Here is a report on an experiment by the US government in the fifties. An artist produced a series of 9 drawings during the course of an LSD trip. The picture to the right is number 6, presumably when his brain chemistry was the most scrambled. Picture number 1 was a rather conventional portrait.
I wonder what would happen with an abstract artist, who starts out drawing stuff like this. Would drugs make him draw realistic landscapes?
I thought doing sudoku in color was weird, but this web site has sudoku with pictures of hamsters. I suppose it could be worse. The hamsters could be animated.
Here we have a fractal flame color-shifting a photo of a cat. There is an old saying:
To a three-year-old with a hammer, everything looks like it could use a bit of pounding.
To which I add:
To a computer nerd with a fractal flame generator and a color-shifting program, every digital photo looks like it needs some animation.
Is this an alien alphabet, and is there a secret decoder ring for it? Maybe it's a syllabary, like Katakana. Maybe it's a series of ideograms, like Chinese characters. How could we tell which? Or, just possibly, it's something so alien that we don't even have a category for it.
We are literate, so we are predisposed to believe that anything with this combination of regularity and disorder has to mean something. My fingers want to type "symbol", but to call something a symbol is to assume that it has a particular kind of meaning. Maybe the glyphs are asemic writing, decorative but meaningless. How could we tell?
The glyphs were inspired by my non-periodic graph paper. I was designing a favicon, and with the limitation of 16 by 16 pixels, I wasn't able to express the idea of a sudoku, so I went with Plan B.
I realized that my favicon was one of a number of variations. Well, of course, let's generate them all and see what they look like. Let's put them next to each other in different combinations and see what happens.
Is Thomas Jourdan the artist? He wrote Kandid, the open-source genetic art program that I used to generate this image. He's never even seen the image. On the other hand, many people have contributed to the math behind fractals, genetic algorithms and evolutionary art. Do they deserve some credit?
Is Kandid, the program, the artist? Or is a program just a tool, much like Leonardo's paintbrush was a tool?
Am I, the user, the artist? All I did was click a few buttons and see what happened.
Am I, the editor, the artist? I generated a few dozen images and picked out the one I liked best. That act of selection seems something like art, the same way I take a hundred pictures with my digital camera and delete 99 of them. However, if we call that art, we have to call what art critics do art as well.
Here is a math video so good that it's fun to watch even if you aren't interested in the math.
In art, there is the problem of perspective, the realistic representation of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. In Medieval art, the Bayeaux Tapestry for example, objects are flat and depth is indicated by overlapping. During the Renaissance, artists worked out the rules of perspective by trial and error. In the seventeenth century, the mathematicians formalized the process, beat it to death, and called it projective geometry. And now we have come full circle: a video illustrating one of the basic principles of projective geometry, a video that is itself a work of art.
This is a variation of my non-periodic plaids. Maybe more practical, maybe not. You can download a 10-page pdf and print out as much as you want. Every page is different. Of course.
You may be asking, "what is non-periodic graph paper good for?" Good question! I just program this stuff, I don't explain it. I program it because I can, not because I have a use in mind.
However: you can draw boxes for flow charts or organization charts and the boxes will line up horizontally and vertically. They won't be the same size, but they'll line up.
You can use the grid to draw large rectangles and subdivide them. Then you can paint them in primary colors. Very Piet Mondrian. The randomness of the grid will keep the composition from looking too regular.
Every snowflake is different. Why not graph paper?
The internet is such a wonderful thing! No matter how obsessed I think I am, with a little googling I can find someone else who already been there and done that.
Here is the sudoku pizza, with nine toppings arranged in a sudoku pattern. The picture above is the stage of construction which most clearly shows the sudoku pattern. The skewers are then removed, the pizza is topped with grated cheese, and is baked to a golden brown.
Andrej Bauer at the University of Ljubljana has a random art generator. You can type in a name and his computer will scramble the name into a computer program, which then generates the art. The process is random in the sense that you, the user, have no idea how the name you type affects the picture. All you can do is try different names and see what happens.
