Apothecary's Drawer Weblog

Smoke photographs

Ray Girvan — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 18:44:00 +0000

When someone devises a nice visual effect, it's only a matter of time before it turns up in advertising. A while back I mentioned the beautiful colourised Smoke photographs at Graham Jeffery's Sensitive Light. His work inspired other artists such as Myla Kent and others at the Flickr ArtSmoke group. Now, I notice, the technique has been used for the print ads for Cancer Research UK's Smoke is poison campaign; their About the campaign page contains links to PDFs such as these for arsenic and benzene.

Lightning in a block

Ray Girvan — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 20:15:00 +0000

Something pretty for the holidays: Lichtenberg Figures, branching fractals created by electrical discharge, whether from electron beam charging of an acrylic block or from natural lightning strikes (such as the 'lightning flowers' formed on human skin). They're named for their discoverer, an interesting and complex character: never beyond a minor scientific figure, he was nevertheless an influential but little-remembered philosopher, writer and satirist (not to mention the originator of A4 paper). See G. C. Lichtenberg: a "spy on humanity" and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at Wikipedia.

Petri gardens

Ray Girvan — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 03:02:00 +0000

Via MetaFilter, a nice gallery of Petri gardens. artistically embellished images of bacterial colonies in Petri dishes, by Professor Eshel Ben Jacob. his homepage has a brief explanation (PDF) of the science behind the art. More examples at the landscape architecture blog Pruned: see Gardens-in-a-Petri (which references this Yale page on fractal bacteria growth) and its sequels here and here.

The beat goes on

Ray Girvan — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:25:00 +0000

A vanity link: The beat goes on, an article on computer modelling of the heart that I wrote for the issue of Scientific Computing World that was out around Valentine's Day. Check out also Felix Grant's companion piece, The science of the sound of the heart, reporting an experiment with sonification software to test the effect of music on heart rhythm.
      The heart is computationally interesting as a complex 'multiphysics' problem showing phenomena that can be modelled by various approaches, a particular insight being the recognition that common arrhythmias - 'flutter' and fibrillation - involve the onset of stable spiral waves in the excitable medium of the myocardium. Especial thanks, for help with images, go to Dr Kirsten ten Tusscher (Spiral wave dynamics and ventricular arrhythmias); Dr Flavio Fenton of the Center for Arrhythmia Research; and Glenn Lines of the Simula Research Laboratory. Following, more links that I ran into along the way.
      Medical: Commotio cordis (PDF paper), how a baseball can fatally disrupt heart rhythm (more at the The Louis J Acompora Memorial Foundation); Electrocardiography, what those traces actually measure; Atrial Fibrillation Therapy, cardioversion etc; Heart rate sonification; and Robotic Surgery, 'da Vinci machines'.
      Computational: Hearts gone wild, the work of Flavio Fenton and Elizabeth Cherry on simulating fibrillation; Mitacs, various projects on visualising and controlling atrial fibrillation; the Cardiac Simulation Home Page; Cellular Automata spiral waves; and Heart Throb, modelling cardiac fluid dynamics.
      Historical: Ibn al Nafis, discoverer of pulmonary circulation; and George Ralph Mines, victim of self-experimentation?
      Mathematical: 3D Plots of Implicitly Defined Surfaces, a nice Mathematica extension; and Heart Surface, equations that generate the stylised heart shape.

Antikythera again

Ray Girvan — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Very nice! Nature has a new article, In search of lost time, about the latest on the ancient Greek astronomical computer, the Antikythera Mechanism. New work using x-ray tomography has produced more detailed insight into how it worked: see also the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.

TRIZ stories

Ray Girvan — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:42:00 +0000

A while back I mentioned TRIZ, a methodology developed largely in the former Soviet Union for formalising the invention process according to empirical rules. I just ran into a nice TRIZ site, Generator. Unfortunately the main explanatory page is in Russian, but the site is worth browsing for its vignettes about interesting inventions and problem solutions: for instance, use of laser projection to display a Poitiers cathedral in its historically painted state; the idea of using the Arctic as a natural refrigerator for strategic food stocks; communication security via Navajo code talkers; elegant ancient drainpipes that distribute outflow to avoid ground erosion; and so on. There's also a pleasant collection of folktales and anecdotes all with the motif of shrewd solution of a problem, as well as illustrating TRIZ principles. The Sufi stories of Mullah Nasruddin feature prominently.

