Slow slide into madness

Summary of PZ Myers post about Robin Williams: "a distraction from depressing news about brown people". He does give lip service to the family's grief and then waves it away as unimportant because some political issue does not get enough news coverage. Can you spell "insensitive", PZ? Or is "bad taste" easier to understand?

PZ had been sliding into... something for a long while. He started out with good articles on developmental biology and explaining why creationism is wrong. Nowadays he hardly mentions biology and prefers to just call creationists idiots. (And he is a professor who ought to understand the value of education versus dismissing people with a handwave. Even if they are saying stupid ignorant things - that's more reason to favor education, not contempt.)

But this hijacking of a death to promote a political issue... Even with Myers' blog nowadays consisting mostly of "idiot!", "atheist X says bad things", "minorities are discriminated" and "Israel is evil", this is a new low for him.

Sad to see a relevant, smart person's gradual degradation into rabid activism for a cause-of-the-day. I hope it's just his Internet persona, not his personality.

August 9, 2014

P. L. Travers and Tove Jansson had been both born on this day.

Trippin'

Day one. Madrid. Prado, jamon, las Meninas... No time for Facebook.

Day two. Airplane, Miami airport, Samuel Adams summer ale... No wifi for Facebook.

Day three. San Francisco, Chinatown, three hours of tea tasting, North Beach... No time for Facebook.

Day four. Oakland zoo, San Jose Rosicrucian Egyptian museum, Ethiopian food. No time for Facebook.

Day five. Disembarked at Embarcadero, walked in a big circuit along Market, Polk, Washington, and Powell, took BART to Fremont to meet with Chris, bought Silvia a new tablet, played poker... No time for Facebook.

Day six. Golden Gate park, Japanese garden, Haight-Ashbury steampunk stores, then more Chinatown, dim sum, roast quail... No time for Facebook.

Day seven. Lying in bed with a torn fascia from all that walking on uneven streets. Plenty time for Facebook now, dang it...

The artist's brain: they are both right!

A new neuroscience study surfaced, focused on what makes artists' brains different from non-artists' ones!

The scientists used MRI to find out, put plainly, what areas of the brain got bigger in people who could draw from observation, and in people who went through artistic training, compared to the average.

Their findings?

"Observational drawing ability relates to changes in structures pertaining to fine motor control and procedural memory, and that artistic training in addition is associated with enhancement of structures pertaining to visual imagery."

The changes also seem to be in proportion to artistic skill.

What is noteworthy is that the three structures that visibly develop more gray matter in us artists are in the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, and the right side of the cerebellum. There is no "artistic side" neatly located in the "creative" right hemisphere, as the pernicious myth propagated by Betty Edwards claims. Instead, unsurprisingly, drawing is a motor skill supported by visualization.


The science journalists, of course, are blowing this a bit out of proportion. I have encountered the claims that it means that artistic talent may be innate. Even the long pop-science article published by BBC states that:

"The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate."

The research suggests little of the sort, yet. It is more than equally likely that the changes in the brain are the result of training than preexisting, because some the same areas are enlarged in people who learn fine motor control, like musicians.

The only way it could demonstrate any support for innate talent would be by finding that children who had preexisting enhanced brain areas ended up in art schools. But that kind of study was not done - and children aren't born able to draw, we all have to start from zero. At most, such preexisting enhanced processor would enable you to learn to draw a little faster. But you still have to learn.

Instead, it is now known that the brain is malleable and adaptable. What this enhancement of brain areas means is that with enough exercise, you can learn to draw. With enough exercise, you can learn visual imagination. There is no magic, just hard work.

Here is the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26925271
Here is the original abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914002237

April 12, 1961

Dougal Dixon's Greenworld surfaces in an interview

This is a page from Greenworld, by Dougal Dixon known for his speculative evolution books like the seminal After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Unfortunately, the two-volume work detailing the prolonged human impact on an alien planet had been published only in Japan:

I hope there is going to be an English version. I haven't even heard of this until I stumbled upon an interview with Dixon by Darren Neish which I recommend to read. Dixon and Neish discuss the creation of After Man and its spin-offs, the complications of getting it published, the new Greenworld book, and assorted tasty paleontology. There are illustrations aplenty, including Dixon's sketches and even maquettes.

