Where's the Log Lady when you need her?

I came across this carpet on Trendir the other day. Hmmmm.

It's Woody Wood Rug by YLdesign in The Netherlands. Woodgrain everything is all the rage these days you know.

Oh so clever board shorts by Ahoy Surf Company.

Martha Stewart for Home Depot faux bois carpet.

Faux bois shade from Lamps Plus.

Faux bois throw pillows by My Imaginary Boyfriend.

Faux bois edible decal by Hello Frosting.

Woodgrain decal for a laptop by Beepart.

Faux bois bow tie by Toybreaker. Note how ably that tie's modeled by an ungroomed youth of today.

This is all well and good and I suppose it's harmless. However, every time I see any of this stuff, two things come to mind. The first is the log lady from Twin Peaks.

And the second is the gem from the silver screen.





Is woodgrain stuff the new macrame?

Back from the wilds

Gene and Melody reliving scenes from The African Queen

What a perfect morning into afternoon. It was great to see the always good company Melody and Gene and it was even better to see them and share a slog through the wetlands.

While we didn't see my favorite spider, Nephila clavipes, there were plenty of other sightings to make up for it. It was good to be away if only for a few hours and it's nothing short of amazing that I can be completely surrounded by a mangrove wetland yet still be less than three miles from home.

A mangrove tree crab (Aratus pisonii) on a barnacle-encrusted mangrove root.

Mangrove trees are a vitally important buffer between water and land in the tropical regions of the world. They grow at the water line and their interlocking roots form a barrier to tidal and hurricane surges. Those same interlocking roots serve a nursery for many of the commercially important fish and crustaceans that keep afloat the economies of the maritime tropics. It's pretty simple, with no mangroves, the land washes away and there are no crabs, shrimp or fish like snapper. Keeping mangrove wetlands intact and healthy is a matter of  life and death frankly.

The oil spill in the Gulf right now threatens all of this in a very immediate way and I hope with every fiber of my being that that spill doesn't lead down a path where it very well may. As great as being out in the wetlands was today I can't shake the feeling that the sword of Damocles hangs over all of us.

Stacation for a day

I live on the north side of downtown St. Petersburg and about three miles north east of where I'm sitting is a little sliver of wilderness called Weedon Island State Preserve. Here it is from the air.

Weedon Island is a pristine slice of old Florida and the preserve itself starts out in the turtle grass beds of the Bay. It includes a healthy stand of mangroves and continues inland through pine scrubland, grassy savanna and hardwood hammock. What this means is that you get a good view of an entire coastal ecosystem and the creatures of Weedon Island have enough room to be themselves.

Weedon Island has been a beacon to human beings for thousands of years and the evidence of those early habitations keep a team of archeologists working overtime. The earliest inhabitants of Weedon Island lived and fished there from 500 BCE onward. Conquistadors came through Weedon Island when this was an outpost of Spain and it was actually Ponce de Leon who mapped Tampa Bay. Pirates are said to have buried treasure there and in the early part of the 20th century, some dreamer started a movie studio there in the hopes of luring the fledgling film industry away from New York. That industry ended up in some town, I can never remember the name of it, in California instead.

Weedon's hardly untouched by human hands but in an area as built up as this is, it's a very welcome respite as well as yet another reminded how tied to the Gulf of Mexico everything around here is.

Well as luck would have it, my great pal Melody McFarland and her husband Gene are in town this weekend and we're going on an adventure tomorrow morning. Melody's a biologist who's never kayaked through a mangrove swamp before. I cannot wait to count birds, bugs, fish, snakes and mammals (marine and otherwise) with her. Besides, I need a break so badly I can't stand it.

Canoe trail through the mangroves

Cownose rays schooling around a mangrove island.

Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the Bay. Yes, they really do jump out of the water like this.

No trip to the Florida wilds would be complete with a sighting or two of Nephila clavipes, the yellow silk spider. Truly my favorite Florida creature and that scale is not a Photoshop trick.

If I had to pick a favorite bird, the roseate spoonbill would come close to the top of my list. Few things in life prepare you for the thrill of seeing a pink bird.

More canoe trail scenery

Tampa Bay is one of the few places in North America with a breeding population of white pelicans. If we're lucky we'll see them.

Yellow-crested night herons are pretty common in these parts but they are still captivating.

Snowy egrets are pretty common too, but they're in breeding plumage at this time of year and they look otherworldly when they're tricked out in it.

And no trip into the Florida wilds is complete without running into a couple of these guys. Despite their endangered status, there's quite a population of these guys in Tampa Bay.

I love things biological almost as much as I like design-y stuff and I am a fortunate man indeed to have such good friends as Melody and Gene.

It's optical illusion Friday

The great and powerful Richard Wiseman has been working overtime in keeping me thrilled with his illusions. Here's his latest, and he posted it with the question, "Does this move for you?"

