Perfect Polly and the Turk

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Figure 1 - A replica of the "The Turk," a fraudulent eighteenth century chess playing machine. From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploladed by Carafe and in the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – A replica of the “The Turk,” a fraudulent eighteenth century chess playing machine. From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploladed by Carafe and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I have to apologize because I feel the need today to deviate a bit off topic – never one hundred percent.  I am incensed.  Yesterday in the groggy hours of morning, you know when that is.  It is when there is no choice on television except  between reruns of “Frasier” and “I Love Lucy,” and when you are sitting in a stupor, sipping your coffee, I was confronted with a television commercial for “Perfect Polly.”  Perfect Polly is a mechanical parakeet that has a motion detector in her chest that causes her to move her head from side to side and to chirp incessantly.  I am pretty sure that my cat would be wholly unconvinced.  She knows full well that her “Squeeky Mouse” is a fraud.  Still she happily disembowels him of his squeaker and drops his lifeless carcass, like so much carrion, in her water bowl.

We have  spoken at length in this blog about the human machine interface, about the intelligent camera, and about the coming of The Singularity and a new bionic age.  I was encouraged by a recent news clip showing a truly bionic leg prosthesis in operation.  The Singularity is near, people.  But a mechanical parakeet?  Come on! It is an insult to parakeets everywhere, including my friend Wendy’s little bird MJ.  I never tire of Wendy’s photos of MJ sharing her Cheerios.  That is cross-species bonding.  But a mechanical parakeet.  This is not what we have been talking about, and it joins robot dogs (remember those?) in the dredge heap of useless things.  Perfect Polly is of the genre of mechanical people and animals in ancient clockworks.

And Perfect Polly is reminiscint of “The Turk.”  The Turk at least has an interesting story and is closely related to the Turing Test of whether a machine is a machine or a human and how would you test it to know. The Turk was  a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. Between 1770 and 1854, when it was destroyed by fire, it was repeatedly exhibited as an automatron, even after it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, The Turk appeared to play a mean game of chess chess against a human opponent.

The Turk was, in fact, a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the mechanism. Over the course of 84 years, The Turk won most of the games it played during its demonstrations and defeated many challengers including: Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Probably the most famous analysis of The Turk and whether it was a fraud or an actual automatron was by Edgar Alan Poe and entitled “Maelzel’s Chess Player.”  Many of Poe’s arguements are incorrect.  Yet, in a sense, the essay is significant in that it anticipates “The Turing Test.”

So a big hurrumph for Perfect Polly.  As for The Turk, I should point out that on May 11, 1997, a chess playing machine developed by IBM defeated then world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match.  The age of “thinking” machines is upon us as witnessed by Deep Blue and our modern digital cameras.  It just has nothing to do with Perfect Polly!

 

Cute cuddly baby animal photographs

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Rescued baby sloth to be returned to the wild - but not so fast. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Ken Mayer creative commons license.

Rescued baby sloth to be returned to the wild – but not so fast. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Ken Mayer creative commons license.

Hurumph!  An old friend has accused me of being rather maudlin on this blog.  I suppose that what she wants is cute cuddly baby animal pictures.  Even I have been known to do it, but not so much!  OK, so let’s get it out of our systems.  Please visit this collection of such warm and fuzzy images. And I have one especially for friend and reader Reebs.  If you still need more visit Facebook.  People are endlessly posting such images there and elsewhere on the web.  It is certainly an escape from the cruel heartless reality of our world.  But as I told my friend, A. E. Housman pretty much summed it up in  “The Shropshire Lad (verse LXII) 1919:”

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.”

The 125th Anniversary of the National Geographic

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Figure 1 - A 1917 Photograph by from the National Geographic Magazine of an Inuit family. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – A 1917 Photograph by George R. King from the National Geographic Magazine of an Inuit family. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

National Geographic Magazine is celebrating its 125th anniversary.  That means that for at least three generations the great geographic discoveries were photographically documented and brought to the world through the National Geographic Magazine.    It is truly the case that this was not just any magazine.  It visually defined our world for over a century and many of the iconic images and the visual memes that we have spoken about were born and preserved by the National Geographic, first in black and white then, subsequently, in color.

National Geographic continues this tradition today by sponsoring and publishing the photographic results of its expeditions.  In addition to its print version, National Geographic has come to be associated with stunning televisions specials that “take you there.  And sometimes the “there” deep in truly breath taking: untouched caverns and unexplored jungles.  We have a real sense that we went with the early astronauts to space and the moon and with Ballard to the Titanic.  There is a stunning retrospective selection of National Geographic photographs and even more images to be found on the National Geographic Website.  As for personal favorites: who can forget Steve McCurry’s photograph of camels foraging desperately amidst the oil fires of Kuwait a blaze after the First Gulf War or Michael Nichols image of Jou Jou, a captive chimpanzee reaching out to touch Jane Goodall’s golden hair.

