A membrane-enclosed outgrowth of the brain

"The eye is unique, both as a membrane-enclosed outgrowth of the brain... '' 

Ionic control of ocular growth and refractive change. Sheila G. Crewther, Helena Liang, Barbara M. Junghans and David P. Crewther. PNAS October 17, 2006 vol. 103 no. 42 15663-15668 

From a developmental perspective the eye is an outgrowth of the brain. During fetal development small patches on the outside of the embryo develop into the two eyes.

... an effortlessly natural extension to the eyes and the hand

British naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye has recently published a fascinating book-long rumination on wildness. The book is based on daily journals kept by Kaye describing the same circular walk from his home in a glen in the scottish highlands up to a small hill loch. One of his essential companions on these walks is a battered pair of Swarovski binoculars, which he descibes as follows;


"Good binoculars are to a field naturalist as a set of spanners is to a mechanic, a stethoscope to a doctor. They must be clear, sharp and an effortlessly natural extension to the eyes and the hand. They are a vital, silent route to where you want to be."

At the Waters Edge; A personal quest for wildness. John Lister-Kaye. Canongate Books. 2010.

John Lister-Kaye comes from a long line of landowners and business leaders. He has an interesting life story, that expains how and why he ended up as a naturalist (Wikipedia has a good entry on him). He has run the Aigas Field Centre in the highlands of Scotland since 1977.

... drawing disciplines the eye and brain, tempers judgement, and makes the hand responsive.

From the Rhode Island School of Design statement of foundation course elements.

In the drawing studio you will work with the development of skills in perceptual drawing, formal visual principles, and abstract thought. Taught by means of the human figure, landscape, still life, or theme, drawing disciplines the eye and brain, tempers judgement, and makes the hand responsive. You will explore form as it pertains to representation and the organization of surface through line, shape, light, texture, and space. At RISD, drawing is considered the basic tool of all art and design disciplines, reflecting the conviction that this skill "the coordination of eye, hand, and brain" is essential to the way the painter, sculptor, architect, or designer creates.

This  is a fabulous statement about the role that drawing plays in Intense Seeing.

Study of a Peacock Feather, 1873. John Ruskin

The Ecological Fallacy & MAUP

The ecological fallacy occurs when analyses that are based on grouped data lead to conclusions that are different from those based on the analysis of individual data. One of the early examples is given in Robinson (1950). 

From the Wikipedia entry;

`An ecological fallacy (or ecological inference fallacy) is an error in the interpretation of statistical  data in an ecological study, whereby inferences  about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong. This fallacy assumes that individual members of a group have the average characteristics of the group at large...'


(on Robinson 1950) 

`...for each of the 48 states in the US as of the 1930 census, he computed the literacy rate and the proportion of the population born outside the US. He showed that these two figures were associated with a positive correlation of 0.53 — in other words, the greater the proportion of immigrants in a state, the higher its average literacy. However, when individuals are considered, the correlation was ?0.11 — immigrants were on average less literate than native citizens. Robinson showed that the positive correlation at the level of state populations was because immigrants tended to settle in states where the native population was more literate. He cautioned against deducing conclusions about individuals on the basis of population-level, or "ecological" data'

This is closely related to a problem that I have been aware of for a long time under the name of "change of support problem" - which is how it is known in the field of mathematical morphology and integral geometry. I recently found out that within spatial statistics and GIS it has another special name; Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). The basic problem is that for spatial data, such as Health outcomes recorded by zip-codes or counties, socio-demographic data from Census tracts, safety or health exposure estimates within a region of suspected source etc etc, statistical inference changes with scale.

A classic early paper is Gehlke and Biehl (1934) who found that the magnitude of the correlation between two variables tended to increase as districts formed from Census tracts increased in size.

Waller & Gotway (2004) describe it as a "geographic manifestation of the ecological fallacy in which conclusions based on data aggregated to a particular set of districts may change if one aggregates the same underlying data to a different set of districts".

The paper by Openshaw and Taylor (1979) described how they had constructed all possible groupings of the 99 Counties in Iowa into larger districts. When considering the correlation between %Republican voters and %elderly voters, they could produce "a million or so" correlation coefficients. A set of 12 districts could be contrived to produce correlations that ranged from -0.97 to +0.99.

