Physical ASCII Mosaic 175
An anonymous submitter, who might be Eric Harshberger, writes: "Some of my past LEGO whackiness seemed to make a few Slashdot readers chuckle, so I thought I'd pass along this link to my latest creation: A mosaic built of thousands and thousands of tiny little letter bricks. Kind of a weird turn on the ol' ASCII artwork." You may remember this guy from the famous Lego desk.
So all this time (Score:5, Funny)
I've been working in oil paints and ink, and all I had to do to get recognition was to build something out of Legos? Ppph! :)
Re:So all this time (Score:1)
Re:So all this time (Score:1)
Re:So all this time (Score:1)
I did look at your site, BTW, not too bad, though your photo work does need practice - best on was the cat in the window above the door (IMHO - feel free to look at mine at http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/Henry/Travels/ )
wow (Score:2, Funny)
Legos... (Score:1)
Just wondering. It's along the same lines.
Art via Geekiosity.
Re:Legos... (Score:1, Flamebait)
The Public 8 Ball was conceived and assembled by Jim Studt, he can be reached at [you know where to find it].
Re:Legos... (Score:2, Funny)
Just wondering. It's along the same lines.
Should be simple enough to find out...
"My sources say no."
Nope, not him.
It'll be lincoln logs next (Score:1)
I hope he gets that into a museum somewhere.
Re:It'll be lincoln logs next (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It'll be lincoln logs next (Score:2)
Why is this not slashdot- worthy? (Score:1)
Heh.
More Lego Genius (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More Lego Genius (Score:1)
Re:More Lego Genius (Score:1)
Re:More Lego Genius (Score:2, Funny)
S&M (Score:2)
Rudimentary cache (since Google doesn't have it) (Score:3, Offtopic)
Physical Graffiti ASCII
The adage states that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' I'm not sure about that, but I can say one's worth about thirty thousand letters...
Question: What should one do with about a quarter million Modulex bricks?
This is not a question that most people will face in their lifetime. For that matter, few LEGO collectors will need to consider it. However, last fall I was sent a couple small Modulex bricks in the mail by a fellow, Ted, who had worked for LEGO some time ago. Ironically, my first thought when seeing the tiny bricks was, "these are so small, they're like toys!" -- as if the standard LEGO brick is not meant to be a toy.
Anyway, my interest was certainly piqued by these 'elfin sized' bricks, and I started doing some investigation. After a couple months of searching and researching, I stumbled into quite a find: for a (fairly reasonable) price I managed to put myself in half-ownership of approximately half a million Modulex bricks. Old, yes, but sealed in boxes and in mint condition.
So, I then had to ask myself what I would do with my new 'toys.'
What should one actually do with a quarter million Modulex bricks?
Some type of mosaic came to mind as the Modulex bricks are smaller than typical LEGO bricks, and the colors are different (more pastel).
What really intrigued me, though, was the fact that among the many, many bricks were some tiny 1x1 smooth bricks (tiles) that were white with black letters and numbers imprinted upon them.
What are "Modulex" bricks? Modulex bricks are smaller 'cousins' of LEGO bricks . They were originally developed by the LEGO company (many decades ago) and marketed to professional architecture firms and such (not as a retail toy). Possibly to the surprise of many LEGO collectors, these bricks are still manufactured today (by the now independent, but LEGO-related, company Modulex).
Modulex bricks are not compatible with typical LEGO bricks. The standard 1x1 Modulex brick (or 'component' as the company refers to them) is 5mm cubed (yes, they are perfect cubes, unlike LEGO unit bricks which are taller than they are wide or deep).
The colors are also different than LEGO colors... much more in the 'pastel' frame of mind they are.
Buying new Modulex bricks is not cheap; piece by piece they would end up being more expensive than LEGO bricks on average.
There are Modulex collectors about, however, and if one searches hard enough, one can sometimes find old ones for sale. The eBay auction site can be quite handy in this instance. I got my idea.
