Now you don’t…
Camouflage– cryptic coloration– is common in the majority of species that have lived on earth; but military camouflage is a relatively recent development. Through the early 19th Century, almost all soldiers tended to dress in bright colors chosen precisely to make them more identifiable on the battlefield; it was during World War I that camouflage found common use.
The earliest military camouflage drew on the work of zoologist and artist Abbott Thayer, applying lessons from the animal kingdom to secreting troops and tanks.
But World War I was as importantly a naval war. Norman Wilkinson, a marine painter [and your correspondent's relatively distant ancestor] who was in the Royal Navy, is credited with being the first to develop camouflage for ships– “dazzle,” a kind of camouflage that is “disruptive” like zebra’s stripes. The Royal Navy allowed him to test his idea; and when the test went well, Wilkinson was told to proceed… but was given no office space. So he went to his alma mater, the Royal Academy, and was given a classroom. Wilkinson hired Vorticist Edward Wadsworth to be a port officer in Liverpool, England and to oversee the painting of dazzle ships. In 1918, Wilkinson came to United States to share his dazzle plans. 1,000 plans were developed through this partnership.
One of Wilkinson’s U.S. collaborators was Maurice L. Freedman, the district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation (a precursor to today’s Merchant Marine). Maurice’s job was to take the plans, adjust them if necessary, then hire painters (artists, house painters) to paint the ships accordingly.
Freedman, who attended the Rhode Island School of Design after the war, donated the plans and photos in his collection to the Fleet Library at RISD. Now (through the end of March) those plans are on display at the library– and online.
As we dress discretely, we might recall that it was on this date in 1258 that (a decidedly un-camouflaged) Hulagu Khan (a grandson of Genghis) and his Mongol force sacked Baghdad, and brought the Abbasid Caliphate (source of, among other marvels, algebra) to an end.
Scaling away…
From Fotoshop on Newgrounds, “The Scale of the Universe“– in the spirit of xkcd’s nifty toon, a wonderful Flash re-do of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten– an animation that lets one scroll through the orders of magnitude of existence.
Just click here (and then click “Play”)…
As we try to remember which pill makes us larger and which one makes us small, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that Joanne Woodward received the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
You say tomAto, I say tomahto…
All one needs to know about why the Superbowl played out as it did…
“Fritzcrate,” a Swedish music blogger, found himself with some down time, and then put it to good use:
Yesterday RyanAir changed my plans. Today I changed my plans, too. I did not feel fit enough to start building my SoundCloud / Echonest comment based remix machine and hacked around, but did nothing real this morning. After reading about the new Metreo Charts in last.fm’s API I finally built “My City vs. Your City“– a JavaScript based app that compares to what artists people listen to in different cities.
One can give it a whirl– comparing any two cities from a long and global list– here.
As we celebrate the rich and diverse pageant that is life, we might spare a grateful thought for the extraordinary Jules Verne– originator of last Thursday’s Almanac item and imaginative writer non pareil. He was born in Nantes on this date in 1828.
Best known for his novels A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and The Mysterious Island (1875), Verne is the second most translated (individual) author of all time, behind Agatha Christie. He is considered, with H.G. Wells, the founder of science fiction.
Verne was startlingly prescient: Paris in the 20th Century, for example, describes air conditioning, automobiles, the Internet, television, even electricity, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts, developed years– in many cases, decades– later. From the Earth to the Moon, apart from using a space gun instead of a rocket, is uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program: three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula– from “Tampa Town” ( only 130 miles from NASA’s Cape Canaveral)– and recovered through a splash landing. And in other works, he predicted helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and the existence of underwater hydrothermal vents that were not invented/discovered until long after he wrote about them.
Now, in addition to penicillin, we can credit mold with elegant design…
Quoting Science, Jim Nash at True/Slant reports on researchers at Hokkaido University who have used mold (Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold often found inside decaying logs) to design a transit system… and found that our fungal friends did a very good job indeed.
The Physarum polycephalum built a replica of the Tokyo train system in 26 hours that’s just about as efficient, reliable and “expensive” to run as the real thing.
Slime mold expands from “Tokyo” to connect to oat flakes representing surrounding cities
…the scientists created a map of the Tokyo metro area using oat flakes for the major cities. Then they put a gelatinous blob (technically, a plasmodium) of Physarum on “Tokyo,” and sat back to see what would happen.
Within about 12 hours, the mold had covered the area with a thin and wet veined sheath of itself. By the 26th hour, the sheath was gone, replaced by mushy tunnels connecting the flakes. The tunnels mimicked Tokyo’s transit system…
…scientists think they can take what they’ve learned about self-organization from the slime mold and apply it to the construction of communication networks and other similar systems.
The whole story is here.
As we revel in the excuse to continue to put off cleaning our refrigerators, we might recall that it was on this date in 1812 that the largest (non-subduction zone) earthquake in U.S. history was recorded. One the last in a series of roughly 1,000 tremblers to hit the New Madrid, MO area, the February 7 quake measured 8.3 on the Richter Scale; it destroyed New Madrid, and was felt as far away as New York City and Boston, Massachusetts, where church bells were made to ring. (The 1906 San Francisco Quake registered at about 7.8, and was felt over a much smaller area.)
New Madrid. MO
A model citizen…
Michael Paul Smith is a photographer and model builder who’s combined those passions to create an album of idealized photos from his past:
The telephone pole, stop sign, the white house and the tree are real and are about a block away from the models. The models themselves are sitting on a table.
What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.
And like a dream, many of the buildings show up in different configurations throughout the photos. Or sometimes, the buildings stay put and the backgrounds change. Visually, this is heading towards the realm of ART.
NO PHOTOSHOP WAS USED IN THESE PICTURES. IT’S ALL STRAIGHT FROM THE CAMERA.
It’s the oldest trick in the special effects book: line up a model with an appropriate background and shoot. The buildings are 1/24th scale [or 1/2 inch equals a foot]. They are constructed of Gator board, styrene plastic, Sintra [a light flexible plastic that can be carved, and painted] plus numerous found objects; such as jewelery pieces, finishing washers and printed material.
Spend more time in Michael’s history here. And check out his other sets of model shots– amazing.
As we let our fingers do the walking down memory lane, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed the first patent for an integrated circuit (U.S. Patent 3,138,743). In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem. Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