More here = http://www.samsi.info/200304/multi/cgcrawford.pdf

From Openshaw (1984);

`the areal units (zonal objects) used in many geographical studies are arbitrary, modifiable, and subject to the whims and fancies of whoever is doing, or did, the aggregating.'

below is an example figure from Openshaw (1984).

References.

Gehlke, C. E. and K. Biehl (1934). Certain effects of grouping upon the size of the correlation coefficient in census tract material. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 29, 169-170.

Openshaw, S. (1984). The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. CATMOG 38. ISBN 0 86094 134 5

Openshaw, S. and P. Taylor (1979). A million or so correlation coefficients. In N. Wrigley (Ed.), Statistical Methods in the Spatial Sciences, London, pp. 127-144. Pion.

Robinson, W. S. (1950). Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological
Review, 15, 351–357.

Waller, L.A. and C.A. Gotway. 2004. Applied Spatial Statistics for Public Health Data. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 

Feynman Page Layout

Richard Feynman is justifiably famous for many things - including a set of Physics textbooks he published in 1964. These are incredibly dense and well written. They also have excellent page layouts. Here is an example.

Daniel Danger Video

A very interesting 45 minute video of Daniel Danger on his website.

“theres nothing out there, I do not hear what you hear”. Ten colour screenprint 2008

Hilbre from the Dunes

Q: What did 1015 Sunsets ever give us? A: Eyes.

This is a profound statement from Prof Ronald Fernald of Stanford.

 

"Light has probably been the most profound selective force to act during biological evolution. The 10¹⁵ sunrises and sunsets that have taken place since life began have led to the evolution of eyes which use light for vision and for other purposes including navigation and timing. Although eyes occur in a variety of shapes, sizes, optical designs and locations on the body, they all provide similar information about wavelength and intensity to their owners."

Fernald, R. D. (2000). "Evolution of eyes." Curr Opin Neurobiol 10(4): 444-50. The file is here = PDF

[NOTE added 25/11/2011. Since posting this I went and re-checked Fernald's estimate and it is wrong by 3 orders of magnitude. I estimate that there have been 10¹²  sunrises and sunsets, not 10¹⁵ .] 

It's a Map

An extract from a book about maps - an Ojibwe map from ca. 1820 in Making Maps

A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS. John Krygier and Denis Wood. ISBN 978-1-59385-200-9

Define Your Space

Traditionally, the recipe for jugged hare begins with the instruction; ‘First catch your

hare’. There is a lot to be said for a recipe like this. Not the least of which is that it

doesn’t miss the obvious. With this example in mind perhaps the first instruction for

Intense Seeing has to be, define your space of exploration. In order to make this instruction

widely useful we should not be limited to thinking about the three-dimensional,

Euclidean, space we are used to navigating around in everday life. In fact it is useful

to learn a few visualisation and conceptual tricks from physicists, who are very used

to manipulating spaces that are different from 3D space. In particular the concept of

a phase space repays consideration, this is an idea that was originally developed by

the brilliant American theoretical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903), but it’s

general approach is very widely used.

In maths and physics a phase space is the space of all possible states of a physical

system, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in

the phase space. This mapping of what a physical system is to a single point in a

high-dimensional space is a flexible and powerful concept and by using the word ‘state’

physicists do not simply mean the spatial positions of all of the objects in the system

of interest, these would occupy a physical space or configuration space, but also their

velocities or momenta. These two sets of quantities allow a physicist to understand not

only the initial state of the system but also allow them to follow the evolution of the

system over time. In phase space a changing set of positions and momenta track out a

path over time, to produce a distinctive ’phase portrait’ of the dynamics of the system.

In any scientific or artistic exploration then it pays to have, or develop, a sense of

the shape and scale of the phase space of interest. In order to keep the following free of

mathematics, I will not explain phase space in the strict manner that physicists use the

expression, butt rather try and widen the concept to signify a high-dimensional space

that encompasses the entire range of exploration, taking into account ‘dimensions’ that

are not spatial; cultural, temporal, intellectual.

This is best illustrated with an example inspired by the lifelong work of Ed Ricketts

in the tide-pools of the Pacific coast.