I'd do a mosaic, but instead of using colors, I'd use the letter and number tiles to create a picture reminiscent of the old 'ASCII art' one can find on the web (and which was certainly around long before the web).
Physical ASCII. How pseudo-retro-techno.
Okay then, a physical ASCII mosaic. But a mosaic of what?
I was sick of building LEGO cartoon/comic characters, so that was out.
I considered a picture from another fascination of mine: Alice in Wonderland (qq.v. Alice, White Rabbit Mosaic ), but the original Tenniel drawings that I like are all pretty much black and white with little gray shading... not very conducive to ASCII art really.
So, with cartoon characters and Alice discarded, I turned to the next obvious thing: an actress (this may not be too obvious, but for anyone who knows me, this should not be a big surprise).
I decided to use a picture of Calista Flockhart.
Okay, I had my picture. Next I downloaded a freely available software program: ASCII Generator.
This nifty tool did just about all that I needed. I could specify what letters to use (and which were 'darkest' and which 'lightest'). I could specify how many pixels of width to give each letter (when printed normally, most fonts have letters that are taller than they are wide; my bricks, however, were square, so I needed to be able to adjust accordingly). All in all, the program was invaluable.
I did run into one snag, however.
See, in all the little letter tiles I had obtained, the distribution of particular letters and numbers was far from equal. For example, I had over five thousand U's, but only twenty-four C's (not twenty-four thousand, just twenty-four... two dozen).
The ASCII Generator program did not care what my supply actually was, so it just used as many of each letter as it deemed necessary. As a result, the output (which was 140 letters wide and 240 letters high) did not come close to matching the letter supply I actually had.
I solved the problem by grouping certain letters together into groups based on their darkness (so, say, the W's and X's and H's were in one group at the dark end while the I's and L's and J's were in the lightest group). With about 6 groups formed using all the tiles I did have, I then wrote a Perl script that analyzed the output from the ASCII program.
My script would look at the letter in each space as designated by the ASCII Generator and then see to which group it belonged. Next, it would randomly pick a letter from that group. This 'randomness' however was weighted so that the letters within the group of which I had the most would be most likely picked. Letters of which I had very few were proportionally less likely to be picked.
The picked letter from the group (which might, in fact, be the same as the original letter analyzed) was then substituted in the ASCII picture.
When the whole text file was thus filtered, I ended up with an ASCII image in which the darkness and lightness was pretty much the same as the original ASCII output, but I was guaranteed to have the necessary letters.
Whew.
With all that done, I could then actually start building.
Oh wait. There was one more problem. I had about 60,000 letter tiles at my disposal, but I had no baseplates to which I could attach them.
I ended up ordering some from the U.S. importer of Modulex products. This was not particularly cheap or timely, but about five weeks later I managed to get the baseplates I needed.
And I began the actual building of the mosaic.
I have constructed plenty of LEGO mosaic in the past (qq.v. New York City, Mona Lisa, San Francisco ), so I was almost prepared for this task. There are notable differences between Modulex mosaic building and LEGO mosaic building, however. Most noticable is the fact that the minute Modulex bricks are *that much harder* to pick up and maneuver. Nimble fingers are required.
Modulex bricks also seem to attach more securely to the baseplates (more securely than LEGO bricks do to LEGO baseplates), and this is nice. However, it also means that a bit more force is need to make each little click. Tough fingers are required.
And finally, since I was creating a mosaic with little letters and numbers, I had to be sure that each brick was positioned with the correct orientation (no upside down P's for me, buddy).
Anyway... in the end, I got the darn thing done. The final 'Calista mosaic' is currently hanging on a wall in my house, and I hope to transport it to the Brickswest (2002) convention.
The mosaic used about 30,000 pieces (the 140 by 240 area for the letters, with some of the white spaces filled by larger tiles, and finally a border).
