The Hand of God

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was an outstanding German painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was also very good at drawing hands. 

Here is one of his sketchs for the Heller Altarpiece -Hand of God the Father (Hände Gottvaters)

 

Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.

Great piece on the distrortion of scientific publishing and increase in number of retractions of scientific papers HERE. 

Original paper HERE.

Their Figure shows that there is a correlation between journal impact factor and number of retractions; people are prepared to cheat more for bigger personal kudos.

The Camera Lucida

The camera lucida was invented by Dr William Wollaston and patented in 1806. They are less commonly seen and used these days but still play an important role in some observational sciences. 

For example, they are commonly used in palaeontology; Professor Harry Whittington, one of the lead academics on the Burgess Shale work of the three past decades, reflected on the methods he used 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 practiced 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.

Below is an artists using a camera lucida.

Artist Sketching With a Wollaston Style Camera Lucida. In: Dollond. George: The Camera Lucida. An Instrument for Drawing in True Perspective, and for Copying, Reducing, or Enlarging other Drawings. London 1830, frontispiece. Drawn by C. Varley for G. Dollond with the Camera Lucida. 

 

The Wasp

Wallchart from HERE

High Speed Jelly Drop

Stills from the following movie of a block of jelly dropped onto a surface.

Steinbeck's Pencils

John Steinbeck famously drafted his books and stories in longhand in pencil (for example see The Paris Review). His choice of pencil was therefore something he worried about.  Here are his three favourites; the Eberhard Faber Mongol, the Blaisdell Calculator, and the Eberhard Faber Blackwing.

Image from HERE

If you are having trouble sharpening your pencils, then worry no more, a complete and authoritive guide has recently be published HERE.

Gopkin on Darwin

The writer Adam Gopkin describes a number of examples of the ‘excellent eye’ of Charles Darwin in his book  Angels and Apes. Quercus. London.

pg 64: ‘More than anything else in life, Charles Darwin liked to look at things. He liked to look at things the way an artist likes to draw, the way a composer likes to play the piano, the way a cook likes to chop onions: it is the simple root physical activity that makes the other, higher-order acts not just possible but pleasurable’.

pg 65: (Discussing the worm and orchid books).

‘He looks as hard as he can, and sees processes, not just plants—his worms are actors, makers of vegetable mold and capable of primitive conciousness and, as we’ll see, even an innate musicality—and this act of looking and organising is for him the probity of the intelligence. ’

pg 67: ‘And always he loved to look. As a boy he was obsessed with beetles in a way that other boys are obsessed with marbles. ’

‘Darwin always thought as he saw; “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation”.

‘Darwin’s turn of mind was encyclopaedically visual . . . ’

pg 69: Talking about The Voyage of the Beagle

‘But what really knocks us out now is how much pure observation, pure plain looking,

there is in Darwin’s book. e poetry lies in the sweep of the seeing. ’

pg 72: ‘As one reads  The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin’s Argus–eyed relentless sheer seeing—his endless observations of spiders and vultures and snakes and beetles, of what it takes to check on the fatness of a tortoise of a lizard’s method of swimming—is what is overwhelming. ’

pg 73: ‘. . .Darwin is, with Ruskin, the greatest pure observer and describer of his time.’

pg 80: From Darwins notebooks in 1830's;

“All science is reason acting / systematizing/ on principes which even animals know (art precedes science -art is experience & observation)"

Intense Seeing in Nahuatl

The English language is enormously flexible, but in order to describe intensity we generally need to bring together two or three separate words; heavy rain, deafening roar, blinding light. Linguistically this is rather inelegant when we compare English with language systems that have special and direct ways of expressing intensity. 


For example, the Nahuatl languages and dialects of the Uto-Aztecan language family of Mesoamerica have an special `intensive' aspectual category in their language that indicates something has great intensity; 

Nahuatl, like many languages, employs reduplication to signal the intensive aspect ... the root itta means `see', but in reduplicated form, iita, means stare, as staring is equivalent to intense seeing. William Frawley. Linguistic Semantics. 1992. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hillsdale, New Jersey. 

