Monthly Archives: February 2012

Finding Physics in Everyday Objects

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Finding Physics in Everyday Objects from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

I spent part of the summer of 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, attending a month-long workshop for young scientists organized by the Santa Fe Institute, a research center for complexity science. Out of the dozens of interesting young scholars participating, the most memorable is certainly Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan who was a senior graduate student at the time and now works as a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. Maha, as he instructed us to call him, also works in physics and mechanical engineering.

In the video above, you can listen to Maha linking patterning in nanotubes with the wrinkling of elephant trunks, sharing his deep intuition about the physical world in such a gentle way that even the non-mathematically inclined can appreciate the rich beauty and poetry of his approach to understanding natural phenomena. Listen also to his fascinating explanation of the difficulty of folding maps, a solution found in natural systems, and an approach devised by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura for folding large solar panels in space travel.

In Sanskrit, the word maha means great, which seems an appropriate way to describe Prof. Mahadevan.

 

What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?

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This is a topic of general importance to everyone in the seminar. No doubt you have had the opportunity to make use of the information in the Wikipedia for your homework or research. You have also, no doubt, observed some of your professors (including me) sometimes cite the Wikipedia. The ones who don’t may be using the Wikipedia privately without admitting so publicly. The fact of the matter is the Wikipedia is a very convenient and often compelling source of information about most common topics, and a wide range of uncommon ones too. But is the Wikipedia a valid source for studying or conducting research? Let’s see what that venerable institution, Harvard University, which ranks at the top of most rankings of academic institutions, has to say about the matter. When I was an undergraduate student, Harvard was my dream graduate school and, in fact, I  was accepted into the Harvard PhD program. But I found my guru elsewhere so, finally, I did not enroll at Harvard. However, when it comes to academic policy, one can do much worse than have a look at what Harvard does. In Harvard University’s official pages on using sources we find the following statement (page accessed 20.02.2012):

There’s nothing more convenient than Wikipedia if you’re looking for some quick information, and when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research), you may get what you need from Wikipedia. In fact, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts.

Nevertheless, when you’re doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. (Case in point: Four years ago, an Expos student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a small town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry.) Some information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not review the site’s entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this source for your essays.

The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to use basic reference materials when you’re trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the library is stocked with introductory materials, and the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you’re writing about.

 

This position on the use of the Wikipedia as a source is fairly close to my own opinion. I would explicitly add, however, that no source should be categorically excluded. To do so is the equivalent of burning (or banning) certain books – the sign of an authoritarian, or at least, elitist mindset. Instead, what is needed (when using any source, for that matter) is the ability to evaluate the quality and reliability of the source. Within the Wikipedia itself, you will find a broad spectrum of reliability. One of the merits of regularly using (and preferably contributing in some way) to the Wikipedia, is that this offers a training ground for honing one’s ability to evaluate the quality of a source.

As a guideline I encourage using the Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic and pointers to the primary and secondary literature on a topic. But it should not be your only entry point into the literature and certainly not the final source you consult. Moreover, one needs to constantly bear in mind the nature of the Wikipedia, the manner in which information is added, and the inherent limitations. The standard of articles seems to vary significantly by topic. Articles in rapidly developing technical areas such as computer science and media technology can be of fairly high quality, often containing information and citations to current primary sources that cannot be found in more archival media such as books or journals, as these suffer publication lag. At the other end of the spectrum are articles about controversial topics such as political disputes. In these cases, it may be more instructive to read the behind-the-scenes disputes (talk pages) about what is to be included or excluded from the main article, than it is to read the article itself, because this offers a quick look at various conflicting viewpoints.

In summary, the Wikipedia is a novel and exciting development in the cooperative   organization and communication of knowledge. It remains to be seen what it will become, but the Wikipedia is worthy of our attention and should not be banned or dismissed offhand.

Virtual Kyoto Gardens

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Kyoto’s own Mercury Software has put their excellent  360° panoramas of Kyoto gardens online, I learned yesterday afternoon from shacho Ian Shortreed, when I bumped into him buying bread. The virtual tours of two dozen or so of Kyoto’s finest temple gardens run in Flash served from Amazon S3 servers. Definitely worth an extended contemplative visit!

