What makes great paintings great? Unless you can see them for yourself—and be awed, or not, by their physical presence—the answers will generally come second-hand, through the words of art historians, critics, curators, gallerists, etc. We can study art in reproduction, but seeing, for example, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn in the flesh presents an entirely different aesthetic experience than seeing them on the page or screen.

Lately, however, the situation is changing, and the boundaries blurring between a virtual and an in-person experience of art. It’s possible with digital technology to have experiences no ordinary museum-goer has had, of course—like walking into a VR Salvador Dalí painting, or through a simulated Vermeer museum in augmented reality. But these technological interventions are novelties, in a way. Like famous paintings silkscreened on t-shirts or glazed on coffee mugs, they warp and distort the works they represent.

That is not the case, however, with the latest digital reproduction of Rembrandt’s grandest and most exclusive painting, The Night Watch, a 44.8 gigapixel image of the work that the museum has “released online in a zoomable interface,” notes Kottke. “The level of detail available here is incredible." Even that description seems like understatement. The image comes to us from the same team responsible for the painting’s multi-phase, live-streamed restoration.

The Rijksmuseum’s imaging team led by datascientist Robert Erdmann made this photograph of The Night Watch from a total of 528 exposures. The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks. The final image is made up of 44.8 gigapixels (44,804,687,500 pixels), and the distance between each pixel is 20 micrometres (0.02 mm). This enables the scientists to study the painting in detail remotely. The image will also be used to accurately track any future ageing processes taking place in the painting.

The hugely famous work is so enormous, nearly 12 feet high and over 14 feet wide, that its figures are almost life-size. Yet even when it was possible to get close to the painting—before COVID-19 shut down the Rijksmuseum and before Rembrandt’s masterwork went behind glass—no one except conservationists could ever get as close to it as we can now with just the click of a mouse or a slide of our fingers across a trackpad.

The experience of seeing Rembrandt’s brushstrokes magnified in crystalline clarity doesn’t just add to our store of knowledge about The Night Watch, as the Rijksmuseum suggests above. This astonishing image also—and perhaps most importantly for the majority of people who will view it online—enables us to really commune with the materiality of the painting, and to be moved by it in a way that may have only been possible in the past by making an exclusive, in-person visit to the Rijksmuseum without a tourist in sight. (For most of us, that is an unrealistic way to view great art.)

See the huge photographic reproduction of The Night Watch here and zoom in on any detail until you can almost smell the varnish. This image represents the painting in the current state of its restoration, an effort that the museum previously opened to the public by live streaming it. Yet, the work has stopped for the past two months as conservationists have stayed home. Just yesterday, the team's onsite research began again, and will continue at least into 2021. This huge photo of the painting may be the closest almost anyone will ever get to the canvas, and the only opportunity for some time to approximately feel its monumental scale.

via Kottke

Related Content:

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Masterpiece

The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

Walk Inside a Surrealist Salvador Dalí Painting with This 360º Virtual Reality Video

Experience the Van Gogh Museum in 4K Resolution: A Video Tour in Seven Parts

See the Complete Works of Vermeer in Augmented Reality: Google Makes Them Available on Your Smartphone

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Largest & Most Detailed Photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Carriers continue to report on the impact of COVID-19 on their networks. One of the more interesting statistics that caught my eye was when Comcast reported that upload traffic on their network was up 33% since March 1. Comcast joins the rest of big ISPs in saying that their networks are handling the increased traffic volumes.

By 'handling' the volumes, they mean that their networks are not crashing and shutting down. But I think there is a whole lot more to these headlines than what they are telling the public.

I want to start with an anecdote. I was talking to a client who is working at home, along with her husband and two teenagers. The two adults are trying to work from home, and the two kids are supposed to be online, keeping up with schoolwork. Each of them needs to create a VPN to connect to their office or school servers. They are also each supposed to be connecting to Zoom or other online services for various meetings, webinars, or classes.

These functions all rely on using the upload path to the Internet. The family found out early in the crisis that their broadband connection did not provide enough upload speed to create more than one VPN at a time or to join more than one video call. This has made their time working at home into a major hassle because they are being forced to schedule and take turns using the upload link. This is not working well for any of them since the family has to prioritize the most important connections while other family members miss out on expected calls or classes.

The family's upload connection is a choke point in the network and is seriously limiting their ability to function during the stay-at-home crisis. But the story goes beyond that. We all recall times in the past when home Internet bogged down in the evenings when everybody in the neighborhood was using broadband to watch videos or play games. Such slowdowns occurred when the download data path into the neighborhood didn't deliver enough bandwidth to satisfy everybody's request for broadband. When that download path hit maximum usage, everybody in the neighborhood got a degraded broadband connection. When the download path got overloaded, the network responded by giving everybody a little less bandwidth than they were requesting — and that resulted in pixelating video or websites that lose a connection.

