Quantum Rocketry

I’ve been doing a fair number of fantasy maps lately, taking pictures of them, and putting them on the Internet. So, I’ve decided to give them their own section on my images page, and their own Picasa album.  There’s even a new one in the album!

I know I’ve liked to draw fantastical maps for a long time now. So, I should not have been surprised at how much fun I had producing a fancy version of a map for a world I’ve been working with for several years. I figured out techniques for drawing the shorelines, forests, and mountain ranges that I think were very successful. I used a lot of watercolor pencil washes, with india ink for lines.

Map of the Southern Continent

Still, though I like it as an image, the product isn’t a perfect map. I made the decision to try and put in all the physical features before any points of interest of placenames, with the intention of doing so in an overlay. None of my scratch tests for such labels worked very well; I ended up putting labels on the map in postprocessing on my computer. Not ideal, but at the same time, it came out okay.

I had such a great time producing the map over the course of a couple of weeks worth of coming home from work, making dinner, and then throwing NPR on while I sat down with my pen and ink. (It was a very meditative sort of endeavor.) I have also been keen on trying to improve the map. Fortunately for me, Fiancée loved the thing and requested that I produce a similar map based on a template which she supplied to me. Well, then. I didn’t need a second excuse to start.

Map of Faerie

I worked primarily from the template; but I had leave to make some modifications such as putting detail on coastlines or changing river courses to be more realistic. I stuck with the same general techniques that worked so well for me on the first map.

This time, though, I planned a bit better. I noted the positions of the physical features; but I also included the major landmarks and indicated to myself where text labels would go. When I inked in the forests and mountains on this map, I left myself spaces for the labels. I practiced ink lettering on scrap paper, came up with a font style that I thought would be fitting, and this time put hand-lettered placenames directly on the paper.

A nicely labeled forest

I will be the first to admit that I didn’t succeed in all instances – this paper absorbed the ink in a very different way depending on whether there was a good base layer of pencil in place – but I like the results, in general. You can also see that this time I have added some carmine red ink to my repertoire, to add accents or denote features on the map (here, provincial boundaries from the template map). Another set of new features comes from a few special points of interest on the map. I will comment that inking a small symbol, such as crossed swords, on a large paper map comes with a particular set of challenges: ink is almost impossible to remove without leaving evidence, and so once I set about drafting such a symbol on the final image, I was committed to it! After all, I’d hate for one badly botched, critical item to ruin the whole work. (Happily, little goofs in the mountains and such simply add to the character of such an image!)

City and Battlefield

Just for grins, I threw on some other embellishments around the coastlines. You know: sea monsters and such. I’m particularly happy with this little guy.

Big fish

I still have the map in my apartment and I’m thinking about whether I should add some kind of border, but I think I’m just going to let Fiancée mat and frame it however she likes.

Now I’ve just got to think about what cartographic project to do next…

I have come into the possession of a most extraordinary object, which I procured rather fortuitously before the auction of goods from an insolvent boutique on the East Boulevard. I do not know how long it lay, disused and uncared-for, in a dusty drawer at that establishment, or when the boutique acquired it. The artifact in question is a curious map of the southern continent. I have scrutinized the place names and cross-referenced the markers corresponding to cities and towns with the atlases and charts in the City Library, and I have determined that this map dates from approximately 530 A.E. It covers the area from the North Barovin Mountains in its upper-left extremity, to historic Vorsvenbal in the south and all of South Brenin, Kalatchal, and part of Olahira to the east.

The dòm Gurand Map

The famous dòm Gurand Map of our southern continent does not only provide interesting historical and societal context, but contains some surprisingly accurate geographic information. One can examine the map for geological purposes, for evidence of historical wind patterns, and for characteristics of the climate of the year 530. Drainage areas of rivers are readily apparent, for instance, and the cartographer has captured some of the different qualities in the mountain ranges. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been working on a map. It looks something like this:

Map Detail

The map consists of India ink laid down on top of a set of watercolor washes. (Well, technically, washes from some Derwent Signature Watercolor pencils – thanks to Robin for those!) This is actually my first excursion into something like this. I like the way the India ink sits on top of the paper, while the watercolor soaks in.

