Refraction of soldiers through a field of wheat

The Vertebrate eye and Its Adaptive Radiation. G.L. Walls (1942) - HERE 

'This bending of light rays when they pass through boundary surfaces is called 'refraction'. Its basis may be best understood if we use an old favorite analogy for our light beam and our pair of optically different substances. 

Suppose a platoon of soldiers to be marching over bare ground towards the edge of a wheat-field, which is at an angle to their line of march. The ranks of soldiers now represent successive wave-fronts in a light beam, and their files represent the individual light rays in the beam. Obviously the soldiers cannot march as fast through the dense wheat as over open ground, so that the latter may represent air, and the wheat-field a piece of glass of higher optical density.

As the first soldiers in the front rank start into the wheat, they are slowed up, but those at the other end of the front rank are still able to march rapidly since they have not yet reached the wheat (a). Consequently the front rank is swung around as if hinged at one end, and by the time the whole of the rank is in the wheat, it has taken a new direction of march which is of course followed by each rank in the whole platoon (b). 

Upon emerging from the wheat-field on the other side (c), the process is reversed and the platoon's line of march becomes parallel to its original one, displaced laterally a distance which depends upon the width of the wheat-field and the difficulty of marching through it'.

MIndless Statistics and Feynman's Conjecture

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy in Berlin. His web page is HERE.

He is also the author of an entertaining paper from 2004 called Mindless Statistics (HERE).

The Abstract reads:

Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of science. What I call the “null ritual” consists of three steps: (1) set up a statistical null hypothesis, but do not specify your own hypothesis nor any alternative hypothesis, (2) use the 5% significance level for rejecting the null and accepting your hypothesis, and (3) always perform this procedure. I report evidence of the resulting collective confusion and fears about sanctions on the part of students and teachers, researchers and editors, as well as textbook writers.

Gigerenzer takes apart what he calls the 'null ritual' that scientists are taught about in statistics lessons. In particular psychologists. 

One of the great pieces of evidence Gigerenzer presents is the result of a test that was set by Haller and Krauss (2002). In this test the researchers posed a question about null hypothesis testing to 30 statistics teachers, including professors of psychology, lecturers, and teaching assistants, 39 professors and lecturers of psychology (not teaching statistics), and 44 psychology students. Teachers and students were from the psychology departments at six German universities. Each statistics teacher taught null hypothesis testing, and each student had successfully passed one or more statistics courses in which it was taught. The question was followed by 6 statements and the people taking the test were asked to mark which of the statements they believed to be true or false.

In fact all 6 of the statements were false. But all 6 of the statements erred "in the same direction of wishful thinking: They make a p-value look more informative than it is".

The results of this study were presented by Gigerenzer:

Gigerenzer also goes on to quote Richard Feynman on hypothesis testing and states Feynman’s conjecture:

To report a significant result and reject the null in favor of an alternative hypothesis is meaningless unless the alternative hypothesis has been stated before the data was obtained.

And quotes Feynman's anecdotal story about his interaction with a psychology researcher at Princeton whilst he was a student.

And it’s a general principle of psychologists that in these tests they arrange so that the odds that the things that happen happen by chance is small, in fact, less than one in twenty. . . . And then he ran to me, and he said, “Calculate the probability for me that they should alternate, so that I can see if it is less than one in twenty.” I said, “It probably is less than one in twenty, but it doesn’t count.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because it doesn’t make any sense to calculate after the event. You see, you found the peculiarity, and so you selected the peculiar case.” . . . If he wants to test this hypothesis, one in twenty, he cannot do it from the same data that gave him the clue. He must do another experiment all over again and then see if they alternate. He did, and it didn’t work. 

References 

Feynman, R., 1998. The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. Perseus Books, Reading, MA, pp. 80–81.

Haller, H., Krauss, S., 2002. Misinterpretations of significance: a problem students share with their teachers? Methods of Psychological Research—Online [On-line serial], 7, pp 1–20.

Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.

The wreck of a small boat on the Caldy shore this morning.

 Copyright M.G. Reed 2013

Ashmolean Mummy & Penicillin electron density plots

The Ashmolean museum in Oxford is just one of the delights of this brilliant city of learning. 

One of the unexpected exhibits is the gallery of Egyptian mummy's, some of which include elaborate body wrappings and painted portraits (HERE). 