 Incidentally, Dixon called Man After Man a "disaster of a project" in that interview. This makes me glad: the thing is as abysmal as After Man is delightful, and this dismissal demonstrates his true integrity. He didn't give detail on that, but you can catch hints of him being co-opted into a spin-off which went into ludicrous deviations he was not happy with.

Go read the interview.

Dancers

A housewarming gift for a dancer we know locally.

Ink (Kuretake brush and Micron technical pen) on Strathmore drawing paper.

Oom pah oom pah

Spritzing is not reading

These guys: http://www.spritzinc.com/ are in the news. They claim to have reinvented reading, they even call it "spritzing" in an attempt to go viral on the net, and claim that you can do it at the whopping 250, no, even 500 words per minute!

Problem is, this is a STEP BACK. I, like many people, already read 600+ wpm without their tech, and skim at 1200+ if I don't need full comprehension. I stop comprehending at maybe 1600, but I still get enough glimpse of the text to know if I want to read it attentively.

I know that there are a lot of people who read slower than the speed this app offers. But what the app does is not reading. They flash the text one word or syllable at a time at predefined speed and claim this increases reading speed because you do not have to move your eyes along the lines.

Why is that a problem? Well, they might as well say it increases reading speed because you do not have to move your lips as you spell out every word.

You see, speed reading is exactly about the level of comprehension of written word where you do not have to follow the lines. You just look at the paragraphs and move the eyes only a little side to side, to register the full width of the text if it is too wide, or nearly not at all if it is, say, a newspaper column. As your reading skill grows, you stop focusing on letters, then on syllables, then on words, taking them in whole. Then you begin to take in whole phrases in an instant. Then you begin to be able to glance a few times around a whole paragraph and see its meaning without effort, reconstructing the whole from fragments even out of order.

As an example, I cannot look at a piece of text in English or Russian anymore without comprehending its meaning automatically. It's like not being able to hear a clearly said phrase without knowing its meaning. (I am near-dyslectic in Hebrew, but that is a different writing system.) If you learn "speedreading" the Spritz way, you will never go to that level because you are never shown the whole phrase, you are fed syllables through a straw. And you cannot go back and re-read; reading becomes a linear experience like an audiobook.

They might as well claim to increase your moving speed by teaching you to crawl really fast, instead of letting you run.

Did people lose reading skills so much that this throwback to syllabic reading is what we have come to?

Fairytale Reservation 2014

Illustration for the Fairytale Reservation project (Заповедник сказок).

The Fairytale Reservation, in its fourth year now, is a collaboration between writers and illustrators. Writers submit stories, illustrators pick the stories to illustrate, and the whole resulting collection ends up published as a book. Fantastic stories of all kinds are encouraged.

I ended up illustrating an actual Christmas carol, believe it or not. I mean it as a genre, not a religious holiday thing - a story of redemption and new life triumphant that happens around the longest night at the turn of the year. Here an old ex-military officer who all but lost his will to live after his wife died, finds it again after deciding to play an impromptu, awkward Santa Claus for his grandchildren.

The book is going to come out in the middle of 2014. You can subscribe here: http://kroharat.livejournal.com/381309.html

Print testing

New prints in making. Strips of test printout laid over originals (and in a couple cases, previously calibrated printouts) for color matching by eye.

There is no other way to achieve color fidelity. No matter how good the hardware is, in the end you have to test the actual printout - and tweak, tweak, tweak. You can see my notes on the test strips, specifying what needs to be done to the spot colors and the source images overall.

Primary colors

The pink of sakura flowers is precisely the same pink of spring kimono fabric.

We also have all primaries - red, green and blue - here.

(Photographed in Jerusalem arboretum yesterday. Girl in kimono from here. )

Old books: Manual of Graphic Techniques

I have a number of old (and sometimes odd) books in my library.

Now, my library is heavily skewed towards books on art, picture books for children, art manuals and reference material. And I love used book shops, so I have accumulated a few old and mostly forgotten specimens of treatises on how to make art.

One of these is the Manual of Graphic Techniques for Architects, Graphic Designers, and Artists by Tom Porter, Bob Greenstreet and Sue Goodman. I had first encountered it in a friend's collection, and knew I had to find one of my own.