It takes a few minutes to generate the art, which gives you time to browser the gallery of pictures that other people created. You can vote the pictures up or down, and the most popular pictures eventually make it to a "best of" gallery.
Seam carving is a new technique for content-aware resizing of images. The idea is to squeeze the images without reducing them. An audio analogy would be speeding up a recording without changing the pitch.
The alternatives to seam carving are cropping and shrinking. Cropping loses information at the edges. Shrinking loses detail everywhere. Seam carving analyses the picture and deletes "unimportant" information.
Of course, I can't just read about something like this, I have to download some software and try it for myself. Here is a feral cat, 400 pixels wide:
Now we progressively carve the picture.
Now the picture is half size. Ouch! The head and tail are about the same size as in the original, and it looks like the algorithm decided that dark shadows, blurry green leaves and white fur were "unimportant" information. The cat's adorable face is preserved. Which makes a certain amount of sense. To me. Maybe not to the cat.
Please accept with no obligation, implicit or explicit, my best wishes
for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,
non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a financially successful,
personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated experience during the generally accepted calendar year 2008, or, if that is not your calendar of choice, the approximate period from the current solstice until the following winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability,
religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual orientation
of the wishee. No elves were exploited, and no animals were harmed, during the wishing of this wish.
By accepting this wish, you agree to these terms:
Enjoy!
I played around with fractals way back when, but the state of the art has advanced quite a bit since then. Apophysis 2.0 is software that will generate "fractal flames", something like fractals but way cooler. Flam3 is software that will render the individual frames of an animated fractal flame.
At 30 frames per second, and 5 seconds to render a frame, rendering takes 150 times real-time. A four-minute animation takes about ten hours to render. Then there is the time to generate the video from the stills, mix in the music and titles, and upload the thing to YouTube.
All of this doable. The computer does most of the work, while I do something else, like sleep or eat. Unfortunately, I can't do my usual strategy of "let's make a dozen of these and see which one we like best". Someone needs a faster computer.
Here is an online sudoku with colors instead of numbers. I have a couple of problems doing these, due to the lack of a natural order. First, I can't say to myself, "I've done the ones and twos, time to check the threes." Second, I can't count off a row or column to find the missing numbers.
I also notice that my internal dialog is more difficult. The words for one through nine are all one syllable, except for seven. Dark green, light green, orange, yellow... colors take more syllables. Or maybe, being a computer nerd, words, numbers and mouse clicks are all left-brain for me, while colors are right-brain. Whatever the reason, I have trouble working these.
Here's the latest silliness from the Regruntled Computer Works: non-periodic plaids. These are constructed like normal plaids, except that the thread counts are randomized.
I rather like the patterns. I'd like to have a dress shirt made. And I'd like to watch the seamstress try to match the pattern for the pocket! OK, that's just cruel. No pockets.
Humans tend to see patterns that aren't there. Conversely, if they try to randomize something, they make it "too random". I'm guilty, too. I generated lots of these plaids, and discarded the ones that didn't "look right".
I suspect that's part of the reason I find the sudoku patterns so interesting. The rules of the pattern create something with the colors all mixed up. It's not random at all, in fact it's highly structured, but to the eye it looks random without being too random.
Here is Zack the cat, colored in a sudoku pattern. Well, not colored exactly, but color-shifted. You can still see the texture of the fur within the blocks. A sudoku needs nine numbers or colors or patterns. Doing nothing is one, I had two more from Color Shift, and three more from Horse of a Different Color. That makes six. Here I've added three more transformations to my palette, namely canceling the red, canceling the green and canceling the blue. That makes 9 transformations, numbered 1 through 9 and applied in a pattern based on a solved sudoku.
Here is the original picture, shamelessly ripped off from TTB at Blogospherical Ruminations:
In a Ben Bridge commercial, I heard a reference to platinum, "the purest of metals". This is complete nonsense, since purity is not an attribute of chemical elements. It makes sense to say that a particular piece of metal is more or less pure platinum, but it does not make sense to say that platinum itself is pure. Nor is purity a particularly desirable attribute! We make alloys for all sorts of good reasons.
