Dissolution Upon Contact With Water

When making some of the works from the γ-series, I noticed, or seemed to notice, that the watercolour was retained in the brush to a greater extent when using real sable hairs as opposed to synthetic materials. As this can influence the amount of control when has on the introduction of the watercolour to the droplet, I decided to test a number of different brushes.

For this experiment, a single batch was made of an unspecified amount of Royal Talens Rembrandt branded Quinacridone Violet (593) dissolved in 0,5 mL of distilled water.

Using a micropipette, a 5 µL droplet of distilled water was placed on Hahnemühle 290gms Agave watercolour paper.

Each brush was then dipped into the watercolour solution, rinsed two times by dipping it into distilled water and then placed into the droplet, as vertical as possible.

The action of adding the watercolour to the droplet was recorded by video. As the droplet had the tendency to move towards the brush, the first frame is recorded when the first movement of the droplet is observed, together with the frames 0,1 and 1 second after after this initial movement.

The following brushes were tested: Da Vinci Colineo, size 2/0; Da Vinci Fit Synthetics, size 0; Da Vinci Forte Synthetics, size 3/0; Escoda Perla Sintético, size 3/0; Gerstaecker, size 1; Winsor & Newton Synthetic Sable Round, size 00; Winsor & Newton Cotman 111 Round, size 00; Raphaël Martora Red Sable, size 3/0.

The experiment was repeated with Royal Talens Rembrandt branded Chromium Oxide Green (668). This colour consists of a simple inorganic pigment in the form of chromium(III) oxide, as opposed to the aromatic quinacridone pigment found in Quinacridone Violet.

This gave the following results:

Da Vinci Colineo, size 2/0

Da Vinci Fit Synthetics, size 0

Da Vinci Forte Synthetics, size 3/0

Escoda Perla Sintético, size 3/0

Gerstaecker, size 1

Winsor & Newton Synthetic Sable Round, size 00

Winsor & Newton Cotman 111 Round, size 00

Raphaël Martora Red Sable, size 3/0

An overview of all these tests gave the impression that the chromium oxide had more of a tendency to leave the brush than the quinacridone pigmented watercolour. The amounts also seemed to vary from brush to brush, with the additional remark that brushes of the same brand seemed to show similar diffusion.
Of these brushes the Escoda Perla Sintético brush had the least diffusion into the droplet. As this was also the most previously used brush, I wondered if this was perhaps related to the amount of use this particular brush has had. In order to find out, I bought an identical brush and redid the above test with both the new and the old brush:

Escoda Perla Sintético, size 3/0, used (top) and new (bottom)

In addition to the Quinacridone Violet and Chromium(III) oxide, I also used Royal Talens Permanent Lemon Yellow (254), which consist of bismuth vanadate.
There was very little difference between the new and the old brush. Perhaps the older brush had slightly more diffusion than the newer brush, but this can't be said with any certainty.

Another noteworthy observation is that the Quinacridone Violet didn't seem to dissolve into the droplet at all from the Gerstaecker branded brush.
Additionally, the only brush that contains the much-coveted real sable hair, the Raphaël Martora Red Sable, has a very different diffusion pattern from all the other brushes. The hairs of the brush spread far more easily than those in any of other, synthetic, brushers.

Related to this is the observation that the water in the droplet is very much attracted to the water present in the brush. This attraction is so strong that with a minimal amount of water, the droplet is almost 'sucking' the water out of the brush:

The Kids Skated Great

This a short clip from a recent video titled JAX AND LUCAS by skateboard videographer William Strobeck. It's characteristic for a style of skateboard videography he developed while making the skateboard film "cherry", that was released in 2014 by the fashion brand Supreme.
This style has since become Strobeck's hallmark, where he focusses more on the skaters' face and feet, instead of on the larger environment in which the trick is done. In Bill's own words: 'That was like the whole thing with cherry, it's like, I wanted to make something that like, you know, not just skaters could watch and still have a feeling or understand that this is what we do every day. It isn't just trick, trick, trick, it's like, you get a sense of what's it's like to be out on the streets.'
While Strobeck has received praise for his novel approach, there are also many in the skateboarding community who don't appreciate the method he developed. As the top comment on YouTube states verbatim: 'kids skated gr8, bill its time to ZOOM TF OUT '.

