Movement - Marey

Étienne-Jules Marey (5 March 1830, Beaune, Côte-d'Or – 21 May 1904) was a French scientist and chronophotographer.

He published a classic book on his use of chronophotography in 1894. This was translated into English and published by William Heinmann in 1895. The complete book as a PDF is available HERE.

Examples are shown to the right and below.


An excellent online exhibition of his work is HERE.

A Gamesworth of reasoning

Count that day lost whose low descending sun sees from thy mind no gamesworth of reasoning done.


If you think for a living it is hard to describe a quantum of work. Usually hours are used but this is an input measure not an output measure. Many other output measures are too crude - a typical scientific paper will represent a significant amount of lab work, thinking, data processing and then writing.


Here is a better output quantum of thinking the Gamesworth of reasoning;


“the amount of reasoning involved in a forty-move game of chess or a hard end-game problem, or a fairly hard (for you) crossword puzzle; that is, half an hour to an hour of problem-solving”


From The excitement of science. John Rader Platt. 1962. Houghton Mifflin.


A longer excerpt from Platt's The Art of Creative Thinking (HERE)

I would like to suggest the convenience of having a rough unit of analytical reasoning so that we can talk more or less quantitatively about how much thinking is involved in this job or that. I think a good unit would be the amount of reasoning involved in a forty-move game of chess or a hard end-game problem, or a fairly hard (for you) crossword puzzle; that is, half an hour to an hour of problem-solving. This might be called "one gamesworth" of reasoning, to give it an obvious name. It is a useful unit because we are all acquainted with such problems and have a feeling for their difficulty easily distinguished from ten-minute problems on the one hand and from three-hour problems on the other. I also think the sequence of mental operations is fairly typical of formal thinking on complex problems, a mixture of memory, rules of procedure, deductions, analogies, inductions, evaluations and insight, all leading to an elegant and novel solution with the loose ends tied up. Also we shall see that it is a natural unit, measuring roughly the amount of reasoning most of us can do at one sitting.Many of us do crossword puzzles every day, but I think that few do a gamesworth of serious reasoning every day. Sherlock Holmes lived for nothing else, but most people, even creative artists and scientists, are creatures of habit and only think occasionally. This is unfortunate. Our highest powers lie unfocused. ... If, one day, a hundred million adult Americans all gave one gamesworth of thought to their work, the world would tremble and mankind would never be the same again.... when Newton was asked "how he had made discoveries in astonomy surpassing those of all his predecessors," Newton replied, "By always thinking about them." ... Actually, I believe that the time need not be very long, that no one really spends a whole working day every day in the kind of intense analysis I am talking about. ... Probably the brain, like the rest of our physiology, is designed for maximum power output in short bursts only. ... Patience and interest flag. In some sense the brain is indeed tired. I suggest that in concentrated analytical thought, one or two gamesworth every day would be about the maximum for most of us. This much actual thought--a couple of crossword puzzles' worth--is not so distressing, is it? This principle is often neglected in the long hours and numerous courses of our schools. ... Who knows what immortal little result you are but two hours away from: Have you done--or revised--your page of thought today? ... I conclude that a page or a gameworth or two of thought every day is about the maximum; and yet this amount is possible for everyone and even easy. We all confess it, in our enjoyment of the daily crossword puzzle. Real thinking is brief and it is fun. ... The daily intellectual tortoise can pass many a high-speed brain that only operates when fancy strikes.
The effort itself changes a person's outlook for the better. A gamesworth of thought takes so little time that a man who has done his hour of reasoning and has had even one idea--even a small one and still buried in the notebook--feels a sense of success and freedom for the rest of the day, or night. ... This pleasure and confidence is seductive, and makes it easy to go on with such a program--one of the motivational feedbacks.







 

Nepenthe

Nepenthe is from the Greek. It is a medicine for sorrow, an anti-depressant and a drug of forgetfulness, that is mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology. A number of poets and writers have used Nepenthe as a way of describing an elixir e.g. Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Triumph of Life:

In her right hand she bore a crystal glass
Mantling with bright Nepenthe. 

Nepenthe is also an excellent restaurant in Big Sur, California. It has unbelievable  views of the rugged Pacific coastline and makes great food. The building that houses the restaurant was once the private home of Orson Welles and his then wife Rita Hayworth.

