Adam Norwood: Tumblr

Radiolab: Strangers in the Mirror

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:21:14 -0500

Another excellent short episode of Radiolab, featuring a conversation with two people I wouldn’t expect to hear on stage together:

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.

Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)

If you’re interested in the science of face perception, I stumbled across this relevant paper this week: Cortical Specialization for Face Perception in Humans (pdf) co-authored by Tel Aviv University’s Galit Yovel.

The man who created the first scanned digital photograph in...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:21:00 -0500

The man who created the first scanned digital photograph in 1957, Russel Kirsch, pioneer of the pixel, apologizes in the May/July issue of Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now 81 years old, he offers up a replacement (sorta) for the square pixel he first devised: tessellated 6x6 pixel masks that offer much smoother images with lower overall resolution. The resulting file sizes are slightly larger but the improved visual quality is pretty stunning, as seen in the closeup above. His research was inspired by the ancient 6th Century tile mosaics in Ravenna, Italy.

There are a lot of comments out there complaining that square pixels are more efficient, image and wavelet compression is old news, etc., and that’s true, but if you actually read the article you’ll find that the point isn’t so much the shape, the efficiency, or even the capture/display technology needed, but rather that this could be a good method for reducing the resolution of images somewhat while still retaining visual clarity, important in medical applications and in situations where low-resolution images are still tossed around.

Bonus: the man in the demo photo above is his son, the subject of the first-ever digital photograph!

(Via ScienceNews)

Dark pulse quantum dot diode laser

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:23:42 -0500

Dark pulse quantum dot diode laser:

A paper in Optics Express describing a quantum dot-powered “dark pulse” laser. I was totally hoping that this was a device that could emit some kind of anti-light to darken the room, but what they’re really talking about is a laser that can go from light to dark very fast. The on/off pulses are down in the 90-picosecond range, useful for even more precise timekeeping or for new innovations in networking / telecom.

(Via The Register)

Computational image processing researchers at Northwestern...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:22:52 -0500

Computational image processing researchers at Northwestern University teamed up with art historians from the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate the colors originally laid down by Matisse while he was working on Bathers by a River:

Researchers at Northwestern University used information about Matisse’s prior works, as well as color information from test samples of the work itself, to help colorize a 1913 black-and-white photo of the work in progress. Matisse began work on Bathers in 1909 and unveiled the painting in 1917.

In this way, they learned what the work looked like midway through its completion. “Matisse tamped down earlier layers of pinks, greens, and blues into a somber palette of mottled grays punctuated with some pinks and greens,” says Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern. That insight helps support research that Matisse began the work as an upbeat pastoral piece but changed it to reflect the graver national mood brought on by World War I.

The Art Institute has up a nice mini-site about Bathers and the accompanying research, including some great overlays on top of the old photos to show the various states the painting went through during the years of its creation.

(Via ACM TechNews)

Augmented Reality without programming in 5 minutes I can vouch...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:57:00 -0500

Augmented Reality without programming in 5 minutes

I can vouch that this works, and it’s pretty straightforward once you manage to grab and build the two or three additional Quartz Composer plugins successfully. I had to fold in a newer version of the ARToolkit libs, and I swapped out the pattern bitmap used to recognize the AR target to match one I already had on hand — the default sample1 and sample2 patterns weren’t working for me for some reason. Apart from that, Quartz Composer’s a lot of fun to use, almost like building eyecandy demos with patch cables and effects pedals, and it’s already on your system if you have Xcode.

(Via Make)

Ancient pigment history is fascinating. From dried beetles...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:38:16 -0500

Ancient pigment history is fascinating. From dried beetles (carmine) to sea snails (Tyrian purple) to ground up human and feline mummies (the rather uncreatively-named Mummy brown), colors come from some weird places. I’d heard of Maya Blue before, but didn’t realize that it’s more of a process rather than a specific mineral pigment. The color was made by intercalating indigo (añil) into fine clay over continuous heat. The slow fusing with clay made the paint exceptionally resistant to weather and acidic conditions (and even modern solvents), and the process wasn’t fully understood / rediscovered until a few years ago. Cooking it up may have been ritualistic, as the incense copal was often burned in the same bowls. The color was important in sacrifice rituals as well: when the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza was dredged back in 1904, a a layer of blue silt 14-feet-thick was found at the bottom (sensationalism aside, the silt was likely more from all of the blue-painted pots tossed in than the blue-painted people…I hope).