The above clip was taken from the video Jante – 10:34 by film-maker Fritte Söderström. Fritte's camerawork is almost universally praised, even if both these clips are superficially very similar. The top comment on YouTube for this video says nothing but 'I was missing this type of filming'. Yet both of these clips are filmed from a static position, zoom in on the skaters' face and then switch to the skater's feet shortly before the skater does their trick. Why one of these filming styles is praised while the other is derided thus can't be a simple case of 'zooming tf out', as the previous YouTube user so eloquently phrased it.
Despite their similarities, these two clips are fundamentally different. In order to see why these two clips are so different from each other, we have to take a short lesson on the history of skateboard films.

Skateboard videos matured around the year 2000. During that time videographers were using professional handheld video equipment and were using it with enough skill to provide dynamic and exciting images that were without any technical detriments, such as camera shake. Probably the earliest example of this style was Menikmati, made by Fred Mortagne. This was followed up in 2003 by Sorry. The two clips below are both from Geoff Rowley's part in Sorry and they display the two hallmarks of the 'gold standard' of skateboard videography.

On the top is a clip shot with a fisheye lens. Held low to the ground and pointed up, this distorted wide angle lens allows the videographer to be close to the action and magnify it, while still showing the whole of the skaters' body and the surroundings. By following the subject closely on their own skateboard, the videographer is able to keep the attention on the skater while the surroundings rapidly change behind them.
On the bottom is a similar trick at the same location using a technique called 'rolling long lens' in skateboarding vocabulary. It is the skateboarders' version of a dolly shot, where the videographer rolls on their skateboard, often in opposite direction to the subject, and tracks their movement. This is commonly combined with zooming in or out and it requires considerable skill to keep everything in frame, in focus and moving at the right speed, while keeping balance on your skateboard. Yet if done successfully, it provides images with a lot of movement and action that make even simple tricks look dynamic and cool.

Hopefully this description gave you an impression of what skateboard films looked like at the beginning of the millennium. This style was a technological perfection of methods there were introduced in the early 1990's and very quickly became the norm in the early 2000's.
Towards the end of the 1980's, skateboarding moved out of purpose-built skateparks and into the streets. The attitude was a bit more raw, more 'punk', than it was before. The blood, sweat and tears image of skateboarding comes mostly out of this time. At the same time, video cameras were also getting smaller, cheaper and of higher quality. Notable are the introduction of Video8 and later DV, as well as the Sony DCR-VX1000 camera, which was introduced in 1995 and is still used to make skateboard films today.
The most influential video of this era was undoubtedly Blind skateboards' Video Days. Incidentally this was also the first movie directed by Spike Jonze, who has by now had a long and storied career that includes starting skateboarding brand 'Girl', creating tv-show Jackass and winning an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Mark Gonzales' part in Video Days starts with the following sequence which has since become an iconic reference point in the history of skateboarding:

Set to John Coltrane's Traneing In, the shaky and unsteady camera work seems to spontaneously react to the skaters' movements. Compare and contrast this with the clean and steady work of French Fred above, where the videographer becomes almost invisible. The premise of following the skaters' movements with dynamic camerawork have stayed the same, but between 1991 and 2003 the skills of the videographers have greatly improved.
This era also saw the the featured skateboarders themselves becoming very involved in the technical aspects of the videography, like in the provocatively titled film Jump Off A Building by Jamie Thomas and Ed Templeton.

Before this, the skateboard video as we know it today started with Stacy Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show and other videos that were produced by his company Powell-Peralta during the 1980's.

This is Ray Barbee in 1989's Ban This. Peralta's films are more cinematic compared to modern skateboard films. The pacing is a lot slower, there is less emphasis on individual tricks and there are often narrative elements present. A number of them were also shot on 16 or 35mm film, which becomes quite costly in the world of skateboarding, where a single trick often requires dozens of takes.
Although Peralta's films are still very watchable today, his style never found any imitators outside his own company.
The legendary Tony Hawk was sponsored by Powell-Peralta for a long time and when his own company Birdhouse first set out to make a film, he was influenced by Peralta and wanted it to be a full length (i.e. 30 minutes or longer) film that was entirely shot on 16 or 35mm film. It was released in 1998 and was aptly titled The End, as I believe it's the last skateboard film to attempt this. In Tony's own words: 'We decided to produce a video that would set us apart from other companies. The raw–and, in many cases, poorly shot–style of video had been the staple of the skate video market, but I thought it was time to step up and make a video that would have the longevity good Powell videos have had.'

