With Julie H & Dr C particularly in mind....

Shaftesbury Avenue, London; warm sunny spring day; a pavement table beneath new elm foliage; bagel with falafel and houmous; lovely.

Memories were...

Memories were just photos printed on synapses. As such, he justified sharing some of them with the world while keeping others locked in private albums.”

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• Ali Shaw, The girl with glass feet, ch 8. 2009, London: Atlantic Books. 9781843549208

Beating the bounds

One of my students recently told me that everything I choose to do (photographically, mathematically, physically...) “is driven by a fascination with the nature of boundaries”. I don't know whether or not that's true. I do know that it has at least enough superficial evidence in its favour to provide hours of exploratory fun.

As I was first turning the idea over in my mind, Julie Heyward of Unreal Nature commented on a Today image that “the brick pattern forces you to be aware of the over/under in the puddle”. This almost certainly connects with Julie's own visual and philosophical interest in inside/outside, and (dis)unified perspectives, but to me on that particular day, primed as I was, it drew my attention to the puddle surface as a boundary surface. A boundary surface between air and water, of course; between over and under, too; but also between real and imagined, an Alice's looking glass. Then again, even in two dimensional terms the image is divided into five regions (asphalt, water, three types of paving material) and those are held apart by linear boundaries. In network terms (which are in my mind for reasons which don't matter here), the visible plane contains five regions, four arcs (ignoring the image frame) but only one node.

Which led me to call up and riffle through other recent Today pages and interrogate them in similar terms. T100404 has two obvious visible boundary surfaces, two more implied, all four separated by a single boundary line where water meets reeds. Others, either side, can be analysed in similar ways.

A red brick alley wall has recently been calling me back again and again (see, for example, T100406, T100412, T100417) to share in its love affair with the low angled spring sun. I've visited it in previous years, too, from time to time, but now it seems inclined to take me fully into its confidence. All of those clearly fit the boundaries view of things.

When it comes to images of people, though, the model seems to break down. The conversation at T100407, for instance: I struggle to find any boundaries interpretation there, beyond weak and general ideas that would fit any image at all.

Whether there is anything in it or not, I've found it invigorating to be given a novel external framework against which to reinvestigate my own vision. I recommend it to everyone as an exercise well worth trying.

Origin & OriginPro 8.1, SR2

The extension of proper data analysis and visualisation to the generic desktop, putting it on the same omnipresent footing as standard office applications like word processor, email and spreadsheet, is a holy grail. With service release 2, Origin and OriginPro 8.1 are probably the current holders for most accessible and user friendly tool on the market. The approachability agenda has been obvious in Origin's development curve for some time, became especially clear with version 8, and sharpened up further with release 8.1, but it is the inclusion of 'gadgets' in this latest service release that pulls everything together in a decisive leap forward. [More...]

MathType 6.6

The first thing a MathType version 6 user would notice on upgrading now is a general and indefinable feeling of everything that used to work well now working even more smoothly. At the same time (and more importantly) there is also recognition of, and proactive response to, changes in the larger computing environment. Design Science has, unlike some providers, demonstrated a consistently clear understanding that mathematical notation is communication, and only one component within a structure that is developing organically on several levels. A simplistic diagram of that structure would depict it as a tension between one dominant content platform, its principle challengers, the complex collectivity of other applications, and continuous evolution of the World Wide Web as a connecting medium. MathType has, so far, very successfully ridden the resulting currents. [More...]

Batteries not included

I'm sitting in a rural café, and a couple of about my age has just come in.

The man is wearing a teeshirt, on which is printed:

I'M NOT A COMPLETE IDIOT.
SOME PARTS ARE MISSING.

“Where did you buy the teeshirt?”, I ask him.

“My wife gave it to me” he replies.

“Just after he had an operation” she adds, and they both grin cheerfully.

An education

Today I saw the film An education for the first time. It's a real gem ... Carey Mulligan was award nominated for her leading part as Jenny but, to my mind, the performances of Alfred Molina (as Jenny's father), Cara Seymour (her mother) and Rosamund Pike (Helen) are equally deserving. And smaller parts, like that of Matthew Beard (as outgunned suitor Graham) demand real attention.

I shall be watching it again (or rewatching it, or rereading it, if Unreal Nature is listening!) more than once, at the earliest opportunity.