This, of course, means that I have about 30,000 or so letter tiles remaining. Enough for another mosaic! Heh... not one for myself, but I'd could always do one on commission, by request. Such a commssion would not be cheap of course (for a similarly sized mosaic -- 30 inches by 50 inches -- you could expect a price tag of many, many thousands of dollars).
But if you're game, let me know... I obviously have a limited supply, so it'd be first come, first serve... requests from actresses would get preferential consideration, of course [grin].
What I'm going to do with the rest of my Modulex stash (the non-letter bricks)... well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
Re:Rudimentary cache (since Google doesn't have it (Score:4, Funny)
Calista Flockhart isn't a cartoon character? Coulda fooled me.
Re:Rudimentary cache (since Google doesn't have it (Score:2)
What a misogynist thing to say. I've had it with so-called feminists who hate a woman for her body shape. Now, Flockhart doesn't do much for me--not my type--but her body is hers, and she should not be hated so for it.
Its 11:37...... (Score:1)
Goddammit! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Goddammit! (Score:5, Informative)
http://calista_lego.tripod.com/calistalego
Re:Goddammit! (Score:1)
Their signup form looks like
Perhaps a few polite emails to them will help
Text of article.... (Score:1, Informative)
Question: What should one do with about a quarter million Modulex bricks?
This is not a question that most people will face in their lifetime. For that matter, few LEGO collectors will need to consider it. However, last fall I was sent a couple small Modulex bricks in the mail by a fellow, Ted, who had worked for LEGO some time ago. Ironically, my first thought when seeing the tiny bricks was, "these are so small, they're like toys!" -- as if the standard LEGO brick is not meant to be a toy.
Anyway, my interest was certainly piqued by these 'elfin sized' bricks, and I started doing some investigation. After a couple months of searching and researching, I stumbled into quite a find: for a (fairly reasonable) price I managed to put myself in half-ownership of approximately half a million Modulex bricks. Old, yes, but sealed in boxes and in mint condition.
So, I then had to ask myself what I would do with my new 'toys.'
What should one actually do with a quarter million Modulex bricks?
Some type of mosaic came to mind as the Modulex bricks are smaller than typical LEGO bricks, and the colors are different (more pastel).
What really intrigued me, though, was the fact that among the many, many bricks were some tiny 1x1 smooth bricks (tiles) that were white with black letters and numbers imprinted upon them.
What are "Modulex" bricks?
Modulex bricks are smaller 'cousins' of LEGO bricks. They were originally developed by the LEGO company (many decades ago) and marketed to professional architecture firms and such (not as a retail toy). Possibly to the surprise of many LEGO collectors, these bricks are still manufactured today (by the now independent, but LEGO-related, company Modulex).
Modulex bricks are not compatible with typical LEGO bricks. The standard 1x1 Modulex brick (or 'component' as the company refers to them) is 5mm cubed (yes, they are perfect cubes, unlike LEGO unit bricks which are taller than they are wide or deep).
The colors are also different than LEGO colors... much more in the 'pastel' frame of mind they are.
Buying new Modulex bricks is not cheap; piece by piece they would end up being more expensive than LEGO bricks on average.
There are Modulex collectors about, however, and if one searches hard enough, one can sometimes find old ones for sale. The eBay auction site can be quite handy in this instance.
I got my idea.
I'd do a mosaic, but instead of using colors, I'd use the letter and number tiles to create a picture reminiscent of the old 'ASCII art' one can find on the web (and which was certainly around long before the web).
Physical ASCII. How pseudo-retro-techno.
Okay then, a physical ASCII mosaic. But a mosaic of what?
I was sick of building LEGO cartoon/comic characters, so that was out.
I considered a picture from another fascination of mine: Alice in Wonderland (qq.v. Alice, White Rabbit Mosaic), but the original Tenniel drawings that I like are all pretty much black and white with little gray shading... not very conducive to ASCII art really.
So, with cartoon characters and Alice discarded, I turned to the next obvious thing: an actress (this may not be too obvious, but for anyone who knows me, this should not be a big surprise).
I decided to use a picture of Calista Flockhart.
