Aku Aku

Painting with People

Or, as it's known to real artists I suppose, Tableau Vivant.

I recently posted my second of these on AkuAku:

37 of 52: The Creation of Eve

I also describe my plans to create a set of cards that facilitates creating more of these famous painting recreations, with a suitable painting available for any number of people I happen to have on hand. Finding the appropriate images isn't easy though.

I flipped through a large art history tome and had problems coming up with others for the list though. So many paintings that the average person would consider famous aren't appropriate either because they are landscapes, or too abstract or too simple and/or require a difficult specific background/props to be instantly recognizable (like the Mona Lisa). They need to be realistic portraits of a small set of people with unique positioning. I'm thinking if I try really hard I can come up with maybe a couple dozen of these. Jeremy thinks he can find 100. So far the only other one I've found is Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (N=4). I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremy's list, I could really use some help! Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

I'm cross-posting this here to try to get more suggestions. Any ideas?

I'd love to do Borscht's The Garden of Earthly Delights at Burning Man some day. It would require a lot of preparation in terms of props, structures and people organization, but sure would make a nice project.

37 of 52: The Creation of Eve

My thing for this week: a snapshot of post-dinner relaxation tonight.

I really enjoyed the first of these sorts of photos. It made me want to do a whole series of Last Supper photos, whenever I had a feast and 13 people I could arrange another shot. To facilitate this I want to design and print 13 placards. On one side of each placard will be the original painting, on the other side will be a close-up of one particular apostle (or savior) along with some meta data (name of the apostle, significance in the scene, etc). I could just pass these out in the proper order and very quickly get everyone to self organize for the photo. The whole process would probably take less than 5 minutes.

Then it occurred to me that I should do a whole series of these placards, so that I have one painting requiring N models where N is between 2 and 13. Then I can take a shot at almost any occasion with any group of people. So I'm working on this list of paintings now. The Creation of Adam is a nice one because it is instantly recognizable merely with model positioning (no props necessary to reliably evoke the original) but also you can pull it off reasonably with any number between 3 and 8 or so.

I flipped through a large art history tome and had problems coming up with others for the list though. So many paintings that the average person would consider famous aren't appropriate either because they are landscapes, or too abstract or too simple and/or require a difficult specific background/props to be instantly recognizable (like the Mona Lisa). They need to be realistic portraits of a small set of people with unique positioning. I'm thinking if I try really hard I can come up with maybe a couple dozen of these. Jeremy thinks he can find 100. So far the only other one I've found is Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (N=4). I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremy's list, I could really use some help! Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

Slumming Mathematician Coders

This gave me a chuckle: I can tell you are a math guy from Jack's Technical Blog

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
• You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
• Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
• You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
• All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
• You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
• All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.

36 of 52: Fire storm

I'm on vacation in the Outer Banks, a strip of barrier islands off the North Carolina coast where I spent most every summer for 7 years during my college days. I love the smell of the air here.

This project is long exposure photographs of a beach grill, capturing the twisting trails of individual embers flung from the grill as a single mass of fire flower. I just thought it would look neat, and it did.

Hey American, put $8.34 where your mouth is.

BoingBoing alerted me to Sean Tevis' campaign for the Kansas state House of Representatives. He's running against an incumbent who represents all the worst we've come to expect from Kansas:  "anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay." He's polling within three points of his opponent and is looking to raise $8.34 from $3000 people to enable him to get the name recognition it takes to win at the polls. I just donated $25.

Tevis is our kind of people. Internet-savvy to the point of producing an XKCD-style graphic that explains his situation.

Sean Tevis

He's also blogging about what he's learning as a new politician. I particularly liked this blog entry:

Many front doors have a prominent “No Solicitors” sign displayed, which is a nice way of pointing out to hopeful door-to-door salesmen that the door will be shut on their face. Thankfully, as a politician, that sign doesn’t pertain to me as I’m not selling anything. The trick, however, is to let people know that I’m not a solicitor.

I rang one doorbell and heard someone on the other side of the front door. I think they were looking at me through their peephole when I heard a man yell “No solicitors!” without even opening the door. “I’m not a solicitor!” I sort of yelled back through the door. “I’m a politician!”

There was a pause.

I wondered if he had gone away, and then he yelled back, “That’s even worse!”

He's campaigning on the issues of sales taxes on food (doesn't like them), education (Kansas can do -much- better), illegal immigration (it can be solved calmly) and my personal favorite: government transparency (more please).

His site seems to be getting slammed right now and is slow to load. If you want to go donate directly just paypal it to
[email protected]

Newbies on Rails

On Monday night I went to a Ruby on Rails Meetup for Newbies. I'm not new to rails but I thought I could help answer questions plus it would be a good way to see if there are any coders who are new to ruby but talented. I am hiring after all. It was a good meeting, I ended up spending more time proselytizing Agile methodologies (Test Driven Development, Pair Programming) than Rails specific things, but met a lot of interesting people and had some good conversations.

The only uncool part was a recruiter (who didn't identify herself as such) and her boyfriend who pretended to just be interested in learning to code ruby, but snuck out soon after the meeting started when it became quite obvious that the ruse wasn't going to pan out very well. Note to Vanessa: if you're going to recruit, do so honestly and actually engage with the geeks. We're ok with recruiters and newbies, but don't much like dishonesty.

One of the cooler things I ran across that evening was Debate Graph which the host, Mark Carranza pointed out after I started talking about my Belief Graph pipe dream. It's a system for structuring debates/beliefs in a way that is more productive than a common verbal argument. I'm quite excited to look into it more, hopefully during vacation next week. The subject came up because Mark is working on a very ambitious cognitive software project called blissn that reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project. It's not public yet but he has a couple of working prototypes that are quite interesting. He's been recording and linking his thoughts for quite some time now and has a large number rapidly available at his fingertips. Looking forward to more from Mark. Plus he was a great host for the meetup.

Thomas Sullivan and Bootsy Collins

My college buddy and inspiration for the 52 things project is touring with Bootsy Collins right now. Soimeone uploaded this video that captures a trombone solo of his. Go Thomas!

bootsy collins band o2 wireless festival 2008

human mirror

oh god. the world has gone awesome.

Human Mirror

Favorite new advertising improvement artist: The Decapitator

Check out the Decapitator Flickr stream.

Decapited_sex_and_the_city