Haphazardly Hunting Hieronymus

We visited the wonderful Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York today. As with any museum of this stature, there is way too much stuff to see, even with a dozen visits.

My secret master plan for handling big art museum overload: chop the impossible down to something I can actually do. In my case, that means hunting for Hieronymus Bosch. I can't see everything in the museum, but I can darned well see all of their Bosch collection. Other than than, I just wander around randomly until I get tired.

It's a humble plan, but it's my plan.

Why Bosch? Beats me. I ran across some of his quirky and troubling work during my formative years, and it appealed to me oddly. His works are rare enough world-wide, with only 25 currently attributed to him. They are so rare on this side of the Atlantic that finding any of them is often an interesting challenge all by itself.

Finding anything at the Met also turned out to be a real challenge. Besides being huge, its hallways are convoluted enough that the best docent advice I got was to walk in some general direction for a while, and then to ask someone else. It was rare that any of the specific directions I got from them turned out to be helpful.

For a while, it was tricky finding a docent who had even heard of Bosch. Finally, though, I found two of them on the second floor. Both, however, told me that the Met had no actual Bosch -- just one that was "painted in the style of Bosch".

Our Bosch-ward course through the museum was probably pretty similar to the classic 3-dimensional drunkard's walk. However, our wanderings finally led us to the room of the imitation Bosch, which was titled Christ's Descent into Hell.

This painting was accompanied by the following blurb:

The panel was painted during a Bosch revival in the sixteenth century, when the artist's fiery scenes of hell were enormously popular throughout Europe, and especially in Italy, where they were prized for their nightmarish and visionary qualities.

However, we were delighted to find, just two paintings away, an actual Bosch, titled Adoration of the Magi.


Not one of his more bizarre works, but pretty swell nonetheless. Its blurb:

Long thought to be a later pastiche, this Adoration of the Magi can now be placed among Bosch's earliest autograph works ca. 1470-75. The salient features of its underdrawing, the tunnel-like perspective, and certain of the rather wooden figure types with sensitively rendered faces are closely related to Bosch's Ecce Homo in the Städel Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, of approximately the same date.

Thus endeth my current round of Hunt for Hieronymus. My cumulative Bosch-score for the U. S. now shows New York in a tie with Washington, D.C., with one H-point apiece. Given the current planetary paucity of Bosch's, I may be running out of U. S. cities that actually have one. However, I'll keep an eye out for him on my next trips to Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

Bone Scans and DNA Testing by Major League Baseball

The New York Times published a very interesting piece a few days ago called Baseball's Use of DNA Raises Questions.

The impetus for these tests:

Dozens of Latin American prospects in recent years have been caught purporting to be younger than they actually were as a way to make themselves more enticing to major league teams.

Apparently, such players have been able to borrow the birth certificate of a younger child from some other family.

Can these tests actually reveal one's age? In the case of DNA, no. However, it can be used to check whether a given player is actually related to the parents listed on the birth certificate. According to the Times, this alone was enough to void the signing of a Yankee prospect last year from the Dominican Republic.

In the case of a bone "scan", I presume the Times actually means a bone age study, in which an X-ray of a subject's hand and wrist (and sometimes other body parts) is compared to a standardized atlas of age-matched X-rays for various ages. How reliable is a bone age study? Not very.

I interpret these occasionally in my practice. When I give my estimate of someone's skeletal age, it is accompanied with considerable variation -- usually one standard deviation equals about a year. In the specific case of a boy with a chronological age of exactly 16 years (192 months), the mean of the expected skeletal age is 195.3 months, where one standard deviation = 12.9 months. From these figures, we can calculate that 95 % of 16 year old boys should have a skeletal age varying between 169.2 and 220.8 months, i.e. 14.1 and 18.4 years old. This 95 % confidence interval of 4.3 years makes a bone age study pretty darned unreliable.

While bone age studies may be of dubious value, they don't lead to a lot of ethical dilemmas. DNA testing, on the other hand, does.

So far, MLB only seems to be using DNA testing to help verify a player's age. However, it's not hard to imagine how they might use other genetic information as well.

Mark Rothstein, a professor of bioethics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said: “The funny thing about this all is that the most famous baseball player with a genetic disorder was Lou Gehrig. Would they have signed him if they knew he was predisposed to A.L.S.?”

Hand Dryer Fu

After a tasty but messy dinner tonight, I went to the restroom to wash my hands. No paper towels for this restaurant -- they had an Xlerator XL-SB dryer. This creature cranks out a torrent of air and sounds like a jet engine revving up. The manufacturer claims this will dry your hands in 10 - 15 seconds, a lot faster than those girly man hand dryers we've all tried to use for years.

I'm a bit skeptical of this claim, as was the reviewer for the Poop Report. Though this device truly honks , my hands took more like 20 - 25 seconds to dry. In my case, this just meant more time for mischief.

As the air blasted the water off my hands, I noticed that my hand position was similar to the one I used to use for two-hand whistling. With a few conscious positional adjustments, my hands began to howl with loud keening sound. This was fun, so I played with my intonation and tone for a while. Finally, however, I realized that it was giving the willies (so to speak) to a guy at a nearby urinal. So I stopped. For now.

We have five more days in Manhattan. Hopefully I can find another one of these units. If so, The Phantom of the XL-SB will ride again...

