Derren Brown's Blog, page 59
November 29, 2010
100 Recycled Bicycles = 1 Weird Christmas Tree
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"Most Christmas trees are already green, but this environmentally friendly holiday display in Sydney takes the concept to a new level: It's made of bicycles that were destined for the recycling yard.
The bicycle tree, dubbed the "Tree-Cycle," is made of 100 old bikes donated by a local recycling company. The bike frames were spray-painted tree green, while the tires were given a multi-colored makeover to make them look like holiday lights.
And if you thought you spent a lot of time putting up your tree, consider this: It took eight weeks to build the 23-foot-tall Tree-Cycle, which is on display at The Rocks, one of the city's prime tourist and shopping districts.
Even the "star" at the top of the tree is made of bicycle parts — look closely, and you'll see it's really just a series of front forks and tires sticking out in each direction.
It's at least the third year in a row that the Rocks has featured a tree made of recycled or recyclable objects.
Last year's Christmas centerpiece was made of bottles, while the 2008 effort was a tree-shaped pile of chairs."
Read more at AOL News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Same Face May Look Male or Female, Depending on Where It Appears in a Person's Field of View
"Neuroscientists at MIT and Harvard have made the surprising discovery that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person's field of view, but female when they appear in a different location.
The findings challenge a longstanding tenet of neuroscience — that how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer, says Arash Afraz, a postdoctoral associate at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and lead author of a new paper on the work. "It's the kind of thing you would not predict — that you would look at two identical faces and think they look different," says Afraz. He and two colleagues from Harvard, Patrick Cavanagh and Maryam Vaziri Pashkam, described their findings in the Nov. 24 online edition of the journal Current Biology.
In the real world, the brain's inconsistency in assigning gender to faces isn't noticeable, because there are so many other clues: hair and clothing, for example. But when people view computer-generated faces, stripped of all other gender-identifying features, a pattern of biases, based on location of the face, emerges. The researchers showed subjects a random series of faces, ranging along a spectrum of very male to very female, and asked them to classify the faces by gender. For the more androgynous faces, subjects rated the same faces as male or female, depending on where they appeared.
Study participants were told to fix their gaze at the center of the screen, as faces were flashed elsewhere on the screen for 50 milliseconds each. Assuming that the subjects sat about 22 inches from the monitor, the faces appeared to be about three-quarters of an inch tall. The patterns of male and female biases were different for different people. That is, some people judged androgynous faces as female every time they appeared in the upper right corner, while others judged faces in that same location as male. Subjects also showed biases when judging the age of faces, but the pattern for age bias was independent from the pattern for gender bias in each individual."
Read more at Science Daily (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
November 28, 2010
Stealing the Mystic Lamb – The story of the world's most coveted masterpiece
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Many of you may be forgiven for thinking that the above image is actually a sculpture, well you'd be wrong. It's painted by an artist known as Jan van Eyck and is considered by many to be one of the most important paintings in history. The awe inspiring lighting, composition and photorealism of this piece isn't just incredible for it's life like qualities. It is in fact because it was painted nearly 600 years ago and since then has had a dark history that can't be rivalled by many other works.
So other than the craftsmanship and age of the piece – why is this painting so important? Well, The Ghent Altarpiece is the most frequently stolen artwork of all time. Since its completion in 1432, this twelve-panel oil painting has disappeared, been looted in three different wars, been burned, dismembered, copied, forged, smuggled, illegally sold, censored, attacked by iconoclasts, hidden castle vaults and secret salt mines, hunted by Nazis and Napoleon, prized by The Louvre and a Prussian king, damaged by conservators, returned as war reparations, used as a diplomatic tool, ransomed, rescued by Austrian double-agents, and stolen a total of thirteen times.
Stealing the Mystic Lamb is the incredible tale behind the deception, fraud and scammers who throughout history have done whatever they feel necessary to obtain it.