The Manual is not a single book, but rather a set of four numbered volumes. It was published in 1978.

This is probably the single most disorganized art manual I had ever seen. Its volumes are not thematic; it jumps from topic to topic like a wild antelope, covering bits and pieces on everything from what kinds of pen nibs there are and how to construct the quick-and-dirty perspective plots from an elevation to fine points of silk-screen printing and mixing plaster of Paris. Then it starts all over again, discussing other ways to do perspective plots, page layout for print, using a modelscope and ways to simulate halftone in ink drawings. And so on. Some topics (like silkscreening) are presented only once, but some (like perspective) get sections in several volumes. It is organized somewhat thematically (most of presentation technique is concentrated toward the end, most of the drawing toward the beginning), but is still haphazard enough to make finding something for quick reference a bit difficult.

But what it lacks in organization of material, it makes up in thoroughness.  It covers topics from abstract composition and type design to marbling paper, etching glass and tips on working with glue when making models.

There is little wonder that the contents are heavily leaning towards architect's interests - I was not able to locate Tom Porter with certainty, but Robert Greenstreet teaches at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Wisconsin. But there is a lot of general drawing, plotting and presentation techniques. Not everything here is of use to an artist, but nearly every artist could find something of interest in this book.
Speaking of presentation, the book itself is beautifully designed. It forgoes long text for short, clear snippets with relevant illustrations, arranged in almost comic-book panel layout. The graphics are more reminiscent of technical manuals than of art books, all crisp black and white, relenting for only a few pages to color. Even the typeface the text is set in is reminiscent of a typewriter: each page feels like an architect's presentation. And the condensed but very readable layout matches the very practical content. This is not a theoretical book; it is hands-on and focused on you getting the job done.

Of course, any art manual dating from before the personal computer revolution inevitably reads a little like a history of forgotten techniques. There are a lot of pages in the Manual dedicated to methods which are no longer used or fallen into disfavor. But for me, it only adds to the charm. And just like knowing how to do calculations in one's head or on paper is slower than using an electronic calculator, but gives you a ground on which to base your intuitive grasp of arithmetic and predictive skill, knowing how to plot a perspective by hand greatly enhances your intuitive grasp of its laws. History is not dead; the past still influences the present with tradition, terminology, context.

That's why I love old books.

Africa

In 1903, the British government had offered the revitalized Zionist movement a strip of land in Uganda.

The Ottoman empire held what is now Israel, Jordan and parts of Syria under its rule. They weren't in any hurry to let the Jews live there, and large parts of Europe, especially Russia, also didn't like the Jews much. By early 1900s, another wave of pogroms in Russia sent the Zionist Congress seeking an urgent escape way, and they did consider Africa as a very possible venue. Some considered it as refuge  until the return to the actual historical Land of Israel could be made; some thought that any place to live in peace would be better than living in hostile countries, historical ties or not; and some thought that temporary solutions often become permanent, and agreeing to go to Uganda would de facto void their claim to the Land of Israel. Nonetheless, the Zionist Congress went as far as sending a investigatory expedition there, which found that the climate was suitable but the land was wild, and the local Maasai warlike. In 1905, they decided to decline the Uganda solution.

This tiny piece of history is still remembered in Israeli politics, however.  Uganda is tossed around whenever someone gets accused of not caring about the historical ties of the Jewish nation to the Land of Israel, and putting the importance on a safe haven alone.

So you occasionally get little puns like this final project of design student Yoav Gati, fusing the Israeli paraphernalia with African motifs. Not that it would really happen if the Jews had settled on the Mau Escarpment in what is now Kenya: they insisted on carrying their old colors and symbols everywhere, and though the orange-green-yellow-blur-violet flag is quite decorative, they'd probably still fly the same blue-and-white one anywhere.
 

I find it highly ironic, though, that Yoav's takes on the African-Israeli currency actually look better than the real modern Israeli currency:

Dancer lighting study

Lighting calculation for a picture in progress. This is easily the most complicated study of this kind I've done to date.

Drawn in black and grey pencil. The stroke direction follows the light angle: this is to keep track of the correct angle at all times.