I did these last night. I was inspired by cignoh's latest avatar attempt and wanted to see if I could achieve the same effect.

I had tried last year to cartoonify myself, but the result (while not horrible) left something to be desired.

The steps I followed (using GIMP) were:

(1) load my picture

(2) create a blank second layer

(3) trace the major lines in my picture (this is a little harder than it looks)

(4) coarsely pixelize (filters -> blur -> pixelize) the original image - nice big blocky pixels

(5) sampled colours from the pixelized image to floodfill the areas in my traced image

Over all, it worked a lot better than my attempt last year at cartoonifying.

However, I still though there should be a more mechanical way (i.e. avoiding having me draw / trace stuff) of doing it. So I played a little more and came up with this (as an intermediate result, but I liked it, so I kept it):

One thing I did was to (1) create duplicate layers of the image, (2) seriously blur one of the image, (3) do a difference of images, (4) invert the image. This resulted in a nice image as well.

The following illustrates the steps I took to achieving this:

Seems I have been alternating a lot this TaD between doing something with my hands and doing something with GIMP.

I took an image from my TaD of 19-February-2011 and performed some simple operations to it: (1) selected and copied half the image, (2) flipped the image vertically or horizontally (depending on whether my selection was vertical or horizontal), and (3) repeated step (1) & (2) for the other dimension.

I also rotated the image 30 or 45 in some cases before applying the above steps.

This produced some pretty kaleidoscope effects (and no mirror required - although, to be fair, it think it would have been easier to use mirrors).

The original photo and candy arrangement.

Today was a gorgeous day in Madrid and I was checking to see how the rose bushes were doing from my aggressive pruning a few weeks back.

Fresh leaves and shoots were sprouting. I can tell because the new ones are always red.

Then I wondered, "Why do the leaves begin red?" After all, they eventually turn green, so why not start off green to begin with?

There are quite a number of plants in Madrid where new growth is not a bright green, but a deep red; something I have observed since arriving here, but never "noticing".

The picture (not a very inspiring one) is of some new leaves on one of the rose bushes.

If you boil a red cabbage (with plain water), you get a beautiful purple coloured liquid out of it.

This liquid is sensitive to pH. You can use it to measure the acidity or alkalinity of substances - it shows good colour range over a wide pH.

Since I boiled red cabbage for dinner, I used the liquid to demonstrate this:

1. Leftmost : ammonium persulphate - highly acidic, turns the liquid a dark red
2. 2nd from the left : apple cider vinegar - acidic, turns the liquid a pinkish colour
3. middle : the red cabbage liquid - a beautiful purple
4. 2nd from the right : sodium bicarbonate - slightly alkaline, turns the liquid a wonderful blue
5. Rightmost : ammonia - very alkaline, turns the liquid a greenish colour

I was surprised at how alkaline the ammonia turned out to be - I knew lye (sodium hydroxide) would turn it green, but I didn't realize ammonia would.

The only error I made was in preparing my solutions from right to left. The ammonia fumes slightly affected the blue and purple mixtures (making them a little greener than they should be - if you look carefully, you can see a little green tint around the border of the liquid in the middle spoon. This happened because I left everything sitting there as I went to the basement to look for the ammonium persulphate and the ammonia fumes diffused into the other solutions).

To preserve the indicator, mix it with an equal part rubbing alcohol and store it in the fridge (much to my wife's chagrin).