The figure (a) shows a simplified map of the coastline of the Monterey peninsula

on the Pacific coast in California. Using this map we can define any point along

the coastline between Monterey (M) and Carmel-by-the-Sea (C) by giving the linear

distance along the coast line in kilometres. For example, take the point p which is 3.4

kilometres from Monterey. Zooming into this point we show a 200 metre stretch of the

shoreline facing Spanish Bay. The hatched regions shows the extent of the inter-tidal,

or littoral, region of this stretch of beach, which has an area of about ?? m2. Zooming

in again to the line a − b and looking at this line as a cross-section through the beach we see in (c) the topography of the shoreline and the mean sea level. During the

normal ebb and flow of the tides the sea level rises and falls around this mean level

and maps out on the shore an intertidal area that reflects both the range of high and

low tides and the local topography of the shoreline. Now in (d) we show a phase space

representation of the rise and fall of the sea level at the point p. The position of the

point is a one-dimensional distance and this is the x co-ordinate measured in kilometres

and the sea level height is the h co-ordinate measured in metres. This is a new way of

looking at the state of the sea level on the Monterey coast. Each and every point in this

new two-dimensional phase space represents one particular ’state’ of the interaction

between sea level and the coastline of the Monterey peninsula. We can also define

volume of interst within this space – for example, the grey bar shown is the volume of

the phase space represented by the beach at Spanish Bay, over the course of the full

cycle of the tides.

Using this phase space representation we can conceptually interogate the Monterey

peninsula coastline in a number of different ways by describing different ’volumes of

exploration’ within the phase space (they are strictly areas but we soon extend to 3

dimensions and higher in which volume is a better term to use).

The Decision Tree

Street Fighting Mathematics

This has literally just been published by MIT press. 

 

Street-Fighting Mathematics

The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving

Sanjoy Mahajan

Intense Seeing Page Layout

I have been pottering about with the typesetting of my Intense Seeing text. The example below is based on the Tufte class,  I have changed the layout so that it fits onto a Crown Quarto size paper 189 x 246 mm. The font is Palatino. 

The Tex & I

In the summer of 2009 I took on the task of re-typesetting a book I had originally co-authored with my PhD supervisor, colleague and friend Professor Vyvyan Howard. We had originally published Unbiased Stereology in 1998 and it had sold steadily enough that by 2004 another publisher had picked up the rights and we made and published a second edition.

By early 2009 our publishers had sold all the copies of the second edition and had hit on the idea of making a Print On Demand (POD) version that allowed them to keep selling copies of the second edition, but not have to pay upfront for a print run of thousands. This also made sense to us as authors because the book was still current and widely read – by early 2009 it had a total of about 800 citations from other papers and books.

Unfortunately, the overall POD quality was poor. Although the glossy book cover looked good ,the print quality of the figures looked like cheap photocopies and more importantly for us as technical authors the scaling of key images was unpredictable and thus unacceptable in the book. Vyvyan and I decided to pull out of the POD route and walked away from the publisher – prompted by my assertion that I could ‘do it myself’.

I knew that many, many academic scientists active in physics and maths routinely used the TeX and LaTeX systems to prepare papers and books, but I had never learnt how to use these systems myself and previously had been put off teaching myself because of the learning curve and because I thought using MS Word was good enough.

The following is based on my experience of going from a complete novice at  TeX  to someone with a fully typeset 296 page book finished and printed. In the process I have recently learnt a huge amount about fonts, typography and book design.

The TeX program was created by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1984 driven by his own inquisitiveness and talents. Within two years Leslie Lamport had created a set of macros called LaTeX that made TeX easier to use and since then a myriad of unnamed Open Source programmers have extended and furthered the vision that Knuth had when he first created TeX. In the process over the past 10 years there has been a quiet, but nevertheless remarkable, revolution in how text is printed onto paper to make physical books.

The latest version of LaTeX is one of the very best things you can get for free, on Mac, Linux or PC. Once downloaded and installed a modern LaTeX  system (depending on the one you choose it will have either a fancy text editor or a a plain one and will have a LaTeX  engine that creates PDF output) will allow you to create a whole book of professionally typeset text, figures and equations.  Virtually all of the defaults help you do something sensible, or better, and hundreds of years of the art and craft of typography, typesetting and page design is opened up.  

The output above is some classic advice on typography from Beatrice Warde. It was created with the raw text file  which has the content text and a small number of TeX commands - to format the text in the same way that a typesetter would have done in the past with physical cast metal text.

The example uses the excellent memoir class which allows you to compose a whole book worth of type. The LaTeX system is pretty complete and comes with a number of useful high quality fonts as standard. I have used both Palatino (for the example here) and a Robert Slimbach designed font called Utopia.

