How often did recording artists visit recording laboratories to make records during the earliest phase of the recording industry, back in the late nineteenth century? How much did they get paid each time? Who were their piano accompanists, and how much did they get paid? What were the salaries of the recordists and other staff?…
Back in August 2016, I blogged about a hypothetical piece of software I wished were available: one that could conveniently and efficiently average large numbers of images by warping them to a set of user-defined control points (and without being limited to forward-looking human faces). Last year, I finally wrote some code of my own…
Image averaging is a powerful tool for revealing patterns in large sets of visual data, and one subject to which I’ve been interested in applying it for a while is the newspaper front page. Every newspaper has a layout that remains fairly consistent from day to day while simultaneously varying to accommodate whatever the day’s…
The Voynich Manuscript has been called the world’s most mysterious book, and with good reason. An illustrated codex written on vellum carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century, it contains page after page of text in a unique and unidentified script, provisionally called “Voynichese,” that has frustrated efforts at decipherment by seasoned cryptanalists for many decades. …
Thinking about ordering some wall art or custom jewelry based on a sound wave, or maybe even getting a sound wave tattooed on your arm? Or just curious about what options exist for converting sounds into tangible art objects—and whether, in each case, the audio would really be there in a meaningful way? If so,…
On January 12, 2019, the ongoing federal government shutdown became the longest in United States history. One of its casualties has been our national park system, if we’re to judge from reports of rampant litter, feces, and vandalism. I was curious to see how the National Park Service air quality webcams have been faring. In…
The art of drawing caricatures might seem quintessentially human, but computers too can exaggerate the differences between any given face and a “normal” face, and they can also work out the opposite of a given face—sometimes called its “antiface”—which is less intuitive, and not a feat I think human artists have ever attempted freehand. In…
