timeimmortal

I do wish I could write as eloquently as David Warren does, especially when communicating a point of such profound importance:

To those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. science was stillborn in all other civilizations.

By contrast, an atheistical view involves no such dogma; and the prevailing Darwinist scientistic view involves an actual self-contradiction so glaring that it cannot withstand a moment’s review. For it claims to explain order by the chance accumulation of random events. Such a view is itself in revolt against a tradition which found reason in nature and an answering reason in man. It can only lead to the death of science.

The Christian outlook stood from the beginning on two ancient legs. One was the revelation to the Hebrews, which lights the way to Christ. And the other was our inheritance from the Greeks. For “Western Civ” emerged out of the ancient world as a set of uncannily adequate replies to questions Greek philosophers had raised about time and final causation. Indeed, the rebirth of empirical science in the Christian Middle Ages was a return to Athens and Alexandria, and to the inquiries of e.g. Aristotle, and Aristarchus (“the ancient Copernicus”).

…

One of the historical myths of today is that such pseudo-sciences as astrology and alchemy preceded the emergence of true science, which overcame them by its superior predictive powers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the actual ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East, it was the other way around. Astrology, alchemy, and various kinds of sorcery emerged from the decadence of Greek empiricism. The mystery cults that sustained them, began to flourish just as that Greek world was crumbling under the might of an expanding Roman power, in the centuries before Christ. The ancient degeneration of science was predicated not on the rise of an “irrational” religious force, that suppressed it, but on progressive loss of faith in, and growing cynicism towards, the ancient religious and cosmological order.

Indeed, many atheistic commentators often seem to forget, in their zeal to use highly selective examples to claim that the Church is antagonistic towards science, that it was the Church which preserved the accumulated knowledge of the “Old World” through the Dark Ages, that it was the Church which frameworked the ancient academies of learning which became the modern university, and that it was the Church and the scientific inquiry conducted through it during the Middle Ages that laid the groundwork for all the innovations and discoveries of the 17th century onward. Far from being anti-science, or anti-reason, or anti-knowledge, the Church has been at the forefront of reason and discovery through the centuries. Animism, Islam, Hinduism, and other religions have not produced the same vibrant tradition of inquiry and discovery; only the West founded by and upon Christianity has done so. And it is the height of foolishness to deny that the Christian origins of the West have had anything to do with the wondrous discoveries that have been made therein.

For the duration of our stay in Greece, Grace and I had a running joke going about this sign, which we termed “the running man.” We saw it in a lot of places we were at, including the airports in Frankfurt and Athens — as near as we can tell, it’s meant to point to the nearest emergency exit (that is, it shows you where to run for your life).

We started to joke, at one point, that we were being stalked by the running man. Seriously, he turns up everywhere.

This is one of the last pictures I took on our honeymoon, and will be the last of the Greek series in the Pics of the Day that began back at the end of November, 2007, with #437. It was taken at the airport in Athens while we were killing time between our early-morning arrival there (which, despite being a bit physically taxing, I would recommend to anyone — it’s worth it for how quick one can get through the security lines) and our flight’s departure.

It was actually a tricky shot to get right — the light behind the sign is actually quite bright, and I had to boost the camera’s shutter speed quite a bit before the exposure on the sign was somewhere in the vicinity of “proper”. The background is still fairly dark, and this after I boosted the shadow exposure level in Lightroom. But that’s okay — it still looks neat.

Greece was an amazing experience, and Grace and I are anxious to go back there to tour some more. Sure, parts of it are loud and dirty, and there’s cigarette smoke everywhere you go, but there is an immense amount of history there as well, and some truly beautiful sights to see. And don’t get us started on the food!

As Grace and I walked back to our hotel from the Roman Agora, we passed down many streets not unlike this one (although this was the only one I thought to take a picture of). Many of the streets in Plaka (that’s a touristy district in central Athens) are approximately this narrow, and yet one sees cars whipping along them with what could almost be termed reckless abandon. The sidewalks are hardly a place to feel completely safe from traffic.