So while a lot of things have changed and developed during those two decades, two things were established from the very beginning that make skateboarding look interesting and exciting, while still communicating the necessary details about the trick and the obstacle.
The first is that the camera itself should be in motion. This is pretty self-explanatory and the famous dolly-zoom technique used in regular cinema is a perfect example of this concept.
The second thing is that for communicating the trick accurately, you have to show the obstacle as well. This is a common mistake other sports journalists make when documenting skateboarding. They tend to focus too much on the person and not enough on their surroundings. To be even more specific, you need a strong connection to the ground in order to show skating well. Establishing the relationship of the skater to the ground they are on is of vital importance in giving your audience a feel for the trick the skateboarder is performing.

In 2007 we arguably saw the high watermark of the 'standard' skate video with Lakai footwear's Fully Flared. This film was a massive production and ran about an hour and a half in length, within an industry that usually measures its films' duration in minutes.
Between 2000 and 2007, the norm was definitely set for the making of a skateboard film, so it was only natural that after this time people started to appreciate various deviations from this norm.

Ty Evans, who made Fully Flared together with Spike Jonze, sought even greater technical perfection, with extremely high production values in his later videos. Through a collaboration with RED cinematic camera's, his modus operandi since the 2010's includes upgrading the rolling long-lens shot to a full camera vehicle with a € >50.000 camera strapped to the front.

On the other side we also have a group of people whose camera work got more slow, with more static shots that show the landscape, which in turn results in a more documentary feel. Jim Greco, a professional skateboarder with a long and prolific career, now focusses his attention on slower paced films showing much of what surrounds skateboarding. The plainly titled film The Skateboarding of Leandre Sanders And Ludvig Håkansson is a good example. Another example would be the land and island films by UK-based film-maker Jim Craven. Subtitled Tom Day and Zach Riley's journey from Land's End to John O'Groats, the film is exactly what it says it would be.

Besides a number of film-makers whove opted for a more static approach, there has been an even larger group that instead went with even more expressive and dynamic camera work, including the post-production, where the film-making itself becomes interwoven in the fabric of the film. This is mainly seen in films made outside the United States of America. Aforementioned Fritte Söderström is a perfect example of this, but also the Japan-based Far East Skate Network deserves to be mentioned, as well as the work of Zach Chamberlin, who rose to fame through Montreal-based skateboard brand Magenta. Independent film-maker Colin Read and his film Spirit Quest must also not be left out, as his evident proficiency in 'editing on the beat' has lead him to create music videos for bands like Radiohead.
A related phenomenon is that a lot of people who are simply really good skateboarders are using those skills on the board and are combining them with videography to create novel approaches. Gustav Tønnesen and Chris Gregson are extremely talented, sponsored, skateboarders, but these days they are probably equally famous for the film-making they have done.

In contrast to these various people who are all interested in pushing the envelope in their own way, we also have a group of people who instead go in the opposite direction. They take advantage of the abundant and cheap, if somewhat out-dated, technology that is available, by making lo-fi films that build upon the DIY and zine aesthetic that has been present throughout skateboarding's history.
The lowest of the lo-fi that still managed to achieve 'mainstream' recognition is probably skateboard company Fancy Lad. Their films are a glorious mess, incorporating camera glitches, scratches on the lenses, skaters that accidentally kick the camera, and wholly inadequate lighting. You name the imperfection and they proudly set it to some obnoxious musical arrangement for your viewing pleasure. The means by which some trick has been recorded seems of secondary, or even tertiary, importance in these videos and the tricks, which are equally out-of-the-box, are at the centre of attention.

Yet amidst all the chaos those videos bestow upon the viewer, they do stick to the two basic 'rules' outlined before; their camera is often physically in motion, and the ground is always visible. And as a result they're still quite palatable to your average skateboard audience.

