Wired has a great image set of famous altered photographs, ranging from the recent (Lebanese bombing, U.S. military operations) to the historic. Above, Trotsky is "disappeared" from an event photograph (the man next to him in "Before," and next to a big gaping void in "After," is Lenin).
Google got a nice bit of buzz when they released their new Google home page themes, and I was an early joiner. But despite the widespread praise they received for the user-friendly act of having dynamically-updating themes, the theme I have applied is completely out of sync with the information it is supposed to be in sync with. In other words, it is not dynamic at all.
Click on the image above, my Google personalized home page, and note two things: the time of day as represented by the image "theme" (sunset) and the time according to my date and time clock widget, which is accurate. It is almost TEN O'CLOCK AT NIGHT. I have provided Google with my zip code, which will remain nameless but which is in the Central Standard Time zone.
Not true - at least not from where I sit. The sun set about two hours ago. It is very dark outside. What gives, Google?
The simplicity of the claim and tool pretty much rule out user error. But maybe it's just screwed up for my zip code, or for my time zone. That seems hard to accept - this is the company behind Google Maps, after all - surely they can corrolate my sunrise and sunset to my zip code using the their own mapping data and the METAR data every weather website accesses from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But what's the alternative?
That Google themes are not dynamic at all.
I mentioned a ways up that the sun set about two hours ago. There is a place where it is, metaphorically speaking, two hours ago: the west coast of the United States. Pacific Standard Time. Very far away from my time zone, but very convenient to Google HQ and and the backbone of the Internet. Is it possible - is it even possible... that everyone who has been praising Google Themes and verified their functionality, everyone who actually adopted and lovingly watched their local sunset or sunrise from their Google home page, lives on the West Coast?
I changed my location to "New York, New York." It is now a little past ten o'clock p.m. here in Texas; in New York, for those of you who don't have your pencils handy, that means it's after 11 p.m. The Theme, which "will dynamically change" to "match" my "local sunrise and sunset times," now shows the sun ALMOST having set. Dusk. At 11:15 p.m., it is now OFFICIALLY nighttime in New York City. After 11 p.m., folks.
Let's all take our Google-goggles off for a moment and admit to each other that this is a poor standard of performance. Timeanddate.com identifies today's sunset in NYC as 7:44 p.m. - three and a half hours after it occurred on the Google home page which "matches" New York City's conditions. Insert your own analogy regarding three and a half hour delays here, and then fire them, miss the wedding, or lose the girl.
Why hasn't anyone written about how poorly Google Themes interact dynamically with the simple data they claim to track?
I picked five winners at random (thanks to random.org) for our TV-B-Gone Giveaway, and emailed them this morning. What they'd like to do with their new devices, as stated in their comment entries:
Brian Sawyer of Hackszine said: "I met Mitch last year and had a great talk about the many uses I'd have for his invention. But turning it off in the pediatrician's waiting room alone would justify the entire purchase price. In fact, that power would truly be priceless."
AJ of Thingamababy also wanted to power one off for the kids. "I'd like to turn off the TV in the play area of our health club," he wrote. "Here you have a spot filled with toys and other kids ready to play and interact with each other and staff paid to engage the kids in activities. But there is a TV mounted on the wall blaring cartoons, encouraging the kids to sit quietly and stare into oblivion. This makes as much sense as mounting TVs on playground equipment."
Zoe said: "Yes, I love TV-B-Gone! In my former welfare office the TV was often blasting Jerry Springer. I will go back and help others with my TV-B-Gone!"
Sandi wrote: "I would turn off the TV at private parties where the TV is on for no reason to begin with. Everyone is talking and enjoying themselves, but someone in the room felt compelled to turn on the TV as background noise instead of playing music. Annoying!"
Brian didn't exactly follow directions, but hey, the random number generator does not lie. He wrote: "This has to be one of the best inventions of the past 25 years or so. I enjoy TV, I do, but it has a place, and that place is not public places. Thanks for passing on this great invention!"
Judging from the highly scientific sample represented in these comments, the following truths can be discerned:
Selections from a list of books and viewings now in the Think In Pictures store:
Photo shared on Flickr by jasoneppink
Photo shared on Flickr by bradlauster
Photo shared on Flickr by Bill Ruhsam
Apparently things didn't work out for the last Vice President of Sales at the Orange Clothing Company, the maker of the SS-Totenkopf T-shirt still for sale at some Wal-Marts. The OCC is currently looking for a replacement.