A decade ago, I made use of some of Ian’s work in my presentation at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference in San Antonio, Texas. Related work on a shape-processing based analysis of dry landscape gardens (枯山水) was later published in a short paper in Nature magazine and a more extensive one in the philosophy journal Axiomathes.

Though their main business is in multi-lingual writing tools, Mercury also sells the iTabi, a wabi-sabi iPhone/iPod pouch available in traditional Kyoto textile designs.

Izis is at Isetan

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Israëlis Bidermanas, nickname Izis, was born in Lithuania in 1911, and moved to Paris to study painting and escape anti-semitism. Bidermanas survived a Nazi prison camp and was a member of the French resistance during WWII. After the war he was active as a photojournalist making humanist street photos mainly in Paris and other locations, such as the debris of London in the aftermath of WWII. He seems to have been fascinated by the circus and his portfolio includes many photographs of circus performers and audiences.

The show at Isetan, in the Kyoto station building, ends on February 26th and is well worth seeing.

イジス写真展 －パリに見た夢－ IZIS PARIS DES RÊVES

2月2日(木)～2月26日(日)［会期中無休］
開館時間：午前10時-午後8時(最終日は午後5時閉館)
入館締切：各日閉館30分前<最終日：午後5時閉館>
入館料：一般 800円(600円)/高･大学生 600円(400円)/小･中学生 400円(200円)

 

cagefest

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This year marks the 100th birthday of John Cage, who is a kind of patron saint of this seminar. I’ve just noticed that Prof. Clark Lunberry, University of North Florida, is organizing cagefest in celebration of the John Cage centenary. The festival runs from March 24th  – 29th in Jacksonville, Florida with a full program of concerts, performances, and exhibitions. Dutch sound artist Jaap Blonk will perform at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the festival.

Clark was a guest speaker in the seminar in July 2011. Atsushi Nishijima, who was a guest speaker in May 2011, has been organizing John Cage centenary count-down events for the past few years, in Kyoto and elsewhere in Japan. You can see Nishijima-san on rainstick in a video from one of the countdown events held at the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, in November 2011.

March should be a very nice time to visit Florida, but unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be attending the Jacksonville cagefest.

Oskar Fischinger’s Lumigraph and The Time Travelers

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(c) Fischinger Trust.

This entry is a postscript to the one on the Cinejukebox, I just want to point out a further example of avant-garde media art technology showing up in a kitsch mass-market setting.

Starting in the late 1940’s animation and visual music pioneer Oskar Fischinger developed a new interface, the Lumigraph, that allowed coloured light to be played expressively in the way one would play a musical instrument. The device did not output sound but was often performed with musical accompaniment. Fischinger hoped to eventually make the Lumigraph available commercially, but as with so many other experimental technologies, this never happened. The following excerpt from the Wikipedia indicates how the Lumigraph was played:

The instrument produced imagery by pressing against a rubberized screen so it could protrude into a narrow beam of colored light. As a visual instrument, the size of its screen was limited by the reach of the performer. Two people were required to operate the Lumigraph—one to manipulate the screen to create imagery, and a second to change the colors of the lights on cue.

This seems to be a very early example of a touch-screen, or at least tactile input device, that are currently changing the way people use computers.  I will not write in detail about the Lumigraph today, but it certainly deserves a closer look and I plan a more detailed entry sometime in the future. For the time being, here is Fischinger’s sketch of the Lumigraph (click for larger image on the web site of the Oskar Fischinger Trust):

(c) Fischinger Trust.

What I would like to make a note of here is that, as with the music visualizer in the Cinejukebox, the innovative Lumigraph shows up in a highly kitsch cultural offering of the day, Ib Melchior’s 1964 B-grade science-fiction movie, The Time Travelers.

Theatrical release poster for SciFi film "The Time Travelers" (1964)

An excerpt from The Time Travelers, with the scene in which the Lumigraph (called Lumichord in the film) appears, is currently on YouTube:

The Lumichord appears in the film as a “love machine” – not part of Oskar Fischinger’s intentions. It appears that the actress does not touch the controls during the performance, which is likely mimed.

There is an account of the Lumigraph, “Writing Light”, by Elfriede Fischinger, wife of Oskar, online at the Center for Visual Music. A short video clip of a 1969 performance on the Lumigraph by Mrs. Fischinger is available on the CVM’s Vimeo channel:

Lumigraph Film (c. 1969) by Elfriede Fischinger (excerpt) from CVM on Vimeo.

