The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery: A New Site Presents 403 Paintings from The Joy of Painting Series

in Art, Data, Technology, Television | June 7th, 2021

“We don’t make mis­takes. We have hap­py acci­dents,” the late Bob Ross soothed fans paint­ing along at home, while brush­ing an alarm­ing amount of black onto one of his sig­na­ture nature scenes.

His mel­low on-cam­era demeanor and flow­ing, wet-on-wet oil paint­ing style were per­fect­ly cal­i­brat­ed to help tight­ly-wound view­ers relax into a right-brained groove.

The cre­ators of the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery take a more left brained approach.

Hav­ing col­lect­ed data on Ross’ ever­green series, The Joy of Paint­ing, they ana­lyzed it for fre­quen­cy of col­or use over the show’s 403 episodes, as well as the num­ber of col­ors applied to each can­vas.

For those keep­ing score, after black and white, alizarin crim­son was the col­or Ross favored most, and 1/4 of the paint­ings made on air boast 12 col­ors.

The data could be slight­ly skewed by the con­tri­bu­tions of occa­sion­al guest artists such as Ross’ for­mer instruc­tor, John Thamm, who once coun­seled Ross to “paint bush­es and trees and leave por­trait paint­ing to some­one else.” Thamm availed him­self of a sin­gle col­or — Van Dyke Brown — to demon­strate the wipe out tech­nique. His con­tri­bu­tion is one of the few human like­ness­es that got paint­ed over the show’s 11-year pub­lic tele­vi­sion run.

The Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery has sev­er­al options for view­ing the data.

Mouse over a grid of grey rec­tan­gles to see the 403 art­works pre­sent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, along with titles and episode num­bers.

(This has all the mak­ings of a thump­ing good mem­o­ry game, à la Con­cen­tra­tion… flip all the rec­tan­gles, study them, then see if you can nav­i­gate back to all the cab­ins or mead­ows.)

A bar graph, sim­i­lar­ly com­posed of rec­tan­gles, reveals the col­ors that went into each paint­ing.

Anoth­er chart ana­lyzes Ross’ use of col­or over time, as he moved away from Burnt Umber and eased up on Pftha­lo Green.

 

Indi­an Red was accord­ed but a sin­gle use, in sea­son 22’s first episode, “Autumn Images.” (“Let’s sparkle this up. We’re gonna have fall col­ors. Let’s get crazy.”)

For art lovers crav­ing a more tra­di­tion­al gallery expe­ri­ence, site cre­ator Con­nor Roth­schild has installed a vir­tu­al bench fac­ing a frame capa­ble of dis­play­ing all the paint­ings in ran­dom or chrono­log­i­cal order, with dig­i­tal swatch­es rep­re­sent­ing the paints that went into them and YouTube links to the episodes that pro­duced them.

And for those who’d rather gaze at data sci­ence, the code is avail­able on GitHub.

Explore the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery here. Scroll down to take advan­tage of all the options.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

The Joy of Paint­ing with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mur­al on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

Expe­ri­ence the Bob Ross Expe­ri­ence: A New Muse­um Open in the TV Painter’s For­mer Stu­dio Home

Bob Ross’ Christ­mas Spe­cial: Cel­e­brate, Relax, Nod Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety show hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Interactive Visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

in Data, Philosophy | May 19th, 2021

2020 was “a year for the (record) books in pub­lish­ing,” wrote Jim Mil­liot in Publisher’s Week­ly this past Jan­u­ary, a surge con­tin­u­ing into 2021. Yet some kinds of print books have so declined in sales there may be no rea­son to keep pub­lish­ing them, or buy­ing them, since their equiv­a­lents online are supe­ri­or in almost every respect to any ver­sion on paper. As I final­ly con­ced­ed dur­ing a recent, aggres­sive spring clean­ing, I per­son­al­ly have no rea­son to store heavy, bulky, dusty ref­er­ence books, except in cas­es of extreme sen­ti­ment.

