So I think I’m going to start writing on this blog on a somewhat regular basis. There are lots of little fun things I want to do, all stemming from my main homepage at MIT (http://web.mit.edu/kmh2011/www). Of course there are always things I want to do and things I say I’m going to do that I inevitably put off for more short-term goals, but thankfully this semester continues to afford me a great deal of flexible time. I don’t intend for MCMDI to become a personal blog, but I think it helps to put it in some context, at least for now while I’m still building it and my website.

I’ll have to wait and see if I’m successful be sure to actually get things done.

That said, I’m very busy right now, so don’t expect any updates for a while. In addition to unrelated matters, it’ll be a while before anything new comes out of MCMDI, other than the kinds of things I’ve already been doing (e.g. commentary, reviews, random stuff).

I’ve been keeping myself pleasingly busy with lab work, miscellaneous matters, reading, fun, relaxing, and other ideas. I’ve taken something of a break from Phoenix Rising, partly because I haven’t had any strikingly new ideas or the motivation and partly because I’ve been distracted by other endeavours. I have begun thinking about another book I want to do before I graduate tentatively titled This Is How I See Architecture outlining my ideas and opinions regarding architecture, the role of neuroscience in architecture, and (hopefully) my research in BCS and how it applies to architecture. I’ve scanned in more film but not yet uploaded them to the interwebs. I’m still reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce and have not yet re-continued Architecture of Happiness. I’ve started reading the textbook and taking notes for 9.29 “Theoretical Neuroscience” in preparation for fall semester. And I had a wonderful 5.5 hour conversation with Michael Grinich, MIT Course XI Class of 2011 and fellow freshman Media Lab program alumnus, over at Cafe Luna.

This time, no guarantees regarding when my next post will be.

Post Scriptum – With regard to the spiral optical illusion I blogged about previously, I had a good conversation with my principal investigator [PI], Aude Oliva of CVCL, about it, and she said that the reason it works is because of two reasons. First, the eye does do active “anti-aliasing” ¹ when dealing with small details, so it will approximate colors at specific points based on the activation of nearby cones ² in the retina. Second, of the three (or four) color cones in the eye (blue, yellow-green, and yellow ³; and for tetrachromats, red-green ⁴), the concentration of blue cone cells is greatest in the peripheral field and lowest in the fovea (the center of the visual field). Thus, when the eye anti-aliases for things in the center of your visual field, it is more error-prone when dealing with blue (and in the given illusion, teal) than with red. That’s why if you enlarge the image enough without cropping out the orange and magenta, the effect significantly weakens—your fovea much more accurately interprets the color of the teal spiral because it doesn’t have to anti-alias.

* EDIT: Previously I had stated that the three types of cones are “red, green, and blue; and for tetrachromats, super-red.” That is incorrect though widely disseminated.

References:

¹ “Anti-aliasing” [Wikipedia]

² “Cone cell” [Wikipedia]

³ “Color blindness” [Wikipedia]

⁴ “Tetrachromacy” [Wikipedia]

In the meantime, condolences and prayers to the family, friends, and fans of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays.

So this optical illusion courtesy of Discover magazine (and apparently original posted on Buzzhunt.co.uk) has been floating around the interwebs and consequently the CVCL e-mail list. I played around with it on Photoshop a bit to find that it appears that lightness of color affects perceptual mutability. I dunno, I just started this field. But if you download the following link* (a Photoshop file), you’ll see that the effect surfaces at two different levels of opacity depending on which layer is above the other.


IF "magenta_orange" ABOVE "teal_teal" THEN opacity="40%" FOR effect="true";
IF "teal_teal" ABOVE "magenta_orange" THEN opacity="60%" FOR effect="true;


Yeah, that’s not actually code.

* Yes, the link is broken. I don’t have a secure file transfer program right now, so once I get my hands on one, I’ll upload my PSD file.

I thought this was a particularly nice illustration. It’s from today’s online New York Times, part of the article, “A Struggle for the Legacy of the Iranian Revolution” by Robert F. Worth. Worth’s article was nothing special. I preferred Reuel Marc Gerecht’s Op-Ed piece, “The Koran and the Ballot Box”. It’s certainly more Romantic.

