Just spent a very fun lunchtime at work filming some video.
For a secret project.
Stay tuned.
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Lunchtime video
Thursday, 22 March, 2012Morning photos
Wednesday, 21 March, 2012
Got up early this morning to take photos at Collaroy. Sunrise was pretty poor, but I got this shot, which I think turned out well.
Webcomics stolen for Android app
Tuesday, 13 March, 2012An Android app developer is using Darths & Droids, plus the work of many other webcomic creators, without permission or even prior knowledge, and making money off it with advertising. I’ve contacted the developer and asked him to remove Darths & Droids from the app. You may want to spread the word to other webcomic communities.
The Intern Menace
Thursday, 19 January, 2012Spent a fun lunchtime today with our group of a dozen or so summer interns at work, helping Andrew S. show them how to swede a movie. We’re running a short film competition for the interns, with fabulous prizes for the best film. The idea is to get them to use cool Canon equipment and have some fun.
So today we gave them a lesson in how to make a short film. And to do so, we recreated Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. From the collective memory of the interns (without help from Andrew and me, and without any reference to a script or other material). And we shot the whole thing in one lunchtime.
We did a total of 16 scenes. Jar Jar died in the third scene. Palpatine became President of the Galaxy by winning a “Ben Hur” race, when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan’s ship crashed into R2-D2 just before the finish line. But the people weren’t happy and attacked Palpatine in a mass fight scene. And in the final scene, Jar Jar came back to life, but Qui-Gon and Mace Windu killed him again.
We filmed it on the lawn in front of our building. Several onlookers were eating lunch nearby – I hope we kept them entertained!
Imagination in adults
Wednesday, 11 January, 2012I recently read this question and answers in “The Last Word” column in New Scientist. I had to type it out and share it. This is a selected extract of the answers, with my emphasis added.
Question: Why are adults and teenagers less imaginative than children?
Answer 1:
I’m assuming that by “imaginative”, the questioner is thinking of such things as “if you plant budgie seed, do budgies grow?” If an extra-terrestrial asked such a question, you wouldn’t think they were imaginative, you would think they had limited understanding and experience of life on Earth, or perhaps the strangeness of the English language.
If imagination is what produces inventive, speculative fiction, and then turns that fiction into a reality, then it is a quality that is not lost as people get older.Answer 2:
The answer is that they are not. Children are happy to imagine a fat gentleman can make a single sledge pulled by reindeer fly and become capable of delivering presents to half the world’s children, that the said gentleman is capable of stuffing himself and these presents down chimneys far too restrictive to accommodate either him or the presents, and all this in the space of 24 hours. Adults can still imagine this, but are more sceptical.
Children show no inhibition in putting their imagination into words because even if their propositions are outrageous, they will be indulged by adults. Adults keep theirs to themselves because they know they will be either exploited, challenged, laughed at, or arrested.Answer 3:
Many young children’s imaginative observations and questions are to do with not understanding how such things as behaviours, objects, and processes are categorised. As we grow we learn a staggering array of social and physical facts: trees cannot walk, fish do not arrange birthday parties, and so on.
Asking “imaginative” questions that are across categories is critical for learning about how the world works and is, fortunately, seen as charming in small children. However, in older children similar observations may be seen as “proof” that basic understanding about how objects, animals, or processes work or are categorised hasn’t been learned. As a result, the child may be teased or told off for being babyish or silly.
Our socio-cultural system values logical, rational, linear thinking higher than intuitive, divergent, imaginative thinking – unless someone has made a lot of money from being imaginative with a novel, film, or invention. People who think “sideways” or in imaginative ways are frequently dismissed or admonished by peers, parents, and teachers for trivialising, daydreaming, or messing about. They are not being s sensible, serious, or responsible grown-up. As no-one likes to be a social outcast, most people censor and inhibit their “silly” or imaginative thoughts.
Imaginative thinking like any other kind of thinking is a skill and it atrophies with lack of use. This is why so many adolescents and adults are perceived as being less imaginative than children.
Those of us who continue to work with imaginative thinking throughout our lives can comfortably give 5-year-olds a run for their money. Real creative thinking – whether in art, literatures, science, or engineering – demands we play with and deliberately mix up categories and types to come up with new ways of seeing existing situations or problems.