I did some googling, and found that "the purest of metals" is a common marketing phrase in the jewelry business. Most platinum jewelry is either 90% pure (10% iridium) or 95% pure (5% ruthenium). In comparison, sterling silver is 92.5% pure, and 22K gold is 91.7% pure.
However, the aluminum foil in your kitchen is 98.5% pure! So, this holiday season, if you care enough to give your loved ones "the purest of metals", forget platinum. It's not that pure. Instead, give them lovingly wadded lumps of 98.5% pure aluminum.
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw and graduate student Matthew Weinzierl have proposed taxing tall people at a higher rate than short people. Their argument is twofold. First, height correlates with income, so tall people have more money, which means that a tall tax will bring in more revenue. Second, people can't change their height, so taxing tall people doesn't create economic distortions, as opposed to taxing the industrious, which discourages them from working so hard.
Do Mankiw and Weinzierl actually endorse such a system? Far from it. Rather, they argue, the proposed tax clarifies our thinking about taxation in general. They say that height is a “justly acquired endowment”: it is not unfairly wrested from anyone else, so the state has no right to seize its fruits. By the same logic, they imply (though they do not state outright) that the government has no right to force someone with the “justly acquired endowment” of entrepreneurial genius to pay a higher tax rate.
I think Mankiw and Weinzierl are missing the best argument for the tall tax, namely "What about the CHILDREN?" Children are short! Especially young children. The tall tax is good for children, and good for America. All we need is a Presidential candidate to champion the tall tax. Are you listening, Dennis Kucinich?
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Consequently, we use magical thinking to deal with advanced technology.
This is very evident to me when I watch other people use computers, which I understand better than they do. Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing, for example when I have to do something with Vista and Microsoft has changed the terminology or behavior to make it more confusing (to me).
As technology advances, any one person will understand less and less of it. We will have to use more magical thinking, not less.
Or maybe there is a synthesis, a scientifically informed magical thinking. With branded chemicals, such as Benadryl, I understand that diphenhydramine hydrochloride has a predictable effect on my body. I believe that I am capable of understanding the chemical reactions involved if I put in some effort, although I do not presently understand them.
There is also a false magical thinking, as when people pay as much extra for the Benadryl brand as they did for the diphenhydramine hydrochloride. The false magical thinking is encouraged by the advertisers, who aren't thinking magically at all.
Oprah is touring with Obama. This is really quite unprecedented. Oprah is a LOT more successful than Obama, she's more famous, and she has more money. Being Obama's warmup act is a step down for her. She's slumming in the sordid world of politics.
Meanwhile, Obama has two things going for him. He's a great speaker, and he's not Hillary. Really, what is Obama famous for, except for a few great speeches?
Obama has always been the candidate with the most style and the least substance. Oprah is the Queen of Daytime Television. By definition, her audience doesn't have anything productive to do during business hours. Is this a natural alliance, or what?
With Oprah to draw a crowd, Obama can reach more people with the audacity of hope, whatever than means. Of course, I like to quantify things. I note that Obama has gone from a 10% chance to a 30% chance for the nomination at Intrade, and that the polls have him leading in Iowa. Intrade has Hillary at 60%. Not that I would take either side of the Obama trade... anything could happen. It's a great story!
I had a runny nose, so I went to the drugstore for some antihistamine. Generic store-brand diphenhydramine hydrochloride, 25 mg caps, three dollars a box. It was right next to the Benadryl, same chemical, same number of 25 mg caps, six dollars a box. The only difference is the brand.
What I find amazing about this is that the brand is worth as much as the chemical. I can only conclude that there are two kinds of customers. Some customers, like me, took chemistry in high school, and understand that chemicals have predictable effects on the human body. Why pay twice as much for the same chemical?
Other customers use magical thinking, and think the BRAND, not the chemical, is what stops their nose from running. What's the point of saving a few dollars if you don't get the magical brand?