Note that the Crystal Goblet piece has clever hyphenation and justification of the text -  LaTeX uses a hyphenation algorithm based on work by Donald Knuth and Michael F. Plass and further enhanced by Frank Liang. This method considers a paragraph as a whole to decide where to add line breaks and language specific patterns to decide hyphenation patterns. More recent developments enable LaTeX to move characters slightly into the margin to generate optically straight margins. These are cleverly NOT geometrically straight but when read they look straight. These computer algorithms are able to simulate the decision making of master typesetters of the past.

Equipped with LaTeX an amateur typesetter can begin to learn about typesetting by  practicing on eitiher their own text or using some existing electronic files (Project Gutenberg has hundreds of classic books in flat text files you can be Charles Darwins typesetter if you wish). If you have Robert Bringhurst's, Elements of typographic Style available and a couple of Edward Tufte books for inspiration you can really get going on more sophisticated things.

The LaTeX  memoir class was developed by Peter Wilson, it is a professional strength typesetting package that is capable of managing all aspects of a complete book project. As well as page by page typesetting it does chapter headings, layout on the paper size of choice, and gives incredible flexibility. Just by using default settings in memoir you can easily give you great page design and typesetting. For example, the command \medievalpage will use the paper size you have selected and produce a medieval page layout based on classic proportions such as those of the 13th century French architect Villard de Honnecourt who devised an ingenious method of setting out optimum proportions for margins and text block on a book page. Other simple commands deliver Robert Bringhurst layouts. If necessary you can set up your own or use a whole class that implements the iconic book layout of Edward Tufte’s books on information design.

And there is a worldwide community of like minded souls. For example, in a thoughtful essay by an Australian philosopher called Adrian Heathcote on how using free, robust and clever LaTeX typesetting programs can help small printers in the UK and Australia make better, more beautiful, books, you can find the following:

There are, however, many other aspects of LATEX that facilitate high quality typesetting. For one, the lines are not justified individually, as they are in Pagemaker and Quark, but in entire paragraph blocks. This simulates the decision making of the master typesetters of old, who would set a page so as to get the greatest evenness of word spacing. LaTeX - or rather the underlying TeX hyphenation-justification algorithm - is able to produce that evenness automatically. This has been so successful an implementation of this old technique that it has been borrowed now for Adobe's InDesign program, where it is called the multi-line composer.

So not only is LaTeX free, but it is also remarkably sophisticated. Donald Knuth knew something when he created TeX – that although computers are a modern science, in the end placing marks on paper is an old art and all art requires craft.

The Anatomy of Texture

“…the anatomy of texture, is that which shews the composition of the organs: it is a kind of analysis, reducing these into their constituent elements.”

William Lawrence FRS 1829. On the Nature and Classification of Diseases. Lecture III October 5th 1829. Printed in the London Medical Gazette.

William Lawrence was an outstanding surgeon and famous in his time for two volumes of lectures he published when he was in his mid thirties - these contained pre-Darwinian and essentially evolutionary ideas on man's nature. Wikipedia has a good article on him. 

The Majoor skeleton

Here is a figure showing some of the excellent work of Dutch typographer Martin Majoor and his large family of fonts Scala, that include very closely matched serif and sans-serif faces.

His website explains that "In my opinion, mixing serif with sans only makes sense when the serif and the sans typefaces are both derived from the same foundation, or even from the same skeleton."

This figure shows how he made that come to life for Scala.

Top Left. How Majoor cretaed Scala Sans from his face Scala. "Scala Sans was literally derived from Scala. Using a black marker and some correction fluid, I changed the serif characters into sans."

Bottom Left. The lowercase letters a-g for serif (upper) and sans-serif (lower) show that the final published forms of the fonts retain the closeness of origin.

Top Right. Majoor shows that both serif and sans-serif sit on the same skeleton; "When I was designing Scala and Scala Sans my motto became: ‘two typefaces, one form principle’. This can be demonstrated by isolating the common skeleton of the roman and the italic in both Scala and in Scala Sans."

Bottom Right: Exactly overlain examples of a-b-c lower case are shown. Although both serif and sans-serif give markedley different texture and colour to a block of text set in the two different typefaces they differ less than about 10% in shape between the two faces.

Robert Bringhurst has a very complimentary write up on Majoors Scala faces in his book Elements of Typographic Style.

