Escher’s Gravity Defying Waterfall: Illusion or Source of Unlimited Energy?
August 24, 2011
When I was in college it was a requirement that you smoked dope, leafed through a book of the amazing print work of Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher and said, “Oh, wow, man.” I don’t know if that remains on the curricula today.
If you are not already familiar with his work, you’ve got an incredible treat ahead of you. His work is a fascinating and unique combination of mathematical ideas, illusions and art.
The video above is an attempt at recreating, in the real world, one of Escher’s most popular images, the endless waterfall. Remember, this is an illusion. Can you figure out exactly how it was done?
Here are two clues: forced perspective, painted shadows. Oh, and a video editing program. See the YouTube channel for creator M.C. Wolles for the full explanation. Well done, Mr. Wolles!
Republican War on Science – Chris Mooney
August 24, 2011
I thought Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science was required reading for anyone who supports a reality-based* approach to the topic of government and science. This is not to say that there aren’t Democrats with equally specious views on scientific issues, but the Republican Party seems to take an anti-scientific view point as, well, as an article of faith.
Here’s an update from Chris on the current presidential race and science.
The future health of the American economy will require a scientifically literate and technologically savvy work force. Just as there needs to be a clear separation of Church and State, there needs to a clear separation of Church and Education in our nation’s school.
You can argue that the Bible can teach you morality and ethics. I’d disagree due to all the rape, slaughter, incest and torture that are such a large part of the Old Testament, but that’s just my opinion. However, it’s certain you can’t learn atomic theory, fundamental biology, neuroscience, or how to create an effective nationwide wireless cell phone network from the Bible. That’s what should happen in publicly funded schools.
Because, believe me, if American students aren’t learning it, there’s a generation of Indian and Chinese students who are.
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* In an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, Karl Rove, the presidential aide quoted below, explained his view of the Republican take on ‘reality.’
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The Orwell vs. Huxley Debate Revisited
July 27, 2011
I tend to fall on the side of Huxley as I believe the modern world most resembles his dystopian future rather than Orwell’s. Author Neil Postman made this case in his excellent Amusing Ourselves to Death and you can find a link to a cartoon version of his argument here, from an earlier post on this site. Promoters of the documentary film Kill Switch, about government control of the Internet, revisit this debate with the following infographic.
Click on image for larger size.
Why Are Americans Fat?
July 27, 2011
MPH Degree Programs.com, a guide to online programs for Masters in Public Health education offers the following infographic on What Keeps America Fat. It contains what I found to be some eye-opening statistics and (forgive me) food for thought.
Click on image for larger size.
Where Does Your Data Live?
July 27, 2011
The folks at Mozy, who offer online, off site “cloud” based storage for the data that lives as ones and zeros on your hard drives, MP3 players, SSDs, external drives and network back-ups have created an infographic that shows where your information is stored geographically (along with other interesting statistics). Fascinating stuff, I think.
Click on the image for larger size.
“Touch of Evil” – Opening Crane Shot
July 21, 2011
If you’ve never seen this late noir classic directed by Orson Welles, you’ve got a real treat in store. This post was inspired by a site that recently claimed to compile the 100 best scenes in American cinema.
Of course, anything like that is wildly subjective and open to serious debate. Let’s just say that my own list does not include Tom Cruise shouting, “Show me the money” or Sharon Stone’s crotch shot from Basic Instinct.
But one sequence on this list that would be not only in my personal top 100, but my personal top 5, too, is the opening of Touch of Evil. It’s brilliant technique and great visual storytelling. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done in film. And it’s one of the reasons true film geeks will always revere Welles.
Touch of Evil was edited without Welles’ consent priot to it’s original 1958 theatrical release. He wrote Universal a 58 page memo to correct these unwanted changes. In 1998 a ‘restored’ version was released that attempted to follow Welles’ memo. The opening sequence (above) had the film’s title’s removed and the original soundtrack restored, integral to being able to follow the movement of the car with the bomb.
Comic Book Economics: 3 Hours of Entertainment for $120. Is This Sustainable?
July 18, 2011
I’m a long time comic book fan, going back to the early 1960s. I agree with the late Harvey Pekar’s view that comics are words and pictures and, despite the medium’s fixation in America with long underwear super heros, there’s no inherent limitation in how good either the pictures or words can be.
Recently I went to a local comics shop and bought a first issue of Deadman and the Flying Graysons, part of the Flashpoint story arc.
In order to read the entire Flashpoint storyline DC Comics requires the purchase of 37 comic books (with 18 pages of content each) at $2.99. With sales tax where I live this comes to a whopping $117.66!
New York based artist Alex Katz once referenced a survey that claimed people at fine arts museum spent an average of 7 seconds looking at a painting. “I try to give them their 7 seconds worth,” he said. His works, like most painters, took weeks of effort to complete, and more often far longer than that.
The 18 pages of Flashpoint #1 took less than 5 minutes to read; a bit more perhaps if you linger over the art.
That works out to 3 hours and 5 minutes of reading time for close to $120.
By comparison, in 1965 an issue of Green Lantern had 21 full pages and 3 three-quarter pages of story and art. An issue sold for 12 cents. (Phun Phact: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that 12 cents would be 86 cents today).
What else is competing for your entertainment dollars in today’s recession?
