Author Archives: David

Using Photoshop as Measuring Tool

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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?

moonphase-copy

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.

All the corny lines you’d need

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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.

Synchronized Metronomes

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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!

Lenovo X300 Parody Ad on MacBook Air

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Whether you’re an Apple fanboy or a PC die-hard, a good commercial is a good commercial. Here’s a clever parody portraying Lenovo’s edge over the Apple MacBook Air – showing off its integrated DVD-Drive, Ethernet ports and 3 USB ports and driving home the message: Lenovo’s machine is not a compromise, but a complete machine that still fits within that small envelope.

In almost every post this would inevitably draw fanboys on the Mac and the PC sides, claiming the superiority of their preferred choice while mudslinging the ‘enemy’. Sometimes it makes me wonder – with the marketing adage that apathy is worse than hate/love – so, what if everything you use has some crazy zealous fan/enemy? All the way from the choice of your breakfast cereal, to the file you use, to the USB cable that you carry – what if each and everyone of them has such polarizing camps?

If that sounds too scary or faraway, then what exactly is the essence that makes a product more polarizing than others? What is it about operating systems, MP3 players, computers and cars that bestow upon them this natural (?) sense of territory and boundary, of ‘me’ versus ‘the rest’?

Neocube Magnetic Balls

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While the Neocube (fancy name!) are really just magnetic balls, they aren’t any ol’ magnetic balls. They are VERY-magnetic balls. Formed of 216 high-energy rare-earth magnets, their very strong magnetic field gives rise to very interesting behaviors as you fiddle with it, creating multitudes of shapes, planes and volumes.

If you’re interested, the online shop’s here.

Wall Cleat

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wall-cleat-by-karl-zahn

Coming from a place that inherited the British wall plug (that comes default with on/off switches, eliminating the need to unplug), I never quite understood why’d anyone decide to have sockets without switches. Of course, that’s how a big chunk of the world operates, embedded in legacy lock-in – and as such it is up to individual designers to attempt to accommodate such decisions.

The Wall Cleat, designed by Karl Zahn, has very simple extensions above and below the standard socket – allowing one to coil extra cables around it. While particularly useful when the cable is unplugged, I could also see it as a simple yet effective device to manage cables that are almost by their very (evil) nature, messy.

A simple solution for a (not-so) simple problem.

Library: Borrow a Person

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borrow-a-person

I thought this idea that is being implemented in libraries in UK is a really brilliant an interesting one:

The idea, which comes from Scandinavia, is simple: instead of books, readers can come to the library and borrow a person for a 30-minute chat. The human “books” on offer vary from event to event but always include a healthy cross-section of stereotypes. Last weekend, the small but richly diverse list included Police Officer, Vegan, Male Nanny and Lifelong Activist as well as Person with Mental Health Difficulties and Young Person Excluded from School.

It’d certainly be fun to chit chat with a living person – being with a real person, relating to actual experiences will certainly lend a great degree of empathy and sensitivity to the topic on hand, beyond what the pages on paper can convey.

Probably as much fun would be to (if not more) be the ‘book’ waiting to be checked out. I think if this idea ever comes where I am, I’d definitely sign up for it.