The online Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, or the SEP, dis­pensed with the need for phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print years ago. It’s “the most inter­est­ing web­site on the inter­net,” wrote Nikhail Son­nad at Quartz in 2015. “Not because of the con­tent — which includes fas­ci­nat­ing entries on every­thing from ambi­gu­i­ty to zom­bies—but because of the site itself. Its cre­ators have solved one of the internet’s fun­da­men­tal prob­lems: How to pro­vide author­i­ta­tive, rig­or­ous­ly accu­rate knowl­edge, at no cost to read­ers. It’s some­thing the ency­clo­pe­dia, or SEP, has man­aged to do for two decades.”

Start­ed in 1995 by Stan­ford philoso­pher Edward Zal­ta with only two entries, the SEP is “pos­i­tive­ly ancient in inter­net years,” but it is hard­ly “ossi­fied,” remain­ing an online source “‘com­pa­ra­ble in scope, depth and author­i­ty,’” the Amer­i­can Library Association’s Book­list review wrote, “to the biggest phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print.”

I per­son­al­ly think the SEP is just as inter­est­ing for its con­tent as its achieve­ment, if not more so — and now, thanks to engi­neer and devel­op­er Joseph DiCas­tro, that con­tent is more acces­si­ble than ever, though an inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion project and search engine called Visu­al­iz­ing SEP.

Visu­al­iz­ing SEP “pro­vides clear visu­al­iza­tions based on a philo­soph­i­cal tax­on­o­my that DiCas­tro adapt­ed from the one devel­oped by the Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Phi­los­o­phy Ontol­ogy Project (InPhO),” Justin Wein­berg writes at Dai­ly Nous. “Type a term into the search box and sug­gest­ed SEP entries will be list­ed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a sim­ple visu­al­iza­tion will appear with your select­ed entry at the cen­ter and relat­ed entries sur­round­ing it.” At the top of the page, you can select from a series of “domains.” Each selec­tion pro­duces a sim­i­lar visu­al­iza­tion of var­i­ous-sized dots.

I found enough entries to keep me busy for hours in the very first domain graph, “Aes­thet­ics and Phi­los­o­phy of Art.” The last of these, sim­ply titled “Thinker,” links togeth­er all of the philoso­phers men­tioned in the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, from the most famous house­hold names to the most obscure and scholas­tic. Just skim­ming through these names and read­ing the brief biogra­phies at the left will leave read­ers with a broad­er con­tex­tu­al under­stand­ing than they could gain from a print ency­clo­pe­dia. (Click on the “Arti­cle Details” but­ton to expand the full arti­cle).

The visu­al­iz­er project car­ries forth into the data-obsessed 21st cen­tu­ry one of the best things about the Inter­net in its ear­li­est years: access to free, high qual­i­ty (and high­ly portable) infor­ma­tion with few bar­ri­ers for entry. Learn more about how to best nav­i­gate Visu­al­iz­ing SEP at Dai­ly Nous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized in an Inter­ac­tive Time­line

“The Philosopher’s Web,” an Inter­ac­tive Data Visu­al­iza­tion Shows the Web of Influ­ences Con­nect­ing Ancient & Mod­ern Philoso­phers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch “Degrees of Uncertainty,” an Animated Documentary about Climate Science, Uncertainty & Knowing When to Trust the Experts

in Current Affairs, Data, Science | May 5th, 2021

We should just trust the experts. But wait: to iden­ti­fy true exper­tise requires its own kind of even more spe­cial­ized exper­tise. Besides, experts dis­agree with each oth­er, and over time dis­agree with them­selves as well. This makes it chal­leng­ing indeed for all of us non-experts — and we’re all non-experts in the fields to which we have not ded­i­cat­ed our lives — to under­stand phe­nom­e­na of any com­plex­i­ty. As for grasp­ing cli­mate change, with its enor­mous his­tor­i­cal scale and count­less many vari­ables, might we as well just throw up our hands? Many have done so: Neil Hal­lo­ran, cre­ator of the short doc­u­men­tary Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty above, labels them “cli­mate denial­ists” and “cli­mate defeatists.”

