Rhinoplasty, digital

I first posted this on New Savanna on December 18, 2010. I'm bumping it to the top for Leanne, who's written a not-yet-out article on Dürer's rhino.

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I first wrote this back in the early 1990s, before the internet. I firstpublished it at The Valve a few years ago.

A decade or so ago I read an article about appropriation as a BIG THING in the art world. I thought it was silly. And so I did what any intelligent person does when confronted with high-toned silliness, I riffed on it.

I took Albrecht Dürer's famous rhinoceros as my starting point:

I then scanned it into my Mac using a clever device that turned a dot-matrix printer into a low-res scanner. I then created variant images and wrote a bit of text, and voilà! Digital rhinoplasty.

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“Do you think he would mind?”

“Who?”

“Albrecht.”

“Albrecht Einstein?”

“No, Dürer, Albrecht Dürer, the print maker.”

“Mind what?”

“If I appropriated his rhinoceros.”

“What for?”

“I want to do some genetic engineering.”

“Genetic engineering?”

“Yes. I had this dream the other night. A voice kept repeating 'zebroceros' over and over again, with a very deep and meaningful intonation.”

“What's a zebroceros?”

“Well, it must be a cross between a zebra and a rhinoceros.”

“And you want to get into genetic engineering so you can make the cross. Isn't that going to be difficult? I mean, the zebra and the rhinoceros are such very different animals. Do you think the cross will take?”

“Don't see why not. This isn't like ordinary cross-breeding. Here we get right into the genetic material, the information specifying the organism's form and function. We just splice one strand of information into the other and voilà! we've got it.”

“I see. Tell me. Do you think we could make a rhinana?”

“A rhinana?”

“Yeah, a cross between a rhinoceros and a banana.”

“Well, if it's OK with Albrecht. It's his rhinoceros.”

“You mean there's no problem about the rhinoceros being an animal and the banana a plant?”

“Of course not. When you get down to the genes it's all just information. Bits and bytes of biocode.”

“Well, then let's try something between animate and inanimate. Wrapping paper. Yeah, a rhinoceros and wrapping paper.”

“But wrapping paper doesn't have any genetic code at all. No DNA to splice.”

“But it does have a pattern. And the pattern is information, just like the DNA. What should I call it”

“Wrappoceros? Papoceros? Zigzagoceros?”

“Oh.”

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In his classic book, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Ernst Gombrich argued that drawing and painting realistic representations required the creation of numerous schemas from which to craft the image. In particular, the repertoire of available schemas often overwhelmed actual observation. As an example, he offers Dürer's famous print of the rhinoceros (from 1515), which was rather fanciful in its depiction of armor plating. Yet that image seemed seemed to have dictated how European artists depicted the rhinoceros over a century and a half later. Gombrich remarks (pp. 66-67).

When Dürer published his famous woodcut of a rhinoceros [59], he had to rely on secondhand evidence which he filled in from his own imagination, coloured, no doubt, by what he had learned of the most famous of exotic beasts,the dragon with its armoured body. Yet it has been shown that this half-invented creature served as a model for all renderings of the rhinoceros, even in natural-history books, up to the eighteenth century.

When, in 1790, James Bruce published a drawing of the beast [60] in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, he proudly showed that he was aware of this fact: ‘The animal represented in this drawing is a native of Tcherkin, near Ras el Feel . . . and this is the first drawing of the rhinoceros with a double horn that has ever yet been presented to the public. The first figure of the Asiatic rhinoceros, the species having but one horn, was painted by Albert Durer, from the life. ... It was wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts, and was the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted, ever since.... Several modern philosophers have made amends for this in our days; Mr. Parsons, Mr. Edwards, and the Count de Buffon, have given good figures of it from life; they have indeed some faults, owing chiefly to preconceived prejudices and inattention.... This ... is the first that has been published with two horns, it is designed from the life, and is an African’.

