groundhog day

misc

I had not seen this wonderful XKCD back in the day. It is great. Especially this part:


The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us.

We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle
curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.

via blarn

Murch on 3D

marketing media

Walter Murch on 3D

I agree with everything he writes. I frequently do. Here he makes his case very clear.

For his profession to be interested in human perception and its inner workings makes allot of sense.

I’d kill him

free of any reason technology

If I ever find that engineer that told the users that the way computers worked could be changed I’d kill him. He had it coming. He probably told those proto-users also that it would be complicated etc etc. But he had already lost them. All they remember is that they can change their mind. The how and why they don’t care about. “you can make that work, right”. No more planning. No more thought. Just charge ahead wherever your mind and dreams might guide you.

All goes to hell, since nobody thought about anything? No big deal. Can be changed. It’s easy, right?

Next profession I choose involves a chisel, a hammer and preferably rocks. Also handy to have something to throw on the floor at all times.

past wasted fears

history media

“Strange Maps” is a wonderful read for me. It shows that on the Internet even strange or obscure content will find an audience.

In the recent post pages from Life Magazine in the forties are the subject. I find them highly entertaining. What Life wrote is utter rubbish. Complete fiction. As probable as you having 5 legs.

In 1942 many people in the US took those maps for a likely scenario. What an amount of wasted fear. I personally don’t like to jump to the conclusion that such non sense got produced to manipulate people into a certain direction. For me it is more likely to see the motivation in the fabrication of fictional war global war maps in that Life hoped to increase the circulation.

I think that today’s articles and ‘news items’ often don’t do much better in the area of plausibility. How is that swine flu pandemic going?

eCloud and trailblazers

art technology

I will try to fly through or to San Jose and have a look at the eCloud

Maybe I should go to Munich as well.

I am looking forward to see what artists will come up with in the future in respect to public sculptures: Since the people controlling funds for these concepts have not exactly been bestowed with imagination it is great to see that more contemporary concepts are a reality.

I am sure we have seen nothing yet.

fonts and their effect on memorisation

media

Seed Magazine writes about a study that links less readable fonts to better ability to recall the conten. A less readable font slows down reading. Makes sense.

However, in those studies the subjects had no choice but to read the poorly typeset text. In reality most reading happens in a context, where other texts -presumably easier to read- are just a glimpse away. A study that would take this into account would probably have devastating results for badly readable fonts: You can not remember what you didn’t read in the first place.

The Albinan Army

history media


It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?

I don’t think so.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes about the future of Netflx according to The Hollywood Reporter

Netflix streaming right now feels indeed like the early Napster: All this content for that kind of price? Amazing. As long the Starz deal runs Netflix will gain momentum.
They will be installed on lots of screens & devices. Maybe they will be able to pay more for content than all the other balkanized wanna be streamers together.

We will see. And watch. And it will be interesting.

bing is better

internet

I found the first case where Bing is the better search engine. Which is good, since that means that there will be competition in search. The case where I found bing results to be relevant is a specific one. It is about an ongoing / developing story. Google is really fast with getting new pages into the index. But their ranking does not show them on the first page. (Ever since they added preview the ability to see 100 results has gone away, sadly). The term in question is ‘SORBS’. If you search for this in twitter you get a good glimpse about what is going on right now. SORBS is a blacklist that is broken. Since November 29th. And they are unable to fix it . Basically since it is a hack written by one person in perl. GFI bought them last year for around 0.5 Million. But that didn’t result in any improvement. So as a searcher you are most likely looking for the current state of SORBS. Bing does a good job in that it links to this comprehensive writeup about the SORBS debacle. Google however does not show this yet on the first page. Only 6 links that are not from SORBS itself are on that page. Not many people click through to the next page.

I should rephrase the title in saying “bings first page is better than googles first page”. Right now.

5 Beekman

history

Looking at the picture of 5 Beekman Street I am wondering why there are no equally stunning buildings going up right now. In theory there should be multitudes of money, technology and ideas around compared to the 1880s. Yet, all we seem to be able to accomplish is to find a gem like this and restore it.

lots of HD TVs – very few showing HD

daily life technology

Nielsen numbers suggest that about one third of HD TV sets actually display HD. I wonder how many sets are still set to the store default mode: It is set as bright and vibrant as possible to make the units “look good”. But it kills the picture.

It is a tragedy: Back in the day of analog TVs it was allot of work and engineering needed to get that electron beam create a pretty and truthful picture. Today it would be easy. The whole pipeline is digital. A majority of households could enjoy unprecedented image quality. LCD and Plasma panels are impressively stable and predictable. But -no surprise there- people don’t care enough. Neither do the makers of the sets.

In a better world the sets could inform viewers about the input resolution. They could ship with a little set up tutorial (all acted out, and understandable) playing from a couple MB of memory somewhere in the set. The store mode would mention that it is active during power up. Remote controls would make sense. A Bluray player would come with a demo / promo / set up Disc that shows how wonderful the format can be. What you can do with it, and why Samsung,Sony,LG,insert-maker-name-here is awesome.