Cli­mate denial­ists choose to believe that man­made cli­mate change isn’t hap­pen­ing, cli­mate defeatists choose to believe that it’s inevitable, and both there­by let them­selves off the hook. Not only do they not have to address the issue, they don’t even have to under­stand it — which itself can seem a fair­ly daunt­ing task, giv­en that sci­en­tists them­selves express no small degree of uncer­tain­ty about cli­mate change’s degree and tra­jec­to­ry. “The only way to learn how sure sci­en­tists are is to dig in a lit­tle and view their work with some healthy skep­ti­cism,” says Hal­lo­ran. This entails devel­op­ing an instinct not for refu­ta­tion, exact­ly, but for exam­in­ing just how the experts arrive at their con­clu­sions and what pit­falls they encounter along the way.

Often, sci­en­tists “don’t know how close they are to the truth, and they’re prone to con­fir­ma­tion bias,” and as any­one pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the sci­ences knows full well, they work “under pres­sure to pub­lish note­wor­thy find­ings.” Their pub­li­ca­tions then find their way to a media cul­ture in which, increas­ing­ly, “trust­ing or dis­trust­ing sci­en­tists is becom­ing a mat­ter of polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty.” As he did in his pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary The Fall­en of World War II, Hal­lo­ran uses ani­ma­tion and data visu­al­iza­tion to illu­mi­nate his own path to under­stand­ing a glob­al occur­rence whose sheer pro­por­tions make it dif­fi­cult to per­ceive.

This jour­ney takes Hal­lo­ran not just around the globe but back in time, start­ing in the year 19,000 B.C. and end­ing in pro­jec­tions of a future in which ring seas swal­low much of Ams­ter­dam, Mia­mi, and New Orleans. The most impor­tant stop in the mid­dle is the Age of Enlight­en­ment and the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 17th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, when sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy rose to promi­nence and brought about  an unprece­dent­ed human flour­ish­ing — with cli­mat­ic con­se­quences that have begun to make them­selves known, albeit not with absolute cer­tain­ty. But as Hal­lo­ran sees it, “uncer­tain­ty, the very thing that clouds our view, also frees us to con­struct pos­si­ble answers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Map of Doom: A Data-Driven Visualization of the Biggest Threats to Humanity, Ranked from Likely to Unlikely

in Data, Life, Science | December 9th, 2020

Sure­ly you’ve learned, as I have, to fil­ter out the con­stant threats of doom. It’s impos­si­ble to func­tion on high alert all of the time. But one must stay at least min­i­mal­ly informed. To check the news even once a day is to encounter head­line after head­line announc­ing DOOM IS COMING! Say that we’re all desen­si­tized, and rather than react, we eval­u­ate: In what way will doom arrive? How bad will the doom be? There are many com­pet­ing the­o­ries of doom. Which one is most like­ly, and how can we under­stand them in rela­tion to each oth­er?

For this lev­el of analy­sis, we might turn to Dominic Wal­li­man, physi­cist and pro­pri­etor of Domain of Sci­ence, the YouTube chan­nel and web­site that has brought us enter­tain­ing and com­pre­hen­sive maps of sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic fields, such as biol­o­gy, chem­istry, math­e­mat­ics, com­put­er sci­ence, and quan­tum physics. Is rank­ing apoc­a­lypses a sci­en­tif­ic field of study, you might won­der? Yes, when it is a data-dri­ven threat assess­ment. Wal­li­man sur­veyed and ana­lyzed, as he says in his intro­duc­tion, “all of the dif­fer­ent threats to human­i­ty that exist.”

When the pan­dem­ic hit last win­ter, “we as a soci­ety were com­plete­ly unpre­pared for it,” despite the fact that experts had been warn­ing us for decades that exact­ly such a threat was high on the scale of like­li­hood. Are we focus­ing on the wrong kinds of doom, to the exclu­sion of more press­ing threats? Instead of pan­ick­ing when the coro­n­avirus hit, Wal­li­man cooly won­dered what else might be lurk­ing around the cor­ner. “Crikey,” says the New Zealan­der upon the first reveal of his Map of Doom, “there’s quite a lot aren’t there?”

