Going the Egg-stra Mile in Illustrator

In additions to creating Illustrator design patterns for virtual "rushnyky," I had also dabbled with pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs). When you look at the picture of some of the eggs that I have done below, perhaps "dabble" is a bit of an understatement. But I'm okay with that.

At first, I started out completely in the dark, developing my technique as a went along. I was a shameless cheat, creating symbol sets from GIF and JPEG files of patterns that I had found on the web. Soon, however, I found images of actual pysanky that I admired and tried to imitate. This forced me into learning a variety of new design techniques.

In addition to practicing and learning Adobe Illustrator, I learned more about the symbolism behind authentic pysanka designs.

If anyone has Illustrator and wants to try their hand at creating an egg, I found an excellent tutorial, Create and color an eco easter egg in Adobe Illustrator, that will give you an impressive start.

Re-discovering Adobe Illustrator

I had worked a little bit with Adobe Illustrator years ago, in another job. Recently, I've had a chance to get into it again as part of the CS4 collection. A couple of things really made it click for me. One was access to the wonderful on-line training at Lynda.com. The other was an interest in the colorful, geometric Ukrainian folk art that one typically sees on Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky) and embroidery. The typical venue for embroidery is the rushnyk, which is a kind of ritual towel.

I've had a lot of fun learning to duplicate some of my favorite patterns into Illustrator. After learning to create and transform geometric shapes, I challenged myself to duplicate the actual look of the stitching.

Here is an example of my most elaborate work to date. This is a jpeg of a greatly reduced image. A single pair of the diamond patterns in Illustrator is about 800 points high. Once I create the core of the pattern, I convert it into a "brush" in Illustrator, after which I can apply the brush to any line or arc.

Since these brushes only repeat along on axis, I cannot make decent rectangles. I can, however, make some pretty cool circles.

I've found that because I'm building these patterns out of imitation cross-stitches (each is a colored "X"), the overall colors are somewhat pale. This example, for instance, is composed of black, red, green, yellow, violet, blue, and organge. Pretty hard to tell from this distance.

When I tried to render a complex pattern such as this into Photoshop, I frequently run out of system memory.

Right: a previous attempt at creating pseudo-cross-stitch.

Playing the Race Card(inal)

A couple of days ago, according to the Associated Press, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana said that in light of President Barack Obama's election, there is no reason why the next pope couldn't be black.

Assuming that Cardinal Turkson was speaking of his own chances at becomming pope, my main concern is going to be over the validity of his baptismal certificate.

• Does it have a raised seal?
• Is it signed?
• Does it have any creases?
• What proof will we have that it's an authentic baptismal certificate?

Would any of that even matter? You can go out on the net and download your own template for a baptism certificate.

After all, it's one thing for a black man to be president of the United States. It's another thing altogether to have one as the spiritual leader of the Catholic world. Look what happened when we had a Polish pope.

I see brilliant people

Just catching up with old news. In this case, it's a TED presentation, Talks Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense, which was posted in March of this year. It's an absolutely brilliant synthesis of technologies: computer, telephone, user interface, etc.

In a nutshell, it's a demonstration of a device that lets individuals pull up and display data on just about anything, from just about anywhere.

Gay rights are apparently not for the faint

An interesting bit of research appeared in the June 3, 2009, ChronicleOnline from Cornell University. It says that there's a correlation between a person's susceptibility to being more easily disgusted and political conservatism.

Assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, David Pizarro, surveyed people with two indexes: the Disgust Sensitivity Scale, and a political ideology scale.

Here are a few cherry-picked highlights from the article:

• Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity. The researchers also found a weak correlation between disgust sensitivity and support for tax cuts, but no link between disgust sensitivity and the other issues...
• Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something -- gay sex between consenting adults, for example -- is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm....
• The research speaks to a need for caution when forming moral judgments, Pizarro added. "Disgust really is about protecting yourself from disease; it didn't really evolve for the purpose of human morality," he said. "It clearly has become central to morality, but because of its origins in contamination and avoidance, we should be wary about its influences."

I'm not sure how to draw my own conclusions. I'm not particularly disturbed by animal blood and guts (human is a very different story), but I am very wary of the gun control agenda. Certain scenes in Brokeback Mountain really give me the willies (no pun intended), but I strongly feel that homosexuals should have equal rights under the law.

Do these contradictions make me a conservative liberal or a liberal conservative?

Rx with Blemishes

After doing a bit of research, I thought I'd plop down $10 of my hard-earned money on what is the most expensive iPhone applet that I've so far purchased: MotionPHR for the iPhone. This applet is billed as providing "a secure record of you and your families (sic) health."

At this point, I'm not into using all of the program's existing bells & whistles. I was interested in two things: pharmaceutical and immunology records. In the day since I've begun to noodle with this program, I can only address my observations about the pharmaceutical side of things.

In an earlier post, I talked about how Google Health makes use of pull-downs and hyperlinks when you add medications to your profile. Perhaps that spoiled me, because I was really disappointed when I discovered that I had to manually type everything into the MotionPHR applet. Forget pull-downs and forget spell checking. To its credit, MotionPHR does let you record the Rx number of a prescription, which is something that Google Health didn't do. However, back to manual data entry: I had a bunch of prescriptions to key in, and I though that it was stupidly inefficient of the program to not make use of the first instance of the pharmacy name to allow for speedier entry on subsequent prescriptions. I mean, most people use a single pharmacy for their various prescriptions, so why should they have to type the same name and phone number each time?

And the phone number is dumb, too. One of my reasons for putting that prescription info in there in the first place was so that I could call my pharmacy's automated voice mail system for refills. MotionPHR does not link the phone number field to the iPhone!

Another feature in the medications portion of the applet lets you record and increment the number of refills. Missing, however, is a calendar entry for when the prescription expires.

If you have a Google account (and who doesn't?) MotionPHR uses 64-bit encryption to back your medical data into a Google Docs account. It's only for archival storage, but it is a handy feature. MotionPHR's Blogspot site mentions that a future incarnation of the applet will soon let users be able to "sync their Personal Health data with Google Health and their iPhone." This could be a good thing,^tm in that one might be able to use Google Health and a real keyboard for entering their prescription information. Or, as MountainLaurel commented on my earlier Google Health posting, it could also be a bad thing.

Google Health

Google has a new toy in their box: Google Health, which allows you to store and manage your health information in a central location. If you want to know more about it, read About Google Health.

One of the impressive looking features lets you import medical records. There's a page of links to providers of internet-based health records. If you know who has your records, you can set up an account with them and ask them to transfer your records to Google. They're supposed to be your records, after all. The problem for me is that I haven't a clue as to which provider may have my records. I guess my doctor might know.

Another potentially neat feature lets you add your medications to your profile. There are easy-to-use pull-downs for generic and brand name drugs, as well as appropriate selectors for dosage and frequency. All of this is conveniently hyperlinked to drug information sites. While it looks like an encouraging start, however, I'm already disappointed in what it doesn't do. There's a Prescription column that I cannot enter data into or edit. This is where I would hope to be able to put in my pharmacy's prescription number, expiration dates and related information.

Google Health is like a boat-load of lawyers sinking into the ocean: a good start. It's still flawed in the type of information that I would like to be able to put into it, but I'm willing to give it a tentative one thumb up.