But now I have a dilemma: I’m trying to decide how, or even if, to label the map with place names. I have already digitized the map (eh, roughly…what I really need is a large-format scanner!) and have been playing around with labeling schemes on the computer. The easiest and clearest thing to do in digital form is to (at least partially) desaturate the map such that the colors are duller and the ink is perhaps 60% gray and then scrawl my labels over it. However, the physical map has fairly bright colors and the ink is, of course, nearly always black, which means that a sweeping label over those mountains or forests will not come out well. I think more experienced cartographers of fantastical lands than I would have done the labeling and the cartography simultaneously, so they could shape the trees and mountains around the words if necessary. But no, I had to go ahead and ink in all the forests and mountain ranges first.

Here is what I am wondering: if I get some, say, red ink and use my pen to write a sprawling label over one of those forests, will the ink sit on top of the black-inked trees and be generally legible? Clearly, doing that with black ink would result in an unreadable jumble, but would red cut across the existing features with enough contrast? Should I just stick with doing it all by computer? Or does anyone out there have a better idea?

I recently picked up some food coloring for a little sanity-check experiment in my lab. Yesterday, I was feeling a little artistic and a little physicsy, so I decided to play with the coloring, some clear glasses, a couple of flashlights, and my camera.

Tendril

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent last weekend in Williamstown, MA, with my family for my sister’s Williams Dance Company performance and the super-swanky Mother’s Day brunch at the Williams Inn. (I’m allergic to chicken and turkey, so I passed over the roast duck; but I made sure to grab some brunch swordfish!)

We also went to the Sol LeWitt retrospective exhibition at Mass MoCA. LeWitt is really interesting; first, because he drew his artwork directly on gallery walls, and second, because the artwork consists mainly of a detailed set of instructions describing how to create the drawing. If one museum sells a Sol LeWitt wall drawing to another museum, then they erase the wall, give the new museum the instructions, and that museum carefully follows the plan to reconstruct the wall drawing in a new space. I found this whole process to be quite interesting. (All the images here are from the Mass MoCA web site; click to see them on the original pages.)

The precision and care that went into each wall drawing (some on walls that were, maybe, thirty feet wide by eight feet tall) are amazing. Each drawing is the product of work by a number of drafters, some of whom are interns and some of whom are dedicated to Sol LeWitt wall drawing. They develop methods for interpreting LeWitt’s instructions. Some of those instructions even leave parts of the implementation wholly up to the drafters.

LeWitt’s method seems to revolve around abstraction – taking something observable and representing it in a symbolic way. The descriptions at Mass MoCA describe how LeWitt was interested in removing the artist from the artwork. This concept resonates for me: here I am, trained as a physicist and engineer, with my livelihood based on constructing, manipulating, and extracting results from mathematical models. Those models are based on the theories that govern physical phenomena; but they never are a full, complete description. Still, we use them to great effect in making predictions or developing new theories. The philosophy of science question here is, are the models conceptually different from the theories they describe? Or are they just a different representation of the same thing? In the same vein, is Sol LeWitt’s art the wall drawing, or the instructions? His opinion seemed to be the latter.

The other thing I ended up thinking about while strolling through the wall drawings was how the implementation of the drawings corresponded to realizations of models in the science and engineering world. We can come up with incredibly complex models for how the universe works, but when constructing a simulation or making a prediction, we often choose to use only a small part of the model. For instance, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity describes how objects move under the influence of gravity (or, equivalently, how they move through curved spacetime). But for a great many applications, Newton’s single equation for gravitational attraction between two bodies is enough: The force is attractive, proportional to the product of the masses of the bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of their separation. Then for yet another large subset of applications, the simple high-school physics expression F = -mg is quite sufficient. In a sense, both of these simplifications are realizations of General Relativity, in the presence of certain simplifications that let us “zoom in” on part of the model. When the drafters have a LeWitt wall drawing instruction sheet, they must match the instructions up to the wall space they have to work with. The instructions seems to be written in reference to relative measurements on the wall (the midpoint of the left side, the corner, the center of the wall, etc), which means that the same instructions – the same idea, the same “theory” can produce very different realizations on different walls. (And, speaking of relativity, I wonder if LeWitt ever took a look at the math behind Einstein’s theories. It would have been neat to see something like this wall drawing as viewed by an observer traveling at 0.5c!)

