Ransen's Blog

To try to get my daughter away from her Samsung Galaxy and and WhatsUp and cold shining colorful screens of never to be fulfilled promise I suggested that we sit outside together on the balcony and draw some plants. And, oddly enough, she agreed. John Ruskin, a long dead art critic, snob and self confessed wanker, taught the "lower classes" to draw in schools for workers. And he said that the idea was not to make great artists out of them, but to make them appreciate what beauty was around them. He was definitely an odd bloke, but that idea struck a chord with me. If you try to draw something, with pencil and paper, you really really need to look at it. And you really really need to understand, wait for it, 3D. So, dear Reader, get some paper, 3 pencils (hard medium and soft, H HB and B), an eraser and try to draw a flower, plant, leaf or shell from life . If you do this with sincerity you'll have no choice but to really look at the object, this is

I went into the garden to get some bay leaves to dry for future cooking. Not me. I don't cook. Anyway I noticed some tiny white dots on the leaves and out with the microsope. I lifted up the leaf sample by using my high tech Veho 200x sample lifter upper device (two pieces of cardboard, as shown below). But what a horror awaited me... Is this animal or vegetable?  Fungus or what? If any of you dear readers, either of you, know what these are and how to get rid of them, please leave a comment.

Viewed up close flowers seem like exotic trees in a landscape. The inside of basil flower: And other parts and flowers I don't know names for: But look at that strange stuff in the center: Since I first saw moss in closeup on my computer screen I've become more interested in it. Two types from my garden: Again these look like scenes from a landscape from the point of view of an insect. But we'll probably never know what an insect thinks when it sees. Or sees when it thinks. If it does. Considering human vision, in Incognito by David Eagleman, he tells that Helmholz pointed out that there is no light inside the skull. It is a totally dark place. We see by unconcious inference . No light inside the skull, and yet we see...

I'm working on version 11 of Gliftex (a Windows pattern and image maker) , and sometimes, after all the thinking and geometry and programming nice experimental images pop up: This image, and the ones which follow, all look a bit like colorful mosaics... It makes the sines and cosines and intersections and tangents and for loops and matrices and vectors all seem worth while!  One last surprise:

In an earlier blog entry I mentioned how I was making a medal like object in software using two different sorts of geometry. I faffed around with a complex one, then settled on a simple one, but that simple one had consequencies. Consequencies I could have forseen if had more than three neurons in my brain. The work was for PhotoToMesh V5 , released last week... ...It creates bas relief files for 3D printers. There is a smoothing setting in the program, explained here , which makes the bas reliefs which the program creates less ragged. When I finally settled on the "correct" medal geometry I'd forgotten about the smoothing. It works by taking the topologically (not neccessarily geometrically) nearest 3d point to the 3d point under consideration, and averages them. With rectangular meshes topologically and geometrically are practically the same thing. With the medal mesh geometry which I'd decided on, they're not. This is because there are fewer distinc

I guess they had a 200x, 40Euro, USB microscope (I keep saying that because I find it amazing value). No insects were killed, all found dead or later released. Something that crash landed on a leaf:   Two things found floating in my cat's drinking water: A dead moth found on the stairs, what a lovely curly nose/mouth it's got! ...and what lovely wing textures too... A creepy crawlie found struggling in a puddle of water. This is really Men In Black: Lovely legs and antenna! I released him afterwards. Probably having a drink at a bar on Venus right now.

My family have accused me of turning the bathroom into an operating theatre, because I changed a light bulb. The light in the bathroom contains two bulbs, and for years they have been normal incandescent light bulbs (the type with the coil which glows). One of the pair burned out and I thought I'd so some energy saving so I put in one of those replacement neon lamps, coiled around itself to make it fit in the same space as a normal incandescent lamp. I noticed it had a bluish tinge, but thought nothing of it. There was a small revolution, it was decided by the rest of the family that the neon light made the bathroom look like an operating theatre or mortuary. Every single time that light was switched on I got a "this is a horrible terrible light" comment. Every single time! Eventually I gave in and bought a warm white LED lamp. But why was the neon bulb so badly recieved? I have a spectrometer I use for work, so I decided to look at the sp