In addition there is a mummy of a 2 year old boy. Next to the mummy and about life size, is a fantastic glass sculpture artwork by Angela Palmer. The 2000 year old mummy was scanned with a CT scanner to create a full 3D data set. Palmer then created a physical representation of this virtual data set by tracing details from the 3D data set onto a set of 111 sheets of glass. The sculpture now sits near to the boy and is a permanent part of the exhibition.

Image copyright Angela Palmer

The technique of drawing contours on parallel sheets of glass that Angela Palmer uses was inspired by her seeing the work of Nobel prize winning crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin-Crowfoot. Below is an image of her work created in the mid 1940's (from HERE).  An original of this artefact is in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science (HERE).

From the 1949 penicillin monograph published by Princeton University Press. A photograph of electron-density contours drawn on sheets of perspex showing the thiazolidine and beta-lactam of potassium benzylpenicillin. 

Owing to the urgency created by the `extreme importance of penicillin as a military weapon' in WWII, determining the crystal structure of penicillin involved the first crystallographic use in Britain of a Hollerith computer; with Dorothy Hodgkin-Crowfoot as lead crystallographer and with Leslie J. Comrie's Scientific Computing Services Ltd developing the computing methodology. 

As noted in the penicillin monograph: `Under the terms of the contract for the publication of the Chemistry of Penicillin the publisher has agreed to waive its rights under the copyright after five years from the date of publication. Thereafter this volume will be in the public domain and dedicated to the public.' 

Data Analysis for Politics and Policy

Before Edward Tufte became very well known for his work on data visualisation, he wrote on the application of statistical methods in the social sciences. 

One of his best books is a slim volume published in 1974 by Prentice Hall, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy.  Even if you have no interest in either Politics or Policy, this is a great book for learning about data analysis. 

The book was previously available to download for free from Tufte's site, but is now available there for $2 as an e-book in PDF format (HERE). 

Below is one of the figures from the book, which shows a data set on US death rates from motor vehicle accidents that Tufte analyses in some detail through the book. The plot shows the distribution in death rate across each of the states in the US. The graphic doesn't reach the high standards that he set himself later in his career, but it already shows a dedication to showing the data in a clear visual manner. 

Images Copyright E.Tufte.

On the unreliability of (some) neuroscience

Raymond Tallis has a superb piece in today's Guardian on the ludicrousness of some of the claims that are made by those who use functional brain imaging to try and explain that who we are and what we do is somehow revealed by the particular bits of the brain that 'light up' in big imaging bits of kit. HERE.

In the piece he references a Nature Neuroscience Review paper by Katherine Button and friends. The abstract reads as follows:

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.

 See  also previous posts HERE and HERE.

Square Word Calligraphy

The Chinese artists Xu Bing plays with words and characters. One example is a project called Square Word Calligraphy.

The blurb on this project from his website:

"Square Word Calligraphy is a new kind of writing, almost a code, designed by Xu Bing. At first glance it appears to be Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read it but cannot. Western viewers, however, are surprised to find that they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed."

An example below. 

A rough translation: Baa Baa Black Sheep have you any wool yes sir yes sir three bags full one for my master one for my dame but none for the little boy who lives(?) in the lane

The city embodies the people...

The Irish GPO has just released a new postage stamp that has a complete short story printed on it celebrating Dublin (HERE).

The 60c stamp has a short story printed on it, that was written by Eoin Moore when he was 17, describing the essence of Dublin. It celebrates Dublin’s permanent designation as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2010.

The Hunting of the Snark - An agony in eight fits

Here is a newish illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark from the entertaining and enterprising publisher Melville House Books.

The book is illustrated by Mahendra Singh (more examples of his Snark art here).

Although Lewis Carroll is more famous for the Alice books the Hunting of the Snark has generated a whole industry of speculations about what it means.

The mathematician Martin Gardner published an annotated version of the poem in 1974.

Lewis Carroll was also known as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Lewis Carroll "explained" the Snark in 1887:

I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse – one solitary line – "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee
He had softly and suddenly vanished away
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Images copyright M. Singh

The aerial photograph and its interpretation

Eduard Imhof's classic, Cartographic Relief Presentation, is available to buy from ESRI Press HERE.

From the blurb:

Within the discipline of cartography, few works are considered classics in the sense of retaining their interest, relevance, and inspiration with the passage of time. One such work is Eduard Imhof's masterpiece on relief representation. Originally published in German in 1965, Cartographic Relief Presentation provides guidelines for properly rendering terrain in maps of all types and scales. This book is an example of the art of combining cartography with intellect and graphics when solving map design problems. The range, detail, and scientific artistry of Imhof's solutions are presented in an instructional context that puts this work in a class by itself, with universal significance. Esri Press has reissued Imhof's masterpiece as an affordable volume for mapping professionals, scholars, scientists, students, and anyone interested in cartography.