I heartily recommend it.

Sea. Mark Laita

HERE is a book full of fantastic photographs of sea life by photographer Mark Laita. 

The blurb;

Internationally award-winning photographer Mark Laita has focused his vast technical and artistic expertise on the creatures of the deep. In Sea, with cutting-edge photographic techniques, Laita unveils the full splendor and otherworldliness of the ocean’s inhabitants in an entirely new and thrilling way. Rippling reflections, stark backdrops, and surprising angles lay bare the astonishing beauty of the life that teems under the water’s surface. Leaping from the pages are piggybacking sea horses, iridescent jellyfish, ethereal but menacing stingrays, and deadly puffer fish. Laita’s masterful photography reveals their extraordinary colors, textures, and personalities to us as never before.

Some examples below.

The R in K&R is no more.

The classic description of the C programming language was given in a book written by Dennis Ritchie (the person who invented the language) and Brian Kernighan, it became known as K&R.

Dennis Ritchie has just passed away and his obituary is HERE.

Ritchie was a modest man and he claimed that hwe wasn't smart enough to be a physicist. The MIT technology Review had an obituary that began;

A giant of modern technology passed away recently, after a battle with cancer and other ailments. His efforts transformed the computing industry, and the fruits of his life's work animate the products that surround us. This may sound like late news to you, but I'm not writing about Steve Jobs. Rather, the man in question is Dennis Ritchie, who died last week at age 70, and without whom not only Apple products but countless other technologies might look very different.

A fascinating article describing the historical development of C by Dennis Ritchie is HERE.

To date the book has been translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Lovely Language

LOVELY LANGUAGE - WORDS DIVIDE IMAGES UNITE


isbn 9789086901272   ONTWERPWERK
Idea Code 10601      £30.00


The world speaks in about 7000 tongues and countless dialects. For centuries, people have tried to overcome this tower of Babel. For instance by propagating one language or by making a new language, such as Esperanto. But the language which today is best understood world-wide does not consist of words, but of images. A universal visual language was the ideal of two Modernists: the social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and graphic designer Gerd Arntz (1900-1988). In Vienna, from the 1920s onward, they developed more than 4000 icons, which together formed Isotype: a visual language in which important information on society, politics, economy and industry could be summarized, also for those who could not read. This book aims at providing material for the discussion about visual communication tomorrow.
294 p, ills colour & bw, 18 x 25 cm, pb, English

Open publication - Free publishing - More gerd arntz

Lino cut Isotype

Here is a lino cut of an isotype by Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) and his proof print of it from 1930. From HERE

  

USPTO NUMPTY

Numpty
	Scottish usage: a) Someone who (sometimes unwittingly) by speech or action demonstrates a lack of knowledge or misconception of a particular subject or situation to the amusement of others.  Worth keeping this in mind when looking at the US PTO office data visualisation. An example below. And an analysis HERE.

Watch Faces

A specialist company called Cador that prints watch faces.

Breakthrough - 1969

In 1969 the following front page indicated the news that a "Self Winding Chronograph" had been invented and launched. 

Art is Art

The famous words of  Ad Reinhardt, here rendered by Edward Tufte as US style road signs, more in this style by Tufte HERE

Information is what forces a change of rational beliefs

There is much said about the difference between Data and Information. Some of it even makes sense. Personally I have found that the people who have grappled with the concept of entropy (as in the concept of Shannon Entropy) have thought about this more deeply than most. For example, here are some thoughts from Ariel Caticha on information (Caticha is a Prof of Physics at the University of Albany).

The need to update from one state of belief to another is driven by the conviction that not all probability assignments are equally good; some beliefs are preferable to  others in  the  very pragmatic sense that  they  enhance our chances to successfully navigate this world.

The idea is that, to the extent that we wish to be called rational, we will improve our beliefs by revising them when new information becomes available: Information is what forces a change of rational beliefs. Or, to put it more explicitly: Information is a constraint on rational beliefs.

This is from an excellent paper on entropy and inference;




Entropic Inference


Ariel Caticha
Department of Physics, University at Albany-SUNY,
Albany, NY 12222, USA.

HERE

Isotypes - the Gerd Arntz archive

I have been researching around isotypes again.