Anatomy of Utopia

Here is a figure that I have just knocked up to illustrate some aspects of typography for an article I'm writing. It uses the Utopia font that Robert Slimbach designed for Adobe and which found its way (via some controversy between 1992 and 2006) into a free software font that is packaged with LaTeX distributions.

Left panel;

Top - examples of the font including full alphabets of capitals, lowercase, and italics. The Utopia font as parcelled with LaTeX doesn't have a proper set of small caps or old style numerals (the full price version from Adobe does).

Bottom - An illustration of terminals, serifs aperture and axis. Utopia is a transitional font (transitional between old style and modern faces).

Right panel;

Top - the fi and fl ligatures that come as standard in the font.

Middle - In a proper typesetting software, such as LaTeX, the letter spacing should be modified so that certain pairs of letters are moved slightly closer together, this is called kerning. Each pair has a yellow box added to indicate the overlap.

Bottom - An example of LaTeX hyphenation and justification engine on a fragment of text from the Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. The algorithm not only very cleverly breaks the words in the most appropriate manner it also adjusts the right hand edge so that it is optically straight (even though as you can see if you look carefull it is not geometrically straight).

Many Dimensions of a Book mapped out

I am working on a journal piece on Text and have tried to get my head around the idea of a book being a multidimensional mapping of black ink into a structured 3D space.

As part of this I wanted to try and show that if you break open a book and consider it as a 2D object then there is an extended dynamic range of lengthscales that have to be right for the book to work. It has to have a coherence and structure in the use of black ink in white space over a set of objects: Book - Page - TextBlock - Paragraph - Line - Word - Glyph.

[Robert Bringhurst makes the point in ETS 3.1 - when describing the Digital typeface Requiem by Jonathon Hoefler that, "...Requiem, unlike Bembo, Centaur and Dante, was born in the digital medium, where two dimensions have to do the work of three" p244.

In an interview with Jonathon Hoeffler he returns the compliment and says; "Robert Bringhurst put it best when he said that typography is an art where the microscopic and macroscopic constantly converge."].

I have chosen to measure the area of each of these 'objects' in millimetres squared and plotted these areas as a measure of the length scale of coherence of the text. The example is based on some pages of text from an article I wrote a few years ago about Ancient Geometry, Stereology and Modern Medics.

The typesetting has been done with the memoir class in LaTeX and the free font Utopia that was designed by Robert Slimbach and released for 'free' use by Adobe.

LEFT PANEL:

Book [Here represented by an eight page spread - but a 296 page book is this multiplied by 32 times]

Page [Here shown as a grey on white diagram.]

Textblock [Here is the actual textblock, individual words can now be seen and the structure of the paragraphs and headings etc. If you zoom in you can read it.]

RIGHT PANEL:

Paragraph [Words and their spacing, leading between lines, justification.]

Line [How words interact and word and letter white space, punctuation]

Word [how glyphs and whitespace interacts]

Glyph [the fi glyph looks close up]

In each case I have measured the area of the object (page or line or glyph etc) in squared millimetres and plotted these estimates in the graph lower right on a logarithmic axis.

 

Reducing Fraction (2)

Reed's Razor

Reeds Razor*;

For Intense Seeing, magnify just enough to gain new insight; but no more

Matt Reed 2010.

*This is a nod to two other Razor aphorisms. 

One great one, Ockhams Razor; Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,

and one facetious one, Hanlons Razor; Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

The Reducing Fraction problem

I arrived at Intense Seeing via a particular and contingent route; from quantitative microscopy. This routing both colours my view and provides me with a chance to describe an analytical insight into the whole area. In quantitative microscopy there are a number of issues that have to be tackled to make progress, one of which is the `reducing fraction' problem. It's a really obvious problem; the higher the magnification you are using to resolve the details you are looking at, the lower the fraction of the whole object you can see in any one `field of view' (Unbiased Stereology. Howard & Reed First Edition 1998).

It can be illustrated in a number of ways but the figure shown is a very simple two dimensional example.

Note that however attractive the Eames Powers of Ten film and book it is quite disorienting. Even increasing the linear magnification by factors of 2, after a small number of iterations, leads to a vanishing fraction of the original area. The 8x gives a 1/64 th; keep going another two powers of two and you get to 32x magnification, which is a /1024 th of the original area.

Clearly in three dimensions things are even worse. 