Not con­tent to just col­lect dis­as­ters (and draw them as if they were all hap­pen­ing at the same time), Wal­li­man also want­ed to find out which ones pose the biggest threat, “using some real data.” After the Map of Doom comes the Chart of Doom, an XY grid plot­ting the like­li­hood and sever­i­ty of var­i­ous crises. These include ancient stal­warts like super vol­ca­noes; far more recent threats like nuclear war and cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change; cos­mic threats like aster­oids and col­laps­ing stars; ter­res­tri­al threats like wide­spread soci­etal col­lapse and extra-ter­res­tri­al threats like hos­tile aliens….

At the top of the graph, at the lim­it of “high like­li­hood,” there lies the “already hap­pen­ing zone,” includ­ing, of course, COVID-19, cli­mate change, and volatile extreme weath­er events like hur­ri­canes and tsunamis. At the bot­tom, in the “impos­si­ble to cal­cu­late” zone, we find sci-fi events like rogue AI, rogue black holes, rogue nano-bots, hos­tile aliens, and the col­lapse of the vac­u­um of space. All the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, but in Wal­li­man’s analy­sis most­ly unlike­ly to occur. As in all of his maps, he cites his sources on the video’s YouTube page.

If you’re not feel­ing quite up to a data pre­sen­ta­tion on mass casu­al­ty events just now, you can down­load the Map and Chart of Doom here and peruse them at your leisure. Pick up a Map of Doom for the wall at Wal­li­man’s site, and while you’re there, why not buy an “I sur­vived 2020” stick­er. Maybe it’s pre­ma­ture, and maybe in poor taste. And maybe in times of doom we need some­one to face the facts of doom square­ly, turn them into car­toon info­graph­ics of doom, and claim vic­to­ries like liv­ing through anoth­er cal­en­dar year.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

M.I.T. Com­put­er Pro­gram Alarm­ing­ly Pre­dicts in 1973 That Civ­i­liza­tion Will End by 2040

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dicts the World Will End in 2060

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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GPS Tracking Reveals the Secret Lives of Outdoor Cats

in Data, K-12, Maps, Nature, Science, Technology | October 2nd, 2020

We track sharks, rhi­no, and bears, so why not Boo Boo Kit­ty, Peanut, and Pump­kin?

The Long Island feline res­i­dents volunteered—or more accu­rate­ly, were volunteered—by their human com­pan­ions to par­tic­i­pate in a domes­tic cat move­ment study as part of the inter­na­tion­al Cat Track­er project.

Each beast was out­fit­ted with a GPS track­er-enhanced har­ness, which they wore for a week.

(Many cat own­ers will find that alone some­thing of an achieve­ment.)

In total, almost a thou­sand house­holds in four coun­tries took part—the Unit­ed States, New Zealand, Aus­tralia, and the UK.

Sci­en­tists were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed to learn the degree of may­hem these cher­ished pets were vis­it­ing on sur­round­ing wildlife in their off hours.

Any­one who’s been left a present of a fresh­ly mur­dered baby bun­ny, mole, or wing­less bat can prob­a­bly guess.

It’s a con­sid­er­able amount, though by and large the domes­ti­cat­ed par­tic­i­pants stuck close to home, rarely trav­el­ing more than two foot­ball fields away from the com­forts of their own yards. The impulse to keep the food bowl with­in easy range con­fines their hunt­ing activ­i­ties to a fair­ly tight area. Woe to the field mice who set up shop there.

Their move­ments also revealed the per­il they put them­selves in, cross­ing high­ways, roads, and park­ing lots. Researcher Hei­dy Kikil­lus, who tracked cats in New Zealand, report­ed that a num­ber of her group’s sub­jects wound up in a fatal encounter with a vehi­cle.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, gen­der, age, and geog­ra­phy play a part in how far a cat roams, with males, younger ani­mals, and coun­try dwellers cov­er­ing more ground. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, those who have not been neutered or spayed tend to have a freer range too.

“With­out the moti­va­tions of food and sex, most cats seem con­tent to be home­bod­ies,” zool­o­gist Roland Kays, one of the US Project lead­ers, not­ed.

Amer­i­can cit­i­zen sci­en­tists who’d like to enroll their cat can find infor­ma­tion and the nec­es­sary forms on the Cat Track­er web­site.