Diphenhydramine hydrochloride also makes me drowsy, and every once in a while I will take it to help me sleep. Guess what? Nytol, a branded sleep aid, is diphenhydramine hydrochloride in 25 mg caps. Same chemical, about the same price as Benadryl, different purpose, different brand, different magic. I suppose there are people who have a box of Nytol as well as a box of Benadryl in their medicine cabinets. If they take a maximum dose of Nytol on top of a maximum dose of Benadryl...
This is a modern HP laptop, taken apart and re-assembled with lots of wood, leather and brass to give it a Victorian look. No price is given, but ForbesLife mentioned $1500 for just a keyboard.
The technology part of this thing will be obsolete in three years. How will it fare as art? Consider a Compaq "portable", circa 1983. 28 pounds, shoulder strap, 9-inch green screen, 4.77 Mhz processor, 128KB Memory, 2 5-1/2-inch floppies, no hard drive. No doubt someone could have replaced all the plastic with leather and wood and made it look like a piece of Victorian luggage. Perhaps someone did. So here we are, 25 years later, and it's a ridiculously obsolete piece of technology dressed up as something a hundred years more obsolete. So what? That's what the steampunk laptop is going to look like 25 years from now.
(Steampunk, by analogy with cyberpunk, is a type of science fiction set in the Victorian era, the age of steam engines. The term has spilled over from literature to art.)
Mitt Romney, in his much-anticipated speech on religion, invoked the memory of the Founders. As a rhetorical gimmick, this is a slam dunk. In EVERY country, EVERY politician invokes the memory of the leaders of the last successful revolution. It's practically a pre-requisite for public life. Let's take a look at what the Founders really believed.
The Founders, for the most part, were not Christians at all, they were Deists. (Deism is out of style these days, but a reasonable modern equivalent would be Unitarian Universalism.) The US did not have a Christian president until 1829, when Andrew Jackson took office, half a century after Independence.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote the Jefferson Bible, which praises Jesus as a moral teacher, but never mentions the miracles or the Resurrection. For a Christian, the Resurrection is not exactly a minor detail.
Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, one of the most anti-religious books of all time. The backlash against this book has been cited as one of the causes of the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival that led, among other things, to Mormonism!
For a Mormon politician to invoke the memory of the Founders in a speech on religion is just a little bit hilarious. Good politics, bad history.
Ron Paul is down to 4.7 at Intrade (I shorted at 7.7). I didn't expect this to happen until late January. OK, so I was wrong, but at least I'm wrong in a good way. My bet is paying off faster than expected. What happened?
Mike Huckabee happened. The only plausible scenario for a Paul nomination is a surge in the polls followed by wins in the early primaries. The come-from-behind, underdog story is there alright, but it features Mike Huckabee, not Ron Paul.
Paul's supporters are already urging him to forget about the Republican nomination and run as an independent (Intrade gives the odds at 25%). His campaign has raised a lot of money, and money has its own momentum. An independent campaign would push the day of reckoning from January to November, allowing the true believers to remain delusional for a few more months.
Intrade also has a contract for Ron Paul winning the general election. I didn't short that one because it was priced lower, presumably because of the possibility that Ron Paul would win the Republican nomination only to lose to Dennis Kucinich in November. If he switches to an independent campaign, I may be able short Ron Paul all over again with the other contract.
Speaking of delusional:
The recent revelation in the National Intelligence Estimate that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has had some interesting effects. The obvious conclusion is that our information was wrong, so we need to stop the saber-rattling and re-evaluate our policy. Duhhh. But Dubya says "... the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion ..."
I listened to the Democratic debate on NPR. The candidates took turns sound-biting each other. "You said this, you said that." A logical response would be "I said that based on the information I had at the time, and the information was wrong". But no, everyone says "what you think I said is not what I actually meant. In spite of having bad information, I've been right about Iran all along." I'm paraphrasing, but I am not making this up.
I'm coining a new word: "back-spinning", spinning a new interpretation of an earlier statement in the light of new information.