Bausch & Lomb 1929 Catalogue

Following my previous post  I have been digging into what type of lens Ed Ricketts actually used. Thanks to a kind expert Dr David Riches I have tracked down a couple of pages from the 1929 Bausch & Lomb catalogue - Bausch & Lomb Optical Co, Rochester, NY, “Microscopes and other Scientific Instruments” 1929 which is HERE.

Here is one of the scans showing the range of Coddington magnifiers that where being sold by B&L in the early 1930's.  A similar page shows the Hastings triplets that where available.

Techniques of seeing - Rickett's 20x Bausch & Lomb

John Steinbeck famously described his great friend and marine biologist Ed Ricketts as follows. 

“…There was invariably pinned to his shirt pocket a twenty-power Bausch and Lomb magnifying glass on a little roller chain.  He used the glass constantly.  It was a very close part of him-one of his techniques of seeing.” 

John Steinbeck, The Log From the Sea of Cortez (London: Pan Books, 1960): p57.

I have been trying to work out what type of Bausch and Lomb Ricketts would have used. There are two types still available from the Bausch and Lomb company;

Coddington Magnifiers. These are very specially shaped lenses with a deep central groove usually painted back. The groove acts as a diagphram to limit the distortions found in the almost hemi-sperical lenses. They are quite tricky to use, but because they are ground from single pieces of glass are waterproof. 

The figure comes from An Introduction to Applied Optics. L.C. Martin 1932. 

Hasting Triplets. As the name suggests they are made by bonding three lenses together. They were invented by C.S. Hastings (1879). On triple objectives with complete color correction. Am. Jnl. Sci. 18 429.

H. Coddington, A treatise on the reflexion and refraction of light. Simkin and Marshall, London, 1829.

Advert for Hastings Triplet from Popular Science July 1979. 

The Fred Strong image of Ed Ricketts in 1935 is available Here.

Intense Seeing [2]

The question is not what you are looking at – but how you look andwhether you see.

Henry David Thoreau. A year in Thoreau's Journal 1851.

Human beings have an incredible ability to both look and see. Each of our eyes is equipped with a high quality lens system composed of two well matched lenses. These lenses are intimately coupled with an adjustable iris and a smooth focusing mechanism that allows us to effortlessly change our focus from close-up objects, less than 10

centimetres away, to objects that are effectively at infinity. The light that is collected by the eye is focused onto the retina, a specialised image forming tissue at the back of the eye ball. The retina is packed with millions of specialised light collection cells; arranged in such a clever way that we simultaneously achieve high and low resolution imaging with colour and monochrome imaging.

The muscles that control where we look constantly and involuntarily shift our eye gaze around, so that we can make the most efficient use of the small, very high resolution, patch on our retina called the fovea. Once a light quanta lands on one of the special photoreceptor cells of the retina it begins a biochemical cascade process and sends a tiny electrical signal down one of the millions of individual nerve fibres that are in the optic nerve. These tiny pieces of data travel back into the specialised visual areas in the brain at a rate similar to that of an Ethernet connection. Once the light generated data has got to the brain specialised arrangements of neurons are used to carry out fast

and sophisticated image computation and analysis.

All of the above is refered to as 'normal visual acuity'. Normal it may be, but simple it is not.

Although the biological processes required for normal vision are quite breathtaking this book will take them for granted and I will not spend too much time explaining normal visual literacy. In this book instead, I really focus on how two specialised and ostensibly different professions; art and science, make habitual use of an analytical form of visual literacy that for shorthand I will repeatedly refer to as Intense Seeing.

Intense Seeing [1]

I have been working for a few months in my spare time planning a new book, Intense Seeing, I intend to post bits and pieces here over the next year or so - or as long as it takes to write.

PREFACE

I am a scientist who has worked for decades to both quantify images and communicate the results of my quantification. I have therefore developed deep interests in two disciplines, (1) quantitative scientific imaging and (2) visual analytics. Perhaps I am therefore well prepared to write a book on Intense Seeing.

Over the past 20 years I have been gainfully employed in a number of commercial scientific research organisations as a specialist in measurement science and in parallel I have been lucky enough to work with some key academic specialists in this field. I have a broad interest in the problems thrown up by image capture, processing, analysis and quantification for scientific purposes and a more specific interest in quantitative three-dimensional microscopy for biological studies - Unbiased Stereology.