If proof were needed that the difference between the medieval draughtsman and his eighteenth-century descendant is only one of degree, it could be found here. For the illustration, presented with such flourishes of trumpets is surely not free from ‘precon- ceived prejudices’ and the all-pervading memory of Durer’s woodcut. We do not know exactly what species of rhinoceros the artist saw at Ras el Feel, and the comparison of his picture with a photograph taken in Africa [6] may not, therefore, be quite fair. But I am told that none of the species known to zoologists corresponds to the engraving claimed to be drawn al vif!

The story repeats itself whenever a rare specimen is introduced into Europe. Even the elephants that populate the paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been shown to stem from a very few archetypes and to embody all their curious features, de- spite the fact that information about elephants was not particularly hard to come by.

These examples demonstrate, in somewhat grotesque magnification, a tendency which the student of art has learned to reckon with. The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.

On the deceptive nature of visual geometry

Another illusion. These two pictures are identical even though the roads look very different. pic.twitter.com/InFvxdMDsG

— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) January 31, 2018

Picturing the Phenomenon: What’s an Abstract Picture?

Two recent posts about Heart of Darkness centered on strange pictures, mathematical pictures. The object of this post is to talk about such pictures, and others equally strange, if not more so. But I wish first to begin with an ordinary photograph, and to think a little, just a little, about how such photographs made and how we understand them.

An Ordinary Photograph

Here’s a photograph of the Empire State Building at night.

Figure 1: The Empire State Building

Though I don’t understand much about the inner workings of my camera or my computer, I nonetheless feel that I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how that picture came to be: I pointed my camera at the Empire State Building, snapped the shutter, ‘developed’ it on my Macintosh, and then uploaded it to the web.

At THIS level of analysis, the level I’m taking in this post, that’s OK. While we know that one can easily monkey with digital photos, I know that didn’t happen. How do I know that? Because I controlled every step of the process. I saw the Empire State Building that night, I took the picture, etc. No one or nothing interfered with the process.

You, of course, pretty much have to take my word on all that. You might suspect, for example, that I didn’t actually take a shot of the Empire State Building and a street lamp. Rather, you suspect, I combined two images. Such things are possible, and quite easy with digital technology. I assure you, I didn’t do that. But, really, that’s all I can do here and now. Offer assurances. I might be lying.

Something Very Small

Now look at this picture:

Figure 2

It’s not a photograph. It’s a line drawing. What’s it depict? We see two spirals connected by rods. Maybe it’s a design for a wrought-iron staircase.

Maybe. But you know it’s not. You know that it depicts (the structure of) a DNA molecule. That’s the illustration Watson and Crick used in the 1953 paper in Nature in which they announced this structure to the scientific world.

How do you know that? Have you seen a DNA molecule yourself, with your unaided eyes. No, you haven’t. They’re too small.

Perhaps you saw it through an optical microscope. No? That’s right, it’s too small for that. The wavelength of visible light is too long to resolve such small structures.

If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, then, how can you know what it is? Because you’ve seen other pictures and have been told that they represent the structure. And you believe what you’ve been told about those pictures; you have faith in the fundamental integrity of the social process needed to inform and support such pictures.

But, how did Watson and Crick come up with that image? What did they look at? They could no more see it with their eyes than you could see it with yours; and their optical telescopes are no better than yours. Well, yes, maybe they did have better optical microscopes. But no such microscope of whatever quality can see such things; that’s a matter of fundamental physics.

What's (a) Google wave?

1. A secret gesture Google employees use to identify one another when they’re on a spy mission in, say, China.

2. A unisex hairstyle available free of charge to Google employees in on-site styling salons.

3. Modeled on ‘the wave’ at sporting events, it’s gesture of solidarity among thousands upon thousands of people in a public place, such as Times Square in New York City, Piazza San Marco in Venice, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

4. Like microwaves, except very much higher in frequency. Used to carry the net traffic of ‘preferred’ users. Or perhaps it’s used in weapons designed to vaporize communications satellites.