Which brings us all the way back to Bill Strobeck and the beginning of this text. In his approach to filming skateboarding, Strobeck constantly breaks these rules of good taste by detaching the skateboarder from the ground, and filming from a static position, using an unusually long lens to counteract the lack of camera movement. In doing so, he flaunts the conventions of skateboard filming, which has provided him with equally as many supporters as detractors. In all likelihood Strobeck hasn't been the first to break these two basic 'rules', but he is definitely the first person to do so consistently and deliberately.
What is also telling as that these techniques were first introduced in "cherry", which is a film produced by a fashion brand. The style Strobeck developed is remarkably similar to the techniques employed by fashion brands creating videos from their runway shows. In those videos the film-makers naturally focus on the models and attempt to detach them from their immediate surroundings. 

This is an effective technique to highlight the models as well as the brand that creates the clothes they wear. Therefore this technique does make the skaters in Strobecks' film appealing to Supreme's target audience; an in-crowd of self-proclaimed cool and stylish individuals.
So while I see the value of Strobeck's methods as a technique with a singular purpose, the widespread use of similar styles by other people for projects that still wish to have skateboarding at their core has lead many to critisize Strobeck and his imitators by gently reminding them that it's time to zoom tf out.

Natural Visually Perfect Algebraic Method

The Casio fx-82MS-2 is the calculator I've been using for the last number of years. This is the cheapest and most basic scientific calculator Casio offered at the time I purchased mine. Like the Texas Instruments TI-30X IIB model that I used in high school, it has a two-line display and a familiar button lay-out that has been common to nearly all scientific calculators for over fifty years. This style of two-line display calculators has been the norm for entry-model scientific calculators for over two decades, so I was a little shocked when I encountered the Casio fx-82CW in a general store.  

The Casio fx-82CW was introduced in 2023 as the successor to the Casio fx-82MS and fx-82EX models. 

Casio fx-82MS (left) and Casio fx-82CW (right)

What immediately caught my eye was that the new Casio fx-82CW has what Casio calls a 'natural' display and input method. Such a display and input method mimic the appearance of mathematical equations as one would write them by hand or see them printed in a book.
This change is extremely significant, as the correct formatting of mathematical formulas, even without the need to carry out the calculations, has traditionally been problematic on far more capable desktop computers. Such display has technically been possible since the 1980's through LaTeX and similar markup languages, but those languages are not easy to learn and use. Microsoft Office introduced a mathematical formatting option only as recently as 2007 and to this day Adobe InDesign still requires third-party solutions to include mathematical equations in documents. Having had first-hand experience with the problems one encounters when attempting to correctly display complex mathematical equations on a screen, to see this functionality on the most basic and cheapest of scientific calculators was a real eye-opener.
For those who are perhaps less familiar with the hardships of using a two-line calculator, in the above image the equation input is the same for both calculators, with the same values for the variables. On the right, in the fx-82CW, the entire equation is visible and the result is displayed as a fraction, in the style that one would write it on a piece of paper. Its presentation is clear and uncomplicated, assuming one is familiar with such equations.
On the left is the same input and result shown on an fx-82MS. The input there is (-B+√(B²–4AC))÷2A, which doesn't fit in its entirety on the single input line. This is problematic because you have to provide the calculator with the correct order of operations through the use of nested brackets. This in and of itself is not a problem, but combined with the limited character space on the single input line, you always end up in the situation where your opening and closing brackets aren't on the screen at the same time. When coupled with the mental effort required to 'translate' the formula as seen in a book or your own writing, this creates a situation where input errors are very likely, while checking for such errors is tedious and unwieldy.
To have a calculator with a more 'natural' display is thus a great quality of life improvement over how calculators have been developed and used during the last 60-odd years.
Of course, there have been calculators in the past that possessed such natural display capabilities and this is thus not a new invention. The first Casio calculator that could display algebraic formulas was the CFX-9970G in 1998, but this was a top-of-the-line graphical calculator with a matching price tag. Even today it's offered on eBay for about $100. More recently, the aforementioned Casio fx-82EX model already had the same display technology that the new fx-82CW uses. This model was released in 2015, and while it was very similar in mathematical functionality to the two-line fx-82MS-2 that was simultaneously on the market, it was about twice as expensive at roughly 25 euros. So, while it's a great thing to see this kind of display technology in Casio's cheapest offering, similar functionality has been available from them and their competitors for a number of years.