I'll give another example of back-spinning: Day-Age Creationism. This is less topical, so maybe we can be more objective about it. Genesis is full of phrases like "and the evening and the morning were the first day". For three thousand years, Biblical scholars thought "day" meant "24 hours". It was not until AFTER science established that the earth was more than 6,000 years old that creationists advanced the theory that "day" really meant "age", an indefinite time period. How convenient. In other words, when Moses wrote "day", he really meant "age". In spite of not having the slightest clue about astronomy or geology, Moses was right all along!
In my Color Shift experiment, I rotated all three colors: red to blue, green to red, blue to green. It is also possible to hold one color constant while switching the other two. There are two ways to shuffle three colors, and three ways to shuffle two colors, for five ways in all. Alternatively, there are six permutations of three objects; the five just described plus the original colors equal six. With computers, when I come to a fork in the road like this, my inclination is to try all possibilities and see what happens. It doesn't take much more programming, and CPU time is free.
The picture above is the most interesting of the five. I explain this by noting that the background (grass, shrubs) is mostly green, and the foreground (horse) is mostly red, so holding the green constant and switching the red and blue results in a blue horse on a normal-looking background. The dissonance between the foreground and the background is what makes the picture interesting.
This is all very glib, but of course the computer doesn't know which is the foreground and which is the background. There are plenty of optical illusions to show that this is not always so easy for humans to figure out either. I tried averaging all the pixels and found that the picture as a whole is slightly more red than green. Holding red constant and switching green and blue results in a normal-looking horse against a bluish background... which is not interesting. The other three transformations change both the foreground and the background, which is even less interesting.
Of course, what I am looking for is some kind of metric that will tell me which of the five color transformations will likely result in interesting pictures.
German engineering, applied to the lowly speed bump. If the player doesn't work in your browser, here is a link.
Zopa is a new social lending site. Zopa UK has been around for a while, and Zopa US is about to launch. (I'm on their email list, and got to do a bit of beta testing.) I'm a lender at Prosper, which is working out OK so far, but I don't have much faith in management. At Prosper, the problem for lenders is estimating the likelihood of default, so the emphasis is on diversifying, choosing borrowers wisely, and getting compensated adequately for risk.
At Zopa, the lender buys a CD, insured by the NCUA. Zopa then lends the money out to borrowers. Zopa handles the diversification, and (with its credit union partners) assumes the risk.
Zopa requires that borrowers have a FICO score of at least 640, which drops out the bottom 25% of the population. The current CD rate is 5.10% for 1 year, which is not bad. I have a CD at GMAC Bank, which is currently offering 4.50% for 1 year.
Zopa borrowers can post their sob stories, and Zopa lenders can "help" them by diverting part of their interest to the borrowers' payments. This is the social part of social lending. For example, a lender with a $1000 5.10% CD could reduce his interest to 4.10% and allocate the extra $10 per year to help specific borrowers. It is possible that a borrower with a good story could get a free loan.
It's nice to see some competition for Prosper. Zopa has a completely different business model, and will attract different borrowers and lenders. There's no reason they can't coexist. Personally, I can't get too excited about Zopa, but the next time I'm in the market for a CD, I'll consider them.
By the way, ZOPA is an acronym for "zone of possible agreement". If a borrower is willing to pay as much as 10%, and a lender is willing to accept as little as 9%, then the range from 9% to 10% is the zone of possible agreement. If there's no ZOPA, there's no deal.
Yet another experimental video. Here the colors are shifted instead of inverted. Inversions change red to an absence of red and vice versa, like a photographic negative. Here I am shifting the red to blue, the green to red, and the blue to green. In the computer, colors are just numbers, and I can do whatever I want with them, including shifting them around.
What I like about this effect is that blacks, grays and whites are unaffected. They contain equal amounts of red, green and blue, so shifting the colors around doesn't change anything. An inversion, on the other hand, will change black into white and white into black.
Watch the horse. The horse has black pupils and white patches that remain constant as the horse changes from brown to purple to green. The fence post stays gray.
