Book idea I just had.... A sciecne book for artists

One of the biggest "facts" in the world is that science and art separate things.

This is complete bull$%£".

The separation of art and science, academically, is a recent invention. Until the 19th century the border that separated scientists and artists were a blur. Think Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, and the guys who invented photography, if you want examples. 

The reason I bought this up is because of an idea I just had today....

A science book aimed at artists.

I have the skills and knowledge to do it, but should I pursue it?

The term "artist" is pretty loose in definition here. It can include cartoonists and animators, as well as writers, illustrators, cross-stitchers, and musicians. And I'm sure many of them have wondered about science once in a while.

It'll be like David Macaulay's The Way Things Work, 

if you wanted an idea what this book might look like.

But, I'll only do it if you demand it.

If you do, leave a comment.

(especially if you happen to be an artist who struggled to understand science.)

I once made an app!!!

The following link is to my art gallery blog, where I have just put on exhibit an interesting relic from my years of higher education.

https://gordonwallaceart.blogspot.com/2018/10/cartoon-connections-flash-app-2009.html

Meme Dictionary Update

I have published on a separate page a list of (almost) all the subjects my meme dictionary will cover.

You can access it by clicking here.

By the way - like the banner?

The Start of (possibly) Many Teardowns

Have you ever had the urge to take a screwdriver to something to take it apart just to look inside it?

I have. Just today I did this.....

I purchased this Acctim alarm clock last year, during my crazy eBay binge. Its fully-mechanical! Yes, you can buy a mechanical spring-powered clock made this century. That's why I bought it. Cost me less than £10. 

Now, I do already have some form of alarm clock at home when I bought this. So why did I do it? 

The answer is above. 

Yes, I bought something just to take it apart.

In fact, I bought a few things just to take them apart. It's only now I got the time to do this teardown. And more are planned in the future, so watch out. 

A Bar Scene from 1891

Written in 2016. First published in News and Views newsletter.

You are in an art gallery confronted by a painting. About A3-sized, the oil painting depicts a Parisian bar full of a dozen customers doing what they usually do in a bar in a style similar to Claude Monet and the like. Behind the bar is a honey-blonde woman serving the drinks with a perifereia of bottles behind her.

“This is one of the noted works of the lesser-known French artist Monet La Trencher – A Bar Scene from 1891. Part of the Neo-Impressionist movement, Trencher explored urban Paris…..”

“Rubbish!”

“Excuse me?”

“This is a fake.”

“And how would you know?”

“Because I am Monet La Trencher. Trencher never existed. I invented him.”

“Why?”

“Shut up, whoever you are. The gallery closes in ten minutes and I got a …"

“Good. Plenty of time for me to spot my deliberate flaws in this painting.”

“Deliberate flaws?”

“Of course. I put a few in to …”

“Just tell us, man.”

“Fine. Notice the youth drinking a coke.”

“Yes, the man holding the coke bottle.”

“That bottle shouldn’t exist in 1891.”

“But I thought coke was invented in the 1880s.”

“Yes, but that bottle wasn’t introduced until 1915.”

(Gasp all round.)

“And there’s more. Notice the bottle of Iron-Brew behind the bar maid. Didn’t exist until 1901. That sign in the background, the font I used is Century Roman, created in 1894.”

“Security!”

Two security guards arrive to drag “Trencher” away.

“The bar serves Strong Bow and Famous Grouse whiskey!”

“Sorry about that. Where were we?”

“He’s right, you know. According to my phone that coke bottle design was first introduced in 1915.”

“And that lass is wearing a fitness tracker.”

“that’s it. Tour’s over. Gallery is about to close everyone. Gift shop is on your right.”

Everyone leaves the gallery. 

The lights go out… 

and (thanks to some luminous dye) the words 

“actually painted in 2013 – Monet La Trencher” appear on the painting.

The Reading Penguin

Written in September 2017. First published in News and Views newsletter.

Imagine sometime in the future where space travel is as regular as air travel is today. Because of the distances involve they are space ferries in operation between the planets. As everyone knows, it takes forever to travel to Mars, so these ferries have facilities to make them as self-sufficient as possible and the trip comfortable. Things like automated farms, restaurants, a school, theatres, a library, a hospital and … a vet.

Yes, some passengers have bought their pets with them. On one of these vessels at any given time they are probably a dozen animals at these vet/kennel at any given time. A dozen animals, of all walks of life, including fish.

Now imagine that something happened to one of these vessels. Space can be dangerous, after all. What if an asteroid hit one of those vessels and killed everyone on-board …. Except the animals? (One got smuggled on board and was under quarantine, leading to the place been sealed off, saving their lives.)

So, here’s the question. With an endless supply of food, water and air, and no humans to guide them, how would they cope?

