http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/beautification/ Perfect for internet dating! Computer scientists developer an image enhancement program that turn portraits into portraits that look like the original, only slightly more attractive. 20:17
Archives
This month: 23 entries.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/02/28/business/20070228_
STOX_P1_GRAPHIC.html Nice timeline (associated with this story) showing the fall of stockmarkets world-wide in response to the crash in Shanghai. 16:25
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6168807.stm Good news that a brave Somali man has defied convention and familial censure to marry a woman of lower caste? Or bad, because his reason was that: “She is beautiful, polite, obedient to me, pious and God-fearing, so there was no reason not to marry her.” (Also: three separate mobile phone companies do business in Somalia, even though different areas are controlled by rival warlords, and (since there’s no functioning government) no real way to enforce contracts.) 23:50
http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/25/six/ Good overview of possible applications of OpenId, a promising approach to single sign on. 18:26
http://www.conservapedia.com/ Wikipedia for conservatives! Seems like a lot of effort to go to; of their six commandments, the spelling problem (they want American spelling) and the date problem (they want B.C. and A.D. instead of B.C.E. and C.E.) have a fairly reliable technical fix (run everything through a filter), and the remaining four issues aren’t very controversial. Is the problem really that they don’t want to be associated with the Wikipedia at all? Also, the Wikipedia does permit both British and American spelling and both date styles. (Conservapedia’s Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.) 18:22
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaybarnes/399980607/ “assorted strange buttons i own.” 18:03
http://store.theonion.com/product_info.php?products_id=217 Real box, fake product: Salt of the Month Club. Also available: USB Toaster and Make-Your-Own-Umbrella Kit. 18:00
http://www.newyorkobserver.com/20070226/20070226_Nicholas_
Boston_media_newsstory4.asp Profile of Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist. He really is married, too, and not in a only-recently-legal kind of way! 22:14
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/009176.html “ Nobody in New York Knows the Difference between At-Home and Outside Conversations.” 20:49
http://shop.lego.com/ByTheme/Product.aspx?p=10179&cn=245 5195 pieces in this Lego Millennium Falcon! 13:05
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/realestate/18cov.html The psychology of house pricing. According to one realtor, a price like $433,779 “would be a real turnoff ... you’re talking about someone who’s going to be arguing about leaving a curtain rod.” 12:54
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magic_tricks Some include “exposures.” (Good discussion of the pros and cons.) 21:23
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2276190.ece Fun interview/profile of Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who is frequently described as the happiest man alive. 18:21
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6360000/newsid_6367700/
6367785.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm Good laconic Aussie tells a BBC reporter about his drunken efforts to catch a 4.5" bronze whaler shark by hand. “Have any of yous got a knife, eh? ... this bloke comes out with little a pocket knife and the pocket knife was about the size of, yeah, half a match ...” (More Australian speech.) 18:17
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/feature/horseshoes-and-hand-grenades-
joel-johnson-returnsto-spank-us-all-for-supporting-crap-
236310.php Former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson returns temporarily to dole out insults to manufacturers, consumers, and current Gizmodo editors. 14:52
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/business/yourmoney/11view.html Overview of time-sensitive road tolls. Economics prof: “Everyone accepts that if your car is stationary, it’s fine to pay for parking. But if you tell people they need to pay to move their car between two points, they think it’s crazy.” 00:03
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/009034.html “That’s how easy love can be.” Aw. 17:18
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/070205ta_talk_collins Talk of the Town profile of designer Marc Newson. (His idea of a perfect object is an egg.) The Talby mobile phone he designed for Japanese network KDDI is lovely. 21:55
http://www.braniffinternational.org/image/braniffhostessnew.htm “A Braniff International hostess is a beautiful person. She is alive for her interest in people for themselves. She is a daughter to the middle aged; security to the confused; a friend to everyone who boards her plane; a heroine to little girls; a source of pride and joy to her parents.” (From Braniff International Airway’s Hostess recruitment brochure.) 23:17
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/features/article2249219.ece How ad agencies would market tap water. (Some silly ideas, but largely provocative.) I don’t think it’s inherently difficult to sell tap water—the reason it doesn’t happen is that there’s no incentive to do so because the only people who directly benefit are water companies, and their profits wouldn’t change even if people drank 10 times as much tap water as they do now. (Fruit and vegetables have a similar problem.) 20:52
http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/4/urls/ URL design, and why the same piece of content should never be reachable by more than one URL. (See also Jacob Neilsen’s 1999 piece on the URL as UI.)
(Listing the raw URL in blog posts has been my small contribution to the URL awareness effort.) 19:00
http://www.e-cr.co.uk/crblog/the-money-maker/ Interview with the designer of the pre-Euro Dutch bank notes, complete with revelations of secret embedded features. 21:26