In addition to my scientific interests in imaging, I have also spent more than 15 years actively trying to understand the complex design issues that are involved in the graphical display of complex high-dimensional datasets. This desire to understand data visualisation has been driven by a very practical need to ensure that the experimental images that I have collected, and the measurement data that I have derived from those images, are presented in the best way possible.

The main stimulus and guide to this study of data visualisation has been the excellent material presented by Edward Tufte in a series of four self-published books; The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 2001, Envisioning Information [1990], Visual Explanations [1997] and Beautiful Evidence [2006].

The penny eventually dropped for me in early 2010. Whilst preparing some lecture notes I casually re-read one of Tufte's books, Beautiful Evidence. I was struck by one phrase; `Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information'. The expression Intense Seeing caught my eye. What was Tufte on about? Did he really mean that there was something qualitatively different about the way that scientists and artists looked at the world and that the intensity of seeing gave them the information they needed? I decided to adopt the working hypothesis that in fact Tufte was right; that the way that artists and scientists used their visual skills to generate new `empirical information' really was different and that they had something in common. 

This book is all about Intense Seeing. It explores the idea from many angles and with both a modern measurement approach and a historical perspective. It gives some practical aides to help develop your capacity to do more intense seeing. It shows illusions and highlights artefacts. It has previously unpublished science and images. It is written by a professional scientist, who has worked for two decades to quantify images, with a deep interest in the graphic design issues involved in producing scientific graphs, tables, figures, illustrations and evidence.

The book  is a record of my journey to probe this hypothesis and in the process try to understand Intense Seeing. The final piece in the jigsaw puzzle was my experience from 2009-2010 learning about book design and typography to self-publish a re-print of my stereology book. This book will also self designed and typeset so all of the problems with it are my own. 

Matt

I show a two page spread below for reference. Although the layout  is based on the LaTeX Tufte class, it uses a different paper stock and the Utopia font designed by Robert Slimbach.

The Economist Data Deluge

The British magazine the Economist has a major piece on the data deluge this week -  Here

"Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still."

Complex movements of hand and eye in Drawing

I have been reading up on drawing - the complex interplay between visual observation and hand coordination required to make a pencil record of what an artist or scientist sees either with the naked eye or with optical aids (lenses, mirrors, camera obscura, camera lucida).

This is clearly of direct interest in art (e.g. the Hockney-Falco thesis) but it is also of real interest in the history of scientific illustration (from the work of Galileo, through that of Audubon to the camera lucida work of Harry Whittington in the Burgess Shale) - as ET put it in Beautiful Evidence "Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information".

As mentioned previously with respect to Ruskin drawing forces us to really see. This is true for science as well - Prof Harry Whittington, one of the lead academics on the re-analysis of the Burgess Shale fauna, reflecting on his methods said the following on the occasion of the award of the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal to him in 2001;

"I soon realised, in my work on Burgess Shale fossils, that explanatory drawings would be needed as well as photographs, to describe these fossils. This is where Dr Wollaston enters the scene - a late 18th to early 19th Century physician, who practised in London for many years, and made valuable contributions to chemistry and optics. He had a cracked shaving mirror, but instead of throwing it away he puzzled over the refractions and reflections of light caused by the cracks.

This led to his realising that by inserting a prism into a microscope tube, the image could be directed laterally, then down on to paper beside the microscope, and provide a way to draw an accurate picture. In much refined form this is his invention, the camera lucida, which I used to make my drawings."

Our ability to make detailed records of what we observe is dictated by our artistic ability and the capacity of the human eye-brain-hand system. Drawing is an extremely complex and interesting process requiring high levels of motor co-ordination and only achieved by long practice.

To illustrate this complexity the figure below will repay careful study. It shows a montage of data that was extracted from a study by John Tchalenko and colleagues at Camberwell College of Arts. http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/drawing_cognition/.

In this study they used an eyetracker, movement sensor and close-up video to study how the painter, Humphrey Ocean, drew portraits. Their analysis concentrated on the painter's eye-hand coordination.  They observed that in general his eye closely followed the drawing hand, with fixations on, or very near, the line being drawn. They also found frequent exceptions to this behaviour when the artist's eye moved from the drawing hand to look at other parts of the drawing or he turned to look at the model. The study concludes that they show evidence, `illustrating the process of visual memory fading and refreshing, and the possible action of a motor memory component in the drawing method of this painter'.