HERE is a web archive of the isotypes created by Gerd Arntz. Some blurb from the site about isotypes;

The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education (Isotype) was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy.

And some examples;

   

The bottom isotype is of an unemplyed man. The image to the right shows Arntz working on this illustration. 

A treasure map from the library of Congress

An early map of the Shaker village Canterbury New Hampshire. From the Library of Congress site.

Eames on Design

In 1972 Madame L’Amic of the Musee des Art s Decoratifs in Paris asked the designer Charles Eames a short list of questions about design. The answers are below, and they include one of my favourite definitions of design;


A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose.

Eduard Imhof collection

Eduard Imhof (1895-1986) was professor of cartography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich from 1925 - 1965. Imhof was a legendary visual designer, artist and map maker. He wrote a classic book on map making - Cartographic Relief Presentation.  

Edward Tufte makes the following comments on Imhof;

"Imhof is one of the people responsible for the great Swiss national maps, one of the best information designs ever (see my Envisioning Information, p. 80 for a sample of the Swiss mountain maps). It is one of the most technically sophisticated design books, so much deeper than the standard books on graphic design.
The book is required reading for anyone serious about information and interface design. Imhof also published many articles in cartographic journals which are also relevant to information and interface design."

HERE is a website of his work, hosted by the ETH library. 

Photo Opportunities by Corinne Vionnet

The photographer Corinne Vionnet has been exhibiting ate the Arles photography festival. Her photos are made by careful superposition of hundreds of digital images she finds online that are of the same typical tourist views of a particular sight. The image below is the Golden Gate bridge - but her other work includes;

The Colosseum in Rome,
The Taj Mahal,
The Leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Hajj pilgrimage, Mecca,
The mausoleum of Mao Tse-tung in Beijing's Tainanmen Square and
The Palace of Westminster, London.

The images are also being published in a book Photo Opportunities by Kehrer-Verlag.

The Sea of Stories

Below is a classic Edward Tufte two-page spread. In this he tries to show how stories unfold in time.

as he explains it

Here, as time flows across the page from left to right, is a tiny part of the Ocean of the Streams of Story, a handful of the thousand thousand thousand and one tales.  

From Visual Explanations by Tufte.

Data Deluge Postage Stamps

The new Blogger Dynamic view is fun. The Snapshot view gives a set of Polaroid type images - here I have made them smaller to resemble a page from a virtual stamp book of Data Deluge postage stamps.  

West the Best

It is not easy to write in a familiar style. Even if what you are writing about is really familiar to you. Perhaps especially if what you are writing about is really familiar to you. This particularly holds true for those places we stay in for a long while, the place, or places, that we call home. How can we capture the elements of human, natural and man - made geography that define the patch of ground in which our home sits.

Perhaps we just can't capture these elements and we should live with it. Perhaps we can capture them with words and images.


I live with my family in a small coastal town called West Kirby, in the North-West of England. In many ways it is a tiny and very ordinary part of the UK. Altogether it is no more than about 5 by 5 kilometres in extent and at no point does it raise itself more than a hundred metres above sea level. Yet if you have a mind to and you have your eyes wide open, then within this tiny patch maybe there is air, sky, land and sea enough to keep you busy and amused over a lifetime.

The Wirral peninsula, on which West Kirby stands, is defined by three water filled absences of land; the River Dee, the River Mersey and the Irish Sea. West Kirby sits prettily at the apex of the peninsula where the Dee meets the Sea. It is a small patch of land bounded to the North by the Irish Sea, to the West by the Dee and to the South by a hill of modest elevation and extent; Caldy Hill.

The Dee estuary has been silting up for decades and for much of the day the view is dominated by the sand flats. At low tide the water is a long way out. But at high tide you get a sense of what a huge volume of water is held by the Dee estuary.


The images were taken at lunch today from the foot of Caldy Hill, where it runs right down to the coast of the Dee estuary. It was a full high tide. The air was hazy and warm and I sat for 20 minutes soaking up the smells and sights of this modest coast.  


The hills in the distance are in Wales. This was one of the estuaries that the Viking warrior Ingimund sailed into in 902AD. In those days West Kirby was known in Norse as Vestri Kirkjubyr (the West village of the Church).

