Haunting

 When you cross paths with unseen things.

When I arose on the morning of June 22 of 2011 I made my mother her tea and waited for her to come out.  She didn’t.  So I went to the bedroom and saw her lying there, mouth open, her right hand clutched in a fist on her chest dead.  Though stunned there was time for grief later.  The first matter of business was to call my father who was attending to family business only to learn from my aunt that he had already left and was heading home.  He had no phone with him.  My heart went out to him because he was coming home to discover his marriage of 57 years was over and the woman he loved was gone to this world.

Full article at Substack.

https://open.substack.com/pub/georgebailey/p/breakdown-of-a-haunting

NASA’s Apollo 13 Mission Report

How does one weigh pounds of water in Zero G?

The main thing that caught my attention was the many references to various weights of onboard liquids such as water, fuel and non liquids such as oxygen while in space. The measurement is in pounds.  While the other mission reports document various weights it is usually regarding how many moon rocks were collected or how much weight the astronauts lost during the  mission.  With Apollo 13, this is the recording of liquids—in a weightless environment!

Full post at my Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/georgebailey/p/nasas-apollo-13-mission-report

AI Image Creation With Grok-2

 

Instant picture making with a sentence.  

Musk announced Grok, the company’s answer to ChatGPT, in November, while Grok 1.5 debuted in April. The chatbot is available exclusively to Premium subscribers on X. Musk's xAI startup is also preparing to build what might be the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, which will handle Grok training.  Emily Price, PCmag.com.

Long before I became a photographer I had studied art.  Fine art to begin with and later graphic design and advertising.  During this time I’ve done some of everything for designing logos, airbrush illustrations, fine art painting, portrait painting, etc.  Later, when home computers became the next big thing I was interested in using them for design and art projects.  I recall my first experience in the mid 1980’s with 3D rendering using Sculpt 3D on the Commodore Amiga.  Just rending a few objects took hours, sometimes in the evening running the computer all night to render simple images.

One day I received an email from one of my photo stock agencies that AI images were acceptable for submission and sale.   I knew nothing about it and was unsure where to start.  Then recently, Grok-2 was announced by Elon Musk for August.  Up until then I had only used Grok to answer questions for research purposes.  I didn’t know it could render images as well.  Once I learned that Grok could create images I decided to explore what it could do.  What follows are my experiences with this new imaging technology.

Full article with examples posted at Substack--

https://open.substack.com/pub/georgebailey/p/ai-image-creation-with-grok-2