The same thing is now happening with the upload links, but the upload path is a lot more susceptible to overload. For technologies like coaxial cable networks or telephone DSL the upload path leaving the neighborhood is a lot smaller than the download path into the area. As an example, the upload link on a coaxial network is set to be no more than 10% of the total bandwidth allowed for the neighborhood. It takes a lot more usage to overload the download path into the neighborhood since that path is so much larger. On the upload path, the homes are now competing for a much smaller data path.

Consider the difference in the way that homes use the download path compared to the new way we're all using uploading. On the download side, networks get busy mostly due to streaming video. Services like Netflix stay ahead of demand by downloading content that will be viewed five minutes into the future. By doing so, the neighborhood download network can have cumulative delays of as much as five minutes before the video streams collapse and stop working. The very nature of streaming creates a buffer against failure — sort of a network insurance policy.

Homes are not using the upload links in the same way. Connecting to a school server, a work server, or a video chat service creates a virtual private network (VPN) connection. A VPN connection grabs and dedicates some minimum amount of bandwidth to the user even during times when the person might not be uploading anything. A VPN carves out a small dedicated path through the upload broadband connection provided by the ISP. There is no buffer like there is with downloading of streaming video — when the upload path gets full, there's no room for anybody else to connect.

The nearest analogy to this situation harkens back to traditional landline telephone service. We all remember times, like after 911, when you couldn't make a phone call because all of the circuits were busy. That's what's happening with the increased use of VPNs. Once the upload path from the neighborhood is full of VPNs, nobody else is going to be able to grab a VPN connection until somebody 'hangs up.'

Residential customers have historically valued download speeds over upload speeds and ISPs have configured their networks accordingly. Many technologies allow an ISP to balance the upload and download traffic, and ISPs can help upload congestion by providing a little more bandwidth on the upload stream. Unfortunately for cable companies, the current DOCSIS standards don't allow them to provide more than 10% of bandwidth on the upload side — so their ability to balance is limited.

As I keep hearing these stories from real users, I am growing less and less impressed by the big ISPs saying that everything is well and that their networks are handling the increased load. I think there are millions of households struggling due to inadequate upload speeds. It's true, as the big ISPs are reporting, that the networks are not crashing — but the networks are not providing the connections people want to make. No big ISP is going to admit this to their stockholders — but I bet a lot of those stockholders already understand this first-hand from having troubles trying to work from home.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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I’ve seen you sneak into your Notes app during Zoom calls with your parents and write, “Funny when boomers can’t figure out technology, something there.” I was in your brain when you rolled over to scribble incoherently during one of your “inspiration naps,” those seven-hour-long, whiskey-soda-fueled fugues you “accidentally” drink yourself into two to three days a week now. I’m so sorry to tell you this, but “Friends but social distancing, no one will Zoom with Ross character, funny but sad and REAL” means nothing. It’s nonsense.

I see it in your eyes. You’re almost there. You’re about to dust off Final Draft, crack your knuckles, and start writing me. But I’m here, literally on my knees, begging you to just… not. Please don’t do it. No one needs me. No one wants me. And no one is going to want me at any point in the future. I’m big enough to admit that I am wholly unnecessary. It’s time you understand this, too.

I know you think that “comedy is what we need to heal.” You’ve said it several times. Out loud. To Mandy. Your cat. But the show that you’re imagining, which according to your notes, has an episode in which “someone farts on Zoom but no one takes the blame but then it happens again” is not it, babe.

You believe that people want art that reflects their reality. But the current reality is so bizarre and unbelievable that I swear to you, no one will want to revisit this when it’s over. Have you ever once looked at those pictures of yourself from your 8th-grade dance? The one where all you threw up penne alla vodka all over the dance floor during Usher’s “Yeah!”? No, you have not. Because no matter how much time has passed, you have no desire to relive the night your whole grade gathered around you and chanted, “Pasta puker! Pasta puker!” while Usher was in the background, singing, “Yeah, yeah.”

This pandemic is the your 8th-grade dance of global history. When this is over, people are going to want zero — count ‘em, zero — reminders of how many showers they didn’t take, how many bras they didn’t wear, or how many bread loaves they fucked up. People will simply never want a sitcom set during quarantine, especially a sitcom whose main character is “depressed but like cool about it,” which is a thing that you used up actual pen ink to write down.

So, please. I’m just an ill-conceived sitcom idea standing in front of a desperate TV writer who recently sat down to write and ended up spending three hours trying to learn a 45-second-long TikTok dance meant for teens, asking her to give up. Because “maybe it would be funny if Cheers but they can’t actually ‘cheers’ because they’re all in their own houses” is not anything anyone will ever want to watch. I promise.

Herd immunity all over again

Comment  Britain is sleepwalking into another coronavirus disaster by failing to listen to global consensus and expert analysis with the release of the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracking app.…

Hey everyone, first off: apologies are in order. I’m super sorry. I thought I was doing a good thing. I hated what’s been going on, so I tried to fix it.

