Gems Sty

Apple has the ‘demo-guy’ - you know, the guy wearing all black demonstrating how to use an iPhone etc in their guided tour? Well, it turns out that Creative Technology have their own equivalent too - and it probably pre-dates Apples.

It’s quite old, but I’ve just stumbeld upon it. Check it out:

Now don’t you feel like rock-and-rolling already?

“Wait a minute, that ain’t quite right!” - yup, they aren’t. Mario Amaya distorts our perception of these familiar icons, and mix-mashes them with other brands to interesting effects. Do you think some of these could’ve worked - or even, better than their original?

Noah Brier has released a very interesting web-application called Brand Tags. The premise is this: a brand is really what the consumer has in mind, the sum-of-all-thoughts regarding that particular brand-name or logo. Using the commonly-used representation of a tag cloud (in which the most popular entry gets the greatest font-size), we can see exactly what each brand (-word) means to the masses.

From the dominant word association, you can get a good feel of what it means as a whole, as various nuances and reactions play themselves out in the word-cloud. It is also quite intriguing to note (as the examples below show), how each brand can embed itself differently in the minds of consumers.

Product/Function
For Bic, for instance, it is very strongly tied to its single most successful product - the pen. Its iconic and classic status mirrors the consumer’s impression of “Bic = Pen”. In this case, the brand is the product, much like how Xerox came to be a substitution for photocopying.

Marketing Tagline
It could also be a reflection of the success of a brand-marketing campaign. For Intel, the most dominant word wasn’t chips, computers or anything like that. It was ‘Inside’. It just shows how strong the ad campaign was to imprint this message into consumer’s heads (even as you read this, perhaps the signature Intel jingle rang through your brain).

Associated Emotion
I must admit I was rather surprised with Harley-Davidson though. In many business textbooks, Harley was a frequent example used to illustrate how the ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellious’ spirit was core to Harley-Davidson’s business. But it does seem like the crowd has a rather different take (although it is still a feeling for a brand):

Perhaps it’s time to rework the campaigns a little?

Anyway, there are quite many more brands on the website - head over and play around!

[via swissmiss]

It is certainly not something to be boastful about. A household in North London was challenged to document how much food they actually waste and throw out - because they passed the expiry dates; because they were just tempted by the food marketers at the point-of-purchase; because they rot before they could eat them, etc. They all added up to almost half of their grocery purchase (!).

The average family throws away £610 of perfectly good food each year — much of it totally untouched — according to figures released this week. That works out at £11.73 a week. And all of that adds to the £10billion of waste across the country. But are these figures really representative of an ordinary family? Femail challenged Ursula Hirschkorn, 36, who lives in North London with her husband Mike, 32, and two sons, Jacob, four, and Max, two, to keep a diary for a week to discover just how much food her family throws out.

It’s quite astounding to see just how much perfectly good food thrown away - and this being a rather normal occurrence, a typical family in a developed world. Head here for the full article.

I’ve been thinking about a shift in my mindset from pre-University days to post-graduation (and subsequently working), as I noticed my ‘I-can-conquer-the-world’ mentality starting to wane and fade. And so when I stumbled upon this comic from PHD it struck me quite strongly.

PHD Comic is primarily about post-grad education - check out their most popular ones here.

We all know how powerful and you can say essential Photoshop is to a designer - It’s virtually the bedrock program for any designers. From touching up photos to creating montages to making posters, Photoshop has embedded itself firmly into the toolbox of virtually any designer.

But what else can Photoshop do besides arts/design related stuff? For instance, can it do math and scientific measurements? Jacks of Science finds that there are some functions in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended that you can take advantage of - in particular the ‘Analysis’ menu - to go about some research problems that could otherwise be much more tedious:

Can you determine the phase of each moon based on this picture?

Turns out you can approximate very accurately - by using the Magic Wand to select a single instance of the moon, and then ‘Record Observations’ under the ‘Analysis’ menu, you get a rich panel of information, including “Circularity” (Circularity measures how circular something is. A value of 1.00 indicates a perfect sphere). By combining the moon’s circularity with the knowledge that there are 30 days between each full moon, you can estimate at which phase your moon is in!

Now, for those of you who like a challenge: how do you know how many green M&Ms are there in this picture?

Answer, and quite a few more of such examples, over at Jacks of Science.

Here’s for all you lexophiles:

1. A bicycle can’t stand alone; it is two tired.

2. A will is a dead giveaway.

3. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

4. A backward poet writes inverse.

5. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.

6. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

7. If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

8. With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.

9. Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I’ll show you A-flat miner.

10. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

11. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

12. A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France resulted in Linoleum Blownapart.

13. You are stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.

14. Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

15. He broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.

16. A calendar’s days are numbered.

17. A lot of money is tainted: ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.

18. A boiled egg is hard to beat.

19. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

20. A plateau is a high form of flattery.

21. The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.

22. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

23. When you’ve seen one shopping center you’ve seen a mall.

24. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.

25. When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.

26. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.

27. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

28. Acupuncture: a jab well done.

29. Marathon runners with bad shoes suffer the agony of de feet.

Here’s a rather neat video showing how you can synchronize 5 metronomes that were initially beating at different frequencies (I said how, not why). From my somewhat primitive understanding of high-school Physics, I’d suppose it’s something to do with natural harmonies and maybe resonance? Something about each (originally isolated) individual systems are brought to form one whole system that can only have one frequency.

Or something like that. Oh well! Still, a rather interesting video!

So this is how a space shuttle launched at night looks like. Magnificent!

[via Flickr]

I guess this just goes to proof the thesis that sometimes, we just don’t see what we see.