Jason's Log

A visual map of the history of western philosophy

This is a project that I have been working on for about a year now. It all began as part of my personal quest to reach an understanding of and a justification for my set of personal moral and ethical beliefs. In order to help me work out some of my own ideas, I decided to work my way through the 84-part lecture series offered by Teach 21 titled " Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition". The course is an amazing journey, starting with Plato and working its way through to the modern era.

Along the way, I decided to make a mind map covering each of the major thinkers that have influenced western philosophy. This is my version of a "cheat sheet of philosophy", and I decided that it might be worth sharing with others. It is by no means complete or comprehensive. It probably does infringe on the copyright of Teach 21 and the lecturers whose notes I cribbed from liberally. I can only hope that they don't send me a DMCA Take Down Request. So until then, here it is.

It goes in approximately chronological order, starting with the Greeks and working clockwise around to the modern thinkers. I try to give a summary of what I found useful or important about each thinker, and probably have overlooked, oversimplified and overstated quite a few things.

If I've made any egregious errors, please leave a comment and I'll fix what I can:

Telemarketing Hall of Shame: San Francisco Opera

In just the lat couple of months, I've been bombarded by telemarketing calls originating from the San Francisco Opera Association (415-551-6319). I received at least one call attempt on each of the following dates:

7/6/09
6/9/09
6/3/09
5/28/09
5/25/09
5/2/09
5/1/09
4/30/09
4/25/09
4/20/09
4/17/09

I've sent them an email pleading to be put onto their Do Not Call list. I sure do hope they take note of it. I just now placed a call-block on their phone number in my Verizon Wireless account settings, so at the very least they'll go right to voice mail.

Fingers crossed...

Camera Lens Calculators are back in action!

A long, long time ago I had written two on-line calculators to help photographers answer the following questions:

1. How far away from my photographic subject can I be and still fill up the frame of the photo with that subject?
   
   This question gets at how large a focal length your lens needs to be in order to photograph a distant object without it appearing the size of a pin-prick in the resulting image. If you find yourself wondering whether you need that 300mm lens in order to capture a water buffalo at 500 meters, this calculator will be very useful to you.
   
2. When doing macro photography, how much of my camera sensor area will be covered by the subject at a given distance?
   
   This is for photographers working on extreme close-ups who want to fill the entire area of the camera's image sensor with the subject of their photograph (a flower, an insect, etc.). This calculation will tell you whether or not you have to have a 'true macro' lens (one that has a macro ratio of 1:1) in order to pull it off.

The calculators are available here. Enjoy!

PS This would not have been possible (or at least as easy as it was) were it not for the Internet Archives. The old version of my calculator page had been lost when I migrated to TypePad as my new weblog platform of choice, but luckily a snapshot of my website from April of 2005 was available, allowing me to pull the original formulas out of the digital dust bin.