The cat-less and those with indoor cats can enjoy pho­tos of select par­tic­i­pants and explore their tracks here.

And what bet­ter fall craft than a DIY cat track­ing GPS har­ness?

via Nation­al Geo­graph­ic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”

in Archives, Data, Education, Internet Archive, Libraries | September 22nd, 2020

Open access pub­lish­ing has, indeed, made aca­d­e­m­ic research more acces­si­ble, but in “the move from phys­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals to dig­i­tal­ly-acces­si­ble papers,” Saman­tha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more pre­car­i­ous to pre­serve…. If an insti­tu­tion stops pay­ing for web host­ing or changes servers, the research with­in could dis­ap­pear.” At least a cou­ple hun­dred open access jour­nals van­ished in this way between 2000 and 2019, a new study pub­lished on arx­iv found. Anoth­er 900 jour­nals are in dan­ger of meet­ing the same fate.

The jour­nals in per­il include schol­ar­ship in the human­i­ties and sci­ences, though many pub­li­ca­tions may only be of inter­est to his­to­ri­ans, giv­en the speed at which sci­en­tif­ic research tends to move. In any case, “there shouldn’t real­ly be any decay or loss in sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that have been open on the web,” says study co-author Mikael Laasko, infor­ma­tion sci­en­tist at the Han­ken School of Eco­nom­ics in Helsin­ki. Yet, in dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, there are no print­ed copies in uni­ver­si­ty libraries, cat­a­logued and main­tained by librar­i­ans.

To fill the need, the Inter­net Archive has cre­at­ed its own schol­ar­ly search plat­form, a “full­text search index” that includes “over 25 mil­lion research arti­cles and oth­er schol­ar­ly doc­u­ments” pre­served on its servers. These col­lec­tions span dig­i­tized and orig­i­nal dig­i­tal arti­cles pub­lished from the 18th cen­tu­ry to “the lat­est Open Access con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.” Con­tent in this search index comes in one of three forms:

  • pub­lic web con­tent in the Way­back Machine web archives (web.archive.org), either iden­ti­fied from his­toric col­lect­ing, crawled specif­i­cal­ly to ensure long-term access to schol­ar­ly mate­ri­als, or crawled at the direc­tion of Archive-It part­ners
  • dig­i­tized print mate­r­i­al from paper and micro­form col­lec­tions pur­chased and scanned by Inter­net Archive or its part­ners
  • gen­er­al mate­ri­als on the archive.org col­lec­tions, includ­ing con­tent from part­ner orga­ni­za­tions, uploads from the gen­er­al pub­lic, and mir­rors of oth­er projects

The project is still in “alpha” and “has sev­er­al bugs,” the site cau­tions, but it could, when it’s ful­ly up and run­ning, become part of a much-need­ed rev­o­lu­tion in aca­d­e­m­ic research—that is if the major aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers don’t find some legal pre­text to shut it down.

Aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing boasts one of the most rapa­cious legal busi­ness mod­els on the glob­al mar­ket, and one of the most exploita­tive: a dou­ble stan­dard in which schol­ars freely pub­lish and review research for the pub­lic ben­e­fit (osten­si­bly) and very often on the pub­lic dime; while pri­vate inter­me­di­aries rake in astro­nom­i­cal sums for them­selves with pay­walls. The open access mod­el has changed things, but the only way to tru­ly serve the “best inter­ests of researchers and the pub­lic,” neu­ro­sci­en­tist Shaun Khoo argues, is through pub­lic infra­struc­ture and ful­ly non-prof­it pub­li­ca­tion.

Maybe Inter­net Archive Schol­ar can go some way toward bridg­ing the gap, as a pub­licly acces­si­ble, non-prof­it search engine, dig­i­tal cat­a­logue, and library for research that is worth pre­serv­ing, read­ing, and build­ing upon even if it does­n’t gen­er­ate share­hold­er rev­enue. For a deep­er dive into how the Archive built its for­mi­da­ble, still devel­op­ing, new data­base, see the video pre­sen­ta­tion above from Jef­fer­son Bai­ley, Direc­tor of Web Archiv­ing & Data Ser­vices. And have a look at Inter­net Archive Schol­ar here. It cur­rent­ly lacks advanced search func­tions, but plug in any search term and pre­pare to be amazed by the incred­i­ble vol­ume of archived full text arti­cles you turn up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Archive Makes 2,500 More Clas­sic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adven­ture, and Oth­ers

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Revisit Scenes of Daily Life in Amsterdam in 1922, with Historic Footage Enhanced by Artificial Intelligence

in Computer Science, Data, Film, Technology, Travel | August 3rd, 2020

Welkom in Ams­ter­dam… 1922.