Interrogate your hi-heel sneakers...*

Unreal Nature and TTMF recently had an exchange about Ursula K Le Guin's take on high heeled shoes; TTMF also posted on the subject

I have, as I briefly noted in that run of comments, strong views on high heels which I have learned to keep to myself. I am not, personally, convinced by Le Guin's speculation that the fetishistic appeal of high heels is congruent with the eroticism of pain. High heels relate to Chinese foot binding only in the fact that both involve feet in sacrifice of well being to a local idea of beauty. The sacrifice in both cases is, however, real.

Unreal Nature points out that “women love their shoes” ... and I don't dispute it. But human beings are eternally capable of loving that which (or those who) will damage or even destroy them. Women love their shoes, I would suggest, because they have grown up in a society where they learnt that this was what they should do.

The usual explanation for the appeal of high heels is a biosocial one: they throw the weight of the body forward, resulting in muscle tensions which in turn produce visual signals interpreted by the male instinctive subconscious as indicative of sexual readiness. That may be true; I am not qualified to either endorse or dispute it, though it makes superficial sense. I suspect that there is an uglier instinct, too: a woman o high heels is completely unable to run effectively and, therefore, advertises vulnerability.

But there is another aspect: high heels are (in the semiotic sense) a sign. Watch a group of men whose inhibitions have been removed by alcohol, and you will see that there are a numbr of signs which will trigger whistles and suggestive remarks. They include long hair, fur coats, and high heels amongst many others. The woman inside the fur coat, bneah the long hair, perched on the high heels, is to a large extent irrelevant to the initial knee jerk response.

Though I differ from Le Guin's analysis of their fetishistic appeal, I personally believe that high heels are unpleasant and dangerous just on the vulnerability issue alone. It is not my place to decide what others wear; but I cannot ever approve of a social convention which places an individual at deliberate risk.

There is nothing wrong with fetishism, nor with social persistence of convention; but there can be very much wrong with the impact of either on individuals and their well being. In the case of high heeled shoes, the harm is both physical and psychosocial. If individuals wish to accept harm as a price for something else, they should be aware that they are doing so − and should not do so under social duress.

On a broader stage, much of this can be generalised to fashion in general. As Le Guin says in the same essay:

“And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it.”

...or, to quote myself in somewhat more melodramatic mode,“...in my opinion ‘fashion’ is a terrible, terrible thing for the freedom of the individual ... a dead hand on the control levers of the individual psyche of which dictators with huge propaganda machines can only dream ... another word for constant, universal, low level mob behaviour.”

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• *Tommy Tucker, Put on your hi-heel sneakers. 1964.
• Ursula K Le Guin, The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination., "Discussions and opinions: About feet". 2004, Boston: Shambhala. 1590300068 or 9781590300060 (pbk.).

Material values

Early in the film Up in the Air¹, characters played by George Clooney and Vera Farmiga start a casual relationship whose emptiness is emphasised in a pointedly tragicomic scene. Picking up one of Clooney’s airline loyalty cards, Farmiga asks “what is that, carbon fibre? ... I love the weight!” and follows up shortly thereafter with “pretty sexy”. It’s a whole new way of looking at materials science.

Carbon fibre, now so ubiquitous that it can be wasted in Clooney’s loyalty card, was of course a fairly early stage in the down-scale migration of materials science. What was considered daringly tiny when I learned my chemistry is now referred to as ‘bulk scale’, the nanoscale has become every day, and quantum effects are the new hunting ground. [More...]

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1. Reitman, J., Up in the Air. 2009, Hollywood CA: Paramount Pictures.

Seeing

When I was taking what was to became today's Today picture (see below), on a new housing estate, a group of children (perhaps ten years old) were coming up the alleyway to my right. I clicked the shutter, stood up, and headed down to alley to continue my walk. As I came close to the children, one of them asked “What were you doing?”

“Taking pictures” I replied, economically.

“Of the puddle?'”

“Of what I could see in the puddle. Of the reflections, the clouds and the sky.”

I walked on. Glancing back, though, I saw that they had stopped on the spot where I had squatted down to get my shot; they were looking at the puddle. I stopped, and went back.

I touched the preview button on the back of the camera (oh, the advantages of digital over film!) to throw my image onto the LCD screen, and held it out in above the puddle where it could be compared with the real world in front of them.

All of their faces lit up with sudden understanding; and one of them glowed with excitement and perception of why. Those expressions in general, and that one in particular, are every "teacher"s favourite dream and greatest reward.