From their Craigslist post:
Are you looking for a fun work environment, but still want the professionalism and opportunity for advancement, growth and personal satisfaction? If so, ORANGE CLOTHING COMPANY is the perfect place for you to further your career. Orange Clothing is a fun, cool, young mens clothing company, specilizing [sic] in branded and private label shirts, hats and boardshorts. We take the product from design to production to sales, and everything in between. Our customers include retailers such as Wal-Mart, Macy’s and JCP, and specialty stores.Submit your fake resume here.
We are looking for energetic, aggressive, motivated and dynamic sales associates to manage our growth and sales efforts. The ideal canditate should have:
• Minimum 2 to 4 years sales experinace [sic]
• Established relationships with retailers
• College degree
• Computer literacy [actual literacy not required!]
• Be a team player [should have be? wait a sec...]
This challenging position calls for a self directed and energetic person with excellent communication skills. Responsibilities will include:
• Developing new business
• Coordinating sales
• Cold Calling
• Input in marketing
The company is based in Miami, and will provide a competitive salary plus benefits.
If you have what it takes E-mail use your resume and Resume@orangeclothingco.com. [wha?] WE WANT YOU!!
Today marks the start of the official week dedicated to celebrating our national pastime by exhorting each other to abstain from one of life's great joys. Yes, it's TV Turnoff Week. Eat your heart out, Marshall McLuhan.
I love the original and modest goal of TV Turnoff Week: Be aware of how much TV children are watching, and limit it. Whatever else TV may or may not do to developing brains, social skills, or worldviews, watching seven hours of TV a day is guaranteed to make a child as fat and gullible as a Christmas hen.
But TV Turnoff Week is undergoing an identity crisis.
First, there was the change in the organization's mission to address all issues of "screen time," encompassing video games and all time spent online while acting as though this introduced no new issues, no alternative set of pros and cons. Then activists adopted TV Turnoff Week as a rallying cry against corporate culture and state-licensed brainwashing.
The end results have been damaging to both parties.
TV Turnoff Week, as mundane and invaluable a call to sensible parenting as the food pyramid or early dental checkups, was radicalized against its will, losing precious ground in a battle that never needed to be turned into a class war.
Meanwhile, the anti-corporate message that animates much of the cultural far left gets a yearly drubbing while attempting to bully the general public into making a pointless and symbolic gesture that does not reflect most TV-watchers' beliefs about the world. The general public is quick to appreciate the fact that anyone preaching to them about the benefits of living TV-free were asking them to do something they themselves could not relate to: giving up something they value and then getting it back, fully intact, a week later. It's nonsense, and what is true about the message - that TV will turn you into a consumer zombie if you don't manage it wisely - which is true! - is completely missed.
I'm tired of the passion play. TV is here to stay, and it ain't all bad. Here are five ways that the ethos of TV Turnoff Week does not reflect the complex relationships we have with our "screen time."
Artists are increasingly being "commissioned" to produce brand-friendly works of "art." From AdAge (registration required):
Agneessens takes an active role in the creative process, collaborating with brands on the vision for art projects as well as artists. "Ironically enough," he says, "I personally prefer to work on branded art projects than for galleries. Of course, there is the constraint of being close to the brand value in the content you generate, but if you select the right artist, this should come naturally." [Via|Link]All of the times you called an artist a "sellout" sound a little hollow now, don't they? The bands that signed with major labels. The artists who started repeating themselves for sales potential. Good times!
The World Wildlife Fund used this promotional vehicle (sorry) to publicize the effects of auto exhaust on the environment in China. The balloon inflates as the car idles. Apparently, the ballon represents the amount of carbon monoxide an average car releases in a day. Kind of cool how the total exhaust is being used to simulate the portion of the exhaust that is carbon monoxide... I'm sure there are interesting analogous visualizations. [Via|Link]
Q: What?
A: Frequent.
Q: Why me?
A: Frequent.
Q: Did you see what they did to that House bill on C-SPAN last night?
A: Infrequent.
Q: How do you spell "phlebotomist" again - one "f" or two?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Are you going to eat that?
A: Frequent.
Q: That Confederate flag on your bumper - is that intended to be ironic?
A: Infrequent.
Q: What possible benefit could an actor of Steven Segal's talents derive from a relationship with organized crime?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Gold, with a density of 19.3, weighs 1204.7 lbs. per cubic foot. The golden plates of the Book of Mormon are reported to have been 7" x 8" by about 6", and thus would have weighed approximately 230 lbs. How did Joseph Smith carry home the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, and how did the witnesses lift them so easily?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Are you kidding?
A: Frequent.
Q: Why are they called apartments when they're all stuck together?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Seriously?
A: Frequent.
Q: Was Mozart murdered by Freemasons for revealing their secrets in his opera, The Magic Flute?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Would you like fries with that?