Neur­al net­work artist Denis Shiryaev describes him­self as “an artis­tic machine-learn­ing per­son with a soul.”

For the last six months, he’s been apply­ing him­self to re-ren­der­ing doc­u­men­tary footage of city life—Belle Epoque Paris, Tokyo at the start of the the Taishō era, and New York City in 1911—the year of the Tri­an­gle Shirt­waist Fire.

It’s pos­si­ble you’ve seen the footage before, but nev­er so alive in feel. Shiryaev’s ren­der­ings trick mod­ern eyes with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, boost­ing the orig­i­nal frames-per-sec­ond rate and res­o­lu­tion, sta­bi­liz­ing and adding color—not nec­es­sar­i­ly his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate.

The herky-jerky bustling qual­i­ty of the black-and-white orig­i­nals is trans­formed into some­thing fuller and more flu­id, mak­ing the human sub­jects seem… well, more human.

This Trip Through the Streets of Ams­ter­dam is tru­ly a blast from the past… the antithe­sis of the social dis­tanc­ing we must cur­rent­ly prac­tice.

Mer­ry cit­i­zens jos­tle shoul­der to shoul­der, unmasked, snack­ing, danc­ing, arms slung around each oth­er… unabashed­ly curi­ous about the hand-cranked cam­era turned on them as they go about their busi­ness.

A group of women vis­it­ing out­side a shop laugh and scatter—clearly they weren’t expect­ing to be filmed in their aprons.

Young boys look­ing to steal the show push their way to the front, cut­ting capers and throw­ing mock punch­es.

Sor­ry, lads, the award for Most Mem­o­rable Per­for­mance by a Juve­nile goes to the small fel­low at the 4:10 mark. He’s not ham­ming it up at all, mere­ly tak­ing a quick puff of his cig­a­rette while run­ning along­side a crowd of men on bikes, deter­mined to keep pace with the cam­era per­son.

Numer­ous YouTube view­ers have observed with some won­der that all the peo­ple who appear, with the dis­tant excep­tion of a baby or two at the end, would be in the grave by now.

They do seem so alive.

Mod­ern eyes should also take note of the absences: no cars, no plas­tic, no cell phones…

And, of course, every­one is white. The Nether­lands’ pop­u­la­tion would not diver­si­fy racial­ly for anoth­er cou­ple of decades, begin­ning with immi­grants from Indone­sia after WWII and Suri­nam in the 50s.

With regard to that, please be fore­warned that not all of the YouTube com­ments have to do with cheeky lit­tle boys and babies who would be push­ing 100…

The footage is tak­en from the archival col­lec­tion of the EYE film­mu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam, with ambi­ent sound by Guy Jones.

See more of Denis Shiryaev’s  upscaled vin­tage footage in the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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16 Ways the World Is Getting Remarkably Better: Visuals by Statistician Hans Rosling

in Data, Environment, Health, TED Talks | May 12th, 2020

It cer­tain­ly may not feel like things are get­ting bet­ter behind the anx­ious veils of our COVID lock­downs. But some might say that opti­mism and pes­simism are prod­ucts of the gut, hid­den some­where in the bac­te­r­i­al stew we call the micro­bio­me. “All prej­u­dices come from the intestines,” pro­claimed not­ed suf­fer­er of indi­ges­tion, Friedrich Niet­zsche. Maybe we can change our views by chang­ing our diet. But it’s a lit­tle hard­er to change our emo­tions with facts. We turn up our noses at them, or find them impos­si­ble to digest.