5. A super tsunami created when an asteroid plunges into the ocean.

6. A special weave in the fabric of the jerseys required of all ‘inner circle’ Google employees.

7. The pattern of revisions to history books as a consequence of changes in the page-rank algorithm.

8. Earth tremors resulting from the explosion of a Goggle data center as a consequence of a massive viral attack.

9. The gesture Sergy and Larry make to the remaining inhabitants of earth when they set course for Mars in their solar sailer.

Bits about Biology, Brains, and Us

1. Artificial computation on an organic substrate

From the article in XXI Century:

Researchers from Japan and the Michigan Technological University have succeeded in building a molecular computer that, more than any previous project of its kind, can replicate the inner mechanisms of the human brain, repairing itself and mimicking the massive parallelism that allows our brains to process information like no silicon-based computer can.

A relatively new technology, molecular electronics is an interdisciplinary pursuit that may very well prove the long-term solution to validate Moore’s law well into the next century. A molecular computer is made of organic molecules instead of silicon. Chips built this way are not only potentially much smaller but also, because of the way they can be networked, able to do things that no other traditional computer, regardless of its speed, can do.

The original article: Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Ranjit Pati, Satyajit Sahu1, Ferdinand Peper & Daisuke Fujita, Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer, Nature Physics 6, 369 - 375 (2010):

Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 10¹³ instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are performed one after another, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. In contrast, although individual neurons of the human brain fire at around just 10³ times per second, the simultaneous collective action of millions of neurons enables them to complete certain tasks more efficiently than even the fastest supercomputer. Here we demonstrate an assembly of molecular switches that simultaneously interact to perform a variety of computational tasks including conventional digital logic, calculating Voronoi diagrams, and simulating natural phenomena such as heat diffusion and cancer growth. As well as representing a conceptual shift from serial-processing with static architectures, our parallel, dynamically reconfigurable approach could provide a means to solve otherwise intractable computational problems.

2. A woman's touch: Physical contact increases financial risk taking:

A woman's touch is all it takes for people to throw caution to the wind. That's the conclusion of a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. If a female experimenter patted a participant on the back, they'd risk more money than if she just talked to them, or if a man did the patting. The researchers think this comes from the way that mothers use touch to make their babies feel secure.

I think that "explanation" needs a bit more work.

3. British Indian children have substantially better mental health than British Whites

Anna Goodman, Vikram Patel, and David A. Leon, Why do British Indian children have an apparent mental health advantage? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Published online 26 April 2010. Abstract:

Background: Previous studies document a mental health advantage in British Indian children, particularly for externalising problems. The causes of this advantage are unknown.

Methods: Subjects were 13,836 White children and 361 Indian children aged 5–16 years from the English subsample of the British Child and Adolescent Mental Health Surveys. The primary mental health outcome was the parent Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Mental health was also assessed using the teacher and child SDQs; diagnostic interviews with parents, teachers and children; and multi-informant clinician-rated diagnoses. Multiple child, family, school and area factors were examined as possible mediators or confounders in explaining observed ethnic differences.

Results: Indian children had a large advantage for externalising problems and disorders, and little or no difference for internalising problems and disorders. This was observed across all mental health outcomes, including teacher-reported and diagnostic interview measures. Detailed psychometric analyses provided no suggestion of information bias. The Indian advantage for externalising problems was partly mediated by Indian children being more likely to live in two-parent families and less likely to have academic difficulties. Yet after adjusting for these and all other covariates, the unexplained Indian advantage only reduced by about a quarter (from 1.08 to .71 parent SDQ points) and remained highly significant (p < .001). This Indian advantage was largely confined to families of low socio-economic position.

Conclusion: The Indian mental health advantage is real and is specific to externalising problems. Family type and academic abilities mediate part of the advantage, but most is not explained by major risk factors. Likewise unexplained is the absence in Indian children of a socio-economic gradient in mental health. Further investigation of the Indian advantage may yield insights into novel ways to promote child mental health and child mental health equity in all ethnic groups.

4. Top 10 Visual Illusions of 2010

From the 6th annual Best Illusion of the Year contest at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples. Have fun looking at the videos.