Why Women Pretended to Be Rocks and Trees in NYC Parks During WWI

I was flabbergasted by one of the image titles. "Women apply dazzle camouflage to a ship in Union Square, New York City." Mostly because Union Square is deep inside the city, far from the harbors. Turns out the ship was a wooden mockup, used as a recruitment tool [1]. The more you know!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Recruit_(1917)

"Private Smith, I didn't see you in camouflage training this morning."

"Thank you, Sir."

Camouflage design is a fascinating area. And what's most amazing is that, two world wars (and countless small ones) later, they're still discovering new things. E.g. when these experiments took place, it was assumed, on common sense grounds, that the way to camouflage a human silhouette is to break up the shape. It wasn't until the 80s that several strands of research in biology have converged to deliver a conclusion that what actually matters is axial symmetry, and effective camouflage is largely about disrupting that (but patterns that disrupt shape well also tend to disrupt symmetry, so they were effective - just not in a way their authors anticipated).

I once heard an interesting story from an older lady - during WWII, she and a group of other women were enlisted to take shifts standing up in a watchtower (in Des Moines, IA, of all places), scanning the horizon for invading airplanes. Apparently, this was common all over the country.

So I learned a new word, "camoufleur".

Not sure how I'm going to steer the water cooler conversation tomorrow so I can drop that one in...

The article glosses over the interesting rationale behind the dazzle camouflage on ships. It's not intended, as the article suggests, to make ships at sea harder to see. That's not really possible since they make a distinct bump on a flat horizon, but the wild paint jobs make it harder for sailors looking through binoculars or scopes to make out the type of ship, its size, or its true heading by breaking up the lines.

There isn't that much evidence that dazzle camouflage worked all that well, but there'e an interesting hypothesis that cubism, an art movement that was ascendant in the early 20th century, was an influence on the technique. And it looks like dazzle camouflage feel out of favor at the same time cubism did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

There's a great 99% invisible podcast on the topic: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-65-razzle-dazz...

... Yoga was a thing in WWI.

why isn't Hollywood making this?

tl;dr: They were helping the war effort by designing better camouflage.