A girl playing noughts and crosses, a Playboy centrefold, Sky satellite dishes, the trill of a modem – all have hidden meanings
Frank Swain blogs at http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/
Even if you don't watch much TV, you've probably come across Carole Hersee. Her TV career has spanned over forty years, clocking up around 70,000 hours of on-screen time with her faithful co-star Bubbles. She's appeared on a host of BBC channels, typically in the early hours, but has yet to land a speaking role. If you hadn't guessed already, I am of course referring to the eternally youthful subject of the BBC test cards, who has graced our screens since 1967.
I like the BBC test card, because it's a wonderful example of how practical industrial design can develop into an enigmatic work of art. But even better is knowing that the image isn't just art, it has an objective purpose worked into it, a secret meaning that reveals itself under scrutiny. The architecture of industrial design is filled with these subtle codes, and together they create a world around us filled with hidden meaning.
If we look at the BBC test cards, the colours and patterns framing Carole have a fairly obvious purpose, providing reference points for colour and contrast. The white triangles aligned with the cardinal points are there to check if the edges of the image line up with those of the screen.
In test card J, the X on the noughts and crosses board marks the exact centre of the screen. Even Carole was chosen for a reason – her skin tone makes it easy to spot if something is wrong with the colours displayed, while Bubbles is there to add some green, so that all three primary colours appear in the image. (Bubbles has since embarked on a solo career, popping up in the BBC website error pages).
Carole isn't the only woman to have been immortalised in a test card in this way. A modest crop of the November 1972 Playboy centrefold Lena Soderberg became the standard test for image compression software.
A couple of months ago I flew over to HP's DIMO facility in Dublin, the sprawling high-tech campus where the electronics giant develops new ink technology. We toured the stadium-sized production room, where conveyor belts loop and twist though a dozen giant machines that assemble cartridges and squirt brightly coloured fluids into them.
At the end of the tour we passed through a small room sectioned off by heavy plastic drapes, where the cartridges are tested on a variety of printers. Piled among the benches were sheets of arcane patterns – the printer test pages. I aksed our guide Thom Brown to decipher the meaning behind them.
Here's a typical example. The T shapes mark out page alignment, while the solid blocks of colour are actually made up of individual lines painted sequentially by each nozzle – hence a misfiring nozzle leaves a long trace across the block. Most printers will produce a grid pattern of some sort so that an engineer can identify the exact nozzle that is at fault.
'Each line in the grid represents a nozzle. Notice that a missing line means that one nozzle is completely not firing (clogged most likely),' says Brown. 'But then some lines are faint or partial: an unhealthy nozzle that's partially clogged or ink isn't for some reason completely filling the chamber. And then some lines are crooked or misdirected, so that drop isn't firing exactly straight like we want it.'
Hidden patterns exist everywhere. If you get disoriented in the streets of London, look for a Sky satellite dish – they always point south-east. Need to synchronise your watch? Wait for the pips to be broadcast on Radio 4 – synchronised with an atomic clock in the basement of Broadcasting House, they begin precisely five seconds before the hour with the start of the final, longest pip marking the exact moment the hour changes.
Grab a newspaper – see those blocks of colour down the edge of the page? Those are printer test patterns too, a quick reference to check if there's been an error during press. And what about the barcode on the back? Those extra-long double lines at each end and down the middle are 'guard bars', which are there to help the scanner align itself properly. It's a subtle detail that's often missed by tattoo artists, leading to punks walking around with the binary equivalent of nonsense Chinese characters on their neck.
I still get nostalgic when I hear a dial-up modem break into song, and I'm thrilled at how, despite the exact meaning behind each tone being way beyond my comprehension, my ear can still detect regional variations in the handshake signal, like some kind of robotic accent.
Like the best tailors, the men and women who craft our technological environment often strive to hide the seams of their work. But if you know where to look, you can occasionally peel back the fabric of your surroundings and spot a trace of what's holding it all together.
Frank Swain is a science writer working in print, TV and radio who blogs at http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/
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