yet another reason to love ‘daily dose of imagery’

In my post-synapse, pre-Christmas, bored at work phase I really cannot find it in me to blog very critically these days.  Something more serious will come up soon, but, quite frankly, I love Daily Dose of Imagery now more than ever and would rather hang around his beautiful images.

More than just a pretty face

Ceci n’est pas un cerveau-1,2,3 

Mystery is not simply one of the possibilities of reality
Mystery is what is absolutely necessary for reality to exist

Continuing the sexy picture hoarding, I will place this following link to the 2005/2006 Research Images as Art / Art Images as Research competition at UCL.

My favourite picture is the Context-Free Tree.

Mr Brock Craft
UCL Interaction Centre

This tree-like structure contains over 56.8 million distinct shapes and 2.1 million branches, but was produced with only 16 instructions. This reduced-size reproduction, if printed at full size, would be meters across. It was created with software that uses a “context-free grammar”. Context-free grammars are logical constructs in Computer Science that can be used to formally describe programming languages and other complex entities. They are useful because they can very economically describe highly complex processes and structures, such as the one that produced this picture.

In this image, the 16 rules describe how to build the structure rather than describing the location and characteristics of its branches and leaves. Besides generating elegant images, research in complex grammars can lead to more efficient and powerful techniques for computation.

The image was produced as a result of research on Information Visualisation at the UCL Interaction Centre.

(And Jeremy Bentham!!!!)

Sexy Pictures

As I was lurking around Mind Hacks I came across a link to the 2006 Biomedical Image Awards at the Wellcome Trust. There are audio clips of scientists explaining their photographs and you can vote for your favourite.