Lets start with our two objects, a blobby object and a rectangle below it.

Crate a clone of the rectangle (Alt+C), the cloned shape will appear on top of the others. A cloned object is linked to the original, so any changes you make to the original will also happen to the clone.

Select the cloned rectangle and the blob object (Shift + Click to multi-select). Then clip the blobs with the clone (from the menu select Object > Clip > Set). This will only show the portion of the blob object that is covered by the cloned rectangle, the cloned rectangle itself will become invisible.

Now you have the pattern displayed on the shape. But more than that, you can resize the rectangle and the pattern will expand to fit it!

TaDa!!!

Introducing my latest papertoy – Paolo the Whale

Click here to download

Comment and suggestions, are more than welcome!

If, like me, you’ve never known which colour space you were working in, chances are it was RGB. CMYK is an alternative, commonly used in the printing industry. I’ll spare you further details, but if you want to know more, you know where to go.

Support for CMYK in Inkscape is ongoing, as is the discussion surrounding it. Click Click Click But we cans till configure Inkscape for CMYK to make things easier further down the road.

Before I go on, a disclaimer: I am in no way an expert in Inkscape nor CMYK colour profiles. These settings seemed to work for me, they may also work for you. I am more than happy to accept comments & criticisms in the comments below.

Download the Adobe Color Profiles and copy them all in to /usr/share/color/icc
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/adobergb.html

Follow the instructions on this page to generate an ICC profile for your monitor
http://www.ubuntufieldmanual.com/?q=node/38

Copy the icc file in to one of the locations that Inkscape searches
/home/username/.local/share/color/icc
/usr/share/gnome/color/icc
/usr/local/share/color/icc
/usr/share/color/icc (best for all users)

Open/restart Inkscape
Go to Inkscape preferences (Shift+Ctrl+P)
In ‘Color management’
Set ‘Display Profile’ to your monitor profile (lcms RGB Virtual Profile)
Tick ‘Simulate output on screen’
Tick ‘Mark out of gamut colors’
Select a highly visible color for the warning color (I prefer a bright green)
Set ‘Device profile’ to an apropriate output profile for your region (US Euroscale etc) and print medium (Coated, Uncoated etc)

Open the Document Properties (Shift+Ctrl+D)
Click the Color Management tab
Link the ‘lcms RGB Virtual Profile’

Now, if you enable Color Managed View (in the view menu), colours that are out of the printers range will show up on the page. You’ll also be looking at colours more-or-less as they come out the printer.

… is Paolo the Whale, looking awesome printed up proper!

Working with Colour and Gradients

If you’ve never touched Inkscape before, this tutorial is a total must.
http://www.kendraschaefer.com/2009/06/inkscape-tutorial-color-and-gradients-for-absolute-beginners/

Spiro Swirls

A new feature in the latest version, this video tutorial (no sound) shows you haw to create killer spirals. Push the algorithm to the edge to see what it comes up with.
http://verysimpledesigns.com/vectors/inkscape-tutorial-spiro-swirls.html

Text Styling

This tutorial runs through the great range of control that Inkscape gives you with text, and shows you how to make a great page title.
http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/04/inkscape-tutorial-2-text-and-simple.html

Creating Icons

This tutorial takes you through the process of creating a Tango style icon. Even if you’re not interested in creating icons, there’s a lot of good tips about working with paths in here.
http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/illustration/how-to-create-a-vector-light-bulb-icon-with-inkscape/

I found all these tutorials through the Inkscape Tutorials Blog, jump on in!

Cons

• Takes pig ages to pick up updates in Twitter, Flickr and wot not. Real-time? Nah.
• Sticks it’s fingers in its ears and makes a “La La La” noise at he suggestion of Facebook integration
• Equally ignorant to Ning. Not really surprising though, Ning’s a bit niche.
• Twitter followers arn’t imported
• Less of a social aggregator, more of an extra thing to keep track of.

Pros

• GMail style conversations – badly needed in Twitter

Gonna keep with it for now, but I expect it’ll be more effort than it’s worth.

10 digitally printed copies of Woadkill Wabbit

Introducing my latest papertoy – Woadkill Wabbit.

Click here to download

Comment and suggestions, are more than welcome!

The Brain is Not a Computer

I actually think the brain is a computer, if you define “computer” quite broadly as an information processing machine. And if you define “information”, “processing” and “machine” quite broadly too. What I’m actually saying it that the metaphor of the brain being like a desktop computer isn’t a very good one.