Which brings us to the other aspect of the fx-82CW that struck me, which is the renewed button layout. As mentioned earlier, the button layout on scientific calculators hasn't changed significantly since they were first introduced over fifty years ago. Both the fx-82MS and fx-82EX models still largely adhere to this traditional layout.

Button layout of fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

The greater possibilities introduced by the new screen has provided the opportunity for a design where the information concerning inputs isn't restricted to the limited space available on and around the buttons themselves. I believe that the designers at Casio recognised this opportunity and designed their new calculator with a two-fold aim. The first is to provide a large degree of consistency between the calculators input and its core functionality, and the second is a greater degree of accessibility for novel users who are used to working with simpler calculators, who are writing equations by hand and who are introduced to new ideas through natural language by teachers or textbooks.

I think the designers did an excellent job at really looking at all the technical functionality these scientific calculators have amassed in the last decades and finding a logically consistent grouping of the major functionalities, even if this meant doing away with some of the ingrained staples of calculator design. Of course, a written text like this one is no substitute for the experience of actually using a device like this, but I nevertheless wish to highlight some of the choices they made and hopefully show how these differ from any other calculator I know.
The first thing that's noteworthy is that there is no equals sign to be found. Instead there is a [EXE] button which is positioned where the [=] button usually goes. 'EXE' is short for execute and simply executes the command you've input. This is perhaps a subtle change, but it's nevertheless important if one wishes to have a more consistent input. To press the [EXE] button after entering an equation makes perfect sense, and so does pressing [EXE] after defining a variable as 'A=1'. This is not the first calculator to move away from the equals sign, but the choice of execute has been particularly suitable for the purpose. Texas Instruments have chosen for [ENTER] on their TI-30XB models, but this has a strong connotation with the keyboards of desktop computers and doesn't imply that any activity will occur after the input.

Right above the [EXE] button is the minus sign, in the place where it is commonly found on a calculator. This minus sign performs subtraction, but interestingly the secondary function of this minus sign is the input for negative numbers. The operators for negative numbers and subtraction have always had two separate buttons on any calculator I've used, which are respectively labelled as [(-)] and [–]. But as both use the same signifier, the minus sign, to express their function in handwriting, it makes sense to have them in the same place. 

Another button that is found in its usual place for Casio calculators is the button for input in scientific notation: [×10^■]. In the manual of the fx-82CW it's written that 'Pressing the [×10^■] key is the same as pressing [×], [1], [0], [◼︎^□]'. This is how I always mentally approached this button, but this wasn't how it functioned on the fx-82MS and many other calculators. On the fx-82MS pressing the [×10^x] inputs '×10' as a single character and the exponent will be whatever number follows this character until a different operator is entered. This system thus gives the following results:
[1], [×10^x], [3] = 1000
[1], [×10^x], [1], [+], [2] = 12
[1], [×10^x], [√], [9] = Syntax error
Even though mathematically all these equations should be equal to the number 1000, the results vary wildly on the fx-82MS. On the fx-82CW however, the input of the button is simply treated as a shortcut for writing the relevant expression and each of these inputs thus give 1000 as the answer. This is again a great step towards further consistency between the user's input and what is shown on the screen.

Buttons used for formatting on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

Another new addition I haven't encountered on any other calculator is the [FORMAT] button. The fx-82CW supports a number of different notational formats for displaying the result of a calculation, namely Standard, Decimal, Prime Factorization, Improper Fractions, Mixed Fractions, Engineering Notation and Sexagesimal. Once you performed a calculation, simply press the [FORMAT] button and you can choose any of these options from a menu.
This functionality isn't new, engineering notation was introduced on calculators in the 1970's, but any other calculator I've used had separate buttons for these options and most of the time these buttons aren't physically grouped together because they are also used for other kinds of input. This is confusing to anybody who didn't memorise the manual and it probably meant entire generations of students used a calculator for years without ever finding out what the 'FACT' function was on the [º ' "] button.
A criticism that has been levied against the removal of the [ENG] and similar buttons is that it's less efficient to display a result in engineering notation. After all, you now must go through a menu to do what before simply required a single button press. I do agree with this criticism for heavy users of a single kind of notation that can't be pre-set, and so I am curious to see how Casio will approach this problem in its more advanced or specialised calculators in the future. As it stands, the choice for this approach in this base level calculator is more than justified in my opinion. Core functionality is no longer hidden behind separate buttons with acronyms or other functions, but organised under a single button with a clear label and position. To any new or light user of a scientific calculator the [FORMAT] button will provide access to functionality they previously might have never known even existed.