This Nahuatl word iita is a handy shorthand for intense seeing. 

An image of a Nahua woman from the Florentine Codex. The speech scroll indicates that she is speaking.

Anatomical Notes (c.1510)

HERE is a great piece in the Guardian on a very rare Leonardo da Vinci page of notes dating from 1510. The page is in the Royal Collection (this and many other rarities have been in the private collection of the English Royal family since about 1690 - it is thought that the papers were acquired by King Charles II from one of da Vinci's successors). 


The page describes all of the materials Da Vinci needed for his anatomical studies. 


A fragment of the page is shown below.

The Wondergraph (1913)

The recently created turntable driven Drawing Machine HERE, reminded me of an image from an article on making a "wondergraph" which appeared in Windsor, H. H., Ed. The Boy Mechanic. Chicago: Popular Mechanics Press, 1913.


It was a precurser to the Spirograph. 

More songs about...

The front cover of the album  More Songs About Buildings and Food (Talking Heads' second album) was  conceived by the lead singer David Byrne and executed by artist Jimmy De Sana. It is a mosaic image of the band comprising 529 close-up Polaroid photographs. 

This cover preceded by a few years the series of Polaroid montages made by David Hockney. In fact Hockney's series of images are better than this cover image, but the principle idea is the same.

Hockney says that these are "pictures that describe how we see - not all at once, but in discrete, separate glimpses... to synthesize a living impression."

This album title was mocked by the Undertones on their second album Hypnotized with a song titled "More songs about Chocolate and Girls". 

Elements of Intense Seeing

The seven elements of Intense Seeing.

The intense seeing assumption is that if we can add, by some means, additional discriminatory power to seeing, then intense seeing is what results. This is the basis of both excellence and innovation in art and science.  

There are seven discrete conceptual elements of intense seeing and often with each concept there is an appropriate law of parsimony that can be applied and these often provide practical benefits and ensure intense seeing. 

To provide an easy way to remember these seven elements each has been given an object to represent the element.  

The Eye. All seeing uses the human eye. It is a wonderful foundation for intense seeing and it has four qualities that are of particular importance; acuity, sensitivity, colour and registration of movement.

The Hand. The hand guides the eye when it has a pencil in it and an intent to record an impression of what is being seen. What is seen when using a pencil is demonstrably different from what is seen otherwise.

The Pencil. Is an archetype of a device for capturing important morphological information. It is one half of the most rudimentary of recording devices. It has some unique properties.

The Dice. Sometimes for intense seeing a controlled amount of chance is useful.

The Notepad. Setting out to observe with the intent to make any kind of notation or  record changes what you see. This is also the second half of the most rudimentary of recording devices.

The Ruler. Introducing a formal means of dividing space or time is one of the core design steps we can take to get improved discrimination and quantification.

The Magnifier. A magnifier provides a real increase in the resolving power of the eye. But all real magnifiers have issues and they must be used with caution.

Icons from www.clker.com

How long is the Mississippi - the 1933 Longimeter

The Steinhaus longimeter was patented in Germany in 1933 by the the Polish mathematician Professor Hugo Steinhaus (1887 – 1972) , it is simple instrument that can be used to estimate the length of a complex curved feature on a map, e.g. a river. 

The instrument consists of a transparent sheet with three perpendicular grids spaced by 3.82 millimetres and each turned by 30 degrees. The length estimate is made by counting the crossings of the curve with the grid lines. The number of crossings is the approximate length of the curve in millimetres.

Steinhaus was sufficiently taken with this excellent idea that he filed a German patent to protect it in 1933, patent number DRGM 1241513.

   

An explanation of how the Longimeter works was given by Steinhaus in his book Mathematical Snapshots published in 1950 by Oxford University Press. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with Steinhaus' interest in measuring complex linear geographical features, he was the peer reviewer of Benoit Mandelbrot's landmark paper on fractal geometery; How long is the coast of Britain? Statistical self-similarity and fractional dimension. Science: 156, 1967, 636-638.