Everything the man throws out there jumps all over the page for me and it never occurred to me that my experience of his illusions isn't universal. Well, it turns out they're not. According to the polls he runs on his blog, up to half of his audience can't see any movement in some of these illusions. While hardly a scientific finding, he's been able to see that these illusions are are not an either/ or proposition. In other words, predicting who'll be able to see them and who won't can't be predicted. So I'm going to throw a bunch of them up here and and you guys if they move for you. I picked these ones specifically because they move for me. If you click on them, they'll show up full-size in another window.

My obsession with these "animated" static images started with this one.

I've been sorting around for an answer for why this image moves so much and I found it. The National Academy of Science has a library of scholarly papers that deal with visual perception. The archives of the National Academy are an information geek's treasure trove. If that weren't enough, I found a great science blog called Neurophilosophy that talks about this stuff less formally.

Now, I've always known that human visual perception is a function of the way our brains are wired. True, it's our eyes that feed the visual stimulus to our brains, but it's our brains that knit the whole mess of stimuli into a coherent narrative. Therein lies the rub.

Human brains evolved to keep us alive as primates first and foremost so they use our eyes to look for patterns and novelty. Just as the T. Rex in Jurassic Park could only see movement, our eyes work in much the same way. Unlike a T. Rex though, we have a brain to oversee the proceedings. When an object stops moving, the visual perceptors in our retinas stop seeing the object and our brains take over. The actual cells receiving the stimulus take a break and the brain steps in and uses what it assumes to be true about a scene to fill in the blanks. Stare at a beige paint chip for long enough and you can see this retinal fading in real life. The minute the view changes though, the cells in the retina spring back into action and send new information to the brain.

Well it turns out that this rentinal fading may save energy, but it can be an evolutionary disadvantage too. If a predator is stalking you, it doesn't really go away when it stops moving. To compensate for retinal fading, our brains evolved an ability to to issue a wake up call to those napping retinal cells and that wake up call is called a microsaccade.

Microsaccades are rapid, imperceptible (the brain adjusts for them), jerking eye movements. Human eyes exhibit these microsaccades all the time and they allow us to perceive stationary objects, among other things. It's also these microsaccades that are making these images move. Sometimes, an image has the right combination of fine lines and contrasting colors to override the mechanism the brain uses to adjust for the microsaccades it triggered in the first place. The result is a static image that appears to move.

Pretty slick. So what's this have to do with designing interiors? Everything. Design plays with perception, not vision and understanding perception is the name of the game. When you know where the chinks in the armor of perception are, you can exploit them. Besides, this is fun.

Now back to my original question, who sees which of these images move?

What does "too taste-specific" mean?

A client came to me yesterday with a photograph very similar to this one as one of his few inspiration images. The image is from Graham and Brown, the British wallpaper people. Further, the pattern is one by Umbra for Graham and Brown. The guy didn't know where to start other than he wanted the feeling of that image interpreted and extrapolated over his entire open floor plan condominium. Perfect, this is just the kind of challenge I love. I asked him what was it about the photograph he liked so much and without hesitation, he said it was the wallpaper.

So I started talking about wallpaper and how cool it is and how my great friend Given Campbell has some patterns he ought to see. He stopped me and said, "Oh I can't use wallpaper."

I reminded him that it was wallpaper that started our conversation and it was wallpaper that was so appealing to him. He went on to explain that he can't use wallpaper in his home because it's too "taste specific." Mind you, this is a man who'd also told me he had no intention of selling any time soon and he was interested in making his house really his.

So when did making a home "taste specific" to the man who owns it become a bad thing? Isn't my whole life spent helping other people make their homes taste-specific to them?

From Awkward Family Photos

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman about a year ago, I think I wrote about it in fact. Anyhow, she wanted to know if it's OK to hang family photographs in the "public" areas of her home. I explained to her that hotels have public areas but homes don't. She looked at me as if I were speaking Russian.

I hear things like that with shocking regularity. "I can't do what I want because it's what I like and nobody else will." Or "I can't leave to personal an impression in my living room." Or "I drip a little vanilla extract on a light bulb every night, how do I keep it from leaving a stain?" How about "I want to paint my dining room a bright color but I'm worried about resale." Has everyone become a home stager all of the sudden?

I know where all of this crap's coming from. It's that great Satan HGTV. I swear, they are the Fox News of the design press. Turn it off please. And leave it off.

Your home is your home and by virtue of the fact that you're an adult, you get to do anything inside of it you want to do. Even if it's stuff I find repugnant, who cares? I'm some guy with a big mouth in Florida, not some final arbiter and neither is anyone else. So go ahead, paint your walls with chalkboard paint, put a damn chicken coop in the back yard, hang exciting wallpaper and for the love of God, stop asking for permission to put photos of your kids on the mantle.

If you're going to put your house on the market sometime down the road, deal with it then but you can't live your life for a potential buyer. And seriously, when is the last time you walked out of a house tour because someone had a perfectly painted red dining room? People walk out of house tours because the place is falling down. Gah!

Don't be a Mr. or Ms. Cellophane. Hey! That makes me want to sing some Kander and Ebb!

Life's over faster than anyone wants to admit. Leave a mark already.