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✇ Open Culture

When the US Government Commissioned 7,497 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World (1886)

Por Ayun Halliday — 9 de Outubro de 2023, 09:00

A picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you are a late-19th or early-20th century horticulturist eager to protect intellectual property rights to newly cultivated varieties of fruit.

Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source of income.

In 1886, long before color photography was a viable option, the US Department of Agriculture engaged approximately 21, mostly female illustrators to create realistic renderings of hundreds of fruit varieties for lithographic reproduction in USDA articles, reports, and bulletins.

According to the Division of Pomology’s first chief, Henry E. Van Deman, the artists’ mandate was to capture “the natural size, shape, and color of both the exterior and interior of the fruit, with the leaves and twigs characteristic of each.”

If a specimen was going bad, the artist was under strict orders to represent the damage faithfully – no prettying things up.

As Alice Tangerini, staff illustrator and curator for botanical art in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History writes, “botanical illustrators and their works serve the scientist, depict(ing) what a botanist describes, acting as the proofreader for the scientific description:”

Digital photography, although increasingly used, cannot make judgements about the intricacies of portraying the plant parts a scientist may wish to emphasize and a camera cannot reconstruct a lifelike botanical specimen from dried, pressed material… the thought process mediating that decision of every aspect of the illustration lives in the head of the illustrator.

 …the illustrator also has an eye for the aesthetics of botanical illustration, knowing that a drawing must capture the interest of the viewer to be a viable form of communication. Attention to accuracy is important, but excellence of style and technique used is also primary for an illustration to endure as a work of art and science.

Primary contributors Deborah Griscom Passmore, Mary Daisy Arnold, Amanda Almira Newton and their colleagues established norms for botanical illustration with their paintings for the USDA’s Pomological Watercolor Collection, simultaneously providing much-needed visual evidence for cultivators wishing to establish claims to their varietals.

(Fruit breeders’ rights were formally protected with the establishment of the Plant Patent Act of 1930, which decreed that anyone who “invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant” could receive a patent.)

The collection’s 7,497 watercolors of realistically-rendered fruits capture both the commonplace and the exotic in mouthwatering detail.

Both aesthetically and as a scientific database, the Pomological Watercolor Collection is the berries – specifically, Gandy, Chesapeake, Excelsior, Manhattan, and Gabara to namecheck but a few types of Fragaria, aka strawberries, preserved therein.

Other fruits remain lesser known on our shores. The USDA sponsored global expeditions specifically to gather specimens such as the ones below.

Queen Victoria reportedly offered knighthood to any traveler presenting her a mangosteen – still a rare treat in the west.  They were banned in the U.S. until 2007 in the interest of protecting local agriculture from the threat of stowaway Asian fruit flies.

The thick, square-ended Popoulu banana would never be mistaken for a Chiquita from the outside. According to The World of Bananas in Hawai’i: Then and Now, its lineage dates back tens of thousands of years to the Vanuatu archipelago.

If you celebrate the harvest festival Sukkot, you likely encountered an etrog within the last month. The notoriously fiddly crop has been cultivated domestically since 1980, when a yeshiva student in Brooklyn, seeking to keep costs down and ensure that kosher protocols were maintained, convinced a third-generation California citrus grower by the name of Fitzgerald to give it a go.

Explore and download hi-res images from the Pomological Watercolor Collection here.

Related Content 

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In 1886, the US Government Commissioned 7,500 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Download Them in High Resolution

A Stunning, Hand-Illustrated Book of Mushrooms Drawn by an Overlooked 19th Century Female Scientist

Via Aeon

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

✇ Open Culture

What Happens When Someone Crochets Stuffed Animals Using Instructions from ChatGPT

Por Ayun Halliday — 5 de Setembro de 2023, 09:00

Alex Woolner knows how to put a degree in English to good use.

Past projects include a feminist typewriter blog, retrofitting sticker vending machines to dispense poetry, and a free residency program for emerging artists at a multidisciplinary studio she co-founded with playwright and painter Jason Montgomery in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

More recently, the poet and international educator has combined her interest in amigurumi crocheted animals and ChatGPT, the open source AI chatbot.

Having crocheted an amigurumi narwhal for a nephew earlier this year, she hopped on ChatGPT and asked it to create “a crochet pattern for a narwhal stuffed animal using worsted weight yarn.”

The result might have discouraged another querent, but Woolner got out her crochet hook and sallied forth, following ChatGPTs instructions to the letter, despite a number of red flags indicating that the chatbot’s grasp of narwhal anatomy was highly unreliable.

Its ignorance is part of its DNA. As a large language model, ChatGPT is capable of producing predictive text based on vast amounts of data in its memory bank. But it can’t see images.

As Amit Katwala writes in Wired:

It has no idea what a cat looks like or even what crochet is. It simply connects words that frequently appear together in its training data. The result is superficially plausible passages of text that often fall apart when exposed to the scrutiny of an expert—what’s been called “fluent bullshit.”

It’s also not too hot at math, a skill set knitters and crocheters bring to bear reading patterns, which traffic in numbers of rows and stitches, indicated by abbreviations that really flummox a chatbot.

