Why printing?

Why was printing invented? Because of the plague. Between 1347 and 1400 waves of plague ravaged Europe, decimating the population by about 30 percent. Consequently there was a labor shortage and salaries rose.

This sparked an intensive demand for technological inventions, and printing, or more precisely moveable type, was one of them. The tedious and time consuming manual copying of documents no longer made economic sense when Hans Genssefleisch von Mentz, also known as Gutenberg, around 1400 started experimenting with type.

Fonts were just a rudimentary idea of individually carved wood blocks, but the enterpreneurial Gutenberg and a few skilled colleagues founded a financing partnership, which rised substantial capital to develop the new technology of mass-produced reusable metal font types.

It ended up taking 10 years until the venture was able to print the first documents using the new technology and sell them for a profit.

Could Gutenberg repeat his feat today?

Imaging Superatoms

A superatom is a composite of atoms, either homogeneous or heterogenous, that exhibits a similar electronic profile to a given single atom in the periodic table. Using photoelectron imaging, the figure below shows that a superatom of titanium oxide (bottom row) mimics the electron energetics of a single nickel atom (top row).


Previous experiments have shown that a cluster of 13 aluminum atoms behaves like a single iodine atom. Now, there appears to be a kind of arithmetic for superatoms. Here's how it works.

Another Fish Story from Justin Marshall

Cichlids [pronounced sik-lids] have several different cone opsin genes that enable them to detect light across the visible and ultraviolet regions of the spectrum. Different species express different subsets of these opsins to create alternate visual systems. Recent research has shown that cichlid fish in the clear waters of Lake Malawi expressed a wide range of opsins, with closely related species differing in whether they used the shorter wavelength or longer wavelength gene combinations.

PLoS Biology article: "The Eyes Have It: Regulatory and Structural Changes Both Underlie Cichlid Visual Pigment Diversity" by Christopher M. Hofmann, Kelly E. O'Quin, N. Justin Marshall, Thomas W. Cronin, Ole Seehausen4,5, Karen L. Carleton. (Not just another fish story)

Real Virtual Pages and Virtual Real Pages

From the in-box comes two different links to digital pages. In one case it's real virtual pages and in the other it's virtual real pages. From Udi comes a link to a set of collectible magcloud magazines relating to the movie Avatar. Which is interesting - a dynamic and timely publication of a physical artifact based on a movie largely constructed with computer graphics.



But what does this have to do with football you may be asking yourself?

Beet Spectrum

From Tim comes a fun site rawcolor.com which includes a page on using cabbage, beet and pumpkin juice as colorants in an inkjet printer.



What fun! But why stop with some test prints - what exactly does the spectrum of a beet look like?

Perceptual vs. colorimetric color spaces

In yesterday's post I noted that the authors had used a perceptual color space instead of a colorimetric one for their study. What is the difference?

Categorical color constancy for simulated surfaces

We all know about colorimetric color constancy, which for us in color imaging mostly takes the form of white point estimation and white balancing. The November 12, 2009 issue of the Journal of Vision has an interesting article by Maria Olkkonen et al. on a different kind of color constancy. [Click on Read more » below for more]

U.S. Share of World Research Community Declines

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics released a study on research last week. It provides new evidence of the global distribution of science capacity. According to the report, the number of individuals engaged in research worldwide grew from 5.8 million in 2002 to 7.1 million in 2007. As much of this growth was in developing countries, the U.S. share of the total declined from 23.2% to 20.3% and Europe's from 28.1% to 25.8%. China's share, meanwhile, grew from 14.0% to 20.1%. As a fraction of each nation's population, however, the U.S. still has more than 4.5 times as many researchers as China. The number of researchers in the developing world grew by a remarkable 56% between 2002 and 2007, while those in developed nations rose by 8.6%.