Niet­zsche did not con­sid­er him­self a pes­simist. Despite his stom­ach trou­bles, he “adopt­ed a phi­los­o­phy that said yes to life,” notes Rea­son and Mean­ing, “ful­ly cog­nizant of the fact that life is most­ly mis­er­able, evil, ugly, and absurd.” Let’s grant that this is so. A great many of us, I think, are inclined to believe it. We are ide­al con­sumers for dystopi­an Niet­zsche-esque fan­tasies about super­men and “last men.” Still, it’s worth ask­ing: is life always and equal­ly mis­er­able, evil, ugly, and absurd? Is the idea of human progress no more than a mod­ern delu­sion?

Physi­cian, sta­tis­ti­cian, and one­time sword swal­low­er Hans Rosling spent sev­er­al years try­ing to show oth­er­wise in tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries for the BBC, TED Talks, and the posthu­mous book Fact­ful­ness: Ten Rea­sons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Bet­ter Than You Think, co-writ­ten with his son and daugh­ter-in-law, a sta­tis­ti­cian and design­er, respec­tive­ly. Rosling, who passed away in 2017, also worked with his two co-authors on soft­ware used to ani­mate sta­tis­tics, and in his pub­lic talks and book, he attempt­ed to bring data to life in ways that engage gut feel­ings.

Take the set of graphs above, aka, “16 Bad Things Decreas­ing,” from Fact­ful­ness. (View a larg­er scan of the pages here.) Yes, you may look at a set of mono­chro­mat­ic trend lines and yawn. But if you attend to the details, you’ll can see that each arrow plum­met­ing down­ward rep­re­sents some pro­found ill, man­made or oth­er­wise, that has killed or maimed mil­lions. These range from legal slavery—down from 194 coun­tries in 1800 to 3 in 2017—to small­pox: down from 148 coun­tries with cas­es in 1850 to 0 in 1979. (Per­haps our cur­rent glob­al epi­dem­ic will war­rant its own tri­umphant graph in a revised edi­tion some decades in the future.) Is this not progress?

What about the steadi­ly falling rates of world hunger, child mor­tal­i­ty, HIV infec­tions, num­bers of nuclear war­heads, deaths from dis­as­ter, and ozone deple­tion? Hard to argue with the num­bers, though as always, we should con­sid­er the source. (Near­ly all these sta­tis­tics come from Rosling’s own com­pa­ny, Gap­min­der.) In the video above, Dr. Rosling explains to a TED audi­ence how he designed a course on glob­al health in his native Swe­den. In order to make sure the mate­r­i­al mea­sured up to his accom­plished stu­dents’ abil­i­ties, he first gave them a ques­tion­naire to test their knowl­edge.

Rosling found, he jokes, “that Swedish top stu­dents know sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly less about the world than a chim­panzee,” who would have scored high­er by chance. The prob­lem “was not igno­rance, it was pre­con­ceived ideas,” which are worse. Bad ideas are dri­ven by many ‑isms, but also by what Rosling calls in the book an “over­dra­mat­ic” world­view. Humans are ner­vous by nature. “Our ten­den­cy to mis­in­ter­pret facts is instinctive—an evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tion to help us make quick deci­sions to avoid dan­ger,” writes Katie Law in a review of Fact­ful­ness.

“While we still need these instincts, they can also trip us up.” Mag­ni­fied by glob­al, col­lec­tive anx­i­eties, weaponized by can­ny mass media, the ten­den­cy to pes­simism becomes real­i­ty, but it’s one that is not sup­port­ed by the data. This kind of argu­ment has become kind of a cot­tage indus­try; each pre­sen­ta­tion must be eval­u­at­ed on its own mer­its. Pre­sum­ably enlight­ened opti­mism can be just as over­sim­pli­fied a view as the dark­est pes­simism. But Rosling insist­ed he wasn’t an opti­mist. He was just being “fact­ful.” We prob­a­bly shouldn’t get into what Niet­zsche might say to that.

via Simon Kuesten­mach­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Against All Odds: A Gen­tle Intro­duc­tion to Sta­tis­tics Host­ed by Har­vard Geneti­cist Par­dis Sabeti (Free Online Course)

David Byrne Launch­es Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, an Online Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Arti­cles by Byrne, Bri­an Eno & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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