Sweet Music Centre

What is knowledge? How do I know when I know something? That seems a straight forward question. I know my address, the name of my children, and the current year.

Simple.

But the question can quickly grow more complex. How do I know about the Civil War? I have read about it. But I also have read about UFOs, about ghosts, and about ancient Mayan gods. So while I might have a certain confidence in the existence of the Civil War of the United States, I might view with skepticism UFOs, ghosts and Mayan gods.

Thus, the existence of many written words about a subject does not provide a clear basis for knowing that I know something. My knowing that I know something involves a justification for that knowledge.

This brings us to what philosophers offer as a traditional, precise definition of knowledge, namely that knowledge is justified, true belief. In this definition, I know something if 1) it is indeed true, 2) I actually belief it to be true and 3) I have a justification for believing that it is true.

So, while I might believe in a God, and feel justified in that belief based on my prayer, study and personal experiences, a philosopher might not say I have knowledge, since significant questions may exist as to whether God does in fact exist.

Similarly, I might believe in UFOs, and UFOs might really exist, but I might think I know that UFOs exist based on blurry pictures of lights in the night sky. Thus many may say I am not justified in my belief.

What might proper knowledge look like? Let’s say on your vacation you visited the Washington monument in Washington D.C. Upon your return you told me that 1) you visited a famous monument in the Capital city of the United States, 2) the monument had the same name as the city and 3) the monument was shaped like a tall obelisk.

Even without your explicitly telling me, I would (most likely) have knowledge, in the philosophical sense, that you visited the Washington monument near the ellipse in Washington, D.C. I would say that based on my meeting the definition of knowledge, as follows:

• It is true you visited the Washington Monument.
• I believe you visited the Washington Monument.

Paintings of still-life objects, landscape and paintings of animals are impressive, express emotions and tell stories. Images of the human figure, in particular nudes, however, translate emotions most acutely.

Early Nude Art Works

The earliest known nude is the celebrated Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria. She is from the Stone Age (ca. 38000 – 10000 BC). Surprising to the archaeologists, sculptures of the nude female figure in the rest of the world were quite similar.

The earliest, most celebrated, nude art known today are from Greece and Rome in the period of Antiquity (900 BC – 300 AD). The realism of these works were quite impressive, and typifies the “Greek God” sculpture look.

There are not many early paintings available to us. These may not have survived the ravages of time. Hence there were only sculptures to tell the story.

The late Antiquity to Pre-Renaissance Paintings

The late Antiquity to Pre-Renaissance (300 – 1450) paintings were dominated by scriptural Christian paintings. This era was also classified as the Middle Ages and included Gothic art, Trecento and Romanesque paintings. Human figures were mostly stylized and symbolic rather than expressive. Nudes (if at all) were depicted as part of a narrative, rather than expression of emotion.

The Renaissance Paintings

The Renaissance period (1500s) was the rebirth of attention to the realistic human figure. It was this time that Artist’s signed their names onto their works and re-focused on the skill of executing artwork to impress, rather than indoctrinate.

Renaissance painters express the nude as beautiful, flowing curves and soft white skin so fleshy that one can feel their warmth. The genre is whimsical and airy like the paintings Sandro Boticelli.

Famous Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci made a lot of study material on the human anatomy, which is fodder for many artists after him.

Michaelangelo Buonarroti (1475 – 1564) was the most illustrious artist of his time. He is regarded foremost as a sculptor. His nudes were beautiful, muscular, god-like. They were almost touchable and much more than realistic. His grandest paintings are frescos on the Sistine Chapel.

The figures of Raphael (1483 – 1520) were more soft-focused and smooth toned. Less musculature, but still strong body language.

Titian (ca. 1488 – 1576) painted nudes of different genres, from altar pieces to mythology. His paintings are dynamic, and there is a lot of motion of figures in his works.

PhotoScape is a cool photograph editing application that will let you basically fix & enhance pictures. With the Viewer function of PhotoScape you can view pictures in your folder or generate a slide show.

The Editor function will enable you take the following actions: resizing, brightness & color manipulation, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red-eye removal, blooming, clone stamp.

Some of its key features include a batch editor that can edit multiple photos at the same time, a page editor that unites multiple photos to generate one last photo, combines multiple photos either vertically or horizontally to produce one concluding photo and able to make a final animated GIF format photo from multiple photos. PhotoScape can also print portrait, carte de visited (CDV) and passport photos, lined, graph, music and calendar paper. It has a splitter that slices a picture into multiple pieces, captures a screen shot so you can save it, a color picker that searches and picks a color when the picture was zoomed, renames photo file names by batch and converts RAW to JPG. PhotoScape also have this awesome feature that finds similar faces on the Internet to match with yours.

PhotoScape’s new features in this release comprises of an added Clone Stamp (Editor -> Tools Tab), added a Paint Brush (Editor -> Tools Tab) and an added Color Picker (Editor -> Tools Tab & Object tab). It also has an improved Mosaic Filter which has a mosaic pixel size that is selectable, just go to the Tools Tab just below the Editor tab.

PhotoScape also integrated a changed editor — a region tab name from ‘Region’ to ‘Tools’, added a Print button to Viewer and Editor, has added 59 travel icons and 6 makeup icons, a Photo Development Service with FOTO.COM (EU Only), and a photo viewer that demonstrates photos in regular sequence as a1, a10, a2, a3 into a1, a2, a3, a10. At combine, with PhotoScape, the first photo’s EXIF information would be saved and PhotoScape run ‘R.

And with its new release, PhotoScape now supports 34 languages: English, Korean, Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico, Latin America), French, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Colombian), Thai, Hungarian, Turkish, Catalan, Slovak, Czech, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Romanian, Hebrew, Galician, Finnish, Indonesian and Arabic.