[The British cartographic society estimate that the coastline of Britain is about 31,368 km.]

What kind of mind?

Due to the internet and web there is now a great deal of difference between how we can learn about things that already exist in our scientific and artistic culture and how we used to - it is a difference as great as that between the library of Alexandria and the World brain of H.G. Wells.

What kind of mind is needed to make sense of the way we can access this interconnected and sometimes unreliable information? In the book Five Minds for the Future Howard Gardner calls this the “synthesizing mind” : 


The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources, understands and evaluates that information objectively, and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also to other persons. Valuable in the past, the capacity to synthesize becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.

Thynnus Thunnina

From HERE

Craster

The tiny fishing village of Craster lies on the North East coast of the UK in Northumberland. It is famous locally for its kippers. From the village you can walk along the shore to the ruins of Dunstanborough castle. The building of the castle was started by the Earl of Lancaster in 1313 and is the largest in Northumberland.

Below is a painting of Dunstanborough by J.M.W. Turner from his book of landscape studies Liber Studiorum (1806-1819), which was donated to Oxford by John Ruskin. Image from HERE. 

Birds Eggs

From James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson's World of Birds

HERE

Creator(s):

Roger Tory Peterson (Illustrator)

Maurice Chandler (Editor)

Susan Tibbles (Designer)

James Fisher (Author)

Publisher:

Crescent Books; New York, NY

Year:

1977

Pages:

191 p.

Size:

27 x 20 cm.

Scale bar added by MGR 4th March 2012, based on average length of Emu egg from Wikipedia article.

Drawn by Ingold

The world of mycology, the study of the biology of fungi in all of its various guises, is a relatively cloistered one and is rarely in the forefront of peoples minds (though without fungi we would not have bread, beer, wine or soy sauce). Fungi have for centuries been treated as part of the plant kingdom and most breakthroughs historically have been by botanists. More recently there has been a change and from an evolutionary point of view fungi are classified as a separate kingdom, that are genetically closer to the animal kingdom than they are to plants. 


Pioneering mycologists have included the Swede Elias Magnus Fries (1794-1878), the South African Christian Hendrik Persoon (1761-1836), the German Anton de Bary (1831-1888) and the German-American Lewis David von Schweinitz (1780-1834). In the past 100 years or so British mycologists have had a major impact worldwide on this field of science and the British Mycological Society, which was founded in 1896, has been a key learned society in mycology for over a hundred years. The BMS has had many notable members, but perhaps the most interesting of all of these mycologists to non-experts, was the incredible Anglo-Irish scholar Prof. Cecil Terence Ingold (1905-2010).

Ingold was born in Blackrock, Dublin in 1905, the son of an English born National Education Officer Edwin George Ingold and his wife Gertrude Ingold. By 1911 Ingold and his family (including his sister Kathleen and their servant Isabella Hawthorne) were living in Donaghodee Road, Bangor County Down.  


Ingold attended Queen's University Belfast and graduated with a first-class honours degree in Botany in 1926. He then took up a one-year scholarship at the Royal College of Science in London, studying with Sir John Farmer in the school of botany. By 1929 he had completed a PhD and been appointed a lecturer at Reading University, then lecturer in charge of botany (1937-44) at University College, Leicester. It was whilst he was in Leicester that Ingold found a form of water borne fungi in a foam that he found in the brook near his house. This discovery led him to write a paper in 1942 that described 16 species and 13 genera, in total he discovered hundreds of species of these fungi. They are now known as Ingoldian fungi in his honour. 

For 28 years (1944-72), he was professor of botany at Birkbeck College, London, where he was vice-master from 1965 until 1970.

Ingold formally "retired" from his University post at age 67, but just carried on working at home. When he was 80 he had a festscrift in his honour that listed 174 publications. But he still hadn't finished, in fact he carried on to publish another 100 papers after this and his last scientific paper was published when he was 93. 

Above all else Ingold was a phenomenal field observer and experimentalist. Many of his papers and books are illustrated with his own line-drawings, both macroscopic and also microscopic camera lucida derived images. He also used a water drop technique in which he observed the spore development of a fungi of interest over time and he made repeated drawings to illustrate the course of development.    