The popular video game Call of Duty: Black Ops retails for $60, provides a much more immersive experience and gamers can play this for dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of hours. The current box office blockbuster Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 runs 2 hours and 10 minutes, the ticket price locally is $11.50 and it’s in 3D to boot!
Back to the saddle-stitched four color process product. Obviously, you can develop a far more complicated storyline given 666 pages rather than the 23 and 1/4 of the 1960s. And the production values of today’s comics are without question much improved in two areas: the quality of paper used and the complexity and subtlety of the coloring.
The basic art of penciling and inking may be better, in general, according to your taste. Although during their run on Green Lantern 46 years ago the combination of Gil Kane’s pencils and Sid Greene’s inks is the equal to anyone working today, in my opinion.
Certainly in most cases anatomy drawing has suffered as several generations of comic book artists have learned their figure drawing skills not from life but from aping the exaggerations of earlier comic book artists. For example, Gil Kane’s women are realistically sexy without the need for breasts larger than their heads.
My conclusion is that the current business model for selling ‘floppies’ or individual issues of comic books is unsustainable. As a fan I hope there is a way for the form to reinvent itself before it sucumbs to market pressures and the competition from other media.
Perhaps the move will be to digital distribution on tablet devices like the iPad, the current trend for the magazine industry in general. Will this mean the end of the ‘brick and mortar’ comic book specialty shop as it has for the bookseller Borders? Tune in next time: same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel. . .
Shoplifting Literature: The 5 Most Stolen Books by Publishers Weekly
July 17, 2011
Here’s an example of a link I just had to click on: Publishers Weekly’s list of the five most stolen books. In fact, except for two specific books on their list, the headline should read the five most stolen authors. The two books that make the top five are On the Road by Jack Kerouac and The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. The other three are really categories of books: anything by William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and Martin Amis.
Honorable mentions went to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, anything by Don DeLillo, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, the works of Raymond Chandler and (obviously, redundantly) Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman.
Is there something about outsider or outlaw status that unites this list? But then what is Paul Auster doing on it? Author of the post Gabe Habash offers this analysis:
If there is one sociological conclusion we can draw from this list, it’s that the “type” of booklifter is likely young and male, and there’s probably a link between the draw of the content of these top books and the actual act of theft. In other words, someone who wants to commit a reckless act is most interested in reading about reckless acts.
“Among the Truthers” by Jonathan Kay
July 5, 2011
Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay has produced an excellent, if somewhat controversial, look at the rise of conspiracy theory believers in America, Among the Truthers: A Journey through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.
If you know someone who believes in any fringe doctrine, this is the book for you. Not because it delves deeply into debunking any particular conspiracy, but because it takes the overview, a sort of high altitude mapping of this territory and allows you to see how and why these ideas develop, and take hold.
Just like television was once touted as a medium to bring high culture and elevated debate into all the homes of the nation, the Internet was also given a lot of great advance press, using almost the same hopeful praise from 60 years ago that greeted the rise of a nation-wide forest of TV antennas.
But just like the multiplicity of cable channels on your television, the vast content of the web makes room for all sorts of disinformation and lies. And since the cost of a professional looking website is within the means of almost everyone with a computer, it can be almost impossible to distinguish between a site whose content is vetted and well-researched and one that is the product of a single author’s delusions.
Into this fragmentation of the country’s media diet all manner of strange beasts stalk.
Just as we now have to be our own health care advocates, we now have to be our own curators of reliable content, if we wish to remain grounded in reality.
I would give Kay’s book my highest recommendation, even though I quibble with some of those he puts on the fringe, like author Naomi Klein and historian Howard Zinn. Another wonderful part of Kay’s book are the compelling quotations that begin each chapter. Below are samples of two that I especially liked:
“The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, mis-understanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible that 10 normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most miniscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.”
–Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
“Nothing you learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this: That if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”
–Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of Britain 1957-1963, quoting his classics tutor at Oxford
Lytro – Light Field Capture Camera: Adjustable Focus, After the Fact
June 23, 2011
Now here’s something that certainly sounds too good to be true: imagine a camera where you don’t ever have to worry about focusing.
Snap your picture and, after being digitally processed with some astonishing new software, have an image that you can click on to change the focus! That’s the promise of the new Lytro Light Field Capture Camera. Seriously, you’ve got to play with some of these pictures in their image gallery.
If I understand it and I’m not sure I do, the concept is that light is traveling from the scene you want to capture in all directions. In a normal photograph all this light is collapsed (or focused) on one plane and exposure and focus are set – unchangeable, irrevocably – at that instant.
Somehow – and here comes the tricky, proprietary, secret formula for Coca-Cola part – the folks at Lytro are able to capture all the wavelengths of light in one file. They do this by substituting software for many of the components of a traditional digital or film camera and in combination with a new type of light field sensor. This sensor is capable of recording the vector direction of all the rays of light in a given scene simultaneously. If that doesn’t clear it up, I’m sure the following illustrations will answer none of the questions you may have.
There’s an awful lot of information that isn’t on the Lytro site right now, like pricing, availability and specs (such as image resolution) on the new cameras. Also, whether or not these new picture files can be viewed on any digital device across all platforms. Still, this does sound interesting.
Will it be a short-lived gimmick or a new era in photography? A toy or a tool? Threat or Menace? Who can say. Me, I thought the development of the Foveon sensor was going to change digital photography forever. But we’ll be watching this one. . .