kottke komments
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We interrupt this vacation for an important message: there's a new episode of The Wire where Bunk and McNulty go skiing. Here's a screenshot.

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Ollie is one year old today! Happy birthday, little guy! Or not so little guy anymore. The time, it flies.

In celebration, I'm taking the day off from posting here. I'll see you after the long Will Smith holiday weekend.

You've likely seen this by now but I've got to link it up anyway because whenever I think about it, it makes me LOLL (laugh out loud, literally). The American Family Association automatically replaces words like "gay" with "homosexual" in the AP stories they display on their news site. When an American sprinter named Tyson Gay is in the news, the practice leads to hilarity.

Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials
Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

And on it goes..."On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heats...", "Homosexual runs wind-aided 9.68 seconds to make Olympics...", "Close call: Homosexual barely averts major flop in 100..." Fox News has applied the same technique to stories about suicide bombers...they changed all instances of that term to "homicide bombers".

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An article from Animation World Magazine about the animation techniques used in Wall-E.

Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent probably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it's in the design of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you're in familiar [live-action] territory.

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Japanese face-scanning vending machines designed to distribute cigarettes only to those of legal age can be fooled by holding a photo of an of-age person in front of the scanner.

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The world's first album cover was designed by Alex Steinweiss for Columbia Records in 1938. Before that, records were sold in generic sleeves. (via quipsologies)

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Flickr set of the cover designs for the 3rd installment of Penguin's Great Ideas series of books. As We Made This rightly notes, the cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is the gem of the collection.

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Christopher Hitchens writes about getting waterboarded for the July issue of Vanity Fair.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning-or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.

As you can see in the video, Hitchens maybe lasted 15 seconds or so.

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Nicely designed poster for The Dark Knight.

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Wall-E was wonderful...best new film I've seen in a long time. With it, Andrew Stanton joins Brad Bird in Pixar's top tier of directors, with the much-heralded John Lasseter in third place. But I can see where Tyler Cowen was coming from when he stated in his short review that the film was "not recommended for children" and that "some bold genius at Pixar will be fired". Wall-E was funny, charming, and endearing but also subversive, disturbing, and dystopian. That combination that usually doesn't play well at the box office but some of my favorite films ride that fine line between comedy and disconcerting drama.

Some other thoughts and observations:

This was the first Pixar movie to include live action sequences. What, they couldn't 'toon Fred Willard?

Disney is selling all sorts of Wall-E merchandise to go along with the movie, much of which will end up in a landfill somewhere. Just like the movie. It's a full circle. Very clever, Disney.

Here's a list of easter eggs and references in the film and here are some Apple-specific references. My favorite was a scene near the end with Wall-E, the autopilot, and the autopilot's buddy that referenced the Luke/Vader/Emperor struggle at the end of Jedi.

I doubt it was an explicit reference, but the future earth of Wall-E resembles that of the under-appreciated Idiocracy.

The ending credits are a fun little tour through art history.

Presto, the funny short movie played before Wall-E, is available for purchase from the iTunes Store for $1.99. Here's the Buy n Large corporate web site. Galax-E is a font inspired by the lettering from Wall-E.

Rating: 5.0/5.0

Observe sunspots by going to Grand Central Terminal?

The southern wall of the Grand Concourse, facing 42nd Street, has semicircular grills high up, with small curlicued spaces like those in a leafy tree. Many of those spaces act like the aperture of a pinhole camera, reflecting an image of the sun that, when it reaches the floor, will be 8 to 12 inches wide. The smaller grill spaces will produce dimmer but sharper solar images on your paper.

(via 92y blog)

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Video art by William Lamson. The banana firecracker, the balloon duel, and the balloon box pop are my favorites.

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Camille Utterback's Liquid Time Series project modifies the playback of a video according to a person's motion in front of the screen. The closer a person is to the screen, the faster the video plays in that area. Kinda hard to explain...just check out the video. See also yesterday's time slicing Processing video.

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The SOS signal celebrates 100 years of official use today.

It took the tragedy of the Titanic to reveal just how vital a universal system was. After the collision in April 1912, the ship's radio operators sent out both the old CQD and the new SOS signals, but some ships in the area ignored both, thinking that they were having a party. They soon learnt otherwise, as international headlines told how Jack Phillips, the Titanic's first radio operator, and 1,500 others had been lost along with the "unsinkable" ship. The new SOS distress signal was rarely ignored after that.

Guglielmo Marconi gave testimony to the panel investigating the loss of the Titanic about the emergency signals.

Mr. Marconi explained the distress signals in use in vessels equipped with wireless telegraphy. "C.Q." meant "All stations" and "C.Q.D." was the distress signal. According to the regulations that signal must not be used except by order of the captain of the ship, or other vessels transmitting the signal. Since 1908 the distress signal had been "S.O.S." This and the "C.Q.D." were simply three letters, but they could be interpreted as meaning "Come quickly, danger," and "Save Our Souls".

Here's a simulation of the message that the Titanic sent out that night.

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The internet and other technologies have had differing impacts on the music and publishing businesses.

One of my friends proposed a theory I find compelling: Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from "individual" to "collective". Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distrbitution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

(via short schrift)

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Almost everything on David Owen's airline costs $50.

Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.

If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are travelling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.

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Advice on writing screenplays.

I think people see inspiration as the ignition that starts the process. In fact, real moments of inspiration often come at the last minute, when you've sweated and fretted your way through a couple of drafts. Suddenly, you start to see fresh connections, new ways of doing things. That's when you feel like you're flying. The real pleasure of any script is the detail. And a lot gets lost in the process. Put it back in at the last minute.

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Classic article from The Onion: Somebody Should Do Something About All the Problems.

I hear jabber-jabbering about the discovery of new subatomic particles. What good is a quark to me? Three and a half minutes it takes to cook a bag of microwave popcorn.

Three and a half minutes! Someone is spending a billion dollars a minute to send radio messages into space, and I have to choke down a bag of Pop-Secret kernels that are only half buttered, some not even popped to full puff. God, I pray for a future when the inventor is the friend of mankind.

DNA fingerprinting -- that's what they're doing now. And still strawberries at Bergmann's are $2.99 a quart. It's ludicrous. It's as if we live in the Dark Ages.

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Foodie Jason Perlow takes the plunge and gets himself a proper barbeque rig, a Brinkmann box smoker for only $70 at Home Depot. The results look impressive, especially for $70.

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The Morning News has an interview with photographer Barbara Probst. I've seen her work at the MoMA but this one is new to me and a definite favorite.

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