A Card Trick Leads To A New Mathematical Bound On Data Compression
"A complicated card trick that deals with the colors of the cards and a binary De Bruijn cycle has helped a mathematician reach a new bound on data compression. Magic and math, more friendly than you'd think!
Here's how the trick works: You hand your friend a deck of cards and ask them to draw six cards (in order) and name the colors. With that sequence of colors, you can immediately name the exact cards that have been drawn. How? Because each color sequence is unique and appears only once throughout the deck (after pre-arranging it to be so), so if you have an insane memory, you'll know which cards correspond to the sequence.
According to Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago, the trick is closely related to data compression:
"Gagie achieves this new [mathematical] bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn. This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128,"
This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.""
Read more at Gizmodo
Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights
"Street lights are an important part of our urban infrastructure — they light our way home and make the roads safe at night. But what if we could create natural street lights that don't need electricity to power them? A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one – not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities.
The discovery came about accidentally after the scientists were looking for a way to create high-efficiency lighting similar to LED technology, but without using toxic chemicals such as phosphor powder. Speaking about the development, Professor Shih-Hui Chang said, "Light emitting diode (LED) has replaced traditional light source in many display panels and street lights on the road. A lot of light emitting diode, especially white light emitting diode, uses phosphor powder to stimulate light of different wavelengths. However, phosphor powder is highly toxic and its price is expensive. As a result, Dr. Yen-Hsun Wu had the idea to discover a method that is less toxic to replace phosphor powder. This is a major motivation for him to engage in the research at the first place."
By implanting the gold nanoparticles into the leaves of the Bacopa caroliniana plants, the scientists were able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under a high wavelength of ultraviolet light, the gold nanoparticles were able to produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission in the surrounding chlorophyll."
Read more at Inhabitat
November 26, 2010
My painting of Patrick Hughes
At last a moment to post on Patrick's portrait. As you may remember from a previous post, Patrick made a "reverspective" portrait of me, and I have painted him, in order to do arty swapsies. The painting is large, as most of mine seem to be – this one, in acrylic, 5ft high by 4ft:
As some of you seem interested in how these come together, I took a few photographs of the stages along the way to show you.
I had taken a set of photos of Patrick in my studio, from which to work. I have a little cobbled-together photo studio set-up so that I can start with decent pictures. I settled on the following to use as a primary reference. It'll give you the likeness:
The photo captures him nicely, so I printed it out and kept it next to my canvas. The canvas and photograph I divide into quarters – when working large it's necessary to have some sort of guide for overall proportion. That done, I start sketching directly onto the canvas. Sometimes I don't do this and begin with the paint, but I was feeling less bold. I don't do any preliminary sketching.
From the eyes and nose I continue until I get a sense of a portrait. Strictly speaking this level of work is unnecessary, but I like to be able to see it come together at the early stage before I involve paint:
Next I need to get some colour tone onto the canvas, so I cover it in orange. Green also works well. The pencil peeps through so I still have a guide. I'm using acrylic paint.
And some around the face. It's important to keep the same tones in the background as in the face, otherwise the latter can end up feeling disconnected from the former:
Now I start to get some dark and light values on as the next layer. I have chosen a palette of colours ranging from a titanium buff for the highlights to a burnt umber/deep blue combination for the darkest points:
He's already starting to look like Bertrand Russell, which is not what I want. I'll be making corrections to the likeness later. Next I want to start getting some colour in there. So some greens, yellows, reds and blues, still allowing the orange to come through. Something starts to emerge:
More building up and something to lift it from the background. A nice fleshiness is falling into place. I normally begin now to work the eyes a little ahead of the rest of the face, which makes it seem a little more lifelike. Equally, a clear the framing of the face makes it look more worked too… these are tricks to make it seem less of a mess in the long central phase of painting:
And I put some more love into the skin texture:
However, it doesn't quite look right. I leave it for a bit and realise that the chin is too weak. In the next picture, I have done nothing but extend the chin, but the face looks quite different (I switch to my iPhone camera here for a bit so pay no attention to the colour shift):
Suddenly it falls into place. Now I keep working on the details and get the jacket and shirt done. I use glazes to build up better colours on the face, and I keep the detail sharp on the eyes and cheek so that the nose and neck fall out of focus. I also use a grey glaze to drop the clothes back a bit. This, along with the very start, is the fun part. Here's a bit of work on the glasses. I need to make his nose more prominent, but can't bring it down any lower as it will compromise the upper lip. So I lift the bridge of the glasses – first by erasing with orange – and then work up some detail on the rest of them. [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]
Until eventually the painting is done. As I have so little time to paint, this was done in little bursts of a few hours here and there over the course of a couple of weeks:
Patrick was delighted. I was so pleased. Here he is with it (and his other glasses on)…
There you go. Hope that's of interest to some of you.
