Dazzle paint

Saw this at Portsmouth too.

A monitor from the first world war, decked out in dazzle paint. Invented by British artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917, it was designed to baffle the U-boats that were sinking our shipping at an appalling rate. It didn't attempt to conceal the ship - no point in that, when the funnel is belching out smoke visible for miles - but to make it hard to tell how far away it was, or which way it was heading. Check out some more examples here. Apparently it works on facial recognition cameras too. Picasso, of course, claimed that the cubists invented it.