Andrew Crompton
The Alternative Natural Philosophy Association
How to Make a Horse Vanish
A nondescript set is a collection of objects can serve as either figure or ground, so they appear and disappear among their companions as if self-camouflaged. Large collections of identical objects have this property, in nature they include murmurations, shoals, herds, but small sets of different object can also be self-camouflaged if objects are designed to balance being similar to and different to each other. It is shown that, with different objects, at least four types is a minimum for self-camouflage to emerge, six or more is better. When objects are identical three can be sufficient, as in the three-card trick in which the eye cannot disentangle cards shuffled in a tricky way. One of the smallest nondescript sets is found in nature among zebra. Their stripes, first described a form of auto-mimesis by Eltingham in 1979, minimise the size of herd in which a zebra can vanish to deter persistence hunters that pursue animals to exhaustion. This allows zebras to forage in smaller groups than otherwise would be the case, although at a cost of being more conspicuous to ambush hunters such as lions. It is conjectured that as few as two zebra can be entangled in an unmarked state, allowing them to vanish for a moment. This is supported by evidence that the patterning is scaling to allow different sized zebra to merge and explains why stripes come in several types.
I am interested in the design of things that are easily overlooked or in other ways hard to describe or remember, such as found objects, and structures with hidden meanings such as gasholders (see AA Files 74), and the Cenotaph, which contains an image of Excalibur, (see AA Files 34). My publications include The Checkerboard of Tunes, which shows a model of all the tunes in the Western musical canon as a single solid object based on George Spencer-Brown's musical dictionary.