Ernst Haeckel’s Jellyfish | Hacker News Reader

Ernst Haeckel’s Jellyfish

publicdomainreview.org

41 pointsmr_tyzik6 comments

I found that Ernst Haeckel illustrations lend themselves perfectly to being used in artistic style transfer. Mainly because of high amount of details at all scales.

Here are some contemporary scientific infographics with Ernst Haeckel style applied: https://rybakov.com/blog/visualizing_complexity/

Those are astonishingly good. It's only a pity that there isn't yet a style-transfer type method to create real accurate diagrams.

I guess with a bit of masking and applying different styles to different image regions - as well as carefully selecting style images - some accurate yet visually rich diagrams could be created.

There is a wonderful documentary about Ernst Haeckel's study of Radiolaria, which I highly recommend. The film is called Proteus: A 19th Century Vision (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0391407/).

You can read all of "Kunstformen der Natur" (Artforms of Nature) at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, along with lots of other beautifully illustrated natural science literature.

Even though it's old, this is still useful scientific information, and digitizing it is very helpful to people without access to a 100-year-old zoological library. As you can see from selecting "Show OCR", there's still some work to be done to get the algorithms working on 19th century German blackletter fonts.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/182319#page/89/mode...

Haeckel's Art Forms of Nature are an astonishing achievement.

High resolution public domain images can be downloaded from the Library of Congress here: https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=contributor:giltsch,+adolf

Unfortunately he was also a terrible racist. The Nazi party not only used his quotes – 'Politics is applied biology' – but also his justifications for the hierarchy of races, nationalism and social Darwinism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel#Polygenism_and_r...

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