In an environment originally-built for humans, would these animals continue been “animals?” Could curiosity eventually allow them to work out how their life support systems work, and allow them to fix them if a fault occurs? Could that later go further, maybe allowing them to read our books? And if so, would they understand what they read? Would they learn from them? Would they use the knowledge we had recorded to build a new civilization? A society with laws and a culture like ours or something completely different? Something unique. Maybe they’ll create their own stories and literature. Maybe in some distant future, a descendent of a bird might be reading Penguin Island with hands that were once wings. Just a thought. 

Making Dictionaries

Have you ever tried to explain what something is to someone who has never seen or heard of that thing before? 

Say something you experienced while on a trip to somewhere “foreign.” Or something you use everyday to someone from another culture. Or an abstract concept to a student or disciple. Or maybe what a new craze or fashion is in your culture? 

Have you ever, during such explanations, used other things to compare it with? Have you ever, while explaining one thing, ended up explaining what another thing is because they didn’t know what the thing you comparing it with is? Have you ever had trouble explaining things because you used words or terms that the listener has never heard before?

Now, keep all this in your mind and get out a dictionary. 

Flick through it and read a random definition in it… and another…. and another…..

You may now have an idea why making a dictionary is no easy task … and one that can take years to complete. 

It took Samuel Johnson seven years to make A Dictionary of the English Language in the 18^th century. This is considered an amazing feat for an individual, if you consider how long it took some dictionaries to be made with the help of a team. The Brothers Grimm started work on Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”) in 1838. It wasn’t complete until 1961 (well, a few revolutions, two world wars and the division of Germany during the Cold War did hold them up a bit (the team who worked on it after the Grimms died)).

Of course, Johnson and the Grimms were doing dictionaries for whole entire languages, making their efforts more tasking. But I bet even dictionaries that have limited what they could list (dictionaries on certain fields, like medicine, for instance) are as tricky to write as those epic productions of lexicography. 

Back in January I did a post proposing an interesting idea - a dictionary. "The Cultural Vandal's Dictionary of Visual Culture" it was originally called. Based in an old book I discovered it was a dictionary that contained images of how various things have been used in media. In other words, a dictionary of memes and how they are used in culture.

Back then, it was just an idea. 

Now, its a project that's going to (probably) take decades to do (on and off, while doing everything else). I've already bought an external hard drive dedicated to collecting images (and other things) illustrating entries and (just recently) I (sort of) finished writing a list of entries and their basic definitions.... which is the main subject of this post.

I want this book (it would be great idea to make it into a real book, like a real dictionary you'll find in a library) to be like an actual dictionary. A two or three column page layout throughout. But how I do the entries is a bit different. Each entry will begin with a small simplified picture of the subject (a picture so simple that (I hope) if embossed a blind person could make out what it is). Then you'll get its name (in English, the most learned second language on Earth) and a simple definition, before finally getting the text explaining it and examples of it.

Here's a random example of definitions I've written (as they are now. They may change in the future).....

Abacus A counting aid made from a ladder with beads threaded through its steps.

Circle A flat shape which results when you curve a straight line until the ends connect.

Flasher A person (usually a male) who exposes their uncovered body parts (especially those subject to taboo) in public.

Piano A machine designed to play music by a mechanism where pressed keys make hammers hit strings inside it. 

Salamander A wet-skinned lizard-like animal.

Spoon A tool made of a stick with a bowl attached at one end used to stir, dig into, or pick up food while eating or preparing food.

Trojan Horse A means to move a means of attack into a target without the target knowing it is an attack.

Wedding A ceremony where two people officially become a couple under a culture’s rules governing people pairings.

To write these I developed some rules.

• They have to be short (As much as possible, just one sentence). 
• I have to use a simple limited vocabulary. (try to use only words that are also found in the dictionary)

The "simple limited vocabulary" rule was inspired Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer. In it, all the text is written only using the "ten hundred" most-commonly used words in the English language. (the word "thousand" wasn't one of the "ten hundred.")

Admittedly, I did use a dictionary to aid me (and I haven't run them through Munroe's Simple Writer to check if they are as simple as they can be …. let). But, its a good starting point for this project. 

According to Microsoft Word's paragraph count feature, I have listed exactly 1,350 entries for my dictionary. So, this dictionary is going to be pretty big. (The book that inspired this project only had 1,200 entries)

The original dictionary that inspired this project was limited to memes used in visual media (it was a book made for graphic designers). My dictionary is going to expand to all forms of culture - music, poetry, cuisine, fashion, interior design, architecture, cave art, even language itself (One recent purchase was Written in Stone by Christopher Stevens, a book about the original Indo-European language and how its words led to the creation of the many words we use today).
One last thing, this is the final title for it - "The Cultural Vandal’s Dictionary of Memes, Metaphors, Tropes, Clichés, and the Occasional Stereotype."