A: Frequent.
Q: I have a few extra items, I like to tell rambling stories and I'm paying in change. Would it be inconvenient for anyone here if I stay in this "Express" check-out lane anyway?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Huh?
A: Frequent.
Q: Under my visa as a temporary nonresident alien, I'm not subject to social security and Medicare withholding. My employer withheld the taxes from my pay. What should I do to get a refund of my social security and Medicare?
A: Infrequent.
Q: Mozart vs. Joseph Smith - who'd win?
A: Infrequent.
Consumerist reports that 22 weeks after Wal-Mart agreed to stop selling T-shirts bearing the insignia of the SS-Totenkopf, they are still on the shelves. Read the backstory here. Consumerist wrote:
Our bets are on a hack designer Googling for skull pix, or a very subversive designer.
Pixel Breaker has made a lovely visualization of a clock with the time of day, date, and day of the week represented by colored bars growing in a circular pattern and changing colors to represent how soon they will advance the digit above them. (Awkward, but I'm not sure how else to put it.) You can see the clock in action here, and download it as a screensaver as well.
Although the hands have been replaced by advancing bars, the bars all click in chords (six degrees per click for seconds and minutes, 30 degrees for hours. This makes sense for days of the week, dates, and months, but for the time of the day, it seems odd that the function of the clock would not reflect the fluidity of time that a growing shape, rather than a physical hand, suggests. I wonder if this was planned or not.
Less of an aesthetic choice and more of a true problem is the syncing of the second hand's numbering and its advance. Notice it? [Via]
Artist Jim Woodring shows off some amazing moleskine pop-up books on his blog. [Via] Amazon has a surprise clearance sale on Moleskines. Dated 2007 materials are obviously going for bargain-basement prices ($6-7), but the rest of the Moleskine line is on sale, too, perhaps to generate buzz - the full range of non-dated Moleskine books is 50-66% off. Check it out here, while they last.
Probably executed using a projector from a fixed viewing point, then painting in the areas designated by the projection. More pictures at the link. The real question (for me, anyway) is does the project look its best when shown from fragments leading towards the whole, as my source blog chooses to present it, or is it better viewed from the whole into fragments? Which tells a better story? Obviously, fragments -> whole best represents a visitor's actual experience at the site. So why do I like seeing the whole first better?
Follow the link to a great clip from the new television series for "This American Life" illustrated by comics artist Chris Ware. The animation is great - I think I like him better when he doesn't tell his own repetitive and depressing stories, which strike me more for their formal construction and lettering than for their storytelling and grim pathos. The subject here is an interesting true story about a fake video-camera-making craze at the interviewee's elementary school years before, and what it did to the kids. They seem to try to nail it at the end as a story about "what the camera does to you," but the kids aren't just "being watched" - they are playing multiple roles in a news agency. To me it sounds like more of a case of "what journalism does to you," or, to be more realistic as far as how young kids like that see the world, "what truly immersive role-playing does to you." And did I grow up in a truly vicious elementary school, or is it actually not a sign of total decadence for a group of 11-year-olds to stand by and fail to break up a scuffle, fake newscast or no?
Good stuff anyway. [Via|Link]
There's a great interview with Dan Goodsell, the tireless artist behind Mr. Toast and his "immersive world," on Old Man Musings. I have admired Goodsell's work for a while, and included him in a recent post on Z Recommends about artists to collect for young children. So I was pleased to have the chance to learn more about him. In the interview he cites his influences:
My childhood heroes were Dick Bruna (Miffy books), Ed Emberley (drawing books) and Bill Peet. Dick Bruna gave me my love of line. Ed Emberley taught me about the creation of worlds and populating them. Bill Peet taught about story and context. I didn’t know I was learning these things when I read their books as a kid but looking back as adult these are the things I strive to accomplish in my work.All three have a ton of stuff online if you aren't yet familiar with them:
Joshua Gibson at Fagistan posted a great piece yesterday about Camille Paglia's ongoing war on Susan Sontag. Here's an excerpt to entice you:
Paglia has a well-known problem with Sontag, though it's one that, even after reading "Sontag, Bloody Sontag", I've never really been able to understand. Paglia hypes herself as one of "Sontag's most outspoken critics" based, almost solely, on that one essay. The essay doesn't really make any particular intellectual charge against Sontag, but instead focuses on how Paglia invited Sontag to give a lecture at Bennington College. Sontag was late and then had the audacity to read a new short story rather than deliver a grand cultural lecture. She was also mean to Camille. This "outspoken criticism" is nothing more than girlish humiliation and resentment and hardly worthy of a serious intellectual attacking another serious intellectual.It gets even better. And then better still. Read it here.
