Archive for July, 2008|Monthly archive page
It’s a Small World
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Check out some of these microphotography – (from top: zooplankton as seen in a drop of sea water with a needle head; mouse embryo; zebrafish embryo). They are just a few out of the many great shots as submitted to the Nikon Small World photography competition:
The Nikon International Small World Competition first began in 1974 as a means to recognize and applaud the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. Since then, Small World has become a leading showcase for photomicrographers from the widest array of scientific disciplines.
A photomicrograph is a technical document that can be of great significance to science or industry. But a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition, and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation.
Head over to Nikon Small World~
Designing the Magazine’s Feature Article
Matt Willey recently put together a video snapshot of the design and editing (and editing, and editing, and editing…) process for a Royal Academy magazine cover story. Before the final layout is frozen – there is a pretty long and iterative process that designs in general often undergo before it reaches the final glossy look (which is what most laymen may have access to).
This may help in-part for those of you who have clients or others saying “What? You spent a whole day just on this”? type of questions.
How to Cook Spaghetti
A wonderfully weird stop-motion video of the pasta-cooking process.
Mortality
How do you want to die?
“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.
This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.
Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.
“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.
And then she showed the audience – health policymakers, legislative staff, advocates for the aged and for family caregivers, etc. mostly at middle ages – these graphs:
Dealing with one’s own mortality is definitely not a pleasant thing – it’s not all fun-and-games, and many of us would probably just turn a blind eye to it, avoid it and pretend it doesn’t exist, so much so that death is in many ways still a conversational taboo. You may ask someone about his family, his career, his life in general, but never about his death. When conversation hits a recently-deceased family member, the standard is just to say “Oh I’m sorry” and to just fudge on from there.
Handling (on-behalf) a sick loved-one’s can prove to be an even more difficult dilemma. Family members with sick elderly often find themselves staring down extremely tough decisions, tangled amongst the vines of exorbitant medical costs, guilt, dignities, care-responsibilities, quality-of-life, etc.
As medical treatment advances we are seeing ways of intervention that can put more time into our lives – but it doesn’t necessarily put more life into our time. At some point we would need to ask ourselves how do we want to age – and die?
[via NYTimes - The New Old Age]
Make a 17′ Gandhi Statue
If you’re in a Gandhi mood today, you may want to pay Joseph Delappe a visit, because he loves Gandhi. Or really admires him. Or something like that. Because for one, he built this incredible 17-feet Gandhi statue (looking somewhat like a video-game character back in the days of Playstation 1 or something – what with the low-polygon count). Not only did he build Gandhi, he’s made an Instructable out of it – so you can make your own Gandhi in your own backyard too!
The reason that he makes it is perhaps somewhat more interesting than the sculpture itself. Joseph has an avatar in the online virtual world Second Life called (guessed it?) MGandhi Chakrabarti:
In March of 2008 me and my Gandhi avatar walked throughout Second Life for 26 days to reenact his famous 1930′s Salt March – the forward steps of my avatar in SL were controlled by me walking in real life on a customized treadmill.
… After walking with Gandhi in Second Life for 240 miles I decided it would be interesting to extract my avatar from this online world and recreate him in monumental scale…the process of creating the 17′ tall cardboard Gandhi using a variety of readily accessible (mostly free!) software tools, cardboard and a hot glue gun. The production of this sculpture took a total of 4 weeks, 6 days a week, 9-11 hour days with the assistance of an intern for two-three days of each week.
Here’s MGhandhi walking in Second Life:
VooDoo Envy Laptop & Packaging
I think Voodoo has certainly showed that they are pulling out every last trick to conjure the absolutely lust-worthy, live-up-to-its-namesake ‘Envy’ laptop. Nothing’s spared – from the packaging we see the high-quality squarish box with a signature cut in front; the microfiber sleeve that comes with it…
On to the laptop itself – taking on a bold, boxy profile with the high-gloss, genuine hand-formed carbon fiber shell (reminds me of Japanese lacquerware or urushi); thickness is only at 0.7 inches (1.79cm); the microweave texture on the surface; and the unique array of dimples replacing the staid trackpad.
There are a few things that I liked about these designs, which are rather rare among other similar products. Firstly, they’ve included the microfiber sleeve that is gorgeous enough to be used as a day-to-day laptop skin – the packaging isn’t necessarily just a temporary refuge for the product waiting to perish after unboxing. Instead I suspect most owners will keep the sleeve and it will remain as an iconic companion together with the laptop.
