My little tribute to Peter Higgs, who passed away few days ago.
If you don’t know who Peter is he was a British theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of a new particle and waited for almost 50 years to be discovered and confirmed. That’s the reason why I love one of his quotes: “It’s nice to be right sometimes.”
Because of this he won the Nobel in Physics in 2013.
The particle was called the “Higgs boson” or the “particle of God”, despite the fact that he was a self declared atheist.
The vector portrait of Peter is composed with all names in list of Nobel laureates in Physics from 1901.
El 1997 el campeón del mundo de ajedrez era un ser humano, su nombre es Garry Kasparov e incluso hoy en dÃa hay quien lo considera el mejor jugador de todos los tiempos. Kasparov tuvo la osadÃa de aceptar la revancha frente a Deep Blue, un super ordenador en el que IBM habÃa montado un sistema experto entrenado exclusivamente para jugar al ajedrez al que ya habÃa ganado previamente. Para sorpresa de todo el mundo esta vez Deep Blue ganó el torneo a seis partidas frente a Kasparov.
De este modo el mÃtico juego donde la creatividad y la estrategia humana parecÃan invencibles pasó a estar en un segundo plano emocional. Es un poco como cuando no te aceptan pulpo y tiras el Scattergories por la ventana.
Pero mira por donde ya han pasado más de 25 años y el ajedrez ha vuelto a resurgir con fuerza. De repente hay millones de jugadores pasándolo en grande, modos nuevos de jugar, partidas apasionantes, retransmisiones en directo, vÃdeos de partidas clásicas, dominios petados de gente buscando su próxima vÃctima o verdugo, e incluso algún que otro ‘marujeo’ que mantiene el ambiente entretenido. Y yo no puedo estar más feliz. He vuelto a saborear este maravilloso juego asomándome a las partidas de Magnus Carlsen (https://twitter.com/magnuscarlsen), viendo la sonrisa polÃglota de Anna Cramling (https://www.youtube.com/@AnnaCramling) y disfrutando con la pasión con la que Juanjo ReyDama habla de sus caballos lechugueros (https://www.youtube.com/@Reydama)… e incluso jugando una partidita rápida de vez en cuando en Chess.com.
Y justo en este momento ocurre el alzamiento de las Inteligencias Artificiales. Un concepto en el que, en realidad, estamos colocando multitud de cosas dispares que sin embargo se pueden resumir en una sola frase: La máquina lo hace más rápido y, casi siempre, mejor. Quizás aún no mejor que nuestros ‘campeones mundiales’, por ahora, pero sin duda lo suficientemente bien como para intimidar a muchos seres humano en un montón de disciplinas.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passed away last September. She was not only a beloved person in Commonwealth countries but also a historical character with a huge and widely respected background. She took responsibilities very young, and I think she was a great example for his people.
I took more than 330 Queen speeches from this site https://www.royal.uk/speeches including her Christmas broadcasts. I only found speeches from 1970 and one of them was missing (broken link) so I had to recover it from Internet Archive (https://archive.org/).
With text cleaned, taken only Queen words, and removing some translation to French, I counted all relevant words. It drops a list of more than 4600 different words with repetition from 480 times to just one appearance.
As base image I selected two very different portraits. First one the official image used to announce her death and another one from a very young Elizabeth, close to the moment she becomes Queen.
Keanu is probably the most loved and nice actor out there. Despite his great success and extensive filmography, everyone that meets him talks about how kind human being he is.
So, I decided to pick a ‘very human’ portrait of Keanu, instead of any of his fictional characters. Original photo from Governo do Estado de São Paulo, taken in a meeting with the actor in 2019.
I took all more relevant words from his movie’s titles. A total of 144 words.
White background is a challenge when talking about text illustrations. I tried my best combining multiple text layers to keep everything in vector. It’s a complicate task and a huge native file but I think it worth the effort.
Emily Dickinson was an American poet born almost two hunderd years ago. Even living in isolation, she created about 1,800 poems, many of them really beautiful.
For this illustration I went back to my old habit of counting words, I counted the words of almost all of her poems and used them to generate a portrait of Emily. This is the list of some of the most used with it’s repetitions:
Since there was no portrait of Emily with enough quality, I used Midjourney to ‘imagine’ a possible portrait of her. It’s amazing what an AI can do, even not knowing where inspiration comes from.
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