This is brilliant at so many levels:

The artist, Pejac’s instagram feed is [here].

Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People is a reference to the Three Glorious Days of the revolution of 1830. [stderr] In today’s protest environment, the July 28, 1830 is more appropriate to celebrate than the 1789 storming of La Bastille: it’s when the people of Paris stood up to the military and police, “aux barricades!” and soundly kicked their asses. Let me not euphemize: they killed a lot of them and put the rest to flight. Imagine what it’d be like, today, if – in some town or city somewhere – the citizens cut off, barricaded, and beat and killed the police that beat and gassed them, took their war-weapons, and then stood off the military for a while? Inconceivable, right? But that’s what all police face, every time they push things too far. And they know it; that’s why they want all the military gear. What the Three Glorious Days mean is that they teach the police: “You are surrounded in a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of us. No matter how tough you are, you are so outnumbered that you’d better think three times before you raise that club or that can of pepper-spray.” I feel it’s getting close to the time that the US police will get that lesson; they aren’t listening and they only seem to be willing to learn the hard way.

I have been avoiding protests, because I’m not the kind of person that’s needed, yet. But it’s tempting to go to a protest with a lot of red/white/blue balloons full of tempera paint. I’m afraid that would probably also trigger a violent response from humorless pigs. Wouldn’t that look awesome, though?

I often run across images that I love, and I want to know a) who did them, so I can properly credit them and b) where I can find more. If that’s a familiar problem for you, here’s how I backtrack a lot of images: save them locally, then feed them up to tineye.com and it’ll give you a pretty good match-list of where images were found on the internet. Usually you can figure it out from there. I don’t think their algorithms are probably super-smart; I bet they’re doing a line/contrast transform and then matching broad shapes. Which, incidentally, is what face recognition does, under the hood. And what our parahippocampal gyrus seems to do, along with our fusiform gyrus. [wikipedia]