They are hoping to shoot the pilot in 2010. I hope so too. TV producers: you need this kind of stuff.

I don’t know enough about the infrastructure that spammers use to know how hard it would be to make the headers look innocent, but my guess is that it would be even harder than making the message look innocent. Assuming they could solve the problem of the headers, the spam of the future will probably look something like this: Hey there. Thought you should check out the following: http://www.27meg.com/foo

I am left speechless by how little the jaw moves. From Christine Ericsdotter’s Ph.D. (via Ian Mansfield)

double pi=3.14159265;
double r    = sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z );
double yang = atan2(sqrt(x*x + y*y) , z  )  ;
double zang = atan2(y , x);
newx = (r*r) * sin( yang*2 + 0.5*pi ) * cos(zang*2 +pi);
newy = (r*r) * sin( yang*2 + 0.5*pi ) * sin(zang*2 +pi);
newz = (r*r) * cos( yang*2 + 0.5*pi );

Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context. And of course the search capabilities are world class.

Mate, it’s been there since 2005.

FORGOT: Steve Jobs has a nice summary of quotes from the guy on his blog.

CMD¹ porn². Although not for a cellphone, rather to analyse the suitability of a range of materials for space use. The LDEF is an oldie form 1984, and the NASA webpage describing the results of the experiment is an impact-resistant oldie from the web of the ’90s. (via @plugimi)

Out of all eight, this one is the truest in my view. (via @bruces and @madebymany)

As I have come to know this landscape I am continually reminded that even though we live beneath the gaze of giants, made with our own minds and hands, it is our simple joys that continue to define us as human.

“How are you guys doin’ back there?”

I love Traktor. The Swedish filmmakers haven’t been adding much to their site lately, but I am happy to have found this new-ish gem. No date as usual and not much information aside from the title.

TRAKTOR is a group of filmmakers. We make films, not websites.

OK. Digging a bit deeper than usual in my archives I also found this old PDF scan from Creativity magazine (June 2003). Reborn.

Found on English ᴙussia on a wild browsing session. Fantastic. Particularly since it came on sight after a series of quasi-serious renditions of former top-secret Russian airplane concepts. And then you go: “Huh?”

Seven healthy males were exposed to the light sources of different colour temperatures (3000 K, 5000 K and 6700 K) for 6.5 h before sleep. The horizontal illuminance level was kept at 1000 lux. Subjects slept on a bed in near darkness (<10 lux) after extinguishing the light, and polysomnograms recorded the sleep parameters. In the early phase of the sleep period, the amount of stage-4 sleep (S4-sleep) was significantly attenuated under the higher color temperature of 6700 K compared with the lower color temperature of 3000 K. Present findings suggest that light sources with higher color temperatures may affect sleep quality in a view that S4-sleep period is important for sleep quality.

software is the computerized SOUL. it’s like little personalities, it’s great.

You’d better know who Why was.

As found at the Bristol zoo. About time…

The following trademarks used herein are owned by the McDonald’s Corporation and its affiliates: 1-800-MC1-STCK, Always Quality. Always Fun., America’s Favorite Fries, Arch Deluxe, Aroma Café, Automac, Big Mac, Big N’ Tasty, Big Xtra!, Birdie, the Early Bird and Design, Black History Makers of tomorrow, Bolshoi Mac, Boston Market, Cajita Feliz, Changing The Face of The World, Chicken McGrill, Chicken McNuggets, Chicken Selects, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Cuarto De Libra, Did Somebody Say , Donatos Pizza, emac digital, Egg McMuffin, Extra Value Meal, Filet-O-Fish, French Fry Box Design, Fruit Buzz, Gep Op Mac, Golden Arches, Golden Arches Logo, Good Jobs For Good People, Good Times. Great Taste., Gospelfest, Great Breaks, Grimace and Design, Groenteburger, HACER, Hamburglar and Design, Hamburger University, Happy Meal, Happy Meal Box Design, Have You Had Your Break Today?, Healthy Growing Up, Helping Hands Logo, Hey, i’m lovin’ it, It Could Happen!, “it’s what i eat and what i do”, Iam Hungry and Design, Immunize for Healthy Lives, Kiwiburger, Lifting Kids To A Better Tomorrow, Mac Attack, Mac Jr., Mac Tonight and Design, McDonald’s Racing Team Design, Made For You, McBaby, McBacon, McBurger, McBus, McCafe, McChicken, McDia Feliz, MCDirect Shares, McDonaldland, McDonald’s , McDonald’s All American High School Basketball Game, McDonald’s All American High School Jazz Bank, McDonald’s All Star Racing Team, McDonald’s Building Design, McDonald’s Earth Effort, McDonald’s Earth Effort Logo, McDonald’s Express, McDonald’s Express Logo, McDonald’s Is Your Kind of Place, McDonald’s Means Opportunity, McDouble, McDrive, McExpress, McFamily, McFlurry, McFranchise, McGriddles, McGrilled Chicken, McHappy Day, McHero, McJobs, McKids, McKids Logo, McKroket, McMaco, McMemories, McMenu, McMusic, McNifica, McNuggets, McNuggets Kip, McOz, McPlane, McPollo, McPrep, McRecycle USA, McRib, McRoyal, McScholar, McScholar of the Year, McSwing, McWorld, Mighty Kids Meal, Mighty Wings, Millennium Dreamers, Morning Mac, Quarter Pounder, RMCC, RMHC, Ronald McDonald and Design, Ronald McDonald House, Ronald McDonald House Charities, Ronald McDonald House Charities Logo, Ronald McDonald House Logo, Ronald Scholars, Sausage McGriddles, Sausage McMuffin, Single Arch Logo, Speedee Logo, Super Size, Teriyaki McBurger, The House That Love Built, The House That Love Built Design, twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesoniononasesameseedbun, Vegi Mac, We Love to See You Smile, What’s On Your Plate, When the U.S. Wins You Win, World Children’s Day, World Children’s Day Logo, World Famous Fries, You Deserve a Break Today, McDWireless.

