Friday, April 27, 2007

Telling a story "Family Break" in 5 frames

A creative photographer Matt posted 5 of his very impressive photographs with an inspirational title "Beware the 5 Stages of Grief" in the group of "Telling a story in 5 frames (Visual story telling)" on flickr. Here they are:
Then I found it funny to interprete it into a complete different story about a mum and her three kids. So I wrote:

The famiy had been having a peaceful and quiet life till the three rebel kids: red, blue and green decided to make a "Family break":
  • 1st photo: The three kids jumped to escape
  • 2nd photo: Only the green kept rising, the blue and red were caught by mother's gravity
  • 3rd-4th photo: The blue was struggling till exhausted
  • 5th photo: The mother became very angry while the green retuned...
Actually at the beginning, I thought the cup of wine could represent the earth, and the three kids would refer to some typical creatures living on the earth - that would be a real "big family" but too complex to explain in a short story.  So I chose to keep it simple.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Water Town Mosaic



Photographed at Xitang(西塘) water town in Feb,2007, with my new lens 18mm-200mm for Canon. This place might open some sealed memory for travelers...

Friday, February 16, 2007

Finding Method C

Below is a 6*6 matrix displayed in Shanxi Museum in Xi'An:
It was explained that's to do with an custom of architecture in ancient China: it was berried for good fortune under the ground of a new building to be built, because, the sum of the 6 numbers in every row, every column and diagonal, is the same of 111 - lucky numbers of 6 lead to another lucky number 111. The distribution of the 36 numbers seem in random like the raw materials of a building - so how to fill them in turn to "build up" such a "lucky" square?
 

Mr. Chen Shu Jie, my respected old classmate, told me that this is the mathematic game of filling numbers from 1 to n2 into the n*n square matrix and reach the magic result: the sum in row, column and diagonal is the same of (n3+n)/2. Above, n=6, so the sum is (63+6)/2=111. He further explained that there are two methods he has known to fill the numbers, which are depending on whether n is an odd or even number.
Method A: 
N is an odd number, for example, n=5.
Firstly fill "1" into the middle grid of the last row, then fill "2" into the grid of "row+1" and "column+ 1", if the grid is occupied, then go to another grid of "row-1" in the same column.
Same for a 5*5 magic square:


Method B:
N is an even number, for example, n=6. 
Firstly, fill the numbers from 1 to 16 in turn from left to right, row by row, then exchange every two numbers on the opposite grids on the diagonal, i.e, 1 and 16, 4 and 13, 6 and 11 etc.  Now, the problem is: How was the 6*6 Matrix in Shanxi Museum made? There must exist another method. - so what is the method C??