I built a time machine and traveled back to 2012 to tell President Obama about the pandemic. But at the White House, they didn’t believe that I was from the future. When I mentioned how Donald Trump eventually becomes president, they were like, “That guy from The Apprentice? You’re hilarious!” So they kept me around for a few weeks as the “funny guy” at the White House before eventually throwing me off the property.

But it turns out that I was an asymptomatic carrier and I accidentally gave it to, like, everyone. So now it’s way worse. Again, I’m really sorry.

I hate to say it, but I have a few more things to apologize for. See, I’d already built this time machine, so before coming back to our time, I thought, “Why not go back a little further and fix a few more things?” So I went back to 2000 to warn everyone about the electoral college. But I ended up giving it to George W. Bush and Al Gore, and now Ralph Nader is a former two-term President of the United States. The second term was not my fault.

Then I went back to 1969 because I’ve always wanted to watch the moon landing in real-time. Well, it turns out I accidentally gave it to Neil Armstrong, and NASA canceled the mission. So now we’ve never been to the moon. I really screwed that one up.

Then I traveled to the early part of the 20th century and tried to “take care” of Hitler, before things got really out of hand. But when I got there, I ran into a bunch of other time travelers who were doing the same thing, so I thought to myself, “They got this,” and left. I wonder how it went!

Then I went back to 14th-century Europe because, hey, why not stop two plagues? It turns out I did not stop either; because of me, they ended up with double-plague. It was way worse. Now Europe has never existed. Nobody knows Europe was ever a thing. I could basically become Shakespeare if I could remember any Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t done. I went back to when Jesus was about to be crucified — I thought maybe I could stop that from happening? I don’t know. Anyway, surprise-surprise, I ended up giving it to Jesus. So instead of staying in his cave for three days he had to quarantine in there for two weeks and everybody forgot about him, and now nobody remembers who Jesus was. I guess I don’t need to apologize for this one, because now none of you know about Jesus. He was cool, though!

Then I went back to the Stone Age and accidentally gave it to the person who was going to invent the wheel, so then I had to invent the wheel. And I think I misremembered what shape a wheel is and now cars have square wheels and they don’t go anywhere.

Finally, I went all the way back to the very first hunter-gatherers. This was totally by accident — I did not mean to do this one, at all. But I ended up giving it to all the first people. And now humans don’t exist. And neither do my parents, which means I don’t exist. Which means I never did any of this in the first place. Which means everything is still the same as it already was. So never mind.

Dear Gary,

It is with deep regret that we must inform you that the order you placed at 6:46 pm at Buffalo Wild Wings has been processed, prepared, and is now on its way to your desired address.

At this time, there is no recourse or appeal process at your disposal to change this result. The damage is done. And as a trusted friend, companion, and the third-party delivery app of your choice, it pains us to have to deliver this news.

We realize your inevitably subpar experience will ultimately be associated with our service, but we’re not going to go down without a fight. We can’t fix what is broken, but we still feel a certain obligation to inform you of what you can expect to happen now.

In your almost assuredly sedentary state, we can understand that there may be a certain catharsis involved when it comes to ordering food from a restaurant most commonly associated with loud MMA fights and sticky Golden Tee machines. But we can assure you that whatever majesty you may personally experience from the atmosphere Buffalo Wild Wings presents does not transfer over to the culinary experience you’re about to have.

It didn’t have to be this way. Despite filtering establishments serving wings by distance, and having no fewer than 13 other seemingly superior options, you went with Buffalo Wild Wings. Not only was it the furthest away from your residence, but this location was also the lowest-rated by nearly a full half star. Even without the extended distance, it’s abundantly clear the delivery process is not kind to a product that must be extremely crispy and/or hot in some capacity for one to glean any kind of enjoyment from it.

And so we just have to ask again, why?

There was no special deal available at this location. No new menu items of note. And, in general, there was nothing proprietary about your order that a closer, more highly rated establishment couldn’t have fulfilled. Your wings were not tossed in the mango habanero sauce many frequently choose. Nor the Caribbean jerk or even lemon pepper rub for that matter. You, out of the dozens of sauces available, chose “mild.” Only mild. For all 50 wings. Of course, we’re grateful for your support of restaurants during this difficult time, but given the multitude of worthy options at your disposal, what the fuck?

We would never say we were disappointed in a valued customer’s decision making. That is not what we’re doing here. Frankly, we’re just concerned. You’re better than this. Last week you tried the Poke Palace — what happened to that Gary? We want to know.

It isn’t always going to be like this. This unusual moment in history will eventually pass, and one day just be a distant memory we all share. What we’ll be left with is our reflections on what we did during this time when Earth seemingly stood still. Our grandchildren will one day ask us what it was like to live through this period in history — what we were like. We hope you’re able to eventually come to terms with the fact that, now and forever moving forward, this will be part of your story.

Enjoy your meal.