Blatant self-promotion

Ray Girvan — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:47:00 +0000

For any readers in the Exeter area: this week (Mon Oct 2nd to Sat Oct 7th) there's an exhibit of my photography in the foyer of Exeter Central Library. You can see a few examples on a temporary page here.

YouTube stream-of-consciousness

Ray Girvan — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:41:00 +0000

Absolutely idle evening, skimming YouTube. Amid the dross, there's some very good stuff where you can just wander, following a theme. I'm a bit of a Bjork fan, so there's plenty of interest there, such as this live performance of Bachelorette backed by Haeckel's Kunstformen der Nature biological drawings (also used for this rather trippy musical animation). Talking of sea and music, one of my favourite music oldies is there: Martha and the Muffins' Echo Beach, whose wistful recollection of an idyllic beach - based on Toronto - reminds me of the characters' longing for Shell Beach in Dark City. On YouTube there's a scalp-tingling reworking of this movie as a music video using the perfectly-matched apocalyptic lyrics of Sonne ("Hier kommt die Sonne") by Rammstein. The latter's original video took a different but equally gothic theme, featuring the seven dwarves as miners in thrall to a gold-addicted Snow White. That'll do for now.

Stitch that!

Ray Girvan — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 09:19:00 +0000

One for the the photographers: AutoStitch™: "the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever".
It's amazing: it does exactly what it says on the tin. You just take overlapping photos from a single location, in no particular order, drop them into a directory, and the program stitches them. The algorithm, developed by Matthew Brown and David Lowe at the University of British Columbia, is already being incorporated into several commercial products (it's about 3 years old - see Forbes) - but the free no-frills Windows demo version ought to be better known. It's limited to a spherical projection and the use of AutoStitch must be credited: otherwise no restrictions or royalties apply.

Chinese human female car expert

Ray Girvan — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:16:00 +0000

I shouldn't encourage spammers, but couldn't resist reading one headed "I am Ling Chinese Human Female UK Car Expert". Turns out be from a real contract car hire company in the north of England, Ling's Cars; it's worth visiting as the funniest and most creative sales website I've seen for a long time.

P.S. Pardon the lack of posts lately (very busy with a part-time day job at Joel Segal Books, whose website I just revamped, and other interests like photography and the Bad Science community).

Biomedical Image Awards

Ray Girvan — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 10:46:00 +0000

Via Bad Science, check out the lovely images at the Biomedical Image Awards 2006. I especially like the colour-enhanced scanning electron micrographs like this stinging nettle leaf.

Picasa

Ray Girvan — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 00:14:00 +0000

I'm sure it's well known among photographers by now, but if not, check out Picasa. This is the freeware (for non-commercial use, anyway) photo management program acquired by Google a couple of years ago. I've been getting heavily into photography lately, and keeping a growing image collection organised (e.g. searchable by keyword) rapidly becomes a necessity. Picasa also has a good toolkit of image processing tools and interesting stuff like a Blogger uplink and Web page export.

Kircher, "dude of wonders"

Ray Girvan — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:10:00 +0000

While searching for background on the previous entry, I ran into the excellent Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, a blog in honour of the Jesuit polymath that the Chronicle of Higher Education called Dude of Wonders. "Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible".

Droste Effect revisited

Ray Girvan — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:33:00 +0000

On the subject of recursive images, MetaFilter just cited Mathematical imagery by Jos Leys. I was especially interested in his Droste Effect gallery: images named after the infinite picture-within-picture design of Droste cocoa packaging. A while back (see this Sep 24 2003 posting) I mentioned the work of Lenstra et al at Leiden University in analysing pictures by Escher: Escher and the Droste effect. Jos has generalised on this, using a transformation in UltraFractal to convert plain images to Droste Effect. Here is the maths.

Seamless images

Ray Girvan — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:02:00 +0000

Via Metafilter, a couple of interesting artists. Both specialise in dreamlike images where scenes and objects morph into others: for instance, cityscapes turning into natural landscapes. The work of Rob Gonsalves has a fresh and slightly naive style, with very Escher-like infinite regressions vanishing into the distance. That of Jacek Yerka is rather darker, akin to the style of the surrealists (Dali particularly springs to mind).