I made this video earlier Which shows that the Golden Mean is used even more extensively in Darth Vader’s helmet design than Mona herself, who is famous for it. The point (that I never get to in the video) behind all this, is not that Darth Vader is related to Mona Lisa… but that there is a margin of error in artistic applications of the golden mean. It’s not big… I’d say (at a guess) it’s around 3%. In a later post, I’ll collect a medium-ish sample-size of examples and figure out exactly what it is. A couple of things alerted me to this… one is the nautilus shell which is always being used as an example… Now that ain’t the golden mean. The exact ratio is closer to 290.5/219.4 = 1.324 (18% wrong)… which is miles out. Now… the measurements on Darth or Mona’s faces are nowhere near as…

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For web stuff. I say free – it comes from the Internet… and now I’m not so sure where. Wikipedia probably Still. You can’t patent 4000 year old mathematical functions. It’s this – and it works really well. A transparent golden-mean-spiral (The one that you download is massive. This is a little version) If you right-click (or whatever it is you do) and save this locally, you can drag it into photoshop (or whatever it is you use) as a layer… and make everything look balanced and beautiful. — Mind you, if you’re anything like me, you’re already (roughly) balanced and beautiful – in which case you can use this transparent png to prove it. See? That’s me on day 2 of caffeine withdrawal. Holy mother of moses that stuff interferes with me. I can only squintily see through one eye, and I feel absolutely terrible. Well balanced though.

If you search for “unboxing” on youtube, you get about 400,000 results. These are all videos of people taking products out of boxes. When I was reading OMNI Magazine in the 70s (a magazine about the future)… I would never, ever, ever have guessed that this would become at type of… what is it? Entertainment? Product review? I think it’s product review crossed with a type of exhibitionism. I think. Anyway, this video is the opposite of that.   The calipers with box, look like this:

Lovely I pinched this for my little brochure-book thing… as an example of Golden-Mean Art… this is one of the modern examples… as opposed to this say: Which is a Vermeer from “The Golden Age” of gilding. I’ve tried googling it (can’t even find where I originally found it), tried uploading it to Tinyeye which does reverse image-searches… cannae find it. Everything is not (yet) findable on the internet. Found this though… … apparently there’s a fern on Pandora, called a Fibonacci – which the (blue) locals use to make (blue) paint, for painting things blue, which is their favorite colour. I can tell without even measuring it though, that that fern-spiral is not fibonacci… the radius is a lot tighter than 1.68. More like 1.2 I’d say. Amateurs.

Been busy… kindof. Busy in a waiting around sort of way. Slow suppliers are the bane of my life. That’s the thing about fast-turnover/low-inventory internet businesses… you’re at the mercy of the supply chain… suddenly it’s Thursday and Nothing Gets Done On Friday, and then it’s the weekend and you’ve lost another 4 days – so you’ve got to go back all-apologies to your customers, wait, wait, wait, wait. Anyway… been making little brochures and booklets and whatnot. I’m going to include one of the little brochure things (they’re about the size of a business card) in each box… Basically consisting of a bunch of little pictures of Golden-Mean things. The brochure I’m getting done at a local printers – the booklet… I’m not sure if I’ll use these to be honest. I got them done at http://www.mypublisher.com/ – and they only cost a couple of dollars each… but they…

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