Below is a plate that shows Imhof's skills applied. The top two images are a stereo pair aerial photograph. The bottom two are Imhof's illustrations, showing at left a contour plot and at right a combined contour and shaded representation. 

Image Copyright E. Imhof / ESRI press.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

On the word Quark:

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

Murray Gell-Mann

[M. Gell-Mann (1995). The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Henry Holt and Co. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-8050-7253-2.]


The passage that Gelll-Mann refers to from Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Book 2, Episode 4, Page 383) is the following:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!

And below a typographic confection of the phrase by Jacob Drachler from "Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Confabulation With Finnegans Wake" (HERE)

The Journal of Mundane Behaviour

There are thousands of issues of hundreds of learned journals published every year. Some are prestigious very widely read science journals such as Nature, which was founded in 1869 and is the most highly cited of interdisciplinary science journals. Others are deeply specialised and of little interest to most people.

Then there is the most gloriously named journal I have ever come across - the Journal of Mundane Behaviour. 

This classic journal was published from about 2000 - 2004.  I am currently making my way through it and it doesn't disappoint. It is the preeminent journal of the prosaic, a peer reviewed outpost of the ordinary and a focus for studies of the unremarkable in life. As Wayne Brekhus points out in the first volume: "The history of mediocrity, the sociology of the boring and the anthropology of the familiar are neglected fields".

Some examples:

Fruit Stickers—The Overlooked Booty of the Lunchroom
Andrea Shiman

Yummy, Steaming Bowls of Mundanity
John D. Schwetman

and even a manifesto:

A Mundane Manifesto (2000)
Wayne Brekhus
Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia

Abstract

This mundane manifesto calls for analytically interesting studies of the socially uninteresting. I argue that the extraordinary draws disproportionate theoretical attention from researchers. This ultimately hinders theory development and distorts our picture of social reality. This manifesto paves the way for an explicit social science of the unmarked (mundane)...

The full manifesto is HERE. 

1981 Vintage Drum Machine

Below is a Movement Systems MCS Drum Computer, details HERE.

Image from HERE.

The ink of a scholar is more precious than the blood of a martyr.

A great piece in the Guardian about the manuscript treasures of Timbuktu HERE.

 

Image of Manuscipt from HERE

Sometimes good comes through adversity.

Ruth Asawa is a Japanese American artist who lives in San Franciso. She is best known for her large and intricate sculptures made from twisted wire. Her work is currently the subject of a solo show at Christies in New York.

Her website is HERE.

During the Second World war she was interned with her family and almost 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who were living on the US west-coast.  In 1943 she was released so that she could study at University.

Below is one of her wire sculptures, more on her site and Christies.

Image of Asawa wire scupture from HERE

The skill of observing... is something that every science student must possess

The Dutch born scientist Geerat Vermeij is a renowned ecologist, marine biologist and geologist who is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Davis. He has achieved success in his chosen fields of observation based science, in spite of being blind since he was 3 years old. Here is a typical paper by him on the academic fields that interest him.

Here is a great piece by him on the importance of observation in science. 

 

A typical image by Haeckel 

The hunters mind in science

"The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve".

E.O. Wilson The Diversity of Life (1992) 

Natural History - past and present

According to the Wikipedia entry on Natural History it is defined as "... the study of organisms including plants or animals in their environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study". Natural history is one of the most venerable threads of observational science with roots that can be traced back to Aristotle. 

The Natural Histories Project is an interesting collection of conversations on what natural history means, hosted by the Natural History Initiative - "a collaborative platform for revitalizing and re-imaging natural history in the 21st century. We are a loose coalition of individuals and institutions dedicated to a re-emergence of natural history".

A less west coast form of natural history, and definitely more hands on, is the Manchester Microscopical & Natural History Society, founded in 1880.

Here is an image from their collection of historical microscope slides. 

I GOT UP

Between 1968 and 1979 the Japanese conceptual artist Mr On Kawara sent two postcards per day on which he had printed the time he had got up. All of the cards list the artist's time of getting up, the date, the place of residence and the name and address of the receiver. Kawara travelled extensively and these daily cards often link into detailed records of his getting up times and local sights. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of 47 of these cards from 1970 covering a visit of Kawara to New York. 

Below one of the New York sequence, I GOT UP 9:47 AM, from FEB 12 1978 (from HERE).