Buttons used for variables on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

An important feature of this kind of non-graphical scientific calculators is the ability to store and recall variables. Equally important is the inclusion of two mathematical constants, namely π, or pi, and e, or Euler's number. While any basic scientific calculator I've ever used provided this functionality, how these variables were entered has been anything but consistent, or intuitive. On the fx-82MS for example, e is the tertiary function of the [ln] button. This makes some conceptual sense, as e is the base of the natural logarithm, but then on the fx-82EX e is the tertiary function of [×10^x], where π is also found as the secondary function on both the fx-82MS and the EX.
On the fx-82CW, π and e are the secondary functions of the numbers 7 and 8, respectively. There they are positioned next to each other and together with other numerical input because that is how they are approached in the context of a calculator, as numerical input.
It thus makes sense that the programmable variables 'A' to 'F' are also found there, as well as the variables x, y and z. z replaces the 'M', or memory, function of previous models. This memory button was an early addition to scientific calculators to temporarily store numbers before more variables became available. To replace 'M' with z thus once again achieves greater consistency for users who aren't already familiar with the history of calculator design.
All input that is equivalent to a number is now done through the lower left segment of the keypad on the fx-82CW and this is a laudable approach.

Setting these variables has also changed to be more approachable in the fx-82CW and this is once again done by consolidating this function to a single button labelled [VARIABLE]. Compare this with the fx-82MS where [1], [SHIFT]+[RCL], [(-)], [=] are the required commands to store the number 1 as variable 'A'. This somewhat cryptic sequence makes a bit more sense when you're physically using the calculator, but it's nowhere near as instinctive as [VARIABLE], 'A', 'Edit', [1], [EXE].
Pressing the variable button on the fx-82CW also provides the user with an overview of the values of the available variables, something that is understandably absent from the two-line fx-82MS. While the fx-82EX provides the same overview as the fx-82CW, it nevertheless relies on a similar method as the fx-82MS for its input.

Buttons used for arithmetic on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

The most important function of a simple scientific calculator will undoubtably be arithmetic and the inclusion of exponentiation, roots and logarithms is essentially what differentiates a scientific calculator from a basic calculator. The styling conventions for these functions have been established long ago, with [x²] for the square of a number, and [x³] for its cube, and then [^] is used for adding any other number as the exponent. Needless to say, these stylistic conventions adhered largely to how the operators were displayed on the screen of the calculator, but still could appear somewhat inconsistent to the user. With the first implementation of their Natural-V.P.A.M. display method, on the fx-82ES from 2004, Casio simultaneously added some changes to the button styling for some of these arithmetic functions. What was previously represented by a letter like x or a, now became a little black square, presumably to indicate where the operator would be placed on the new and more complex screen. This purely visual system does away with letters in favour of shapes to convey vital information about its function. From 2004 until 2023 Casio didn't use this symbolic language consistently, however. On the fx-82EX most symbols were replaced with open or closed squares, yet for all exponent operators an x variable was still used. It seems like old habits were hard to shake. For the fx-82CW Casio once again went with consistency and used only squares where one is expected to find a number in the symbols for the operators. They also removed the unnecessary [x³] button and removed all instances of Euler's number in the operators, instead opting to make the natural logarithm a secondary function of the general logarithm, while e can be found in the numerical section as previously mentioned.
This made this group of five buttons sleek, visually simple, easy to understand and consistent. 

Finally, I must note the inclusion of one last button that I've never encountered before, and this is the [CATALOG] button. Once more this button does exactly what it says, as it opens a menu where all the calculator's functions are grouped in a handful of categories. This includes some probability functions that no longer have a separate button on the keypad. I doubt many people will use this menu to regularly input common functions, but as an overview of the calculator's capabilities this level of redundancy is a nice addition.

Overall, I'm impressed by the fx-82CW for its willingness to challenge and change several conventions that have been in place for decades. These conventions by and large grew out of specific needs for specific users in combination with the limitations of the available technology. Now that the technology has gotten sufficiently affordable to provide these complex and more advanced functions on the most basic of models, Casio has dared to see the impact this could have on users and rethink its core interface. In doing so it has created a great improvement for a first introduction to the more complex calculators found in high school education, as well as a wonderfully clear and workable calculator for unsophisticated daily use.