From Discoblog:

The researchers knew that the Mayans made their blue by heating the pigment with palygorskite (a type of clay); their analysis showed that this heating allowed the pigment to enter tiny channels in the clay which are sealed after the mixture cools, protecting and keeping the pigment true blue for centuries.

Humor and death: a qualitative study of The New Yorker cartoons (1986-2006)

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:33:42 -0500

Humor and death: a qualitative study of The New Yorker cartoons (1986-2006):

A paper in the academic journal Palliative and Supportive Care analyzing perceptions of death and dying through the lens of New Yorker cartoons. Science!

“Personification of Death” (n = 38) included a subtheme of “Bargaining with Death.” The main theme included representations of death with human attributes, such as the Grim Reaper. Examples are the Grim Reaper sitting in a bar talking to another man; the caption reads, “Sometimes I give myself the creeps” (from 2005; Mankoff, 2006. p. 28). The subtheme involved people negotiating for more time to live. Many of the cartoons in this theme show the Grim Reaper standing at someone’s door as he or she tries to negotiate his or her way out of dying. For example, one such caption read, “Couldn’t I do a couple of hundred hours of community service instead?” (from 1990; Mankoff, 2006. p. 46). This can be seen as the legacy of death (Elgee, 2003), that we are all its slaves.

(Via NCBI ROFL)

Light-driven nanoscale plasmonic motors

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:26:43 -0500

Light-driven nanoscale plasmonic motors:

Moving things (very, very, very tiny things) using nothing but photons. Not immediately useful given the scale, but this is a first and could have applications in nanoelectromechanics and biology. Originally this same principle was thought to be what powered the nifty Crookes radiometer (that black-and-white vaned vacuum bulb thing that’s now usually sold as a novelty desk toy), but that device is actually moved by thermal transpiration or temperature differences.

(If the above link is behind a paywall for you, you might try the basic Nature writeup instead)

Super Mario Bros. speedrun matchmoved onto a real-life wall. Fun...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:39:04 -0500

Super Mario Bros. speedrun matchmoved onto a real-life wall. Fun to think about.

(Via Waxy)

L’Artisan Electronique, an openFrameworks-powered “virtual...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:19:53 -0500

L’Artisan Electronique, an openFrameworks-powered “virtual pottery wheel”. Users can deform the cylinder geometry by waving their hand between the lasers and then print a physical copy of their piece using an attached RepRap machine.

(Via Make)

From the New York Times obituary for Louis Moyroud, co-inventor...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:06:47 -0500

From the New York Times obituary for Louis Moyroud, co-inventor of the phototypesetting Lumitype machine that revolutionized the newspaper industry in the 1950s:

Then, in the early 1940s, Mr. Moyroud and Mr. Higonnet — electronics engineers and colleagues at a subsidiary of ITT (formerly International Telephone & Telegraph) in Lyon, France — visited a nearby printing plant and witnessed the Linotype [the older Victorian-era printing process that was still in use] operation.

“My dad always said they thought it was insane,” Patrick Moyroud (pronounced MOY-rood) said. “They saw the possibility of making the process electronic, replacing the metal with photography. So they started cobbling together typewriters, electronic relays, a photographic disc.”

The result, called a photo-composing machine — and in later variations the Lumitype and the Photon — used a strobe light and a series of lenses to project characters from a spinning disc onto photographic paper, which was pasted onto pages, then photoengraved on plates for printing.

If you’ve ever seen the older lead-alloy-fueled “hot metal” Linotype process you’d agree: it was crazy.

(Photo of the Lumitype/Photon wheel by Flickr user Jeronzinho)

From an Op-Ed in Monday’s New York Times about a...

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:28:32 -0500

From an Op-Ed in Monday’s New York Times about a frustrated search for the existence of the “real” Nighthawks diner painted by Hopper:

Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, cobbler shops and much more come tumbling down at an alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now the discovery that the “Nighthawks” diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper’s imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen.

It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love a city that has vanished. For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.

To me, it’s quite the opposite: Hopper was delivering to us an entire city’s electric nightlife collapsed into one tidy, incredibly lonely painting, and that is far more interesting than any image of a specific, real diner. Why mourn the non-existence of a restaurant when the sadness and predation that Hopper reflects in us still exists in every large city, at no risk of demolition?

The world’s only working (modern) Pallophotophone plays...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 06:09:44 -0500

The world’s only working (modern) Pallophotophone plays 80-year-old NBC radio broadcasts:

The pallophotophone was an early audio recorder created by GE researcher Charles Hoxie in 1922. Rather than using magnetic wire or lacquer disks, the device captured audio waveforms on sprocketless 35 mm film as a series of 12 parallel tracks reflected from a vibrating mirror. It was used to record some of the world’s oldest surviving radio broadcasts on Schenectady, New York radio station WGY between 1929 and 1931.