This was a good walk overall, a fine end to another day of touring. If memory serves, we stopped at a little jewelry store called Plaka’s Agora, where we bought a nice pair of earrings for Grace that feature an ancient Greek symbol for eternity. We also bought a couple of icons while we were there — let’s face it, the Greeks do beautiful icons.

But back to the image for a moment. It’s a fairly straightforward shot, and all I really did edit-wise was clean up some chromatic aberration.

Just outside the Roman Agora, Grace and I stopped for a bit of a rest (we’d been walking non-stop since just after breakfast, and it was mid-afternoon by then). I noticed the ruins of a building across the road, and decided to grab a picture of them.

I don’t know what this building was before it…er…fell into disrepair (in truth, it looks like it got bombed and was never repaired), but something about it suggests that it might have been a church. Regardless, it’s a husk now, but it’s interesting that the doorway has survived while the walls have all toppled. You see ruined buildings in the oddest places in Athens, but none of the others that Grace and I noticed had parts of them in such relatively undisturbed condition as the doorway here.

Edit-wise, I tried to do some highlight recovery, but there wasn’t much I could do against the sunlight washing out in the clouds. A bit of fringe reduction was also necessary, as there are some fairly high-contrast areas in this picture.

My beautiful wife, Grace.

I took this picture of her as she was wandering around some ruins at the Roman Agora, a bit west of the Ancient Agora in Athens. Unlike at the Ancient Agora, the security at the Roman Agora is rather lax — one is left with the impression that while it is a mortal sin to disturb even the gravel on the paths at a Greek archaeological site, it wouldn’t be all that frowned upon if one was somehow able to make off with an entire pillar from any ruins dating back to the Roman occupation of Greece.

(And don’t even bother looking for Persian ruins.)

Anyhow, Grace was looking at a pile of rocks that might once have been a wall, and I was mostly looking at her through the lens of my camera, and she turned and gave me this pose almost without warning. I normally hate posed shots, but this one turned out really well, and it’s now one of her favourite pictures of herself.

She really is so pretty, yes?

Edit-wise, I had to do a bit of fringe reduction, and some saturation adjustments to get her skin tone just right. But I think it would be fair to say that I’m very happy with how this picture turned out. It’s easily one of my favourite pictures I’ve ever taken, mostly because I dearly love the subject, but also because it’s just a darned good photo in general. So good, I thought, that I made it one of the pictures that rotates randomly through the left half of the site’s header.

As we continued our walk through the Ancient Agora, we came across these ruins just after descending from the hill on which rests the Temple of Hephaestus. I can’t recall exactly what we’re looking at here — I want to think that these are ancient walls of houses, but something in the back of my mind is attempting to tell me that this is actually part of some sewage system of ancient Athens.

Either way, it certainly looks neat on camera. The Agora is chock full of this sort of thing, old bits and pieces of walls and canals telling the tale of the glory of an ancient civilization. Modern Athens isn’t quite as fascinating.

Edit-wise, this shot received some chromatic aberration correction in Lightroom, and a bit of colour adjustment (white balance, saturations). I wanted to bring out the green a tad more than the camera decided to.

Looking out over the Ancient Agora from in front of the Temple of Hephaestus, I felt moved to take another panoramic image. Unfortunately, it was a very cloudy day in Athens, but I think that the resulting image, despite the lack of blue sky, is nonetheless quite impressive.

There are quite a number of images comprising this shot (if memory serves, it’s a matrix of images, at least five across and two high). As has become my usual practice for panoramic images, I began by matching exposures between shots in Lightroom, and then cleaning up things like chromatic aberration and doing some highlight recovery. With that out of the way, the images were imported into Hugin, and if memory serves I defined an absurd number of control points (as many as 30 between just two images!) in order to get some of the details (like the Stoa of Attalos, over there on the left) to line up neatly.

The render took a while as well, although it’s less painful using Hugin on my work computer (with its Core 2 Duo processor) than on my Powerbook G4.