The figure below is a re-coloured and slightly modified line drawing made by Ingold that shows a Gyoerffyella craginiformis, a conidium from ditch scum at Wheatfen Broad (Ingold & Ellis 1952). Notice the carefully hand drawn 50 micron scale bar. This is the sign of careful camera lucida observational technique. Assuming the scale of an image, or reporting the magnification of the optical set up used to make the image, do not pin down the observed conidium to a real-world scale.  These are two ways of de-quantifying a scientific image.  Ingold doesn't do this. His observations, as recorded with these simple and elegant line drawings, are images that have been created with Intense Seeing. 

References

Obituaries of C.T. Ingold in the Guardian and Independent

Ingold, C.T. & Ellis, E.A. (1952). On some hyphomycete spores including those of Tetracladium maxilliformis, from Wheatfen. Transactions of the British Mycological Society, 35, 158-61.

My involvement with aquatic hyphomycetes. C.T. Ingold Chapter 2 of A Century of Mycology. Editor Brian Sutton. Cambridge University Press 1996.

Visual Recipes

Here is a set of 10 visual recipes created by illustrator Katie Shelly.


She warns that "The following recipes are not intended as precise culinary blueprints. Instead they are meant to inspire Experimentation, Improvisation and Play in the Kitchen."


The example below is for Pesto Sauce.

British Power Food

The Great British Breakfast. (Click for Bigger Size)

Image Copyright M.G. Reed 2012

Opie Wrapping Paper

I missed this Julian Opie wrapping paper before Christmas, but it is still available for download from the Guardian website.

How to Write

On September 7th, 1982, David Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees.

“How to Write”:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

The Treachery of Projections

The Blue Marble is one of the most iconic images of the Earth that we have. The colour photograph was taken in December 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft when they were a distance of about 45,000 kilometres above the surface of the Earth. There are a number of striking features of this image. Perhaps the most obvious is the vibrant colour of the image; the blue, white and browns of the sea, cloud and land. Almost equally remarkable is the very marked curvature of the Earths surface, here is compelling photographic evidence that the Earth is not flat. The last feature that causes us to look twice is the fact that in the original image released by NASA the Earth is “upside down” (at least according to Wikipedia). 

However, no matter which way up we prefer it and how beautiful we find this picture, as Rene Magritte would have put it; ceci n’est pas une planète. This is not a planet. It is an image of a planet. More precisely this image is a projection of a three dimensional, almost spherical globe, onto a two-dimensional plane. Map makers call this type of projection an orthographic projection. This projection introduces subtle distortions and a gross problem, in an orthographic projection at any one time we cannot see the far side of the object.


It was to try and solve this problem that the so-called Mercator projection was developed - which is a trick for showing a spherical Earth on a flat surface. This projection was developed by the 16th Century cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was Mercator’s brilliance that allowed him to describe and use a rational method for squeezing the full and irreducible 3 dimensions of the Earths surface into a 2 dimensional piece of paper. There are dozens of different map projections and each and every one of them has issues - HERE is a good overview and introduction.

FAC10

Joy Division were an outstanding live band. I saw them support the Buzzcocks on 2nd October 1979 at Mountford Hall, Liverpool University.


Their debut album Unknown Pleasures was released on Factory Records as FAC10 in June 1979. The front cover was a stacked time series scientific data plot in white on an expensive textured black paper.  The image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background, it shows successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21 or CP 1919. 

Ishihara Cards

I am Red/Green colourblind. I have known this since I was about 11 years old - and I found out because I was asked to look at a distinctive set of coloured cards designed by the Japanese opthalmologist  Shinobu Ishihara (1879 – 1963).  

I was told at the time that the Red/Green colourblindness that I had would mean that I would never be a pilot. They were right, I'm not. 

It is quite tricky finding out about Ishihara - there is a biographical book on him published in 1984 but it is in Japanese and it doesn't look like there is an English translation. Eric Kindel has a good piece  HERE.