It is a useful metaphor to understand the difference between the brain and the mind (brain being the “hardware” and mind being the “software”), but that’s as far as it’ll take you. Beyond this, in any way you’d care to compare them, the brain and a computer are different.

Computers are mostly serial processors, they do one thing at a time, in a pre-defined sequence. Parallel processing is becoming more and more common, but a quad-core processor is hardly comparable to the 100′000 plus processing units of the brian – neurons.

Computer memory is designed to store data accurately, for a long time. There are checksums and recovery processes built in to computers to ensure that the data stays the same as it’s moved between hard disks, RAM and across networks. Human memory is nothing like this. Information in our brians degrades over time.  It is recalled, reviewed and rebuilt in many different ways, all the time. When we fist ‘make’ a memory, it’s already inaccurate. We don’t remember everything we see or hear, only the bits we find interesting at the time, or more accurately, the bits our brains tell us are probably the most interesting. When we recall memories the gaps are smoothed over by intuition and guesswork.

Computers break. They break a lot. For no apparent reason a computer can just stop working. This doesn’t happen to our brains,  if parts of our brain has problems other parts can step in. Studies on amputees have shown that ‘unused’ parts of the motor cortex can be reused by neighbouring parts. This can give peculiar sensations like feeling a feather on a missing hand when it’s brushed against the cheek.

There’s three reasons, but there’s countless more. In nearly every way brains are good at the things that computers are bad at, and vice-versa. I’m not saying that computers can’t be programmed to act like brains, artificial neural network models are more common than you might think. But computers are also used to model, engine parts, bridges, traffic flow, economic strategies, wars and a ton of other things, none of which we compare to being ‘like’ computers.

So that’s my theory. ACCEPT or REJECT?

]]> http://www.craig-russell.co.uk/its-only-my-theory/feed/ 0 http://www.craig-russell.co.uk/gravity-goblins-and-confirmation-bias/ http://www.craig-russell.co.uk/gravity-goblins-and-confirmation-bias/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:39:52 +0000 Craig http://www.craig-russell.co.uk/?p=305 I’ve got a theory about gravity, not just a theory, an explanation for how gravity works. I can tell you, dear reader, exactly why bodies of mass are drawn together. My theory is clear, simple and above all correct. I know this because I have proven it. The proof is all around, as clear as sky. Allow me to explain…

My theory of gravity is simple, all objects on this earth have invisible pieces of string attached to them, upon the oppisite end of which little invisible goblins hang off. That’s correct – invisible goblins.

What do you mean you don’t believe me? Fine, I’ll prove it to you…

Pick up a pencil (or any other object you have to hand) hold it at arms length over the floor and prepare to release it (being mindful of any children or animals below). Now if my theory is correct, when you release the pencil, the Gravity Goblin (as I have christened them) will pull upon the invisible string, drawing the pencil towards the floor.

Ready…?

Release…!

Theory proven. I thank you.

Obviously, this is bollocks. But I tell it to illustrate a key part of the scientific process – falsification. Falsification allows us to differentiate between Gravity Goblins and Isaac Newton. Any monkey can “prove” a hypothesis (I’m using the more scientifically appropriate term now), finding evidence in support of a hypothesis is easy. Just pick any phenomena you fancy and make up some bullshit to connect cause and effect.

Soap bubbles in the washing up bowl? – Microscopic scuba elves.

Crystal Healing? – Energy flow and focusing and karma and that…

Homeopathic Remedies? – Diluted sub-molecular chemical memory or something…

The massive diversity of life on Earth and the subtle interactions and behaviours therein? – God.

For a hypothesis to be scientifically tested (and hence logically robust) you’ve got to attempt to prove it wrong. You’ve got to be prepared to say “if my hypothesis is correct, I can hit it with the sledgehammer of reason and it won’t crack”. Suggest a way to break it and invite others to try, if it stands up, well done, you’ve got yourself a robust theory.

Despite what you may (or may not) have thought, this kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally to our human brains. We have a habit of favouring evidence that supports our beliefs while giving less weight to the opposing evidence. Psychologists call this effect ‘confirmation bias’.  Understanding our natural tendency towards confirmation bias makes it all the more clearer why a scientific, rational approach to exploring ideas is so powerful.

Without knowing how to properly test our ideas, how to prove them wrong, we’d never be able to develop our ideas, to differentiate fact from superstition. Without falsification, we could all be believing in Gravity Goblins.