An example of beginner-level instructions from a free downloadable pattern for a cute amigurumi shark:

DORSAL FIN (gray yarn)

Rnd 1: in a mr work 3 sc, 2 hdc, 1 sc (6)

Rnd 2: 3 sc, 1 hdc inc, 1 hdc, 1 sc (7)

Rnd 3: 3 sc, 2 hdc, 1 hdc inc, 1 sc (8)

Rnd 4: 3 sc, 1 hdc inc, 3 hdc, 1 sc inc (10)

Rnd 5: 3 sc, 1 hdc, 1 hdc inc, 3 hdc, 1 sc, 1 sc inc (12)

Rnd 6: 3 sc, 6 hdc, 3 sc (12)

Rnd 7: sc even (12); F/O and leave a long strand of yarn to sew the dorsal fin between rnds # 18-23. Do not stuff the fin.

Pity poor ChatGPT, though, like Woolner, it tried.

Their collaboration became a cause célèbre when Woolner debuted the “AI generated narwhal crochet monstrosity” on TikTok, aptly comparing the large tusk ChatGPT had her position atop its head to a chef’s toque.

Is that the best AI can do?

A recent This American Life episode details how Sebastien Bubeck, a machine learning researcher at Microsoft, commanded another large language model, GPT-4, to create code that TikZ, a vector graphics producer, could use to “draw” a unicorn.

This collaborative experiment was perhaps more empirically successful than the ChatGPT amigurumi patterns Woolner dutifully rendered in yarn and fiberfill. This American Life’s David Kestenbaum was sufficiently awed by the resulting image to hazard a guess that “when people eventually write the history of this crazy moment we are in, they may include this unicorn.”

It’s not good, but it’s a fucking unicorn. The body is just an oval. It’s got four stupid rectangles for legs. But there are little squares for hooves. There’s a mane, an oval for the head. And on top of the head, a tiny yellow triangle, the horn. This is insane to say, but I felt like I was seeing inside its head. Like it had pieced together some idea of what a unicorn looked like and this was it.

Let’s not poo poo the merits of Woolner’s ongoing explorations though. As one commenter observed, it seems she’s “found a way to instantiate the weird messed up artifacts of AI generated images in the physical universe.”

To which Woolner responded that she “will either be spared or be one of the first to perish when AI takes over governance of us meat sacks.”

 

In the meantime, she’s continuing to harness ChatGPT to birth more monstrous amigurumi. Gerald the Narwhal’s has been joined by a cat, an otter, Norma the Normal Fish, XL the Newt, and Skein Green, a pelican bearing get well wishes for author and science vlogger Hank Green.

When retired mathematician Daina Taimina, author of Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, told the Daily Beast that Gerald would have resembled a narwhal more closely had Woolner supplied ChatGPT with more specifics, Woolner agreed to give it another go.

Two weeks later, the Daily Beast pronounced this attempt, nicknamed Gerard, “even less narwhal-looking than the first. Its body was a massive stuffed triangle, and its tusk looked like a gumdrop at one end.”

Woolner dubbed Gerard possibly the most frustrating AI-generated amigurumi of her acquaintance, owing to an onslaught of specificity on ChatCPT’s part. It overloaded her with instructions for every individual stitch, sometimes calling for more stitches in a row than existed in the entire pattern, then dipped out without telling her how to complete the body and tail.

As silly as it all may seem, Woolner believes her ChatGPT amigurumi collabs are a healthy model for artists using AI technology:

I think if there are ways for people in the arts to continue to create, but also approach AI as a tool and as a potential collaborator, that is really interesting. Because then we can start to branch out into completely different, new art forms and creative expressions—things that we couldn’t necessarily do before or didn’t have the spark or the idea to do can be explored. 

If you, like Hank Green, have fallen for one of Woolner’s unholy creations, downloadable patterns are available here for $2 a pop.

Those seeking alternatives to fiberfill are advised to stuff their amigurumi with “abandoned hopes and dreams” or “all those free tee shirts you get from giving blood and running road races or whatever you do for fun”.

Related Content 

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A Biostatistician Uses Crochet to Visualize the Frightening Infection Rates of the Coronavirus

Make an Adorable Crocheted Freddie Mercury; Download a Free Crochet Pattern Online

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

✇ Open Culture

How Artists Get Famous: A Physicist Reveals How Networks (and Not Just Talent) Contribute to Artistic Success

Por Colin Marshall — 5 de Setembro de 2023, 08:00

“The inhabitants of fifteenth-century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo,” writes tech investor and essayist Paul Graham. “Milan at the time was as big as Florence. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name?” Once you get thinking about the question of “what happened to the Milanese Leonardo,” it’s hard to stop. So it seems to have been for network physicist Albert-László Barabási, whose work on the distribution of scientific genius we featured last month here on Open Culture. Graham’s speculation also applied to that line of inquiry, but it applies much more directly to Barabási’s work on artistic fame.