The Landform Map

Erwin Raisz (1893 -1968) was a Hungarian-born American cartographer, best known for his physiographic maps of landforms. HERE is a biographic article and below is one of his superb physiographic maps of the USA.

A twilight zone of time...

The Guardian has a great piece HERE by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín on the relationship he had with his mother, an unpublished but talented poet. In this essay he cites an essay that Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote on the short story writer Seán O'Faoláin that dealt with childhood and memory: 

"There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being … Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births."

This resonates with me as I think back about the family stories that I imbibed as a child, my twilight zone of time includes; the extended families on both sides, the story of my Mum's family during the war, my Dad's jobs in London with my uncle - his first taste of ice-cold Coke in the tyre factory he worked in and the reason why we had an anthology of poetry from Peckham library, the poems of Robert Service (I remember The Cremation of Sam McGee in Songs of a Sourdough), the reason my grandfather had a glass eye, the daily masses my Mum had to attend at Bellerive Convent School and the Manx kippers my Dad had on his family holidays in the Isle of Mann. 

Image of Rocky Lane, Tuebrook late 1960's or early 1970's from HERE.

The World of Pacific Gas & Electric - R.E. Harrison 1939

A pre-computer age infographic / map by Richard Edes Harrison created for Fortune magazine 1939. Richard Edes Harrison (1901-1994) was a cartographer active in the 1940s. Harrison studied Zoology and Chemistry at Yale but graduated with architecture, he pursued scientific illustration in New York  and published his first map for $25 in 1932 in Time Magazine. 

An Elephant

Some fantastic full page illustrations from J.Barnes, Wild Animals Painting Book, Published by Blackie  c1905 are HERE.

Chernoff Faces. Not.

I happened to be looking at Chernoff faces - and they don't work for me. At all. The don't work for Alex Reisner either - but he has done something about it and has a brilliant piece here (http://alexreisner.com/baseball/stats/chernoff) that explains his solution. At the risk of spoiling it his solution is a set of Reisner faces - which he shows in a small multiple here to show baseball statistics for 2005 National League. The raw data is as follows; PCT H HR BB SB ARI .475 1419 191 606 67 ATL .556 1453 184 534 92 CHI .488 1506 194 419 65 CIN .451 1453 222 611 72 COL .414 1477 150 509 65 FLO .512 1499 128 512 96 HOU .549 1400 161 481 115 LAD .438 1374 149 541 58 MIL .500 1413 175 531 79 NYM .512 1421 175 486 153 PHI .543 1494 167 639 116 PIT .414 1445 139 471 73 SDP .506 1416 130 600 99 SFG .463 1427 128 431 71 STL .617 1494 170 534 83 WAS .500 1367 117 491 45 He has an algorithm to map these into graphic win pct = cap rotation hits = mouth shape home runs = tongue length walks = left eye size stolen bases = right eye size His set of faces are as follows;

The Terminology of Perspective of Joseph Moxon.

From the Tate collection.

By JMW Turner.

The Terminology of Perspective of Joseph Moxon, Lecture Diagram 14  circa 1810.

Pen and ink and watercolour on paper

support: 482 x 600 mm

on paper, unique

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

D17028

Finberg number: CXCV 58

Turner’s second lecture was devoted to theterms and procedures of standard perspective. He included terminology used by now lesser known writers, such as the English hydographer and mathematician Joseph Moxon. Turner owned a copy of his manual Perspective, or Perspective Made Easie, published about 1670, which included pop-up illustrations.

 (From the display caption August 2004)

Image Copyright Tate Collection

The Elements of Drawing at the Ashmolean

The Asmolean has a superb site describing the teaching collection of John Ruskin, HERE.


Below is the first page of the Preface to Intense Seeing - mentioning both Ruskin and his little book The Elements of Drawing. 

Warhol's Europoort

Cartographies of the Absolute has some images of Rotterdam's Europoort HERE. Europoort is by volume one of the largest ports in the world. Below some containers turned into a Warhol style poster.