Astronomy photographs of the year

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I don’t know about you, but I am getting pretty sick and disturbed about all of the world’s bad news.  It’s time to look for something else, maybe something “out of this world.”  So I am turning today to The Royal Greenwich Observatory’s 2013 Annual Astronomy Photographers competition.  Some of these pictures are absolutely stunning and, well you know, out of this world.

Among my favorite is the wired angle shot “Quadruple Lunar Halo” taken by Spanish photographer Dani Caxete.  Then there is “Snowy Range Perseid Meteor Shower” by US photographer David Kingham.  Kingham combined twenty-three individual frames to capture all of the splendor and excitement of this past August’s Perseid meteor shower.  From a physics point of view this image does an excellent job of illustrating how all the meteors come from a single locus in the sky – an guess what those of you who know your stars will recognize that this locus is in the constellation of Perseus.  And finally I just love the “Ring of Fire Sequence” by Jia Hao of Singapore. This composite image shows the progression of an annular solar eclipse in May 2013. It is a curious fact of nature that the moon and the sun are both 110 times their diameters away from the Earth.  As a result during most solar eclipses the moon perflectly occludes the sun.  However, in some cases the moon is just a bit farther away and the occlusion is shy of complete.  The effect is the “ring of fire” of what is referred to as an annular eclipse.  Here the effect is made just a bit more dramatic by atmospheric distortions that occur as the sun/moon near the horizon.  Ain’t nature wonderful?

The first touches of autumn

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Figure 1 - First touches of fall, (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 1 – First touches of fall, (c) DE Wolf 2013

I tend to write my blog a week or so ahead.  So this picture was taken in late September.  Some of my readers may have seen it already on Facebook, but I wanted to share it with all of my readers.  Fall is a poetic time for New England photographers.  There is rich golden morning light and slowly the beautiful colors evolve.  This picture was taken along the Charles River Reservation below the Watertown Center Bridge and shows “the first touches of autumn.”  I was taken by the pastel beauty of that particular afternoon:  The fading summer lily pads, the leaves starting to turn, the wonderfully blue shy reflected in the water, and the dull brown tones of the rocks beneath the surface.

In processing I allowed myself a little bit more color saturation than I would usually use.  In general when toning a black and white or adjusting color in a color image I cut back a bit from what strikes my eye, in fear of the color looking artificial.  Here I liked the effect.  The image seems to me to be more a painting than a photograph, or maybe a tribute to Claude Monet andmodern impressionist Debra Gold.

The good and the bad

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I know that I have been accused of being a naysayer here for featuring so many grim heart-wrenching photographs of terrible events.  And certainly the news has no shortage of both natural and man-inflicted suffering.  So I am hoping that my recent posting of cute cuddly animals buys me some latitude, because this week I came across this riveting and very moving photograph by Bernandino Hernandez  of the AP showing a little boy sleeping and hugging his dog in a Acapulco shelter on September 17, during the recent hurricanes that have devastated Mexico.  This is really one of those cases where the picture is worth a thousand words and tells the entire story.

Unfortunately, a lot of bad things happen in the world.  So there really is a need for press photographers to document them.  Natural disasters like hurricanes need pictures to spawn public response.  Man-made suffering needs press photographers to document  and create collective outrage.

We have previously spoken about one of the most egregious of these outrages modern day slavery, particularly sex trafficking.  So I’d like to end on a small positive note, emphasis on the word small – a baby step in the right direction. The highest-ranking judge in New York state, Jonathan Lippman, announced on initiative Wednesday, September 25, that the state will begin treating most alleged prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, and seek to steer them toward medical treatment, job training and other social services to break the cycle of sex trafficking.  New York is establishing special courts to handle the cases and expects most of them to be set up by the end of next month.

 

 

 

Is the 3D printer the future of photography?

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Figure 1 - Miniature human faces printed with a 3d printer. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by S Zillayali and uploaded under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – Miniature human faces printed with a 3d printer. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by S Zillayali and uploaded under creative commons license.

