This guy shows off some icons and screenshots from the next Mac OS, illustrating some aspects of pixel independence. I find that subject very interesting (I’ve mentioned it here before). From that page, here’s an Aqua window scaled up without pixellating – note the slight graphical glitches, and (in the full image) that some of the graphical elements still look pixellated:
(full window)
I’ve been making muesli for breakfast for the last couple of days, in an attempt to emulate the Bathers’ cafe‘s `bircher muesli’. Here’s where I’m up to:
As I said, this is a work in progress, tending towards the Bathers’ Cafe style.
Other things to look at:
‘”Like the Internet, increasingly sophisticated hardware such as mobile phones can be a vital communications tool, but in inexperienced hands they can become a pipeline for perversion,” said the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan.’
(source)
Haven’t I heard that lovely turn of phrase somewhere before?
.
Amazon doing their best to adopt the style of a smarmy waiter:
It’s funny, I’m sure they intend this kind of language to be cushioning and non-confrontational, but I find it rather condescending.
Jonathan Schwartz describes a lunch held for Tony Blair and some ‘silicon valley leaders’, at which this interesting snippet came up:
I took a quick poll to prove a point – nearly everyone in the room was a product of public school education (myself included). So the opportunities weren’t isolated to higher education. (Mr. Jobs followed up to make the reality more painful – showing how few of us were sending our children to public school.)
From 2001, a Nat Friedman blog entry which I liked:
Does anyone really want to sit eight hours a day in a windowless walled cubicle under fluorescent lights breathing carpet fibres with unblinking eyes inches from a computer monitor only to spend hours crawling home to a homogeneous subdevelopment through traffic emitting noxious deadly fumes listening to shrinkwrapped pop hits and tear through three layers of non-biodegradable packaging to get to the chemical-impregnated food products that were once blinded bleating veal calves growing into a revenue stream in pens only slightly larger than their bodies while you sit in front of three hundred channels of somnolent mass media crap?
Is this the price of an indiscriminately heightened chance of procreation and a longer lifespan? Please, say that it isn’t. Please, no.
(source.)
Really interesting tidbit from the university of South Australia in light of the government’s recent unhappiness with junk-food in kid-targeted advertising and school lunches:
Professor Tim Olds continues his presentation from last year’s series, delving into data dating back to the 1880s which details the eating habits of a quarter of a million children from 24 countries. What this says defies conventional wisdom: today’s children are actually eating less than their great-grandparents did. What’s more, they eat less fat, less saturated fat and enjoy a greater variety of foods. So why are they more obese? The likely answer you’ll discover in this fascinating history lesson is that they don’t expend as much energy.
(source.)
I’d also like to know a little more about the effect of my long-time-favourite scary synthetic ingredient, trans fats – that’s a big dietary change the West has undergone in roughly the same time-scale as the ‘obesity epidemic’.
(In recognition of World Intellectual Property Day)
If I have a useful idea and I do not share it with you, it is because I believe that it has the capacity to save me, but that we cannot all be saved. Like hundreds of people competing for one lifeboat. It is because I fear that I will not be able to secure enough resource for myself without taking some of it from you.
One of my friends once described Free Software as a very middle-class idea: That only people who have not known scarcity will be interested in a concept like sharing a potentially lucrative asset.
(the title comes from The State Of The Art by Iain M. Banks).
From the SMH:
A couple of things that caught my fancy today:
The latest Hardcore Zen update – What is Enlightenment? – is a very satisfying (if inflammatory) read:
The thing about Enlightenment is that a lot of folks have a lot tied up in the concept. For many so-called “Masters” out there, the belief in Enlightenment is a kind of commodity. It’s what they are selling. So if someone comes along and says there is no such thing, it is taken as a serious threat to their livelihood.
. . .
Unless people believe in Enlightenment, Enlightenment cannot exist. The Enlightenment they sell is nothing more than the belief in Enlightenment. This is the same deal with religions. That’s why it’s still punishable by death in some places to question the Word of God. It’s not like believing in the existence of Mount St. Helen or something tangible like that. Once someone questions the existence of God, the very existence of God itself is threatened, because that sort of God is nothing more than the belief in God.
Flickr user Yuki has some great portraits expressing student life:
…which made me think of Joshua Ellis’s grim meathook future commentary.
Last night’s Plenary talk at the HCSNet SummerFest was given by Justine Cassell. She was an extremely good speaker and is doing some really interesting research.
One choice quote (on the subject of doing human-interaction experiments with extroverted and introverted subjects):
There was an interesting artifact of doing the study at MIT: We had to go outside MIT to find extroverted subjects.
Is it just me, or do these ads have a certain… non-native-speaker kind of feel to them?
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Both from Greenwood Plaza.
(cf. engrish.com)
Nice going, Australia:
I had no idea the Kyoto protocol was so widely ratified.
Of course, the government has decided to spin the protocol as outdated and something which needs to be ‘moved beyond’ (by which they presumably mean ‘ignored’).
But the federal Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, says Australia is focused on measures that should be taken after Kyoto expires in 2012. (ABC)
Early this year I happened to be sitting in the gallery of the house of reps on the day Australia was required to say whether it would ratify the Kyoto protocol. Howard and most of the government got up and walked out after question time, and Beazley stood and gave a long and rather impassioned speech about how important the protocol is. It seems like one of those issues where everyone can see it coming, slowly but inevitably. And there’s going to be lots of apologising after it’s far too late, but the incumbents here and in the US basically seem to have decided it’s a better bet politically or economically to pretend the issue doesn’t exist.
Since it’s pretty cool-looking, I thought I’d share a screenshot of what I’ve been doing at work today:
The system (Steve’s) differentiates speech from background noise. This is a trivial test in a quietish room with one speaker (me) saying the same thing over and over again.
The top purple line is the system’s guess at where the speech is, with the bottom purple line being the real location of speech. The red and blue lines represent “likelihood that it’s speech” and “likelihood that it’s silence” – when the blue line is higher than the red for a significant time, the area is marked as speech.
It’s sort of sad that they felt the most broadly marketable use of a cellular wireless card was to sit at home with it.
Slashdot links to Bob Cringely’s usual brand of wild conjecture, this week about Google. But, man, this paragraph plays right to everything that I find exciting about computers:
The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig.
Remember that X-Files episode (perhaps one of the ones scripted by William Gibson) with a secret shipping container down at the docks full of busy rack-mount hardware and workstations?