The below image has an optical illusion. Can you spot it?

Believe it or not - and I didn’t - the blue and the green are the same colour. I had to zoom in in Photoshop to prove it to myself. There’s a close-up here.

Looking again at the full-size image, I can just pick up a green tinge at the edge of the upper-left blue, but that’s all. Impressive. I’d be interested to see a writeup of it at Illusion Sciences. Via Richard Wiseman.

I just received the uni feedback for my secular Christmas cards. My favourite part is where I’m penalised for a lack of visual coherence: if you look at the images, you’ll see one has a white background, while the others are darker. Fair enough - if those are the requirements of the course, sure. But the second year of university has done a stunning job of crushing any interest I ever had in art photography.

The depiction of computers in movies seems to irritate a lot of people. I’ve never understood why. Yes, computers don’t have fancy graphics, large-text access denied messages, mouse-less operation, and you can’t magically hack into anything at will - especially with a gun to your head and, um, other distractions - but it’s not real. It’s a film. Using a computer is not inherently dramatic - filmmakers have to do something.

That said, I was smiling throughout Die Hard 4: it was clearly written sans geek. My favourite part was ”he could download the entire financial data of the US onto a portable hard drive”, when the average portable hard drive would barely hold my photo collection. Incidentally, said financial data could then be taken anywhere and used to move money in an untraceable manner…somehow…

Of course, Die Hard made up for it when Bruce Willis jumped onto an airborne F35. Give and take. And it’s not as bad as the CIA using Norton Antivirus in The Bourne ThirdOne. That was offensive.

Dating site mysinglefriend.com has more Andrews than any other male name. Why is this? The obvious explanation is that potential romantic partners are too intimidated by our awesomeitudemacity to ask us out. It’s a curse¹.

Alternatively, there might just be a lot of Andrews, although this seems unlikely.

Anyway, you too can help reduce the Andrew deficit with the “Random Andrew Generator”, which links single women directly to the Andrew of their dreams. A fully-functional example of this can be found here.

1. though it could be worse [↩]

Hello! I am still alive. Apologies for pulling a vanishing act - I think that’s one of the longest periods I’ve gone without blogging since I started. You noticed, right?

I’ve been in London since last we spoke, sorting out family stuff. It’s been a curious couple of weeks, as - I feel bad saying this - independent of home stuff I’ve actually been having a great time. I photographed the big BHA Darwin / Humanism / Science day, as well as a memorial celebratory service, a book launch, and the International Humanist & Ethical Union international conference. I was also in the audience for the Radio 4 News Quiz, as well as upcoming BBC3 sitcom We Are Klang. Someone flirted with me in a coffee shop. I failed to understand bus routes a lot. And this morning I nearly got splatted.

So a strange mix of highs and lows, but starting to calm down now. I’ll head home - officially the most charming town in the world (they clearly haven’t met the swans) - soonish.

A couple of days ago an uncle of mine died unexpectedly, and I headed down to London to be with family. I’m ok personally - I hadn’t seen him in ten years - but things are generally a little sad. I might be a touch slow at responding for a little while - sorry about that.

I’m in town for a fair bit, as starting tomorrow I’m photographing the European Humanist Federation’s general assembly, which should be fun. Lots of events centered around the big Darwin, Humanism and Science conference on Saturday. I’ll be wandering around in the background, trying not to drop anything during the talks.

I haven’t laughed this much in ages:

I was already in fits, then the backing singers at 1:20 completely took me out.

I’ve just finished the fifth season of LOST, which I think brings me up-to-date for the first time in years, and it was pretty exciting¹. To still be compelling after five years of the same story is remarkable.

I watched the whole thing on the iPhone - after buying it through iTunes - and that’s definitely the way I’ll get it in future. No adverts, no tv announcers saying “and now, it’s a tragic day for…” or whatever, great quality picture/audio, and the ability to watch in bed / on the train / wherever. iTunes syncs the last few unseen episodes without any effort, too.

1. if the tiniest bit scientifically dubious [↩]

‘Migrant Mother’ is possibly the most famous photo in the world. It’s now on Flickr, scanned from the - slightly tricksy - original negative:

It’s tricksy because the negative itself was retouched in the ’30s - can you spot the change? I couldn’t, despite knowing what I was looking for. Then I looked at the original, and the edit is now all I can see. Probably forever. I can’t believe I never noticed it…

I am now sad. That was sad. Really, I am upset.

The first bunch of marks just came in, and I’m forced to conclude my degree is broken.

Theory side: The module this term was ‘Contemporary Photographic Practices’, which is pretty much what it sounds like, if you pretend it’s 1997. One of the guest lecturers actually puts his photos on the Internet, but only one, and I don’t think Flickr was mentioned once. It was all about photobooks and gallery spaces, which are the primary practices of contemporary wanky photography, and I didn’t feel anything at all. Last term’s module, with its focus on anti-scientific Freudian bullshit, annoyed me no end. But this one didn’t even get that far. Sure, I’d be interested in the lecture for 2 hours, but nothing followed me out of the room. I wasn’t all that interested, but there was still an essay to write.

So an essay I wrote. About Flickr. And it was woeful. I managed my time very badly this term, and knew it would come down to two weeks of crazy work+worry. At the same time my personal life had a few unexpectedly exciting turns, and the essay took the hit. I typed it in a day and a half, in my uncle’s flat in London, with barely any research. It should have been ‘critically informed’, and I found one appropriately highbrow article talking about Flickr (it was silly). I made up bullshit theories about gallery-wall-whitespace having parallels with Web 2.0 page layouts, with nothing to back me up. Most of my topics were stuff I remembered reading about online, and quickly googled to fill in the blanks. My references were all blogs and tech sites. I hit 2500 words without a problem, because it was - genuinely - a long blog post. It felt exactly the same as writing for this site, and I handed it in knowing my notoriously sarcastic head lecturer would rip me to shreds, but I didn’t care - I’d handed something in, and it should scrape a pass.