I was looking at a picture by Dan Kitwood for Getty Images today on the BBC News showing two women staring in wonder and amazement at a 3D Model of Party Leader Nick Clegg created with a 3D printer at the Lib Dem autumn conference in Glasgow.  Your first reaction is probably well done photograph; but the 3D printing process still has a long way to go.  After all, the model shown in the picture took seven hours to print.  Well, it isn’t so long ago that we were working with low resolution 16 color printers in 2D and could go pretty much go off for lunch while they printed a picture.These were hardly up to the task of competing with film photography.  But look where we are really just a short while later.

3D Printing is a type of Rapid Prototyping Process that can produce full color 3D objects from a CAD input within hours.  It is relatively low cost compared to other rapid prototyping technologies.  It sounds impossible, but if you think about it we can print in 2D quite easily and a 3D object is really a set of very thin, typically 100 um, cross-sections or 2D prints.  There are a number of competing technologies at present to accomplish this magic.

Typically, the starting point or input is a CAD drawing, a computer aided design.  But as seen in Figure 1, human faces can be copied by 3D printing. The device is creating really complicated objects, as seen for instance in Figure 2.

The question then is whether 3D is the future of photography either via 3D printing or a 3D display technology such as holography.  I am seldom an early adopter.  However, I have recently found my laboratory using 3D printing to prototype our optical biosensing devices.  And, of course, there’s the Big Bang episode where Wolowitz and Koothrappali buy a 3D printer.  You imagine it; the machine prints it.  So hold your breath and prepare to be amazed.

Figure 2 - 3D printed model. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Axel Hindemith under creative commons license.

Figure 2 – 3D printed model. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Axel Hindemith under creative commons license.

 

The power of catch light

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Figure 1 - Witch without catchlight, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Witch without catchlight, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Recently I posted a series of Halloween photographs.  When I started this project, I took the image shown in Figure 1.  She is a happy witch, not menacing, but something seems wrong with the photograph.  Somehow the witch is listless and unlifelike.  The reason for this is that her eyes lack the phenomenon of “catch light,” which is, simply put, the reflection of the illuminating light off the cornea of the eyes.  The cornea is the clear, wet surrounding layer. Catch light is essentially the sparkle in one’s eyes. The most common form of catch light is that which forms from a flash.  Since flashes usually are, like the sun, point sources of light, the catch light often appears as a bright dot in the dark center of the eye, within the pupil.

Take a look at Figure 2, which a funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy.  I chose this image because it is nearly two thousand years old.  So while it is not a photograph it is still pretty lifelike, and the two catch light bright spots in the eyes really brings the boy to life, or back to life.

Figure 2 - Funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy, From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploaded by Juanmak and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy, From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploaded by Juanmak and in the public domain.

Catch light does not have to be bright spots.  This is shown in Figure 3.  Indeed, the eyes are portals to the soul and mirror whatever is in front of them.  This has been used to great effect in several mystery stories where the plot hinges on blowing up the catch light to reveal the “murderer” or other detail in the mystery,

Catch light has played an important role in the movies.  Directors often light up the sparkle in the eyes of starlets to make them more vibrant and glamorous, for instance Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.”  On the other hand, catch light is removed from the eyes of bad guys to create a sense, like our witch and others in my Halloween series, of the sinister and ominous.

So what about our witch.  Since I wanted a happy lifelike witch I use Adobe Photoshop to add two catch light spots to her eyes. I have also used the same trick when I remove red eye.  The process of removing red eye often simultaneously removes catch light and re-adding it with little bright spots adds to the

Figure 3 - Baby with sparkle or catch light in its eyes. From the Wikimedia Commons original by Christine B. Szeto and put into the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 3 – Baby with sparkle or catch light in its eyes. From the Wikimedia Commons original by Christine B. Szeto and put into the public domain under creative commons license.

sense of vitality. In fact, if you think about it red eye is itself a kind of bad catch light.  It is a reflection of the light source off the retina.  This is particularly extreme in animals like cats that have a special layer called the tapetum lucidum which reflects light that passes through the retina back onto it, thus improving their night vision.  Of course, if you want your cat to look sinister and evil, real cats are never evil, leave the red eye.

As Figure 4, I show again the final image of the witch.  All of the processing is the same as Figure 1 now with catch light added.

Figure 4 - Witch of Figure 1 with catch light added. (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 4 – Witch of Figure 1 with catch light added. (c) DE Wolf 2013

 

Thirteen ghoulish photographs for Halloween

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It is October First and in New England that means that it is time to get excited about two things: fall color and Halloween.  I have prepared a photoessay entitled “Thirteen ghoulish photographs for Halloween.”  They are pictures of Halloween Wind Decorations.  All are fun.  Some are outright scary!  I’m inserting them as a slide show here, but you can also find them in a temporary gallery called “Halloween 2013.”

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