On Kawara does not give interviews or talk about his work. 

He apparently stopped this sequence when the set of rubber stamps he used for the times and addresses was stolen.

Copyright Kawara

 

The Seaboard

There aren't many innovations per year these days in pianos. So it is definitely worth having a look at, and listen to, the new Piano like key board, called  a Seaboard, that has been developed by the London based company Roli.

Image Copyright Roli

Spiral Scratch (1649)

This year, just in time for Easter and the new Pope, there has been a lot of talk about the Shroud of Turin. There is a new TV show, book and now, thanks to the wonder of mobile technology, an app you can download so you can look at high resolution images of the shroud (more HERE).

Although the Turin Shroud is perhaps the most famous example, there is of course a long history of images of the face of Christ. I personally remain skeptical. 

However, there is one particularly remarkable image of the face of Christ that even a skeptic can appreciate - it is an engraving created by the French engraver Claude Mellan (1598-1688). Mellan was known for his unusual technique that used parallel lines of varying thickness to create light and dark in the image rather than the more traditional engraving technique of cross hatching with lines of equal thickness. 

The most famous of Mellan's engravings is an image of Christ's face known as the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, which was engraved by Mellan in 1649.

The whole image is created by the unfolding of a single line that spirals outwards from the tip of Christ's nose. The contrast in the image is created by varying the thickness of this single line and the distance between lines. 

Below is a close up of the centre of the unfolding spiral. 

Full image available HERE.

If best-selling albums had been books instead…

Christophe Gowans is a designer. One of the things he likes to do is take a classic record and re-imagine it as a book cover.

Below are some examples. For details see his site or go to HERE to buy postcard and print versions. 

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure is a celebration of literary names you almost surely have never heard of. Partly because they are all failures, partly because they are all fictional characters. 

The site is currently working through its mission; "A celebration of writers who have achieved some measure of literary failure. Each week a short biography will be posted. After one year, they will all be deleted."

Recent posts have celebrated the lives, and failures, of Wilson St. John, Lord Frederick Rathole, T.J. Waronker, Hermann von Abwärts and The Beasley Collective.

Currently BDLF  is up to number 51 - you have been warned - within a short time these biographies may have disappeared and you may well regret not having read them. It would be a great shame if they were deleted, not only are they funny they are very well written. 

The author of BDLF is a certain C.D. Rose who has recently published with Unthank Books.

 

The Grimace Project

Visualising emotion is a tricky thing to do. The Grimace Project has created a technology to try and do this - it was developed by Thomas Fadrus, Oliver Spindler. Grimace helps to show you what emotions look like. One of their key inputs was Scott MCloud's book Making Comics.

The Grimace System was developed out of a degree project at the Technical University of Vienna. It can render human facial expressions, based on a mixture of 6 essential emotions:

 Images Copyright Grimace

Sperling 1960 - Citation Classic

George Sperling (b. 1934) is an American cognitive psychologist based at the University of California, Irvine. In the early 1960's Sperling began to explore the existence of iconic memory - a very short term form of visual memory. 

After a broad undergraduate science education at the University of Michigan he went on to do an MA and PhD in psychology (the latter at Harvard). As he says on his faculty page at Irvine; "My goal then, as now, was to apply the quantitative and theoretical methods of the hard sciences to the analysis of cognitive processes."

The following is an example of his early 1960's work. It is a Current Contents citation classic write up of  Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 74: 1-29. This citation classic was published in 1979, when Sperling had a joint appointment between New York University and Bell Labs.

Gene Krupa caught in a Paradiddle or two

Gjon Mili (1904 – 1984) was an Albanian-American photographer. He collaborated with Harold Edgerton of MIT and used flash and strobe techniques in his work. He is  best known for the work he published in LIFE magazine including images of Pablo Picasso's light paintings.

Below is one of a series of images that Mili took of jazz drummer Gene Krupa in 1941.

Those interested in what Krupa is doing might want to check out Percussion Instruments and their History by James Blades from 1970 (HERE). 

 

Image Copyright TIME-Life.

The Invisible Gorilla

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons met at Harvard University in 1997, where they began to collaborate on research. In 2004 they received the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology, awarded for "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think," for the experiment that inspired their book The Invisible Gorilla (HERE).

The classic Gorilla selective attention test by  Chabris and Simons involves a short video of about 6 people, 3 dressed in white and 3 in black. The people in the video are passining a basketball between themselves whilst moving around. Participants in the test are asked to count the number of passes of the basketball between the team dressed in white shirts.