Okay, I had my picture. Next I downloaded a freely available software program: ASCII Generator.
This nifty tool did just about all that I needed. I could specify what letters to use (and which were 'darkest' and which 'lightest'). I could specify how many pixels of width to give each letter (when printed normally, most fonts have letters that are taller than they are wide; my bricks, however, were square, so I needed to be able to adjust accordingly). All in all, the program was invaluable.
I did run into one snag, however.
See, in all the little letter tiles I had obtained, the distribution of particular letters and numbers was far from equal. For example, I had over five thousand U's, but only twenty-four C's (not twenty-four thousand, just twenty-four... two dozen).
The ASCII Generator program did not care what my supply actually was, so it just used as many of each letter as it deemed necessary. As a result, the output (which was 140 letters wide and 240 letters high) did not come close to matching the letter supply I actually had.
I solved the problem by grouping certain letters together into groups based on their darkness (so, say, the W's and X's and H's were in one group at the dark end while the I's and L's and J's were in the lightest group). With about 6 groups formed using all the tiles I did have, I then wrote a Perl script that analyzed the output from the ASCII program.
My script would look at the letter in each space as designated by the ASCII Generator and then see to which group it belonged. Next, it would randomly pick a letter from that group. This 'randomness' however was weighted so that the letters within the group of which I had the most would be most likely picked. Letters of which I had very few were proportionally less likely to be picked.
The picked letter from the group (which might, in fact, be the same as the original letter analyzed) was then substituted in the ASCII picture.
When the whole text file was thus filtered, I ended up with an ASCII image in which the darkness and lightness was pretty much the same as the original ASCII output, but I was guaranteed to have the necessary letters.
Whew.
With all that done, I could then actually start building.
Oh wait. There was one more problem. I had about 60,000 letter tiles at my disposal, but I had no baseplates to which I could attach them.
I ended up ordering some from the U.S. importer of Modulex products. This was not particularly cheap or timely, but about five weeks later I managed to get the baseplates I needed.
And I began the actual building of the mosaic.
I have constructed plenty of LEGO mosaic in the past (qq.v. New York City, Mona Lisa, San Francisco), so I was almost prepared for this task. There are notable differences between Modulex mosaic building and LEGO mosaic building, however. Most noticable is the fact that the minute Modulex bricks are *that much harder* to pick up and maneuver. Nimble fingers are required.
Modulex bricks also seem to attach more securely to the baseplates (more securely than LEGO bricks do to LEGO baseplates), and this is nice. However, it also means that a bit more force is need to make each little click. Tough fingers are required.
And finally, since I was creating a mosaic with little letters and numbers, I had to be sure that each brick was positioned with the correct orientation (no upside down P's for me, buddy).
Anyway... in the end, I got the darn thing done. The final 'Calista mosaic' is currently hanging on a wall in my house, and I hope to transport it to the Brickswest (2002) convention.
The mosaic used about 30,000 pieces (the 140 by 240 area for the letters, with some of the white spaces filled by larger tiles, and finally a border).
This, of course, means that I have about 30,000 or so letter tiles remaining. Enough for another mosaic! Heh... not one for myself, but I'd could always do one on commission, by request. Such a commssion would not be cheap of course (for a similarly sized mosaic -- 30 inches by 50 inches -- you could expect a price tag of many, many thousands of dollars).
But if you're game, let me know... I obviously have a limited supply, so it'd be first come, first serve... requests from actresses would get preferential consideration, of course [grin].
What I'm going to do with the rest of my Modulex stash (the non-letter bricks)... well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
More pictures
My initial set-up before actual construction began.
This was my basic layout of the bags. Each bag contains a separate letter (keeping them separate was vitally important, of course).
As work progressed, the workspace got messier and messier, but a facade of organization was kept.
The first baseplate (upper left of mosaic) is completed.
More progress. The empty areas would later be filled with white tiles (not all 1x1s).
A closer look.
The eyes are completed.