To this I add:
Revel in your imagination. Revel in the fact that it is more mature and knowledgeable than the imagination of a child, and thus can come up with far more interesting flights of fancy and can lead to creative output of high quality. Exercise it. Imagine something weird, strange, or amazing every day.
And, at least occasionally, do something with those imaginings. Turn them into projects, or artworks, or writing.
You don’t have the excuse that you’re not as imaginative as a child.
Muppets
Tuesday, 20 December, 2011After Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and Gonzo, who is the next most important/significant Muppet?
iTunes by genre
Wednesday, 7 December, 2011Putting all my filed* music on to my iPad and exploring it with the “Genre” navigator reveals to me the following:
- Alternative & Punk: 43 songs
- Australian Pop**: 165 songs
- Australian Rock: 622 songs
- Classical: 136 “songs” (really movements)
- Classical Crossover: 25 songs
- Comedy: 56 songs
- Country: 80 songs
- Folk: 104 songs
- Holiday: 15 songs
- Jazz: 20 songs
- Latin: 52 songs
- Musical: 304 songs
- New Age: 135 songs
- Pop: 280 songs (non-Australian)
- R&B/Soul: 20 songs
- Rock: 1059 songs (non-Australian)
- Soundtrack: 544 songs
- Steampunk***: 13 songs
- Swing: 46 songs
- World: 42 songs
I still have a bunch of CDs to rip which will add stuff, mostly in the Soundtrack and Classical genres. I prioritised ripping popular music when I started the long process. The iPad (and iTunes) has these cool genre icons for most of these, but very annoyingly doesn’t have one for Musical. Nor Swing. (Nor Steampunk, but that’s kind of understandable.) It’d be nice if there was an easy way to add custom genre icons (of which there are lots), but apparently you need to dig through the guts of jailbroken code to do so, which isn’t my idea of fun.
* What’s the right word here? It’s not “digitised” because music on CDs I haven’t ripped is already digital. It’s not “ripped” because I’ve bought and downloaded many songs that aren’t ripped from CDs.
** Yes, I sub-genre-fy my pop and rock stuff into Australian and non-Australian. It helps split up two large categories into more manageable and searchable chunks.
*** Yes, Steampunk! I grabbed a free concept album. Some of it’s pretty good. “Clockwork Heart” in particular is brilliant.
Mahon Pool at Dawn
Sunday, 23 October, 2011
I got up at 04:45 this morning to head out to Mahon Pool at Maroubra for a photo shoot. Unfortunately the sky was a bit too cloudy for anything really spectacular, but I got a few decent shots. Then went to a cafe and spoiled myself with eggs benedict for breakfast. :-)
iTunes sorting
Thursday, 8 September, 2011I’ve been adding a lot of music to my digital collection recently, both by buying some stuff and ripping CDs I own. And so I run into the same old problems with the way iTunes sorts music. Actually it’s even worse on an iPod, because there’s no fancy GUI that you can customise with different columns and views and stuff. You’re stuck with selecting your songs by artist, by album name, or by composer. The problem is if I select by artist, part of the “B”s looks like:
- Mike Batt
- The Beatles
- Bee Gees
- Jodi Benson
- Berliner Philharmoniker
Okay, The Beatles and Bee Gees make sense. However, Berliner Philharmoniker is a symphony orchestra. The two albums performed by them that I currently have on my iPod are Holst’s “The Planets” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I also have some Beethoven performed by other orchestras. However, the name “Beethoven” is not on my artist list, because he’s a composer, not a performer! If I want to find Beethoven stuff on this list, I need to look up all the different orchestras that perform his work. And each different orchestra has an unrelated bunch of works by different composers.
Who are Mike Batt and Jodi Benson, I hear you ask? (Okay, some of you probably know already.) Mike Batt composed the stage musical version of The Hunting of the Snark, based on Lewis Carroll’s poem. It was recorded by several artists, and Batt himself performs one song on the album. The rest of the album is scattered amongst several other artists’ names on the iPod artist list. Jodi Benson is the voice of Ariel, The Little Mermaid, who performs two songs on the movie soundtrack album. Again, the other songs on the album are scattered through the artist list.
