Google published updated Street View photographs for Manhattan this week. The changes include sharper images, an ability to look upward at the island's skyscrapers and, in an effort to satisfy nervous -nelly privacy advocates, blurred faces. Including one belonging to a publicity-shy relative of Mr. Ed, starring in his latest off-Broadway role.
Fashion photo retouching (i.e. high-brow Photoshopping) gets the New Yorker treatment with this story on retoucher Pascal Dangin, one of the best in the business.
In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria's Secret).
The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna's recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who's never lifted a weight in her life.
The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we're being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don't appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don't know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:
He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.Link (via Consumerist)He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.
“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”
Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.
How to find images on the internet, an extensive list of links and resources.
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Britney Spears discovered Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Jack White got gussied up for the Met’s fancy costume gala and Pete Doherty got sprung from jail. Click here to check out those photos and others, including John Mayer, the Edge, Devendra Banhart and more.
[Photo: WENN]
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This is almost my dream cooler ... I wish it came in a "passive cooling" version, boo on USB fans
Moshi's Zefyr is a portable cooling pad for the MacBook that provides a near silent fan, powered by USB, and offers a temperature drop of roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit. The Zefyr is designed to place your MacBook at an ergonomically beneficial tilt, and when not in use, the Zefyr collapses to better fit in a bag.
The Zefyr also provides a pass through USB port, so that peripheral use is not sacrificed. A portable cooling pad might be a little silly, but for anyone who's experience the heat of a MacBook on their lap, and worries about going sterile, it may be useful. It's available now in black and silver colors, and sells for $75. [Moshi]
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Remember the case of the drunkard dressing up as Vader and beating some Jedi-wannabees with a crutch? Here's the vid. I can't believe someone got charged with assault for this. Footage of the actual attack just takes all the juice away from the tale. I mean, in the old days, you had to take off someone's arm or head, or scorch their Jedi robes at least. Kids these days. [BBC]
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Here's what you do when you're a student in the Belgian town of Leuven. You don a blue plastic poncho alongside 1,499 undergraduates, all standing in line at very long table, on which is placed a bottle of Diet Coke and a Mento. On the count of three, having raised your hood, you drop the mint in the plastic bottle, and 1,500 fountains of sticky drink erupt simultaneously. More pics below. Update: We've stuck a video up there, as well.
It's rather reminiscent of a miracle occurring during dinner in the refectory of the Order of the Blue Man Monastery (patron saint Tobias Funcke.)
The record was broken, I hope the stickiness was cleaned up from Place Ladeuzeplein, and the kids got to keep their ponchos.
(Foto nicked from here)
I gave this talk at Paul Graham’s excellent Startup School and the fine folks at Omnisio synthesized slides and video. They have all the other talks from the school as well. Here’s Wired’s take on the day.
Update: Some folks are saying the video above isn’t playing correctly for them. If that’s the case, here’s an alternate version. It’s not as high res, but hopefully it will work.
Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv
If you don't feel like you're doing a job right unless you involve power tools in the mix, web site Sleepy Dog Labs details how to put together a cleaning brush with power-drill chops. In all it's a pretty simple process, and when you're done you'll be begging for an excuse to do some cleaning. The author uses his brush to clean the bathtub, but this power brush is the natural enemy of any surface where grime reigns.
The reality, however, is simply that these dirty scumbag musicians and their filthy swindler record companies figure they don't have enough money already so they want to take a slice of the money I'm getting for my iPods. As if they have anything to do with the design and manufacture of iPods. No. Of course they don't. We design them. We write the software. We run the store. We source the parts and manufacture the iPods and sell them. Nonetheless these assholes want my money because people play their music on my devices. What up with that? Do the makers of TV shows go around saying they want a slice of every television that gets sold?
Thank God the hacks have been utterly dismissive of this ridiculous proposal by the UK music business. Their counterparts in the States just report stuff like this with a straight face, as if maybe it makes sense. Not so the Brits who just spew contempt. My fave is this guy in the Torygraph who says if you're going to tax people for "format shifting" then why not tax them for other things, like the ability to carry a CD out to your car, or to your living room, or the ability to open your patio doors and listen to music outside, or the ability to press "pause" button or even the ability to hear music better if you clean wax from your ears (ie "wax shifting")?
God, I love the Brits. I really do.
San Francisco citizen, code monkey, sketch comedy player
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