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.
The year.
A year on earth is measured by one complete trip around the sun. Seems simple enough but there is a problem. The earth doesnt travel in a path around the sun that returns it to its starting point. So how do we know when the year starts or ends?
Chicage Sun-Times curmudgeon Terry Savage had a recent fist-shaking post about kids on his lawn giving away “free” lemonade, in which he points out that it’s not really free (the parents paid for it), that giving away a product will lead to negative profit margins and how this is a terrible business lesson for the kids, and now he has a followup in which he points out, again, that it’s not free, et cetera, et cetera.
My recent column about teaching children how to run a lemonade stand seems to have caused quite a furor. In case you missed it, I explained to the young girls — who were giving away their product — that the whole idea of having a business is to figure out your costs and then set a price that gives you a profit. In fact, that’s the basis of our American entrepreneurial, free-enterprise system.
Maybe that was the lesson of his lemonade stand as a child, or would be the lesson if Alex Keaton was your father, but I think he’s just overthinking the problem, or overestimating the teaching value of it. I thought the point of a lemonade stand was to teach kids a lesson about working to earn money, above and beyond taking out the trash, rather than just (possibly) collecting a small allowance. When I was a kid, we charged 2¢ a glass (yes, this was back in the more recent good old days, though I think it went up to a nickel by the time I retired from it and my little brother and his friends took over the business.) There were no discussions or calculations about cost of supplies, profit margins or privileges at the executive wading pool. I was six or so. Teaching us to be entrepreneurs wasn’t the point. The point was that we were going to have to sit out in the hot sun and take turns holding up the sign advertising the stand, and try to get people to stop and buy our product. Exert ourselves, sweat a little and in the interim, be bored. IOW, teach us what an average semi-skilled job was like, and make us not want to do the adult equivalent, so that would be on our minds whenever the ‘rents were convincing us that we needed to do well in school and go to college, so we would have something better to look forward to.
Or maybe they just wanted us out of the house for a few hours, and this was a cheap way of doing it.
Sam Kean is doing a series of blog posts in support of his new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements
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.
Up on the hot, possibly tin, roof.
Zoom into your Roof: Checking the Thermal Performance of Homes
[H]ow can individual citizens determine whether such a costly renovation is worthwhile for their own house? The online project “Zoom into Your Roof” [antwerpen.be] tries to help solve this question through a relatively simple visualization. During the winter of 2009, a small airplane with an infrared scanner made a wide sweeping thermal scan of a large part of Belgium, which resulted in the largest thermographic map currently available online. Inhabitants living within this area are able to select their home address and answer a few questions (such as the angle of the roof). in order to determine for themselves how their own roofs actually perform.
Either the upgrade of the strain of golfing against Judge Smails for $40,000 has left the blog admin software acting a little psychotic lately; I am intermittently not allowed in to post or edit, and then later it acts as though everything is fine. (I will not, will not, will not speculate on the server’s gender, though you may insert your own joke — and nothing else — here.) At the moment I have successfully distracted the beast with some cheese which allowed me to post this, though, so I can apologize for not posting other things.
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.
SFN server will be (or was, depending on when you read this) offline today for an upgrade, ~1700-2100 UTC.
The Baron of Bubbles
The Sultan of Soda
The Ayatollah of Coca-Cola
Cocktail Party Physics: father of fizz
In honor of ” Pepsipocalypse,” and my own inordinate fondness for Diet Coke (which I share with Bora!, as evidenced by the photo at the end of this post, although he’s partial to the sugared variety), it seems appropriate to pay tribute to the grand-daddy of fizzy drinks: British scientist Joseph Priestley. He didn’t actually invent carbonation, which is a natural process: at high pressures underground, spring water can absorb carbon dioxide and become “effervescent.” “Seltzer” originally referred to the mineral water naturally produced in springs near a German town called Niederseltsers, although today, it’s pretty much just filtered tap water that’s been artificially carbonated. No, Priestley is responsible for the artificial carbonation process, along with “discovering” oxygen (more on that, and the caveats, later) and eight other gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
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What to call it: I have previously linked to a Soda vs Pop map