The origin of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover art (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The origin of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover art (2015)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

144 pointsCharlesW42 comments

Related ongoing threads:

Animated Unknown Pleasures in 3 lines of K (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35422570

Show HN: Unknown Pleasures, a tiny web experiment with WebGL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35419771

I have a Python script to generate these kinds of images if anyone is curious: https://github.com/leoadberg/UnknownPleasures

For anyone wondering: these kind of plots are sometimes still called "joyplots", but more and more commonly referred to as "ridgeline plots". Many plotting libraries have support for them nowadays, some more 'native support' than others. For ggplot2 there's ggridges [0], the seaborn docs have an example here [1] or in my own ggplot2 inspired lib for Nim [2] it's built in:

[0]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggridges/vignettes/i...

[1]: https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/kde_ridgeplot

[2]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim/blob/master/recipes.org...

Yup. At some point there was a storm in a teacup in the dataviz community about the name of the plot, because someone discovered the plot, discovered Joy Division, and learned of the origins of the name -- then immediately had to get offended and mount a crusade about it.

Luckily, "ridgeline" does describe the plot type quite well, maybe even better than "joyplot".

This is really interesting. How did you get the "A map of the world with elevation" out of it?

I've got the install working (this is my requirements.txt):

  contourpy==1.0.7
  cycler==0.11.0
  fonttools==4.39.3
  imageio==2.27.0
  kiwisolver==1.4.4
  lazy_loader==0.2
  matplotlib==3.7.1
  networkx==3.0
  numpy==1.24.2
  packaging==23.0
  Pillow==9.5.0
  pyparsing==3.0.9
  python-dateutil==2.8.2
  PyWavelets==1.4.1
  scikit-image==0.20.0
  scipy==1.10.1
  six==1.16.0
  tifffile==2023.3.21

But when I run python main.py images/world_elevation.jpg the image it generates is nothing like what you have (even if I play with the sliders)

You have to reduce the value of noise. I got similar results with a noise level below .4

Me too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729268

I wrote a thing for it to generate images based on SRTM data, for drawing "Joy Division T-shirt" logos of islands. It worked pretty well but I never got round to having the T-shirts printed.

https://onlyfandans.com/skye.jpg

Hi, what's an "heightmap image" you're referring on the github page? I don't understand what kind of input it expects.

Thanks

Usually a heightmap is x,y grid (2d array) with values between 0 and 255 which represent a grey scale value. Sometimes these values could also be -1 to 1 or 0 to 1 or something similar.

There's two examples in the images subdirectory

Yes, but to me it's just a white rectangle inside a black one https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leoadberg/UnknownPleasures...

Or just a silhouette https://github.com/leoadberg/UnknownPleasures/blob/master/im...

..so i was wondering if i was misunderstanding something.

> white rectangle inside a black one

White means "high", black means "low"

> Or just a silhouette

Lighter shades mean higher

There's an xscreensaver as well fwiw

You'll have to cut and paste the below link because JWZ has been slowly morphing into someone as easy to get on with as RMS in many respects.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/12/xscreensaver-5-41/

edit: maybe not? Maybe the link is clickable without silliness nowadays?

> You'll have to cut and paste the below link because JWZ has been slowly morphing into someone as easy to get on with as RMS in many respects.

This is incredibly uncharitable. Everyone has one or more communities they dislike - especially when they send a certain type of traffic your way - for jwz, HN is on his "no thanks" list. As for why, I can think of a few reasons why an old school hacker like jwz may dislike "Hacker News" and its values/ethos.

Check out his public complaint that "signal leaks his phone number" and moxie's patient, thorough explanations and what followed, including the re-editing the original post.

jwz is totally allowed to be as bigger ass as he likes with my blessing. So can rms. To eachother even. It's happened! Both are difficult to get on with. So what? So that's a factor in why you get a hairy testicle in an eggcup linking to jwz.org from this site. Hardly a big deal really and you're entitled to disagree and think the testicle and ranting is lovely. Not sure why you're taking offence about my pointing it out but you're entitled to for sure.

No, still blocked. Incognito mode blocks referrer though.

With all due respect, I don't think anyone has alleged the JWZ of sexual misconduct

https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Richard_Stallman

I don’t believe that anyone has tried to imply that.