The International System of Units

My city, like many other cities, has a waste recycling point. This recycling point is funded by city taxes and thus every inhabitant of the city gets twelve 'free' visits a year. Of course, there is a limit to the amount of waste one can bring to the recycling point on each of these visits. 

On their website the city has posted some guidelines for a number of categories of waste. My favourite of these is 'Small Chemical Waste', of which one can bring a 'maximum 0.5 m³ per visit, including latex and paint'.
This never stops being funny to me, as my city apparently considers six thousands litres per year a perfectly normal amount of chemical waste for a regular household.

Those Lying Bastards

In the previous months I've been in a somewhat unique position where I was simultaneously working on two publications. The first of these is a small monographic publication on some of my own drawings. The second is a research report on some physical characteristics of a novel alkyd resin. Naturally, the first of these deals with art in the freest sense, while the second is a strictly scientific publication, meant to provide reproducible insights upon which future research can be based.

And while working on these publications, a very clear distinction between art and science revealed itself to me. The distinction is obvious, but not commonly discussed, so I believe it's valuable to discuss it here.

The artistic publication I'm working on concerns itself with drawings of stick figures that perform certain movements that were memorable to me. Because I can't produce visual imagery in my mind, actively recalling movement for me is difficult, if not impossible. It was therefore interesting to explore this by creating distinctive stick figures, that are nevertheless awkwardly positioned and proportioned because I can't recall the nuances of the movements. On the one hand these show a great understanding of form in the abstract sense, yet on the other hand they are also poorly drawn and unrealistic.
In the introductory text to the publication I've written that 'this book is but a number of drawings. Each of them was an attempt to draw from memory those movements which can’t live in my mind.'
And this is a lie.
In the process of making the publication there were many times where I worked directly from photographic reference material. This was necessary in order to show the dichotomy between my abstract understanding of shapes and artistic techniques. Doing that involved highlighting interesting and easily recognised movements, and they have to adhere to a certain 'ideal' in order for me to place emphasis on the skewed knowledge I have of them. Showing the 'true' skewed memory I have would make recognising the starting point challenging, so for many of these drawings I worked from reference material to some extent. Below is an example of the same drawing, one truly from memory and one I made using references:

As you can see, these drawings are very different. The pose of the first drawing, made from memory, doesn't posses the nuance and comprehensibility of the second. The original point of this specific pose, a reading of the body as the letter 'K', is even largely lost in the first drawing. And although I can easily recognise that this is so, I couldn't imagine what I should do to change that.

To lie in my actions therefore fits the truth of the narrative better than merely showing the drawing that adheres to the factual truth. This kind of abstraction of reality in order to clarify your point of view is very common in the arts. It might even be one of the main aims or achievements of visual art, as can be gleaned from the common term 'artistic license' for such creative interpretations of the truth.

This is of course in sharp contrast with the aims and methodologies of science. No scientist should ever attempt to bend the factual truth in order to better fit their own preferred narrative.
If as a scientist my results don't fit my desired narrative, then it's the narrative that has to change, not the results. This might lead to something ugly, messy and incomprehensible, but that's unfortunate only for me as a person. One has to abide by the factual truths that one is confronted with, even if understanding and explaining those truths is rarely a straightforward and elegant path.
For scientific results to be reproducible, it's also important to be as comprehensive as possible about your methods. Any parameter, any tool, anything that might have influenced your research is supposed to be included in your description of the experiment. Exhaustive descriptions of methods and materials, as well as their influence, are preferably quantified and explained in the text.
Such a completeness of information is almost never polished and simple, with many little things that were adapted to changing circumstances over time. But unlike in art, in science there is no way to discard unwanted information. No way to make your narrative more easily digested by leaving out or altering crucial details. Everything and anything has to be included, nothing can be left out.

It is therefore impossible in science to increase the readers comprehension simply by making the available information fit the narrative, while in art the exact selection of information to fit your narrative is often a basic necessity.
If you understand this fundamental distinction, it's easy to see why rigorous scientific research can't ever be good art, and why research that focusses on an artistic narrative can't ever be science.