And the result? Well, you can see for yourself, O Reader. It’s a commanding view of the Agora, and also gives just a hint of an impression of what ancient Athens must have been like.

The Ancient Agora used to be the marketplace of old Athens, more or less. There were any number of residences there as well, and quite probably temples, but the majority seems to have been taken up by shops and plazas concerned with the sale of various things. It’s also a fairly large area, covering a substantial majority of the area of the park in the middle of Athens wherein the Acropolis, Areopagus, and Temple of Hephaestus can also be found.

Another bit of Hugin magic, this panoramic of the Agora is comprised of four or five images, arranged horizontally. These are unusually quick to compose in Hugin, and render very quickly as well. As usual, there aren’t many (any?) visible join seams.

Edit-wise, I did some chromatic aberration reduction on each image prior to exporting it for use in Hugin, and also did some highlight recovery and exposure balancing between shots. My typical Hugin usage is six to eight control points between two pictures, and I forget which rendering view I employed when I finally accepted the output. Not that it matters, I suppose. I had to crop the image a bit, but fortunately there was no need to scale it — the image was not wider than the maximum 10,000 pixels that Lightroom tolerates.

Here’s another tomb from the ancient cemetery near the Ancient Agora in Athens. Unlike the previous tomb (which was a tomb for a person’s ashes), this is a tomb for someone buried in state. Interestingly, the two tombs are only about one hundred metres apart; this one sits to the east (and a hair south) of the other one.

The area around this tomb is roped off and cannot be visited by the public, and there weren’t any good angles from which one could hope to see into the tomb more clearly, but the basic shape of it can be gleaned from this view. Also visible, just barely, is evidence of how as successive cultural generations passed, each one built new tombs and graves atop the old ones already in place. Whether this was done expressly to wipe away vestiges of the past, or simply to economize on space, I do not know.

Edit-wise, this picture required a bit of chromatic aberration reduction, but very little else. The camera was performing very well that day, and the in-body sharpening and saturation boost did wonders for the shot.

Near to the Ancient Agora in Athens is an ancient cemetery in the process of being excavated. Situated just a bit north and west of the Temple of Hephaestus, some of the graves in this cemetery evidently date back a good 3,000 years; there is so much history there that you can even track the changing attitudes in ancient Greek society toward full-body burials vs. cremation.

Also, they have tortoises there.

Grace and I were just walking along through the cemetery when I glanced down and saw this guy just sitting there. I almost thought he was a statue at first, until he moved. I took a couple of different photos of him, including this one from essentially ground-level.

This was an unaimed shot, as I was holding the camera by my feet at the time and hoping for the best. Fortunately, the best more or less happened, and the tortoise was even obliging enough to stick his head up and out (just a bit) for the photo. Edit-wise, I didn’t have to do much (shooting all of Greece in JPEG mode was such a good idea) to this shot apart from some chromatic aberration correction — the camera handled the saturation and sharpness just fine, and the picture turned out great. I’ve learned to keep the 17-85 mm lens locked at f/8 whenever possible, and this picture demonstrates why for how sharp the details are.

The day after we saw the Parthenon and the Ancient Agora, Grace and I set out to see a few more archaeological sites in the middle of Athens. The first place we set out for was an ancient graveyard, and along the way we had to pass down a rather busy, dirty, noisy road.

I couldn’t help but noticing that some of the buildings along the way were in…bad shape.

We saw it on Crete, and we saw it again here: a lot of buildings in Greece look as though nobody has bothered to repair the bomb damage from World War II. This was just one more example.

That said, I managed to capture the building from a pretty appealing angle. Edit-wise, I had to do some highlight recovery (clouds can make for a very bright background), as well as some fringe reduction. That was all in Lightroom. I then tried to run the iPhoto ‘Enhance’ option on the picture, but nothing really changed. It’s rare when that happens, but when it happens I usually take it as a sign that I got the post-processing almost exactly where it needed to be.

Once we left the Areopagus, we made our way north toward the Ancient Agora, which in days of old would have been the site of the marketplace (and some residences) of Athens. Along the western side of the Agora rests the Stoa of Attalos, a large covered portico (now converted to a museum) built some time between 159 and 138 BC.