My paintings are on view at derrenbrownart.com for your delectation. I have moved away from the caricature paintings which dominate that site to something softer and, I hope, more grown-up and accomplished (fond as I am of the earlier ones). This February I should be holding an exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in Charlotte St, and we'll let you know as soon as we have a date for that. The exhibition will contain these paintings produced since the publication of the 'Portraits' book, such as the equally large Grande Dame below:
Aiming to paint the cellist Steven Isserlis next. Right, off you go.
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The wisdom of crowds – just how wise are they?
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The Wisdom of crowds is not a new concept – but research in to it's use is. Derren Brown used this very concept in his show "How To Predict The Lottery" – it powers the interest in his websites and often is at the core of his live shows. MIT have this to say:
The rise of the Internet has sparked a fascination with what The New Yorker's financial writer James Surowiecki called, in a book of the same name, "the wisdom of crowds": the idea that aggregating or averaging the imperfect, distributed knowledge of a large group of people can often yield better information than canvassing expert opinion.
But as Surowiecki himself, and many commentators on his book, have pointed out, circumstances can conspire to undermine the wisdom of crowds. In particular, if a handful of people in a population exert an excessive influence on those around them, a "herding" instinct can kick in, and people will rally around an idea that could turn out to be wrong.
Fortunately, in a paper to be published in the Review of Economic Studies, researchers from MIT's Departments of Economics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have demonstrated that, as networks of people grow larger, they'll usually tend to converge on an accurate understanding of information distributed among them, even if individual members of the network can observe only their nearby neighbors. A few opinionated people with large audiences can slow that convergence, but in the long run, they're unlikely to stop it.
In the past, economists trying to model the propagation of information through a population would allow any given member of the population to observe the decisions of all the other members, or of a random sampling of them. That made the models easier to deal with mathematically, but it also made them less representative of the real world. "What this paper does is add the important component that this process is typically happening in a social network where you can't observe what everyone has done, nor can you randomly sample the population to find out what a random sample has done, but rather you see what your particular friends in the network have done," says Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor in the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, who was not involved in the research. "That introduces a much more complex structure to the problem, but arguably one that's representative of what typically happens in real settings."
More Over at MIT
November 25, 2010
Is this the most realistic CGI you've ever seen?
Are the best computer animators only as good as the technology they use, or does natural talent distinguish their work from the rest? The question has been debated online this week after a new super-realistic computer-generated video appeared on YouTube.
At first glance, the minute-long commercial for kitchen worktops looks like slick, well-timed slow-motion footage of fruit falling in a shiny kitchen. It's only when the peppers and pears smash like glass on the counter that it becomes clear these are not real fruit.
Full details at NewScientist
A misconception of procrastination covered
The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can't manage your time well.
The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.
Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish. If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you'll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think. Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to "Dead Man Walking" from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?
Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and its the same reason you believe you will eventually do what's best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do. A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Some were lowbrow like "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Mrs. Doubtfire." Some were highbrow like "Schindler's List" or "The Piano." In other words, it was a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb.
After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked Schindler's List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was. All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn't, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies like "The Mask" or action flicks like "Speed" when they knew they had to watch it forthwith. Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, "Schindler's List" was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all.
Read more at You Are Not So Smart (Thanks Johnny5)
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