I want a doctor to take your picture
So I can look at you from inside as well
Coloured X-Rays of Flowers : Turning X-Ray Into An Art by Hugh Turvey
Category Archives: Art
Damn Near Killed 'em!
Rectified Flowers, and the flickr set
Comment by kottke
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first.
Rebuffing Romantic Rapscallions
Close Examination: Fakes, mistakes and discoveries at the National Gallery, review
Scientific evidence can be invaluable but it has to be used with caution and always in tandem with historical research. For example, Corot’s ravishing plein-air sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct has always been dated to about 1826, soon after the artist’s arrival in Rome. However, the green pigment called viridian that Corot used throughout the picture only became available to artists in the 1830s. The landscape wasn’t a fake and for stylistic reasons couldn’t have been painted later than the mid-1820s. All became clear when art historians did further research and discovered that the firm that sold artists’ supplies to Corot in Paris started making the newly developed colour available to selected customers in the 1820s, long before it came into widespread use.
Tread on Me
I’ve pointed out geodrawing before, in which one uses a GPS receiver to record a track of some artistic merit. There’s a new one up that’s quite an achievement: Traverse Me
The University of Warwick campus map was drawn on foot at 1:1 scale with 238 miles of GPS tracks walked over17 days
…
I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible.
The route was recorded with GPS technology and was walked in stages over the 300 hectare site.
My shoes turned brown in the dry fields and they turned green in the long grass.
Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.
Clavula, Next Stop! Next Stop, Clavula!
Interesting “body as a map” artwork by Samantha Loman
Bony Landmarks – The cranium drawn as a map
Underskin – the body’s various systems drawn as a subway graphic, and there’s no Taconic parkway leading to the clavula (did Ty just make that up?)
Unfortunately only part of the Underskin drawing is shown in high resolution; I found another site with the work that lets you click for more detail
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Other artsy stuff inspired by subway graphics
Design
I found another site that has a slightly more complete answer for how the “fridge of the future” is supposed to work. Nano bio robots upconvert IR into visible light, and send it out of the system. (No, it doesn’t. We call this magic, when we’re in a charitable mood. At other times what we call it involves the biology of used food, sometimes incorporating a male bovine)
But I’ve already said all of that.
The other thing that bothers me about this is that it’s part of Electrolux’s Design Lab competition, and I think they should be embarrassed to have included it. Design is not just aesthetics. If something serves no other function than to evoke a response based on how it looks, it’s art. We like art because it’s pleasing to the eye, or it arouses a certain emotional reaction, or make you think (or some combination thereof). But this wasn’t an art competition. It was a design competition, ostensibly meaning you want the best design. Design brings with it an additional requirement: it has to work.
Design incorporates a lot of things, and it’s not like experimental physicists are routinely mistaken a great designers. We tend to swing to the other end of the spectrum; if it works, who cares what it looks like? We’re the only ones who are going to use it, so why make the controls intuitive? Our experiments typically involve duct tape, parts held together with bits of wire and cables everywhere, and few labels. If you want design, you need to talk to an engineer — s/he will make it work, and do so in a more efficient fashion, put it in a box and make it (somewhat) easier to use. We than measure the quality of design by the attractiveness of the package and the level of user-friendliness, and great design is hard because you are trying to optimize for multiple variables, with often conflicting constraints — one demand might be that it’s small, but another requirement needs it to be big, etc. It’s hard to do all that. But the unspoken part of all of this is that the box has to do what it’s supposed to do — if it doesn’t meet spec, we tend to get mad and demand it be fixed, or give us our money back.
So an item that can’t possibly work can’t be an example of good design. It shouldn’t even get in the door.
The Refrigerator of the Futurama
Zero-Energy Fridge Uses Gel to Preserve Food
No, I don’t think it does. All of the links I found eventually lead back to an Electrolux design competition, which is short on detail. I think “design” here is code for “engineering a bonus but not necessary”
The closest I could find to an explanation of how it works is this:
The zero-energy concept relies on a biopolymer gel that uses luminescence to preserve food items.
I think they dropped the “which hasn’t yet been discovered,” because cooling something to below ambient temperature requires energy. Those ornery laws of thermodynamics are quite insistent on this. And the sad thing about the discussions on tech sites I’ve read is that the main focus is on the goo and whether it would really be odor-free and not sticky, with very little mention of it relying on magic to work.
But it’s easy for me to get a mental image of Fry reaching into a glob of green goo and pulling out a can of Slurm.
UPDATE (6/22): found this
Bio nano robots absorb heat (infrared radiation) and emit it in the visible spectrum – luminescence. In addition, they protect from ultraviolet radiation that can damage the products.
No, they don’t. While it is possible to combine low-energy photons to emit higher-energy ones, the real process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Tomorrow I'm Making Waffles
Making interesting pancakes for his 3 year-old daughter.
Toil and Trouble
The Bubble Chamber is a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles built with Processing. A single super-massive collision produces a discrete universe of four particle types. Particles draw their positions over time resulting in the construction of oddly familiar patterns.