I got a first - 73. This can only be because I know how to structure an essay. There’s no other explanation: that essay went against everything we’ve been taught, and had hardly anything to do with the module! This isn’t me being modest when in fact it was secretly good - it was honestly appalling. In the end, it apparently all comes down to writing style. While this is good for me personally, it’s stupid. That shouldn’t be the point.

Practical side: We’ve only been given the marks for our workbooks, which are are worth ~25% of the final mark when combined with the photographs themselves. My workbook for the ‘Happy Humanists’ project was less than ideal. I can’t claim it was excellent. I can’t even, hand on heart, claim it was particularly good. But it was ok. It had research, written notes throughout the project etc.. The stuff you need. It was, however, a bit of a departure for me by being scrapbook-style. Notes and pictures were pritt-sticked in, and almost everything was hand-written. A similar-style workbook on a different project netted me 64 - a 2:1 - which was fine. Another, a 16-page typed report, got 63. No problem. I’m not great at workbooks, but they get by.

My Happy Humanists workbook scraped a pass: 43 - a low third. That’s enough to get me in trouble - anything below 50 and they’re worried about you. 43 is going to raise questions. I haven’t seen the detailed feedback yet, but it’s going to be damning. I have to hope the photographs themselves do ok and bump my mark up a bit.

But I’m still pissed off - it wasn’t that bad. Jesus. Somewhere in the 50s, sure, but 43? What the hell? Much as I hate to be this guy, I have to mention these are the teachers with whom I had the fairly exciting public disagreement about how much I cared about visual consistency. Plus, one gave me my only other <50 mark, in the first term of the first year - I’ve yet to drop below 60 with any other teacher. Clearly I’m doing something they don’t like.

Hell, maybe it’s deserved and I’m just annoyed at getting such a terrible mark. Maybe my judgment’s off and I need recalibrating. I don’t know. But right now, 43 feels ridiculous.

I’m not actually bothered about workbook scores, above and beyond their repurcussions for my university career. The marks for the photographs themselves are more interesting to me (although increasingly less so, but that’s another post) and I’ve yet to receive those. But these two marks are way, way off. Not impressed.

I don’t buy the Irb Bru story:

Mr Barr is one of only two people in the world who knows the secret recipe for the best-selling Irn Bru drink and the two never travel on the same plane.

Once a month the essences for the drink are personally mixed by Robin Barr in a sealed room at the company’s headquarters in Cumbernauld.

[...] Only one other unnamed person shares the secret but the formula has been written down and is stored in a bank vault somewhere in Scotland.

This is all PR fluff, right? Like the magical secret Coke recipe, presumably. Surely it’s not beyond the wit of chemists to figure out ingredients?

That must have taken some serious work. Kudos.

I just bought Eucalyptus - the new e-reader application for the iPhone. At £6 it’s the most I’ve paid for an app¹, but I’m hoping it’ll be worthwhile - it downloads its books directly from Project Gutenberg, the heroic volunteer-created database of thousands of public-domain texts. I already have all the Sherlock Holmes stories, Alice in Wonderland, the complete works of Byron², On the Origin of Species, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, some early Bertrand Russell and even a Kurt Vonnegut short story³ to keep me going on the next train journey.

First impressions are good: the app works well. The text is easy to read, and appears almost instantly - the latter is particularly important, as I find delays on e-readers maddening. Flicking across the screen produces a fast, non-annoying and aesthetically pleasing page-turning animation (it even takes note of where you grab the ‘paper’, if you look carefully), while the text-size can be increased/decreased with a standard iPhone pinch/expand. It seems to save the last-read-page correctly, for multiple books, and if you were reading a book when the app closed, it goes straight back into it - there’s no need to mess around in menus. It also appears to save an image of the last read page, which it then displays while the application loads in the background, so startup is very snappy indeed. That’s pretty thoughtful. Downloading books is easy, with a built-in search as well as ipod-like browsing of the library, and the ‘processing’ of each file happens smoothly in the background. And it generates book covers around the iconic Penguin design, which is a nice touch.

On the down-side I downloaded a bunch of books and tried to read one while all the others were still processing, and the app crashed. This doesn’t mean much, as iPhone crashes can be related to all sorts of things, but I’m hoping it won’t be common. I’m also a little worried about battery life: the iPhone’s battery isn’t all that hot, and it’ll be interesting to see whether extended reading periods with the backlight on are a drain.

Of course, I haven’t actually tried reading anything on it yet. But I’m nevertheless quite chuffed with Eucalyptus. £6 seemed a lot at first, but I’ve been wanting an e-reader for years, and if the app Just Works like it seems to, I should finally get through plenty of I’ve-always-wanted-to-read-those classics. Excellent.

1. I even balked at £3.50 for Myst (Myst! On a phone! Myst!) [↩]
2. finally in a decent format [↩]
3. thanks to @bengarvey [↩]

If you’ve some time to kill, soy tu aire is worth a look. Just a few minutes of lovely, and the long loading time has its rewards. The spanish introduction roughly translates to:

‘I’m your air’ is a song full of many and few. Conductor and threads going. Of half-truths and lies and has up and down as we wanted to give you something if you could move with the song.

A brush.
Because I’m your air, is pictured here in the air.

Move to where you want, where you ask the song.
We end up with your own work that you can. if you want. see video.

Admittedly that doesn’t help much. Have a play. Via @egwor.