Also, as everyone’s led and harping about Apple’s ‘simplicity’ I like how Envy’s going on all burners in the details with textures. Personally I think appropriately placed surface textures add interest and detail to a product, helping to prolong an interactive experience with the owner in the longer run. Check these out:
I think Voodoo have set for themselves a mark to beat.
[More Envy goodness]
Content Page Designs
If you’re into content page design – Smashing Magazine has collected a smorgasbord of content pages from a wide variety of publications in a wide variety of styles.
Guide to Grammatical Errors
Annual Report for SB Bank
The Canadian Hockey Atlas
Head over for more!
Have Internet YOUR way!
Hey look – Google has just dedicated its homepage to my site!! I swear there wasn’t any Photoshop involved!
But… there may be just something else. Just indulge me if you’ve known this little nifty piece of code for a while – but it turns out that if you paste the following code in most browsers, you can start to edit their site’s content as you wish:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0
Of course, this is just about editing the local copy on your own computer’s browser – it does nothing to the real website. Of course, you can also do this in Photoshop (but it’s gonna be a bitch matching all every font, font size, etc). Of course, you can also just download/save the site and edit it – but they don’t beat the simplicity of this one line of code aye?
And this code is also probably one of the ways Internet marketing scams “prove” to you that without doing anything whatsoever, they can get Adsense/Paypal/Bank Account credit of $xxxxx *EVERY DAY!!*.
So there – if you didn’t know about it, go ahead and deface (my?) site!
[via Blogstorm]
72nd birthday for Phillips (the screw)
On July 7th 1936 (just about 72 years ago) Mr. Henry F Phillips received a patent for a type of screw and the accompanying screwdriver – the Phillips screw. The Phillips screw has been around for so long, and have been taken for granted for so long that I’ve never pondered about its birth – why did someone come up with a “+” shaped head to go along with the “-” shape. The only thing that went off in my mind was probably, “+” shape has four arms and somehow that makes it easier to turn and less likely to slip.
It was of course that, and more:
The Phillips-head screw and Phillips screwdriver were designed for power tools, especially power tools on assembly lines. The shallow, cruciform slot in the screw allows the tapering cruciform shape of the screwdriver to seat itself automatically when contact and rotation are achieved. That saves a second or two, and if you’ve got hundreds of screws in thousands of units (say, cars), you’re talking big time here.
And not only does a power Phillips driver get engaged fast, it stays engaged and doesn’t tend to slide out of the screw from centrifugal force. Another advantage: It’s hard to overscrew with a power tool. The screwdriver will likely just pop out when the screw is completely fastened.
Ah! That additional bit of engineering, design and thoughtfulness that almost everyone have taken for granted – and I suppose, that’s why it became such a popular fastener.
That said, consumer electronics do seem to increasingly treat screws with disdain – it is now seen more as a blot in the aesthetics, if you will. Could the screw ever one day disappear from manufactured products altogether?
[via WIRED]
Bypassing Chinese Censor
It is well known that the Chinese government proactively clamp down on any media that it deems to run contrary to its own interest. Besides keeping a tight lid on official press such as newspapers and TV reports, popular online forums are also actively patrolled to keep a tight patrol on dissidents that run contrary to their appetites.
Chinese netizens, of course, aren’t simply willing to lie low and submit to that. Apart from technical solutions such as proxy surfing, they’ve also been quite creative in forum posts. Chinese forums are commonly littered with different-but-phonetically-similar words in place of more sensitive terms. But that too, gets caught by the officials pretty quickly.
The latest round in this cat-and-mice game is rather ingenious – rearranging words to read from a different orientation to fool the (very likely computerized) scanning. For instance, instead of writing from left to right, the posts are authored from right to left, or even scrambled to a top-bottom arrangement. This, in fact, heralds back to the traditional Chinese script back when the times where it was written on bamboo strips vertically from right-to-left. Thus, it makes perfect sense for human readers, but State computers may have a tougher time combing.
An example of the scrambling software:
Which made me ponder – captchas have come to become an integral part of the Internet landscape to verify if one is a human or not. This could mean having to recognize jumbled-up digits or alphabets, or recognizing cats from dogs. These are tasks deemed easy for the average human being, but tough for computers to crack.
Could there be other similar hacks around censored forums that are easy for humans to decipher, but difficult for computers to crack? What are some of the methods that defies simple computing power? And tools to achieve this in a forum setting? Scrambling orientation is one of them – could there be more (and more interesting ones too)?
[via WSJ]