During the video a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks across the scene, turns to camera and beats his chest. 

Only 50% of test participants see the Gorilla.  

Their paper "Gorillas in our midst" from 1999 is HERE 

A still from the video is shown below.

 

A Million Times

Here is a still from a clock based installation by Swedish design firm, Humans Since 1982. The video is worth seeing. 

Evolution

Kelvin Okafor is a young British artist, who creates hyper-realistic drawings using charcoal and a variety of pencils. 

In digital images of his finished work it is hard to believe that these images are drawings. 

On his site he has an amazing sequence of 54 images called Mana - Evolution, which shows the stages of the creation of one of his drawings. 

Below is image 30/54 from this sequence.

Image copyright K. Okafor

Winter Sun

This photo was taken on the 27th January in West-Kirby in the North West of the UK. The colours haven't been modified - it was an unseasonal blue sky and it was warm.

Minya Konka

The British travel writer Robert Macfarlane recently published The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, a superb book describing his journeys on land and sea over a couple of years. In this book he has a chapter called Ice, that describes his expedition to Minya Konka, one of the highest mountains outside of the Himalayas (7556 Meters high) (a full extract of this chapter is available HERE). 

Minya Konka is an incredibly tough mountain to climb - Macfarlane claims that up to 1999 more climbers had died trying to climb the mountain than had reached the summit.

Back in 1930 the famous Swiss geographer Eduard Imhof  traveled to Chinese Tibet to  measure the position and elevation of Minya Konka. He was accompanied by Paul Nabholz and Arnold Heim.

While working there Imhof lived in a Tibetan monastery at the foot of the mountain. He estimated that the elevation of Minya Konka was 7590 metres. 

The Eduard Imhof archive has some superb illustrations made by Imhof from this expedition (HERE). 

The image below is one of Imhof's sketches of Minya Konka:

A hidden snake

Abbott Thayer is widely refered to as the father of camouflage. His Wikipedia entry (HERE) says the following;

"Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921) was an American artist, naturalist and teacher. As a painter of portraits, figures, animals and landscapes, he enjoyed a certain prominence during his lifetime, as indicated by the fact that his paintings are part of the most important U.S. art collections. During the last third of his life, he worked together with his son, Gerald Handerson Thayer, on a major book about protective coloration in nature, titled Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern; Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Disclosures. First published by Macmillan in 1909, then reissued in 1918, it had an effect on the use of military camouflage during World War I. He also influenced American art by his efforts as a teacher who trained apprentices in his New Hampshire studio."

A copy of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern; Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Disclosures is available at the Internet Archive to read or download (HERE).

An image of a Copperhead Snake on its own and hidden in dead leaves from Thayer's book is shown below (painted by A.H. Thayer and Rockwell Kent).

 

A piece in the Smithsonian magazine puts Thayer's controversial animal colouration ideas into a broader context (HERE). Early in his career the American artist Rockwell Kent worked  for Thayer.

 

Dazzle

During World War one British and American warships were camouflaged using Dazzle (or Razzle-Dazzle) painting (HERE).

One of the people who was most involved was the artist Edward Wadsworth who supervised the painting of over 2,000 ships and later painted both abstract compositions that look a little like a Dazzled ship and also realistic images of some of the ships he had painted. The image below was painted by Wadsworth and shows Dazzle ships in dry-dock in Liverpool 1919.

The Rhode Island School of Design has an extensive archive of images from the US navy showing some of the dazzle designs used in WW1 (HERE)

Up Goer Five - xkcd

The cartoonist XKCD has a brilliant blueprint of a Saturn 5 rocket annotated with only the top thousand most used words (Up Goer Five). This inspired Theo Sanderson to write an editor that helped people to create prose that only used the top thousand words HERE.  

 

Image Copyright XKCD.

Richard Edes Harrison - working methods

In the February 28th 1944 edition of Life magazine there was a multi-page article describing how Richard Edes Harrison created his distinctive global perspective maps (HERE see page 56). 

The article described Harrison's process - the six steps are summarised below. 

It is interesting to see what ingenuity he needed to create his distinctive views of the World. Standard maps created using the Mercator projection did not give him the specific viewpoints he was after. He therefore directly photographed a globe so that he could get the right perspective distortions of the shapes of countries right and the right curvature of the Earth. 

 The finished map above appeared under the title The Not-so-soft underside. A later version was published under the heading Europe from the South-West in 1944 by Alfred A. Knopf in Look At The World: The Fortune Atlas For world Strategy. 

Images copyright Life