As a forgotten optical medium, I guess its more modern analog would be laserfilm discs. Sort of working along the right path, but just not practical compared to other media coming out at the time. There’s more about the rediscovered pallphotophone recordings on the GE Reports blog.

(Via Coudal)

Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple...

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:09:09 -0500

Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple projected pattern of light points. The structured-light code is open source, looks like a pretty cool project.

(Via Make)

"It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built..."

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:05:43 -0500

“It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.”

- David Eaves argues that the best way to foster a data-literate society is to open the floodgates on open data, creating niches for discussion and analysis to engage the citizenry in much the same semi-guided way that public libraries provided in the 19th Century.

(Via Radar)

"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:54:06 -0500

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

- The above quote from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was inscribed as a watermark into the DNA of the much-discussed synthetic cell created a couple of months back by Craig Venter’s team. From The Loom:

The scientists who produced the new synthetic cell copied the genome of a microbe, letter for letter, and then inserted the synthetic version into a host cell. To determine that their experiment worked, they needed a way to tell the genomes of their synthetic cells from the natural genomes that were their model. So they inserted “watermarks” into the artificial genome. These sequences of DNA (which spelled out the work of Joyce and others through the genetic code) sit in non-coding regions of the microbe’s DNA. As a result, these watermarks cannot disrupt any essential protein-coding genes or stretches of DNA that are vital for switching genes on and off.

God-Particle-Sounds

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:56:55 -0500

God-Particle-Sounds:

Music of the Large Hadron Collider. From Discover:

Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson–the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass–is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles.

I’m rarely convinced that audio visualization (what’s the better term for this field?) makes patterns in data easier to find, but it sure can sound interesting.

From a recently declassified history (PDF) detailing the...

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:09:33 -0500

From a recently declassified history (PDF) detailing the NSA’s computing equipment up to 1964, comes a description of their house-sized computer ABNER’s mercury-powered memory banks:

A succession of pulses (signal or no-signal) travels through an acoustic medium, say mercury, from one end to the other of a “delay line.” […] At the input end of the line is a crystal that converts an electrical pulse to a mechanical wave which travels through the mercury to the other end, where another crystal reconverts it to an electrical signal. The series of electrical signals is recirculated back to input, after passing through detector, amplifier, and driver circuits to restore the shape and strength of the pulses. Also, in the part of the cycle external to the delay line are input and output circuits and “clock” pulses for synchronization. In mercury, the pulses travel at the speed of sound, which is much slower than the speed of electrical signals, and thus the delay in going from one end of the line to the other constitutes a form of storage. […] In ABNER, the mercury tank was a glass tube about two feet long; the delay time was 384 microseconds, or eight words of 48 bits at one-megacycle-per-second rate. Thus the 1,024 words were contained in two cabinets holding 64 mercury delay lines each.

ABNER was named after comic strip character Li’l Abner, reportedly because it was a big, hulking machine that “didn’t know anything”.

(Via Bruce Schneier)

BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, one of the best games I’ve played this...

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:02:00 -0500

BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, one of the best games I’ve played this summer. A hypnotically synaesthetic music platformer, something like an inspired cross between Vib-Ribbon and Michel Gondry’s Star Guitar video. Well worth the few bucks if you’ve got a Wii.

(Seen above is a run of level 1-11 by YouTube user NintenDaan1, the level that I’m currently stuck playing over and over again trying to get all of the bonus gold…)

Adam Norwood: Tumblr

Radiolab: Strangers in the Mirror

The man who created the first scanned digital photograph in...

Dark pulse quantum dot diode laser

Computational image processing researchers at Northwestern...

Augmented Reality without programming in 5 minutes I can vouch...

Ancient pigment history is fascinating. From dried beetles...

Humor and death: a qualitative study of The New Yorker cartoons (1986-2006)

Light-driven nanoscale plasmonic motors

Super Mario Bros. speedrun matchmoved onto a real-life wall. Fun...

L’Artisan Electronique, an openFrameworks-powered “virtual...

From the New York Times obituary for Louis Moyroud, co-inventor...

From an Op-Ed in Monday’s New York Times about a...

The world’s only working (modern) Pallophotophone plays...

Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple...

See also: The Mountain Goats’ “Best Ever Death Metal...

"It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built..."

"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."

God-Particle-Sounds

From a recently declassified history (PDF) detailing the...

BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, one of the best games I’ve played this...