>because JWZ has been slowly morphing into someone as easy to get on with as RMS

Slowly?

This same illustration was used for a book entitled,

Professional Software Development For Students by, Mike G. Miller

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Software-Development-Mik...

I'm sure it's purely coincidence.

I met Peter Hook one time. He seemed pretty unimpressed by me.

I don't like posting video links but this doco is worth watching if you're into Joy Division (this is a deeplink where Peter Saville explains where the famous cover came from):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFO5SgDE2lk&t=1868s

> A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh billions of tons.

> Pulsars can spin anywhere from once every few seconds to 700 times/second, with the surface speed approaching 1/4 of the speed of light.

Sometimes I wish I could be like Dr. Manhatten, just to be able to view these incredible phenomena up close.

Never thought about it like that, but i concur. (addendum) Thank you for the inspiration. Reminds me of Einstein: "When i could stand in a train that travels at the speed of light and look in a mirror, what do i see?"

Same, I was trying to imagine what it would look like and even just my mind’s eye was in awe.

I love Peter Saville's art; don't want to post an amazon link but there are some really good coffee table books of his stuff.

10 years ago we had a discussion of a similar article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Unknown Pleasures Plot: Recreating an iconic cover and your favorite 80s t-shirt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470243 - May 2022 (1 comment)

The Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15165634 - Sept 2017 (38 comments)

The History of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” Album Art - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071628 - Feb 2016 (1 comment)

Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068921 - Feb 2015 (6 comments)

The History of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” Album Art - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124 - May 2013 (41 comments)

HTML Canvas recreation of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4790929 - Nov 2012 (2 comments)

I was kind of disappointed when no one noticed this (and the associated illustration) in our blog about Super Bowl LVII trends: "While the so-called NFL cities across the country are loyal to their local teams, looking at traffic trends across cities from both conferences makes it clear that fans everywhere find joy, not division, in the unknown pleasures of a good halftime show."

https://blog.cloudflare.com/super-bowl-lvii/

well, that needs to be a t-shirt.

A photo of the Orion Nebula from the same book:

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy (https://archive.org/details/cambridgeencyclo00mitt)

also provided the cover of Joy Division's Transmission 7" single:

https://imgur.com/a/NNWuUDC

I have this album hanging on the wall in my living room. The inside sleeve has a comparably small illustration of a hand opening a door from the inside of the room.

It turns out that this is also a well-known image, stolen from newspaper clippings but actually from a respected artist, Ralph Gibson: https://web.archive.org/web/20130405184348/http://www.tate.o...

Of course, it's much rarer to take the entire sleeve out unless you're rotating it 90 degrees.

When I was a young lad, my parents got me that book for Christmas. I loved it. When Unknown Pleasures came out I immediately recognized the image. I used to (I assume) bore people with my knowledge of its provenance - "You know, that image is ..."

I had cut it out of the book and pasted it on wall at some point. What I didn't find out until many years later was that Saville had use that book as the source, and not some earlier primary document.

Sadly can't provide a source but somewhere i heard that a woman who was involved with this picture or pulsars in general won a medal/prize for her scientific work. It was 1_000_000 € or £ can't RC. She donated all to science. Maybe that documenary video from sibling comment says something about it, an't watch since on the go.

Of course Peter Saville with Ben Kelly are living legends, but this article manages to mention none of them. They were the forefront of modern design. They are also featured in several movies.

There are some interesting animated variations on this theme:

https://www.google.com/search?q=unknown+pleasures+gif

This is basically blogspam. The original Scientific American article, also from 2015, seems like a much better submission:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-p...

Usually I'd agree, but I wouldn't call the Kottke post (The blog that just had it's 25th birthday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163193) blog spam, even if just for the fact that it's more pleasant to read than the scientificamerican.com version with ads, cookie banners and newsletter signup modals.

Kottke is a special case but yes - changed from https://kottke.org/15/02/the-origin-of-the-joy-divisions-unk... now.

Indeed, not only does it show the original plots, it also features an interview with the creator!

Much better than this blog that simply quotes a bit of an article without adding anything itself.

kottke.org is a 25 year old blog which links to interesting stuff on the internet. You’re criticising it for something it does not do.

I understood the criticism to be of submitting the kottke link rather than "dereferencing" it to get to the original full article it excerpts.

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