The concept of ornament has emerged as a result of the existence of the human being and its relation to its environment. Ornament of objects, which aim at adding qualitative features to objects alongside their quantitative states, is a practice that is as old as humanity. Within this process of the individual’s efforts in thinking, designing, creating, and communicating, one comes across orname...

The handicap principle suggests that individuals of superior quality can more easily bear the cost of developing extravagant ornaments. Consequently, ornament size should provide reliable information about quality or condition. Previous models have largely ignored the process of ornament growth, focusing only on final ornament size. We model ornament growth schedules for individuals of differen...

Planar ornaments, a.k.a. wallpapers, are regular repetitive patterns which exhibit translational symmetry in two independent directions. There are exactly 17 distinct planar symmetry groups. We present a fully automatic method for complete analysis of planar ornaments in 13 of these groups, specifically, the groups called p6m, p6, p4g, p4m, p4, p31m, p3m, p3, cmm, pgg, pg, p2 and p1. Given the ...

Two sites located on the northern Levantine coast, Uçağizli Cave (Turkey) and Ksar 'Akil (Lebanon) have yielded numerous marine shell beads in association with early Upper Paleolithic stone tools. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates indicate ages between 39,000 and 41,000 radiocarbon years (roughly 41,000-43,000 calendar years) for the oldest ornament-bearing levels in Uçağizl...

The fitness consequences of female ornamentation remain little studied and the results are often contradictory. Female ornamentation may be an artefact of a genetic correlation with male ornamentation, but this possibility can be disregarded if the ornament only occurs in females. Female-specific white wing bars in eiders (Somateria mollissima) have been suggested to indicate individual quality...

Knowledge itself is power, not mere argument or ornament.

Older red-breasted flycatcher males (after the second year) have an orange patch on the throat and breast. To date, the occurrence of this ornament has been explained in terms of male-male interactions. In this paper, we show that badge size also influences the mating success of red-breasted-flycatcher males. In addition to the size of the ornament, arrival time was a second factor related to t...

Hand drawn ornamentation, such as floral or geometric patterns, is a tedious and time consuming task that requires skill and training in ornamental design principles and aesthetics. Ornamental drawings both historically and presently play critical roles in all things from art to architecture, and when computers handle the repetition and overall structure of ornament, considerable savings in tim...