The final mosaic is 150 by 250 bricks (30 inches by 50 inches); these dimensions include a five-brick-wide black border.
A close-up shot to prove these are actually little letter tiles [grin].
A close-up of one of the eyes.
Here's a view of the printout instructions I used. I deliniated every 10 rows and columns to help keep things straight.
I 'signed' the mosaic in the lower right corner by placing letters at a ninety degree rotation.
Also, I should give thanks to Ted, Brad, Irving, Arne, and Henry for helping me get this crazy little project conceived and finsihed in about four months time.
Finally, for the trivia prone people, I'll toss out these little bits:
While I did not purposely place any messages in the mosaic (other than my signature), some small words did appear by chance. The longest were four letter words. Among the ones I remember: FILL, FULL, NOUN, QUOD (a strange word probably only familiar to Scrabble players). I caught these reading left-to-right as I built the mosaic... others may be hidden vertically.
The longest string of a single letter was an iteration of eight Y's (it appeared in the second row from the top).
I seem to recall a number six digits in length embedded within the mosaic, but I can't remember what it was, and now can't locate it in amongst the gibberish. It was the longest continuous string I spotted, though.
Here is a breakdown of the symbols used (of course, I may have erred a bit in the actual production, but this is what made up the text file; no M's or 9's were used -- they are just W's and 6's upside down; the balance of space was filled with blank white tiles):
[A] -> 83
[B] -> 109
[C] -> 24
[D] -> 596
[E] -> 468
[F] -> 1726
[G] -> 1851
[H] -> 985
[I] -> 562
[J] -> 2820
[K] -> 540
[L] -> 617
[N] -> 455
[O] -> 365
[P] -> 560
[Q] -> 1816
[R] -> 284
[S] -> 820
[T] -> 234
[U] -> 4157
[V] -> 1432
[W] -> 290
[X] -> 414
[Y] -> 2782
[Z] -> 150
[0] -> 491
[1] -> 197
[2] -> 346
[3] -> 100
[4] -> 383
[5] -> 358
[6] -> 277
[7] -> 128
[8] -> 52
[=] -> 1103
Slashdotted--but here's some information (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
And, since you built the whole thing out of the 1x1's, is this indicative of your opinion that she needs to eat more?
LV
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:2)
This would definately qualify as Boston.com's most unusual Valentine's Day gift [boston.com].
. .
"I have constructed plenty of LEGO mosaic in the past (qq.v. New York City, Mona Lisa, San Francisco)"
. .
Sorry for the jibe. .
did anyone download the pics? (Score:2)
"who might be Eric Harshberger" (Score:2)
Than, next time you don't have to post a link to "http://www.ericharshbarger.org/" which is owned by Eric Harshbarger.
Re:"who might be Eric Harshberger" (Score:1)
I still think there's quite a difference between someone not being able to type their own last name and someone making a mistake in a foreign language.
Work of love, marginally art (Score:4, Insightful)
Some might say art is about taking things that no one thought could be art and make it into art, like how andy warhol took soup cans and turned into pop art. Or distorting reality by creating a representation that make the viewer stop and think about the creative process. Some are questionable like Jackson Pollock, who most people would consider junk. So make of the portrait what you will. Lego and calista art? It's probably more artful than calista :)
Re:Work of love, marginally art (Score:1)
There are thousands of views on art, including death as art as in "performance art". There's a movie named frozen [amazon.com]. Or there's Guillermo Gómez-Peña [telefonica.es] who is well known in the performance art world. I'll stop there. Lego art :)
Re:Work of love, marginally art (Score:1)
Re:Work of love, marginally art (Score:2)
In this case he completely changed the medium, the color and thus the representation.
From the art classes that I've taken this fits into what I was taught art is. Whether it is good art or not is completely subjective. I have seen art that is just a blue triangle on a white sheet of paper. I accept it as art, but reject that it is good art.
I don't have any obsession with Flockheart, but I would hang that on my wall. It's damn cool.