No Cell is an Island - the death of the Cancer Cell

The latest HERE from Sonnenschein & Soto (two candidates I suspect for a future Nobel prize in Medicine).

THE DEATH OF THE CANCER CELL

1. Carlos Sonnenschein1 and 
2. Ana M. Soto2,*

 Corresponding Author:

1. Ana M. Soto, Anatomy and Cellular Biology, Tufts University, 136 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA, 02111, United States ana.soto@tufts.edu

Abstract

For a century, the perception that there are qualitative differences between a normal cell and a cell belonging to a tumor has dominated discussions aimed at explaining cancer. However, an analysis of the experimental evidence suggests that individual normal cells and individual cancer cells share the same two fundamental behavioral properties, namely, proliferation and motility. Each individual cancer cell carries no recognizable molecules or structures that make them consistently distinguishable from normal cells. Herein, we argue that the differences between normal and cancerous states are instead identifiable at the tissue level of biological organization, and therefore, the search for identification of a cancer cell should be abandoned.

• Received February 22, 2011.

I should have tried harder. I shouldnt have given up

Daniel Danger keeps working away. His print style is distinctive and very dark. I am not sure I always understand how he connects the titles of his work to his prints. But they are great to look at.

A recent print of his; I should have tried harder. I shouldn't have given up

Awesome Nerds

A great post on the MIT Technology Review blog - on how business needs data scientists (HERE).

The blog includes a Venn diagram showing what is needed to become an Awesome Nerd.  Sad perhaps to say but some of the people who I work most closely with (and enjoy working with) are in this exalted overlap. 

Here also is a plot of the popularity of different data analysis softwares. R is way out in front! (from HERE)

Data Deluge - the Stats!

I have been working away at this blog for over two years - the first post was on June 12th 2009 (which was itself a collection of stuff I had already written and had posted elsewhere). 

My working assumption has been that I am effectively writing this for myself. I like the URL and its good to find somewhere to keep all of the images and links that I like, so that I can go back and find them, it is also a journal of work in progress on Intense Seeing.

Google have just put a stats function on the Blogger dashboard and I can see in some detail how many pageviews for the blog there have been. 

Here is a plot of pageviews per month;

And a listing of the most viewed pages;

Amazingly the total pageviews since June 2012 is 26,858. 

So a big, big thanks to all my readers.

Matt

Craig Mod - Post Artifact Books & Publishing

Craig Mod has been busy again thinking very hard about the impact that digital is having, and will have, on books (HERE). 


A quotation;

"With the emergence and growing adoption of the Kindle and the iPad, publishers, writers, readers and software-makers have concerned themselves with shoehorning the old-media image of a book into new media. Everyone asks, ‘How do we change books to read them digitally?’ But the more interesting question is, ‘How does digital change books?’ And, similarly, ‘How does digital change the authorship process?"

He includes some thought provoking diagrams that illustrate his argument.

Stealth Iconography: The Waveform

Here is a great piece on the emergence of the waveform as an icon for digital music.

A Volcanic Fermi Problem

Enrico Fermi not only estimated the number of piano tuners in Chicago, one of his most famous estimates was the one he made during the first atom bomb test on 16 July, 1945. There was an important question in the minds of the bomb makers on the yield of this new class of weapon. During the test Fermi estimated that it was about 10 kilotons.

Fermi didn't guess - as the shockwave from the explosion hit Fermi he threw a handful of paper scraps into the air and watched how far they moved. Using this data and some assumptions he made his estimate. It was surprisingly accurate. Not only to the correct order of magnitude, but within a very respectable factor of 2. The actual yield was 19 kilotons.

Fermi used the "piano tuner" approach to train his students to be able to conceptualise and evaluate "order of magnitude" estimates.

For a very recent Fermi estimate - of the energy released (and volume and mass of sand ejected) during the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano in Chile on 4 July see here = http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1165.

