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…
Early narrative phonography was as creative and conceptually groundbreaking in its way as early narrative film. Take just one example: Muggsy’s Dream (1908). The audio presented here was transferred from a cylinder in my collection by Dan Figurelli and Melissa Widzinski of MDPI on the Endpoint Audio Labs Cylinder Playback Machine (to get some practice…
“kn u rd ths? gr8!” That might look like twenty-first-century mobile phone text messaging slang, of which it would in fact be a perfectly good example. But that’s not what I’m using it here to illustrate. Instead, I wrote it in one version of nineteenth-century “stenotypy,” following the guidelines put forward in a book published…
A few months ago, I picked up a photograph on eBay showing a view of a town with a body of water in the background, evidently taken from a great height. The seller described it as an “early aerial photo ca. 1860 from balloon” but wasn’t sure quite when it had been taken or where,…
It’s always interesting to browse the old handwritten documents that turn up for sale on eBay. Often mysterious and illegible to the people selling them, they can repay careful attention by revealing the occasional text of unusual age or interest. Here’s one recent acquisition that the dealer identified as “LARGE ENGLISH PAPER 1600s,” although it’s…