[1] William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, John Libbey Publishing (2004).

For more material about the Lumigraph start with a brief look at the Wikipedia article, then proceed to the materials online at the  Oskar Fischinger Trust as well as the Fischinger pages at the CVM.

N.B. None of the images or video clips in this post is hosted by our server. The first resides at the CVM and the second at the Fischinger Trust. Clicking either will open the images on the original sites.

Cinejukebox (1966)

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The above image has been on my mind since I first chanced on it a few days ago. The retro-futuristic Ferrari-red semi-egg shaped oddity in this dance club is the Cinejukebox, a deluxe version of the Cinebox, an Italian coin-operated jukebox that played short colour 16mm musical films. The Cinebox, invented in Rome in the late 1950’s and mass-manufactured in Milan during the 1960’s is less well known than the French-produced Scopitone. A recently published book, Canzoni da guardare/Songs to See: Cinebox & Scopitone [1] by Michele Bovi provides evidence the Cinebox has precedence.

Several things fascinate me about the image, taken from a promotional brochure for the Cinejukebox. What initially caught my attention is the kaleidoscopic display on the monitor, the blue sub-title, Color Dance, and the injunctive Look at Rhythm, followed by the claim:

The Cinejukebox brings you to a completely new idea because it transforms the musical rhythm into a moving, continuously changing color design on the screen.

Naturally the first question on my mind was the mechanism behind this feature.
Fortunately some materials are available on the web pages of Michele Bovi, linked above, as well as the Scopitone Archive maintained by Bob Orlowsky, a lawyer who researches the history of the music video as an amateur. Orlowsky’s archive contained two pages of a Cinejukebox technical brochure including the following sketch (click for larger size on original site):

It seems that the Cinejukebox contained a caleidoscopic [sic] projection unit, with separate 12V 100W quartz-iodine lamp. The box also contained separate lamps for the 16mm projector and an optional still projector for showing promotional slides when neither musical films nor records are selected. From the technical brochure:

The amplifier also is equipped with a section for excitation of the visualizer of music during the playing of records, with action which is independent of the volume level generated by the sound control system.

In other words, this is a music visualization system functioning, not acoustically, but most likely via an electro-mechanical actuator driven by the electrical audio waveform. The Cinejukebox was a mid-1960’s version of the earlier Cinebox,with functionality added to allow playing (vinyl) records, like a jukebox. The kaleidoscopic visualizer added graphical activity to the Cinejukebox screen when using jukebox mode.

An aesthetic aspect of the Cinejukebox interests me. While I have not yet been able to see what it looked like in action, the kaleidoscopic visual display is reminiscent of some of John and James Whitney‘s films from the same era (early to mid-1960’s). See, for example, James Whitney’s 1966 16mm short film Lapis. The Whitneys’ experimental animations were (and are) considered to be the height of avant-garde cinema for the day. By contrast, the Scopitone and Cinebox were used to circulate some of the most kitsch visual media humanity has ever seen (more about this in future post). Susan Sontag’s famous essay Notes on Camp [2] described Scopitones as part of a camp canon. How did it come to pass that what was aesthetically experimental media, for its time, made it contemporaneously into technology aimed at mass consumption? In brief, the Cinejukebox appears to be Scopitones and the Whitneys in the same screaming red box. Could this reflect the futuristic techno-utopianism current during the early 1960’s? Was the kaleidoscopic music visualizer evaluated positively by viewers and what impact has it had, if any, on later soni-graphical experiments and technologies? Were there precedents for this kind of audio driven kaleidoscopic display? Further research would be necessary to provide answers for these questions.

Finally, the kaleidoscopic visualizer seems to be related, in concept at least, to an interactive system, the Iamascope, developed by my colleague Prof. Sidney Fels, in the late 1990’s and shown in the Millenium Dome in London during the festivities for the year 2000-2001. It was also demonstrated at NIME-01 held at the Experience Music Project, Seattle.

The pessimist might conclude nothing under the sun is new, while the optimist might answer interesting ideas never die.

[1] Michele Bovi, Canzoni da Guardare/Songs to See: Cinebox & Scopitone (2007). (Accessed 15.02.2012.)

[2] Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, In: Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York, Dell (1967).