A week ago there was a rally in Harvard Square. I took photos. The film has been developed, and I’ll scan them in later tonight.

This is a very interesting revolution. We shall see where it goes and to what other events and changes it leads. I do believe that this is the first true revolution of the twentifirst century. It’s incredibly exciting. It makes me want to write.

And on that note, the story is going well. Characters have grown tremendously after speaking to a host of confidantes, including Emily Aicher, Michèle Oshima, Kay Cook, and Nick Gatto. They’re really starting to jump around. I feel like I’m meeting new people.

I started reading it again last night.  I didn’t finish it, even though it’s very short.  It’s a very powerful book.

The last time I visited Japan I went with my mother and my sister.  We stopped by the Little Prince Museum in Hakone.  The Japanese have taken a particular fondness for the Little Prince, which should be of no surprise to anyone who’s read the book.  It was a fun little place—very kitschy—which focused more on the life of the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, than the book itself.  If you’re ever in the area and are a fan of the book, I’d recommend visiting the place.  The day we visited, it was very rainy.  We were with my grandmother and aunt.  As we walked through the exhibition, my sister remarked to me that she thought Antoine and I would have gotten along well.  He was a pilot.

I’m in contact with my good friend and high school English teacher Robert Kaplow (author of such books as Me and Orson Welles, which has been turned into a movie and will hopefully come out this fall somewhere) who has already given terse but valuable advice regarding character names.  Since my only real commitment this summer is my UROP (associate advising and being a FAP counselor are fairly minimal at least for now), hopefully I’ll have the energy, inspiration, and motivation to complete a good chunk of it before summer ends.

ABOVE: The Hotel Marqués De Riscal ³ in Elciego, Spain. (Gehry Partners, LLP)

I thought about this theory, and then I thought about it from an architectural perspective and whether similar things happen in the construction and perception of built structures. I do think that something very similar happens in architecture. In a “good” building, universal features like doors, windows, walls, roofs, et cetera, are easily recognizable regardless of the observer’s background, culture, or genetics. A broken wall is not mistaken for a door or a window, nor is an atrium confused as a missing part of a building. In more controversial buildings, like those of Frank Gehry ⁴, these features are harder to perceive correctly and thus create an internal discord in the observer (the same effect, I propose, happens in steps that are too shallow or zebra crossing lines that are too far apart or close together). Thus, it seems logical to me that humans are hardwired in a fashion similar to linguistics to understand space in a particular way. It also seems logical to me that other animals with visual perception should have some kind of comparable set of rules for analyzing and understanding scenes. Luckily, I work in a lab that specializes in scene understanding (the Computational Visual Cognition Lab ⁵, lead by Aude Oliva and part of MIT’s Department of Brain + Cognitive Sciences ⁶), so hopefully one of us (certainly not me, at least now) will study this idea in greater detail.

References:

¹ “Syntactic Structures” [Wikipedia]

² “Transformational Grammar” [Wikipedia]

³ Marqués de Riscal, Elciego [Starwood Hotels]

⁴ “Frank Gehry” [Wikipedia]

⁵ Computational Visual Cognition Lab [MIT]

⁶ Department of Brain + Cognitive Sciences [MIT]

I first came across this mechanical pencil at the local Utrecht store up in Cambridge.  They only had two of the 0.9mm version in stock, but I bought them both.  Since then, I think I’ve bought five more.  I love them because they have all the features I want from a pencil:  an eraser that twists out and is replaceable; a good metallic textured grip; a good clip that won’t break off; and a handy ring, just above the grip, that can rotate to indicate what kind of lead is currently in the pencil (2B, B, HB, F, H, 2H, 3H, 4H).  I use my Papermate pencil in all of my notetaking, though I use pens for my sketchbooks.  I think I paid about $8 per pencil, so it’s certainly somewhat pricey, but I view it as a solid investment, and I’m sure you can find it online for much less (a quick Google search turned up a price of $6.11 per pencil).