The figure to the right shows data about the fixation of the eye above the horizontal line and data about the position of the hand below it as the artist composed the portrait of Nick to the left. In both cases vertical distance away from the horizontal line corresponds to physical distance away from the paper; which is the physical fulcrum of the exercise (eye, pencil and paper come together). There is an initial period of practice during which no contact is made between paper and pencil but the eye flicks back and forward from the model to tracking the pencil. Then the eye focuses on the paper and immediately fater the pencil hits the paper to begin the first four strokes H1-H4. These take 2.68 seconds and a total of 10 cm of pencil stroke is created. The eye evaluates what the pencil has done then back onto the model and so on.

The graphic is quite special - the physical paper is represented by a horizontal line and the two times series (eye data and hand data) are running in synchrony.

The camera lucida

The camera lucida is an optical component that fits into the optical train of the light microscope in such a manner that when observing the specimen through the eyepiece you can simultaneously see your piece of paper and pencil and the drawing you are doing.  

Artists use macroscopic versions of this device -  and David Hockney in his book Secret Knowledge uses a Camera lucida to replicate the rapid and accurate sketching style of Ingres drawings - http://www.koopfilms.com/hockney/articles.html).

Using a camera lucida is not a tracing task nor just copying - it requires an ability to choose which details are most important to record to make an accurate record of the specimen.   It does not use hardware and the image recording medium is paper and pencil (or pen).

The field of paleontology still makes heavy use of camera lucida drawings to illustrate research papers - they have found that photographic reproduction of a faint impression on a dark background does not reveal the detail that they can see with the human eye through a stereo microscope.

Interestingly one of the most famous paleontological stories of the past 30 years - the re-discovery of the Burgess Shale fossils - was facilitated by camera lucida drawings - here is the lead academic Harry Whittington reflecting on it;

"I soon realised, in my work on Burgess Shale fossils, that explanatory drawings would be needed as well as photographs, to describe these fossils. This is where Dr Wollaston enters the scene - a late 18th to early 19th Century physician, who practised in London for many years, and made valuable contributions to chemistry and optics. He had a cracked shaving mirror, but instead of throwing it away he puzzled over the refractions and reflections of light caused by the cracks.

This led to his realising that by inserting a prism into a microscope tube, the image could be directed laterally, then down on to paper beside the microscope, and provide a way to draw an accurate picture. In much refined form this is his invention, the camera lucida, which I used to make my drawings."

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/society/history/page2986.html

Here is a camera lucida drawing of an anomalocaris fossil trilobite from http://www.trilobites.info/species.html

Pete Frame Rock Family Trees

See my post below about the Erics family tree.

Pete Frame has now set up a website where you can buy high quality large prints of the graphics - it also has a nice web browse facility - here is the one for the Beatles family tree.

ERICS - The graphic

Here is a large and very detailed Rock Family tree graphic drawn by Pete Frame. This one has a personal connection for me. It describes the hugely energising creative outburst of bands that happened in Liverpool UK in the early 1980's and centred around the famous Erics club, which opened on October 1, 1976 in a building basement on Mathew Street opposite The Cavern Club where The Beatles had played.

Pete Frame had this to say in his graphic;

"For the second time in twenty years, Liverpool is the most exciting city in the whole rock world. In my few days there, I became so intoxicated with the place that I collected far too much information for one family tree - so what you see here is the basic framework for a wall-size effort."

I lived locally and went to Erics and other clubs around often enough to have seen or heard of most of the bands or people on this graphic.

Here is a zoomed in piece of the graphic linking the bands Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes with Bill Drummond (who famously set up the KLF and burned a million pounds as a piece of conceptual art). In late 1979 I saw Echo and the Bunnymen (complete with Echo the drum machine) support The Teardrop Explodes at Chester art centre.

Your Manuscipt

Here is a website and book celebrating found art and typography on the streets of Liverpool.

http://www.letterpool.com/

Small Multiple Stamp Art

Here is a very nice use of postage stamps as small multiples forming part of an invitation to a talk on Postage Stamps by Type Designers: A Primer. Held at The Typophiles on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at the National Arts Club. The talk was by Michael Russem the principal of the Kat Ran Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts - http://www.katranpress.com/news.html.

A visual Pun on fixed point theorems (I think)

Under the heading 'Self-Description' Randall Munroe has a very thought provoking comic strip that is a visual pun on fixed point theorems, i.e. a function f that has at least one fixed point, a point x for which f(x) = x.

http://xkcd.com/688/