“In the contemporary art context, the value of an artwork is determined by very complex networks,” Barabási explains in the Big Think video above. Factors include “who is the artist, where has that artist exhibited before, where was that work exhibited before, who owns it and who owned it before, and how these multiple links connect to the canon and to art history in general.” In search of a clearer understanding of their relative importance and the nature of their interactions, he and a team of researchers gathered all the relevant data to produce “a worldwide map of institutions, where it turned out that the most central nodes — the most connected nodes — happened to be also the most prestigious museums: MoMA, Tate, Gagosian Gallery.”

So far, this may come as no great surprise to anyone familiar with the art world. But the most interesting characteristic of this network map, Barabási says, is that it “allowed us to predict artistic success. That is, if you give me an artist and their first five exhibits, I’d put them on the map and we could fast-forward their career to where they’re going to be ten, twenty years from now.” In the past, the artists who made it big tended to start their career in some proximity to the map’s central institutions.”It’s very difficult for somebody to enter from the periphery. But our research shows that it’s possible”: such artists “exhibited everywhere they were willing to show their work,” eventually making influential connections by these “many random acts of exhibition.”

This research, published a few years ago in Science, “confirms how important networks are in art, and how important it is for an artist to really understand the networks in which their work is embedded.” Location matters a great deal, but that doesn’t consign talent to irrelevance. The more talented artists are, “the more and higher-level institutions are willing to work with them.” If you’re an artist, “who was willing to work with you in your first five exhibits is already a measure of your talent and your future journey in the art world.” But even if you’re not an artist, you underestimate simultaneous importance of ability and connections — and how those two factors interact with each other — at your peril. From art to science to insurance claims adjustment to professional bowling, every field involves networks: networks that, as Barabási’s work has shown us, aren’t always visible.

Related Content:

What Does It Take to Be a Great Artist?: An Aging Painter Reflects on His Creative Process & Why He Will Never Be a Picasso

An Interactive Social Network of Abstract Artists: Kandinsky, Picasso, Brancusi & Many More

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Umberto Eco, Patti Smith & More

An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame

Why Einstein Was a “Peerless” Genius, and Hawking Was an “Ordinary” Genius: A Scientist Explains

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.

✇ CONTI outra

Família recordista: Mãe, pai e 7 filhos fazem aniversário no mesmo dia

Por CONTI outra — 13 de Julho de 2023, 11:05

A família Mangi, que vive em Larkana, no Paquistão, entrou paro o Guinness Book devido a uma peculiar coincidência: todos os nove membros do clã compartilham a mesma data de aniversário. O pai Ameer Ali, a mãe Khudeja e seus sete filhos nascerem todos em 1º de agosto, de acordo com o Guinness World Records.

Essa coincidência de aniversários tornou-se um marco para os Mangi. Além de comemorar o nascimento de cada membro da família, o dia é especialmente significativo para Ameer e Khudeja, pois também marca o aniversário de seu casamento. Eles se uniram em matrimônio em 1991, exatamente um ano antes do nascimento de sua filha mais velha.

Os sete filhos Mangi também detêm o recorde de serem os irmãos com a mesma data de nascimento. Anteriormente, esse título pertencia aos cinco filhos da família Cummins, dos Estados Unidos, que nasceram em 20 de fevereiro entre 1952 e 1966. Até então, esse era o único caso registrado de uma família com cinco filhos nascidos no mesmo dia.

Ameer ficou “surpreso e encantado” quando seu primeiro filho, Sindhoo, nasceu em 1º de agosto de 1992, compartilhando o mesmo aniversário que ele e sua esposa. Todas as crianças foram concebidas e nasceram naturalmente, sem qualquer intervenção médica para induzir o parto prematuro por cesariana.

Ter dois pares de gêmeos é uma raridade em si, mas ter ambos os pares nascidos no mesmo dia é ainda mais incomum. Ameer e Khudeja ficaram “bastante surpresos” quando seus filhos gêmeos, Ammar e Ahmar, nasceram em 2003, cinco anos após o nascimento das gêmeas Sasui e Sapna.

Essa é a quinta vez que uma mãe registra o nascimento de dois pares de gêmeos com a mesma data de aniversário, igualando o recorde de mais irmãos gêmeos nascidos no mesmo dia.

O dia 1º de agosto é uma ocasião extremamente alegre na casa dos Mangi. Em vez de nove bolos individuais, eles celebram com um único bolo de aniversário compartilhado. “Antes, nossas comemorações de aniversário eram simples, mas agora fazemos muito mais e com muita alegria”, disse Sasui.

***
RFedação Conti Outra, com informações do R7.

The post Família recordista: Mãe, pai e 7 filhos fazem aniversário no mesmo dia appeared first on CONTI outra.

✇ JuliánMarquina…

¿Qué sucede en Internet en tan solo un minuto? [Cifras 2021]

Por JuliánMarquina — 10 de Dezembro de 2021, 07:33

Internet es el motor de la vida online tanto de las personas como de las organizaciones. La información, los contenidos y el poder de comunicación e interacción es un aliciente para los más de 5.000 millones de personas internautas que hay en todo el mundo. De hecho, la cantidad total de datos consumidos a nivel [...]

La entrada ¿Qué sucede en Internet en tan solo un minuto? [Cifras 2021] se publicó primero en JuliánMarquina....

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