{"id":753,"date":"2009-12-28T18:28:19","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T18:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/12\/28\/in_which_i_seek_patterns\/"},"modified":"2009-12-28T18:28:19","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T18:28:19","slug":"in_which_i_seek_patterns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/12\/28\/in_which_i_seek_patterns\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I seek patterns"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent most of 2009 in the lab engaged in visual pattern recognition \u2013 the scientific equivalent of one of these things is not like the other<\/a> (or, for the Brits amongst you, the odd one out round<\/a>). In the initial triage stage of my RNAi morphology screen, which went on for months, I sat in front of my computer and flashed quartets of images before me in rapid suggestion, asking myself simply, which of these is normal, and which deviate?<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nRecently my father emailed me an etching of my London neighborhood, Rotherhithe, as envisioned by James Whistler (1834\u20131903). In the picture, two men sit relaxed on a quayside with the boats and river behind them, and I was captivated by how familiar the scene looked. Like me, Whistler was an American ex-pat in London, making the image doubly significant. I was immediately inspired to try to track down the precise site featured by the artist using solely what I could see in the picture \u2013 no cheating on the internet unless I was stumped.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nRotherhithe (Originally published as Wapping), 1860.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nUnknown even to some Londoners, who as a rule tend to shun the La Rive Gauche<\/em>, Rotherhithe is a leafy, beautiful place steeped in history. Situated in the Docklands on the south bank of the river opposite the Isle of Dogs and Wapping, in the old days it was a village on the outskirts of London, a port in its own right since the 12th century. Many of the old warehouses have been converted to flats, and there’s a beautiful old pub called The Mayflower where, apparently, our Founding American Fathers paused for a quick pint. The area is also memorialized in Elvis Costello’s haunting waltz tune, “New Amsterdam”. In fact, when I moved back to London from Amsterdam in 2003, I opened up the A-to-Z<\/em> and tried to find a place that would remind me of my Dutch flat in the Hemonykwartier of the Pijp. Homing in on canals and docks, I made this place my new home.<\/p>\n

\nI thought it would be easy to track down the scene; after all, the artist had incorporated what looked to be highly diagnostic curvature in the river beyond. Of course many of the waterfront buildings would have changed, but there was no hiding that sexy bend. Nevertheless, I failed miserably on my first outing: there simply was no place anywhere between Deptford and London Bridge where the Thames had that exact curve. I emailed my Dad in despair, opining that Whistler must have conjured the scene from his head with no precise view in mind.<\/p>\n

\nIt was then that my father wrote back sheepishly and told me the image he’d ripped from the internet had been displayed in the wrong orientation \u2013 flipped 180 degrees around the y axis.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nBack on track! So that sketchy dome in the far right corner suddenly resolved itself as St Paul’s Cathedral, and all clicked into place. Along with my neighbor Richard<\/a> and one of his daughters as reinforcements, I set off by bike on a frigid sunny afternoon armed only with a printout of the etching, correctly oriented this time, slowly working upriver from Nelson Dock Pier. Soon it was clear that, as expected, Whistler had created his work right in the heart of Rotherhithe. It looked very much to us as if the artist had been standing on the back terrace of the Mayflower itself; we were initially flummoxed by Tower Bridge, conspicuously absent from the Whistler composition, until Richard thought to whip out his iPhone and confirm that it hadn’t been built until 1886. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nIt didn’t seem precisely right \u2013 if the scene were part of my screen, I’d have scored it as a mild phenotype. But it was getting late: spatters of cold rain were coming down and we all felt we deserved a session at the pub to warm up. It turns out we were a thousand feet shy of the real target: the riverside balcony of the Angel Inn on Bermondsey Wall. Sounds like a good excuse to take a walk, on this long, lazy holiday week, have a nice pint and try to capture the definitive photograph once and for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent most of 2009 in the lab engaged in visual pattern recognition \u2013 the scientific equivalent of one of these things is not like the other (or, for the Brits amongst you, the odd one out round). In the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}