So, on a quest to find all my Beethoven in one convenient location, I switch to selecting by composer, where the “B”s look a bit like this:
- Mike Batt
- Garry Beers, Tony Bruno, The Matrix, & Shelly Peiken
- Garry Beers, Andrew Farris, & Michael Hutchence
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Chuck Berry
- Berry, Buck, Mills, & Stipe
- Berry & Willis
There are about a bazillion composers in this list. Sometimes a rock album will have songs by a dozen different composers! Beethoven is there, but he’s surrounded by thousands of composers I don’t care about, most of whom have one songwriting credit on some rock album. That’s no good.
And how do I find the entire Hunting of the Snark or Little Mermaid, should I wish to listen to the entire albums? I have to switch to a third view, the albums view. This view is not so bad, it does list all the albums as whole items, but the albums by any given artist (or composer) are all split up.
The solution to this? Well, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. There are web pages and blog posts and forum questions all over the net with people asking how to sort their music better in iTunes. And there are no good answers. One common trick is to move the composer of classical works into the “Artist” field, so you see Beethoven in there with The Beatles and Bee Gees. But then the actual artist has to be deleted, or moved into some other field. It seems nobody has come up with a decent solution to this problem.
I was lamenting this fact at work today, when Andrew suggested that iTunes needs a “Primary” field, which is the primary sorting field you want to use for each album. It can be a radio button that selects one of either the artist, the composer, or the album name. For most stuff it defaults to the artist; for music marked as “Classical” in genre, it defaults to the composer; while for compilations, musicals, and soundtracks, it defaults to the album name. Then you can have a list that uses the Primary field to index all your music, and you’ll end up with a list that looks like:
- The Beatles
- Bee Gees
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- The Hunting of the Snark
- The Little Mermaid
Ta da! All your music sorted into one list in a sensible way! You can find everything by the most likely name you want to use, and with no superfluous data cluttering up the list.
How about it, Apple?
Origami notes
Friday, 26 August, 2011We had a brilliant lunchtime seminar by a guest speaker at work today. She talked about origami.
I wasn’t sure what to expect – if it’d just be demos of paper folding, or cool models that people had made, or what. There were both of these things, but there was much more. The speaker is doing a Ph.D. in statistics, so has a strong mathematical background. She started by showing some examples of origami with a slide presentation. But then… she went to the whiteboard…
She presented origami as a composition of two functions: a first one-to-one (and thus bijective) mapping from a flat sheet of paper to a 3-dimensional folded version of that sheet of paper – specifically a folded version which produces a number of points that can be used as the basis of extremities of a model (for example, animal limbs, fingers, horns, etc); and a second function mapping that 3-dimensional structure to a tree diagram with nodes at end points and junctions. The second mapping doesn’t preserve point correspondences or distances, but (and she proved this as a theorem) points on the tree diagram corresponding to points on the sheet of paper are separated by a distance less than or equal to their separation on the paper.
The upshot of this is that you can sketch a three-dimensional stick figure of anything you like, with correctly proportioned stick lengths; then map that on to a flat sheet of paper such that you produce a tree with nodes and branches in analogous positions such that the distances between them are equal to or greater than the corresponding distances in the stick figure; then from there you can apply a deterministic algorithm to figure out the arrangement of mountain and valley folds to produce the points at the nodes. There are programs that can do this and solve the fold pattern for any desired stick figure in a few minutes.
The result is a map of exactly how to fold the sheet of paper to produce a 3-D model that resembles your stick figure, with the correct number, arrangement, and lengths of all the extremities. From there it’s a simple matter of subtly modifying the shapes of the points with additional folds to produce an accurate model of your desired shape. She showed an example of a buck deer with four legs, a tail, a head with a nose, and two antlers, each with 4 distinct points. The resulting tree has 14 leaf nodes, and produces a complex fold map, but it’s perfectly doable, and the resulting origami model looked amazing.
I was utterly blown away. I always figured origami artists created new models by trial and error and months of hard work. But apparently you can do it with a stick figure sketch and a simple piece of mathematical computer code, in a few minutes. I should stress this only produces the basic “stick figure” form, and the subtle shaping of a 14-pointed piece of folded paper into a realistic deer shape still takes artistic talent, but still, I was amazed that the hard structural part of the work was so tractable and solvable by a beautiful application of mathematics. It shows how mathematics can be applied to surprising fields and come up with usable models and solvable answers for problems that seem unapproachable any other way. Very nice stuff.