Not only do the spaces shape the wall drawings, but the drafters themselves may be left with choices in how to interpret and then implement LeWitt’s instructions. Take this wall drawing:

I spent a little while thinking about that three-pointed star. Without that, it’s obvious how the progression works: the nth star is centered in the middle of each square, its points are evenly spaced about a circle, they all extend to the same radius, and the border of the star comes in between each point so that the shape is concave. But that three-pointed star breaks all those rules! It need not have – it could have been just like the four-pointed star, only with three points. Instead, it is a triangle with one concave side. Here, I do not know: was this in LeWitt’s instructions, or did a drafter determine how to construct this three-pointed star?

Some of the wall drawings definitely did have ambiguity built in. My favorite of MoCA’s drawings was 146A:

The instructions for this drawing specify that the drafters make “not straight” lines. Okay…so we define the line by what it isn’t, and leave a still-infinite space of possible lines that meet this description. The drafter can make “not straight” lines as un-straight as they like. They can make lines that wander as much as they want. They can choose to tie their “not straight” lines in to the “not straight” lines in the rest of the drawing or not. If you take a look at the timelapse video of this wall drawing being drafted, you can see how each drafter does each “not straight” line differently.

Were I Sol LeWitt, I think it would have been interesting to create a set of wall drawing instructions that contained intentional contradictions. Some drawings might have tiny contradictions, some might seem like egregious errors. What would the drafters do? Would they prioritize the instructions, and satisfy the most important ones first? Would they try to satisfy both constraints equally? Would they push back at all the instructions for the wall drawing, going for the most “average” level of meeting the instructions? That would sure be an interesting way to comment on our artistic, geometric, scientific, or philosophical methodologies. In an exhibition with many drafters and many walls, giving them all the same set of contradictory instructions would likely turn up some very interesting results!

Some of LeWitt’s later wall drawings were just plain fun. Drawing 692, above, was also one of my favorites – I liked how it gave the impression of different planes, and how the vibrant colors made the painting stand out as if with its own light. It was like looking through a windowpane onto another stained-glass window. Remember – this image doesn’t convey it, but I stood only a little taller than the second black line from the floor!

Then, of course, there were wall drawings like Splat, the intentionally impossible-to-look-at Loopy Doopy, Whirls and Twirls, and some cool experimentation with glossy and matte paints.

But of course, being a Williams guy, I had to like Wall Drawing 852 best of all.

The Sol LeWitt Retrospective is a very cool exhibit. I didn’t always like the art at Mass MoCA, but I’ll happily recommend a trip to see this!

This past Saturday, I biked to upper Robert Treman State Park with some friends. Lots of hills between the lower and upper parks!

I brought along my little Canon PowerShot SD1000 – a pretty simple point-and-shoot – and GorillaPod. This camera is obviously designed for sliding into pockets and taking snapshots with a variety of presets, not for taking really high-quality artsy, landscape, or action photos. Still, this camera has been my personal mainstay for a while. (And given the right subject matter, who cares?!) Along with the GorillaPod and CHDK, it can actually be quite powerful. Most of my pictures on Saturday were high-dynamic-range composite photos that came out quite well in postprocessing. (Okay, still not as well as I could have done trying the same thing with a really good camera. But still: this is a great way to get excellent photos for about $220.)

High-dynamic-range, or HDR, photos are composites of several sub-images with varying exposure times. I followed this article and used Qtpfsgui to composite the images.

Lucifer Falls

HDR images essentially combine the dark areas of overexposed photos with the light areas of underexposed photos. The net effect is an image that seems more like our everyday perception: you can see the details in both lit and shadowed areas of the resulting image. Of course, there are several algorithms that do this, and tweaking the settings can result in various realistic or artistic effects. Read the rest of this entry »