Fermi Problem: Power developed at the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic system in June 2011

By Hernan Asorey & Arturo López Dávalos

Abstract of the paper reads;

On June 4 2011 the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic system produced a pyroclastic subplinian eruption reaching level 3 in the volcanic explosivity index. The first stage of the eruption released sand and ashes that affected small towns and cities in the surrounding areas, including San Carlos de Bariloche, in Argentina, one of the largest cities in the North Patagonian Andean region. By treating the eruption as a Fermi problem, we estimated the volume and mass of sand ejected as well as the energy and power released during the eruptive phase. We then put the results in context by comparing the obtained values with everyday quantities, like the load of a cargo truck or the electric power produced in Argentina. These calculations have been done as a pedagogic exercise, and after evaluation of the hypothesis was done in the classroom, the calculations have been performed by the students. These are students of the first physics course at the Physics and Chemistry Teacher Programs of the Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro

The Spectrum of Riemannium

Space over Time

Here is a great infographic by Tommy McCall and Mike Orcutt on the MIT technology review site. There is a high quality PDF of the graphic available there.

Engineering is NOT Science

Engineering is not equal to Science.

In December 2010 Henry Petroski, a professor at Duke wrote the following  article in IEEE Spectrum (HERE).

Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things. Conflating these separate objectives leads to uninformed opinions, which in turn can delay or misdirect management, effort, and resources.

Pictorial Ratio of Ten Thousand to One

From HERE

A Timeless way of Building

Christopher Alexander is an architect (links and details HERE).

One of his books is called A Timeless Way of Building.  There is a Wikipedia entry on it HERE.

In this book Alexander sets out to describe the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:

Alexander uses a concept which he calls the "quality without a name", and argues that we should seek to include this nameless quality in our buildings. 

"The first place I think of when I try to tell someone about this quality is a corner of an English country garden where a peach tree grows against a wall. The wall runs east to west; the peach tree grows flat against the southern side. The sun shines on the tree and, as it warms the bricks behind the tree, the warm bricks themselves warm the peaches on the tree. It has a slightly dozy quality. The tree, carefully tied to grow flat against the wall; warming the bricks; the peaches growing in the sun; the wild grass growing around the roots of the tree, in the angle where the earth and roots and wall all meet.This quality is the most fundamental quality there is in anything."

Also of note is the design of the book, it is a long series of italicized headlines that are followed by short sections that provide more detail. The author suggests that this long book (over 500 pages) can be read in an hour by only reading the italicised headlines, which frame the book's complete argument. 

Alexander also published two follow on volumes on architecture that for a trilogy with this book - A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and The Oregon Experiment. 


The Pattern Language book has been very influential in computer science and software engineering (for example HERE).  

Mervyn Peakes Gormenghast

Here is an original page from one of Peakes' manuscripts for his Gormenghast trilogy, showing Fuchsia Groan and Steerpike.



And one of Steerpike.

Galileo's Scrap

A good piece on a scrappy letter that was Galileo's first record of the moons of Saturn HERE

Rh Book Preface by James Watson

One of my great privileges was to get to know Ronnie Finn.


Professor Ronnie Finn FRCP (1930--2004)

Ronnie Finn received the Albert Lasker award (often known as the American Nobel prize in medicine) in 1980 for his contribution to the development of an effective treatment for Rhesus haemolytic disease. The resulting anti-Rh(D) injection, which is given to thousands of women worldwide every year, is estimated to have saved some half a million lives to date.


The book Rh; The Intimate History of a Disease and its Conquest by David R Zimmerman was published in 1973 it describes the history of this disease, first defined 40 years earlier and which is now preventable.

Here is the introduction to the book by James watson.

Justin Partyka: The Place That Roger Built

From HERE

Fibonacci manuscript

A page from the Liber abbaci manuscript. Leonardo da Pisa

Maunder Diagram

Simulated Swarming

From Robert Hodgin (here)



Bait ball from flight404 on Vimeo.

I Ching

Ancient Chinese Concept of Change

The Astronomical Phenomena. (Tien Yuan Fa Wei). Compiled by Bao Yunlong in the 13th century. Ming Dynasty edition, 1457-1463.

The book is an explanation of the 'Ba Gua' used in the Yi-ching (I Ching or Classic of Changes, also known as the Book of Divination). According to this Chinese world view, the universe is run by a single principle, the Tao, or Great Ultimate. This principle is divided into two opposite principles--yin and yang. All phenomena can be understood using yin-yang and five associated agents, which affect the movements of the stars, the workings of the body, the nature of foods, the qualities of music, the ethical qualities of humans, the progress of time, the operations of government, and even the nature of historical change.