Saturday, April 16, 2011

What Is the Playbook Missing?

(I love it when he loses his patience and the accent for a second.)


Banana art

Tommy found these banana sculptures.
I guess you'll do best if you're not hung up on the longevity of your art!


... Oh, and it also helps if the overall shape of your creative ideas tend towards the... er, phallic. 

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Four photos

(Click for big pic)




All from the Fujifilm X100, mostly on aperture-priority, and with auto-ISO.
It's very lovely to use. I like that due to no mirror it hardly makes any noise or vibration at all. Good camera for church and concert use, also because it works so well in low light, ISO 6400 is usable, and 3200 very good.


Update:
AnotherAnonymous said:
Mundane photographs, no two ways about it.
It is almost sacreligious to take photographs like this with a decent camera.

I am sorry you can't see it. But these are good photos. Photos are not necessarily about the subject. In fact to my own personal taste, more interesting photos are often less about the subject.
Don't look at the subject, look at the picture. Look at it as tones, as lines, as colors, as textures. As compositions, seen as a whole.

Nue York

Apart from the main attraction, I think many of the photos are actually quite good and interesting photos.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Unique Flipped Landscape Photography

Unique Flipped Landscape Photography, photo post.

Such a simple, but neat idea.

Huge Paper Tapestries Carefully Cut by Hand

Huge Paper Tapestries Carefully Cut by Hand, post.

Holy moley.

FRIDA Robot Could Appear in an Assembly Line Near You

FRIDA Robot Could Appear in an Assembly Line Near You, article.


And the question then always comes up: do robots steal work from humans, or create more riches for humans?

In Iain M. Bank's Culture books, he has a semi-galactic civilization where machine intelligence has outspanned human intelligence by several orders of magnitude, and where everything anybody (humans, aliens, or drones) need is produced automatically. Nobody needs work if they don't want to. Amazingly, most people are sane, more so than on Earth today in fact, if I'm any judge. I wonder if work or at least some kind of function in society is not necessary to stabilize a human being.

Q&A: Supersize Cut-and-Paste in Microsoft Word

Q&A: Supersize Cut-and-Paste in Microsoft Word, NYT article.
While the basic cut-and-paste maneuver just grabs one chunk of contiguous text from a file at a time, recent versions of Microsoft Word include a helpful feature called the Spike that may help here. The Spike is sort of a longer-term storage area within Word. By using the Spike, you can select and cut noncontiguous text from around the original document — and then paste it all as one big batch into the new file.

This is great.
Except: note the little word "cut"... the text and images are not copied, they are cut. They disappear from the document. What an odd choice in programming.

Monday, April 11, 2011

New graphic-rich ebooks

Graphic-rich ebooks are so far the step-child of the ebook world, but only because we don't yet have the large, high-resolution ereaders necessary. But this will change within the next year or two. (15-inch, 260-DPI iPad 3Super?) (Hey, there are already people who make a *21-inch* ereader tablet!)

And then... it struck me what an impressive list of advantages we have to show potential buyers of of these books, cook-books, comic books, technical books, fine art books, maps, etc etc.

  1. They are massively cheaper than their paper counterparts. 
  2. You can get updates, usually for free. Typos and new discoveries are no longer a bane of books. 
  3. The screen means that the pictures are sharper and have better colors than the paper books ever had. 
  4. You don't have to fear damaging the book, since it's virtual, it can always be replaced. 
  5. You save lots of shelf and storage space. 
  6. You no longer have to agonize over which books to let go when you clear out, or discover that you had let one go you shouldn't have. Electronic storage is virtually infinite. 
  7. There are interactive features, like note-comparing, which never existed on paper. 
  8. Many of the books will be a lot lighter and smaller than their paper counterparts, easier to handle when reading. 
  9. You can acquire the books much quicker and easier, from a global market.
  10. Certain features are there if you want them, like the ereader reading the text aloud for you, or for your child. 
  11. You can zoom in on graphics, getting far, far more detail than from a paper book. 
Me, I can't wait. These will be so rich experiences.