Autostitching the Big Apple v 4.0

Since it was next door to our hotel, we took a college tour of the Juilliard School this morning. Looks like a swell place, but probably not the best fit for my son, whose musical tastes, shall we say, are somewhat orthogonal to most Juilliard norms. I did use part of the tour time to grab this quick Autostich panorama of the Paul Recital Hall there, using 6 images:


Then we hopped the D train up to the Bronx, and watched the Yankees beat the Orioles 6 - 4. It's a very nice stadium -- if they can consistently fill it up with enough hungry and thirsty fans every game, they might just be able to make payroll on their team of millionaires. I grabbed two panoramas -- an exterior view (3 images), and an interior view (28 images):



The Orioles hit two successive home runs in the last inning, which elicited some interesting crowd behavior from the Yankee fans.

The first was caught by a lady about 50 feet from us. The Yankees fans began yelling, "Throw it back! Throw it back!" Then, when she tossed it back to the left fielder, they all cheered. We were puzzled by this behavior, so my brother quizzed a local about it. Apparently, home run balls hit by Yankees are highly prized and kept. Balls hit by opposing teams are regarded as offal, and are expelled back onto the field as waste.

The same thing happened with the next home run ball to right field. From our left field seats, it looked like a mighty amoeba snarfing up a food particle and then spitting it back out in disgust.

Autostitching the Big Apple v 3.0

I hope it doesn't seem as if I've gone completely off the deep end about Autostich here in NYC. It never came up at all during most of the things we did today, including several tasty meals, the Hayden Planetarium show or the Broadway production (Westside Story) we saw this evening.

However, we also spent the afternoon at the wonderful American Museum of Natural History, where there were way too many large photogenic objects that were beyond my ability to resist. Here are my favorites, along with the number of images I used to create them.

Ginormous Northwest Native American dugout canoe, 6 images:


Same canoe, different angle, 3 images:


Views from both ends of the Hall of Biodiversity -- a stunning way to convey the concept of just how many species we have on this planet, 4 and 5 images, respectively:



Beryl exhibit in Hall of Minerals. Stills like this are easy to get with the iPhone even in low light -- pasting the phone against the glass case steadies it as well as any tripod -- 7 images:


Ichthyosaurus skeleton, 2 images:


Pterodactyl skeleton, 2 images:


Brontosaurus, 8 images:


Tyrannosaurus rex, 8 images:


Stegosaurus, 12 images:


Triceratops skull, 4 images:


Triceratops skeleton, 4 images:


Mammoth and mastodon skeletons, 4 images:

Tomorrow, Autostitch meets the new Yankee Stadium!

Autostitching the Big Apple, v 2.0

I tried out a few more panoramas again today in Manhattan, using my iPhone 3GS and Autostich.

The image on the left was built from four shots of a tower crane which was hauling up a big container of wet cement up many stories into the sky. The waviness of the tower is, fortunately, an artifact of the process, as well as my inexact positioning of the camera.

Vertical panoramas seem to be a weak point of Autostitch -- at least when one is pretty close to the subject. The following shot of Rockefeller Center (built from 11 shots) demonstrates this well -- the actual main building is much taller than it appears here. Autostitch's big brothers may well have settings to control for this prominent shortening effect.


While the kids were sacking and pillaging the M&M and Hershey store in Times Square, I stayed outside and shot 20 shots that were combined into the following panorama, covering about 135 degrees. The black areas in this and the prior shot make it easy to see where I should have gathered a bit more data.


My most successful shot was the sign at the Staten Island Ferry. The algorithms in Autostitch had little trouble with a purely horizontal pan. Four shots were combined to form this image.


Despite some of the distortions revealed with these shots, I'm quite happy with the results. I'll try to grab a few more panoramas while we're here. The Yankees vs. Orioles game on Wednesday afternoon in the new stadium should be a fine time to experiment.

AutoStitching the Big Apple

We just spent the day visiting a few cultural icons here in Manhattan. This seemed like a fine time to play with a new iPhone app called Autostich, which merges multiple separate pictures into a much larger panoramic image.

I've actually used one of this program's big brothers (Calico) for several years to stitch together mountain photos from my big Nikon into cool panoramas. Both programs are based on image-processing research from the University of British Columbia, which has licensed its algorithms to other developers, including Industrial Light & Magic. We also use similar software at work to stitch together life-sized vertical panoramas of the entire human spine from several smaller shots.


To kick things off, here are 4 iPhone 3GS photos of the Time Warner Center at dusk...

The resulting AutoStitched panorama shows a bit of distortion, but still looks pretty swell.


With a bit of PhotoShopping, it looks even better.


We visited the 5th Avenue Apple Store, which is extremely keen for many reasons. Even in a town with a lot of eye-grabbing architecture, this store stands out.


All of the action at this 24 x 7 x 365 store takes place in a giant underground room beneath the cube. Here's a hasty 6-picture panorama of this store, which earns more money per square foot than Tiffany's:


We also spent some time at the American Museum of Natural History. Here's a panorama of the foyer, which is filled with dinosaurs, including a big brachiosaur. This image was stitched together from fifteen 3.0 megapixel images.


My one-word review: awesome.

It's been quite a while since I have gotten so much pleasure for a buck ninety-nine. It's also pretty incredible to know the sort of image-processing power I now carry in my pocket.

Holy crap.