weeknotes: winter break, Hong Kong

I had a few days in Portland solo, so I visited museums. Then I flew to Hong Kong to start the Research at Scale residency!

OMSI visit

The membership at the Harvard Museum of Natural History gave me free entry to OMSI, a favorite growing up, so I popped in. It was packed with children during winter break, and the upstairs was under construction, so everyone was on the first floor. It had a nice little exhibit about “sea monsters” as a way to explain natural history. They had a whale vertebra next to one a human vertebra. The earthy-colored shadows and textures on the bone were really pretty, and it reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe talking about how pretty bones were.

They also had a piece of rock with fossilized little shells, and had polished it to emphasize the fossils. I don’t think I’ve seen stone carved like that before, where it’s artistically polished to look interesting, but the shapes also emphasize the science of it. It reminds me of gems that are carved to look beautiful, but the shape also directly comes from the science of how the crystals form.

I also stopped by the Portland Art Museum. I liked this piece Toll (2015) by John Grade. It reminded me a lot of generative work: small variations building up to a coherent shape. To get that spiral shape, the shifts need to happen in a precise order. There are also nice effects from the grain and the alternating light and dark.

Systematically looking at birds in art

At the art museum, I took pictures of every bird I saw in the museum. Between that and my are.na findings, it got me thinking that I should be more systematic about researching birds in art. I wrote something that used the Wikipedia API and started downloading all of the Birds in art category page.

I tried running YOLO on them, which poorly identified the artistic birds. Maybe because YOLO is trained on more images than art? I figured out how to run CVAT, an annotation tool, and manually drew boxes around the thousands of birds in 100s of images. I used that to improve YOLO and ran it on a new batch of images, and… it still wasn’t that good. Maybe I need to use a different model or run it for longer?

My annotations of the Garden of Eden, with the birds by Jan Brueghel the Elder and the humans by Peter Paul Rubens.

Real Birds

Let’s finish up with some real birds.

I spent some time with a Scrub Jay that was watching me and ripping the lichen off the branches.

After the new year, I flew to Hong Kong. My trip went well, and started with getting to experience PDX at 5 am: you could buy pizza and beer. I was planning to eat something healthy for the very long journey ahead of me, but I couldn’t resist grabbing a Blue Star donut instead. The trip went well; I landed at night and woke up to explore Kowloon Park. I started meeting the birds in that part of the world. This red-whiskered bulbul (one of the very most common birds there) posed in the flowers.