Pastoral idealism

I started reading Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden - Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.

I like this quote from Freund describing fantasy, and am quoting it from the book:

The creating of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of "reservations" and "nature-parks" in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten to change ... the earth rapidly into something unrecognizable. The "reservation" is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality principle.

CVPR 2010

I am in San Francisco right now for CVPR 2010. I was planning on writing up something on some of the interesting papers that I have seen here, but the conference has been keeping me extremely busy. Maybe I will write something up once I leave for home tomorrow afternoon. To summarize my experiences so far, CVPR started out not that exciting but in the last two to three days I have seen some excellent work. I am looking forward to this afternoon session on sparse coding.