Re:Work of love, marginally art (Score:1)
Q: Do you consider what you do art?
A: I have never called what I do art, and never will. I find this question a little silly.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Yet all I can say is this guy is the biggest geek I have ever seen. I am bowled over. The part about writing a Perl script to analyze the output of the image to ASCII art program to match his distribution of Modulux blocks was the straw that broke the camel's back. That is bad ass!!!
Re:Uh, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL. What makes him a geek isn't the fact that what he did is difficult, it is the fact that he does this in his free time. The same way Linus is a supreme geek in my eyes because he works on a freaking operating system as his means of unwinding after a hard day of work. Of couurse, it takes a real geek to appreciate such things.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
A Mirror (Score:1)
http://www.geocities.com/wirelesstap/lego.html [geocities.com]
Re:A Mirror (Score:1)
Calista?! (Score:3, Funny)
Just a thought.
great (Score:2)
Must be new, as google hasn't crawled it yet. Mirrors?
Mirror (Score:1)
Letter frequency (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, let's compare the frequency of letters in his mosaic to the frequency of those same letters in the English language, using data from this website [santacruzpl.org].
Letter----Mosaic-------English
'A' ---->
'B' ---->
'C' ---->
...
'G' ----> 7.668 % ----> 1.994 %
...
'Y' ----> 11.52 % ----> 1.982 %
'Z' ---->
Feel free to calculate and post the rest yourself. Use your favorite non-English language if you like. YMMV.
Re:Letter frequency (Score:1)
BTW, I've got real respect for this guy... He builds LEGO for money. As a kid I always said I wanted to be a 'lego-professional' when I grew up... I guess it's time to look at that dream again
Re:Letter frequency (Score:2)
He said he was buying them from other people. He probably wound up with letters that other people hadn't used, and presumably purchased bags of different letters based on availability and price. Given that he was working with leftovers it would have been surprising if the distribution were not way out of line with normal usage.
Mirror (Score:2, Informative)
http://calista_lego.tripod.com/calistalego
Re:Mirror (Score:1)
Re:Mirror (Score:1)
Not that it makes it right, but squid can handle them (at lest the version I run). The killer is white spaces in a URL for which you have to use the "uri_whitespace" option in squid.conf for it to work.
cheating... (Score:1)
I knew it was bad... (Score:5, Funny)
Mirror (Score:1)
We'll bring the website back online... (Score:2)
This man... (Score:3, Funny)
"Hey baby, come up to my bed room and see my, uh, Lego set."
Re:This man... (Score:1, Funny)
Anonymous means "didn't submit through /. account" (Score:1)
> An anonymous submitter, who might be Eric Harshberger...
Umm...
"Anonymous" in the case of story submissions refers to Anonymous Coward, the screen name of a guest user on Slashdot. Just as some ACs sign their comments with their name, so do some ACs who submit stories.
When I first read this (Score:2)
Another Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
As I don't have loads of bandwidth, I'd like to ask that other people mirror it and post their mirrors as well.
Please refrain from killing the server
ot: about ascii art (Score:1)
Re:ot: about ascii art (Score:1)
I think this would actually be a nifty file format if the ASCII/RGB-Grayscale table got to be semi-standard, it would end up being about 1/3 the size of a grayscale BMP, aside from it beinghard to view. Theres probably better ways, but thats what I've come up with.
Mirror (Score:1)
Here [askadick.com]
White Stripes video (Score:2)
See it here [boardsmag.com].
Cute Actress but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes I know he made it for himself.
Why the PERL script?! (Score:1)
From the website:
The ASCII Generator program did not care what my supply actually was, so it just used as many of each letter as it deemed necessary. As a result, the output (which was 140 letters wide and 240 letters high) did not come close to matching the letter supply I actually had.
Maybe it's just me, but I think you could have saved some time and just resized the tiny jpeg [bluecherry.net] you used for input.
How do you spell "DUH!" in ASCII art?
Re:don't you look stupid. (Score:1)