Kurt Vonnegut photo by Zach Fine.What he learned, of course, is that public support doesn't have much to do with American foreign policy. It's a nice thing to have, but our leaders can get along without it. And it really would be ridiculous for any writer to expect that a well-crafted novel could actually change their priorities.I meant it then, and still do. You are still one of my favorite writers. More importantly, you influenced which writers would become my other favorites - Thomas Hardy, Donald Barthelme, Laurence Sterne, Saul Bellow. I can trace my appreciation for many of them back to my reading and re-reading of your books.
So Vonnegut has a different goal: to catch young people before they become corporate leaders and politicians and, as he puts it, to "poison their minds with humanity."
Take this opportunity to be poisoned. There are few authors, dead or alive, whose work so skillfully marries criticism and compassion, who have so comfortably combined intelligent ideas and a lucid style, and even fewer who have written as seriously and as humorously at the same time.
My only criticism is that the "child" icon looks, iconographically, like it should be negating something. I get the arms-and-legs intent, but the "x" is a bit too pure. Why not draw on the iconography of signs relating to children? Perhaps because the silhouette additions to a figure to denote a child (rather than an adult) are either to pair them with an adult or to use a culturally-specific referent - lunch box, baseball cap, balloon - and that the mens' and women's restroom style figure necessarily comes with gendered baggage. Is there any universal symbol of childhood that could be attached to a small person, and any way to strike a unisex chord as well? Perhaps not. And perhaps this can explain the magenta x we are greeted with. [Via|Link]
From the official website:
[Via|Link]Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals - the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow - and the Olympic Flame.
Each of Fuwa has a rhyming two-syllable name - a traditional way of expressing affection for children in China. Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda, Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow.
When you put their names together - Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni - they say "Welcome to Beijing," offering a warm invitation that reflects the mission of Fuwa as young ambassadors for the Olympic Games.
Fuwa also embody both the landscape and the dreams and aspirations of people from every part of the vast country of China. In their origins and their headpieces, you can see the five elements of nature - the sea, forest, fire, earth and sky - all stylistically rendered in ways that represent the deep traditional influences of Chinese folk art and ornamentation.
A tattoo artist in Chicago is being sued for misspelling a customer's requested tat "Chi-Town" as "Chi-Tonw."
This cracks me up because graphic designers are typically very poor spellers. This is either a hemispheric brain thing or just the product of their intense training to look at text as a compositional and graphic element rather than reading it. As an editor I have had designers produce typographically-driven graphics which completely fall apart when a key misspelling is corrected.
The tattoo has been fixed as well as possible, but the lawsuit is still going forward. Meanwhile, fellow tattoo artists are signing up to let the offender replicate the misspelled tattoo on their own skin to show their support. Can't say I've heard of anything like that happening in the design community...
From a series of images designed to illustrate the nutritive paucity of various "diets."
You too can have your logo on TV for four one-hundredths of a second or less for only $39.
The individual behind this project is trying to sell individual frames for an eight-and-a-half-minute ad. Hurry, only around 13,000 frames remain.
If you like this idea, I would be interested in selling you advertising space on my left pinky toenail for a mere $38, and will wear sandals all day Saturday to display it. Just as many people will see your ad, they will be just as impressed, and you will save a dollar.
I predict abject failure for this project, but such a statement presupposes that Mr. Augusto actually believes it will work. Perhaps he is simply doing what he can to draw attention to his other project, a half-baked predictions market.
[Via|Link]
Photographer Kent Rogowski turned teddy bears inside out and restuffed them for a great photo series. The book will be published in May.
Photograph copyright Kent Rogowski 2007.
[Via|Link]
Recreating an artwork's composition is one way of "looking" intensively at it. I love what instructor Glenn Zucman is getting his Art Appreciation students to do at California State University-Long Beach. These photos crack me up.
Jacques Louise David, The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis
Diego Rivera, Flower Day
One of my favorite people. Kind of hard to reproduce though, what with the hierarchical scale. The Photoshopping jobs are pretty rough, so scratch that one.
Hmmm. Better. I'm now reminded of a Sesame Street coloring book which put the show's characters in all of these famous paintings. I think Grover was Washington. Or was it Bert?
Okay, this is my real request. I'm sure you're covering Botticelli, this is a very important painting, and it also happens to be one of my favorite paintings of all time! That grace. That tension! It's like a dance, but also like a marionette dancing, with the angel pulling her into that angle like she has a little string. Beautiful. I'd like to see the kids in Long Beach pull it off.