I took the reciprocal of this image, but didn’t like it as much due to the higher number of people in the shot; this one has almost nobody visible in it. The stoa is impressive, to say the least, constructed as it is of (very finely polished!) marble and limestone. The 2003 European Treaty of Accession was signed there, for those whose tastes run to more recent history.

Edit-wise, I did a bit of highlight recovery and fringe reduction on the shot (especially in and around some of the pillars on the right). The day I took this was marked by a fairly persistent cloud cover, so there are no hints of blue to be found (unfortunately) peeking in between the columns. That said, the image gives the reader a very good idea of just how well-kept this structure is, and how impressive.

The Areopagus was a great place to take yet another panoramic image from.

Giving evidence to what I said before about how massive Athens is, this image is essentially facing in the exact, opposite direction to the previous panoramic…and the capital city of Greece is still content to stretch out as far as can be seen. As before, everything in this picture that a) is not green, and b) is not obviously sky, can be considered to be buildings in the city of Athens.

This picture was taken from the west side of the Areopagus.

Edit-wise, I didn’t do much to this shot, apart from the stitching. Hugin again performed flawlessly, seamlessly stitching the seven or eight photos that comprise this view together. It’s a wide image, nearly 10,000 pixels (the upper-limit image dimension in Lightroom), but not all that tall, so I’ve uploaded it a bit wider than the standard 1024 pixel width for the Pic of the Day, just so that there is at least a hint of vertical detail preserved.

We eventually wandered to the “back” of the Parthenon (its western face), which is where the Acropolis Museum is situated. Said museum was closed at the time (pity!), but the old fortifications at the western tip of the mountain were still intact and open to the public.

I took this panoramic from that vantage point. It’s a big file on my laptop (10000×1792 pixels), so it is presented here at 1200×215 resolution so that details are reasonably visible in it. That’s a bit wider than the usual Pic of the Day.

Our hotel is somewhere in the middle-right of the image. I very much doubt it’s really visible at this resolution, though.

Athens is a staggeringly massive city, which is odd considering how small it looks from its aerial view. But everywhere in the picture here that is a) white or grey, and b) obviously not sky, is the city in all its expansiveness. And the same view can be found looking out from the Parthenon in every direction.

I can’t remember exactly how many images were woven into this one picture — six or eight, if memory serves (but there’s no counting on that). Edit-wise, I did some basic noise reduction, fringe reduction, and white-balance adjustment in Lightroom before attaching all the pictures together. Then, in iPhoto, I ran the ‘Enhance’ feature on the photo, which really brought out a lot of the detail you’re seeing here. The thing I love about ‘Enhance’ is that it seems to be particularly good at dealing with foreground smog and windows in many pictures…it just brings out the stuff in the background as though the haziness wasn’t even there.

Okay, okay, okay…after keeping you waiting one more day, O Reader, here is the first of a few pictures of the Parthenon (or parts thereof).

This structure has a long and colourful history, which would take up far too much space here, even as a summary. It was, primarily, a temple to Athena, and must have been gloriously beautiful in its day. The centuries and weather, and the vagaries of war, have not been kind to the structure, though, and much of it has toppled or worn away.

But the Greeks, fueled by national pride and determined to…well…do whatever the hell they damn-well please (evidently) with their own historic treasures, are attempting to restore the structure to its former glory. Where parts of it have been bolstered with concrete, they are carving replacement parts out of marble. Where parts are missing, they are fabricating marble blocks anew. They are restoring the old marble as well, and the whole Parthenon site is a flurry of activity, cranes, and scaffolding.

And while it kind of ruins the picture, it does rather tease the imagination. How magnificent might this structure look in another decade, build back up to the state it was in during the glory days of ancient Athens?

Personally, I’d be inclined to make the trip back to Greece to see that.

At any rate, there wasn’t much done to this image in the way of editing, apart from a bit of white-balance adjustment and some fringe reduction.