This is for Brendan Walker. And that one above is Dirk Auer from Germany. Imagine him meeting Dash Macdonald.

Inside a Predator drone control center. It is clearly staged, still the emotional detachment of the pilots comfortably sitting in an air-conditioned truck comes through nicely. What is really missing there is a McDonalds meal sitting next to the joysticks.

I have arthritis in basically all of my joins but mainly my hands, and more so in my right hand, so being right handed is annoying, but the pain I get when carving at times drives me forward, I’m not going to stop doing this art I love, a lot of pain goes into each piece I work on but that just helps me to drive to finish it and not quit as I could easily do.

Keep it going.

• Wind tunnel tested to 60.4m/s (136mph)
• RF transparent foliage tested at Loughborough University including effects of rain and ice
• UV resistant and flame retardent foliage
• Fatigue relieving base details
• Extendibility – expand to multiple users at minimal cost
• Multi-user capabilities (up to 3 users, taking up to 6 antennas at each level)
• Design to BS6399, with full account taken of the effect of the wind pick-up on the foliage
• Full orientational flexibility of antennas from unique support frames that enable the antenna to be disguised by foliage

Yes, it’s the tree mast I was mentioning in the previous post.

Nice bingo from Wired.

Are you not reading it yet?

Man’s shirt modeled in subdivision surfaces and printed on Objet. The one you see is a small scale test. By far one of the hardest models I’ve ever built, as most of it had to be a single volume. Actually, only the buttons and the stitching (not visible) are separate geometry.

More on this later…

Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use.

Maybe I am just discovering hot water, but could it be that the whole secret to Google’s success is to provide a shelter of realization for extreme nerds?

This year at the Fiera I’m showing 39 new projects.

Feeling the crisis…

One good side of this crisis is that it makes us all consumers consider for a moment, regardless of how well off we are or how poor we are, what and why we have what we have in our lives.

Huh?

There’s a certain naivety now, that you pick up a magazine, y’know, if I could just make one funky chair that gets attention I’m gonna be famous. I think that’s kind of a wrong approach, you know, there’s something about the impatience of popular culture that’s happened, where we all have this kind of desirous want to be famous, to be immediately recognized.

I see…

You are so gentle to talk to, it’s really beautiful.

…

Writers cling hard to the word, to semantics, to meaning and sensibility. Design, by contrast, is less verbal. Design is busily inventing new ways to blow itself apart. Design is taking more risks with itself than literature. That is why contemporary design feels almost up to date, while literature feels archaic and besieged.

From Tony.

As usual, here is a more readable PDF version of the same article

I first encountered Ballard on the back shelves of used bookstores, and thought he was one of the best treasures I ever discovered there. I always felt, reading his work, that I didn’t process a Ballardian piece of fiction; instead, it processed me.

Jeff VanderMeer on Amazon’s book editors’ blog Omnivoracious

• Start the request as for any other TLD in the known world (I use Gandi, a fabulous non scammy maintainer from France).
• Download a PDF version of the LAR, a contract letter written in Italian, where you accept legal requirements and other similar bureaucratic jam. The rest of the world does this (if ever) with a FORM and a checkbox.
• Make sure you read through it carefully, because there are a few catches hidden in the bureau-lingo. For example, if you are an Italian national you have to provide you fiscal code (don’t ask what it is…) whether if you are just European you must provide your passport number. Great. Someone thought this out really well in Italy.
• Sign the letter. With a pen please. Not digitally. It easier to counterfeit it if you use a pen, Italians love counterfeiting.
• Once the whole thing has been compiled you have two options to send it back. Email it. No, you can’t, sorry bad joke. You have to either post it or send it by FAX¹.
• (optional step) If you are sending by snail mail, send something along with it. Be it money or a nice salami, every little helps.
• Then pray, but pray something Catholic. Of course, there is no feedback whatsoever on whether your FAX was received or not, when it going to be processed, how long will take…
• In case of fail repeat the procedure, but make sure you do it in less than 14 days.

As of Tuesday 28th of April, more than 20 days since I started the registration, the domain is yet to be seen.

Flat to compound, through a laser cutter and some brilliant work by Elijah Porter.

I have a thing for this sort of stuff. See here

The about page is jaw-droppingly self-confident, but her work is in fact quite impressive.

I’m Nirrimi, a sixteen-year-old aspiring fashion photographer aching to take the world by hurricane, thunder and rainstorm. Photography took my hands and led me to a personal paradise at age thirteen, and I’ve been self-taught and seeing life through a lens since. My aspirations are heaven high and my potential and dedication higher still. I have a peculiar vision of beauty- I see beautiful where others don’t think to look and I capture it all so they do. I want to be shooting for Vogue before I’ve even reached adulthood.

Best written article I’ve read in a long time about Dubai and the UAE. A chilling read.

It is a long article, and it is definitely worth reading, so I am providing (with no explicit authorization form the Independent) a re-typeset PDF which you can print, turning the reading pleasure dial up to 11. The original link and the source are included in the PDF for fairness and backtracking ease.

Already out of stock on Amazon UK… Mad. Good job Geoff.

Going to implement this sometime soon: How To Block The Diggbar.

UPDATE: Implemented with a simple mix of PHP and JS. URL detection is server-side á la Gruber, redirection is via JS. Why? Not sure, but it works perfectly and I prefer having the server do the majority of the work. I think I might also add some 301 in the redirected header. May Digg dig its own hole.

And on a side note, have a laugh.

They are cheap, they are small, they are lost property moments after you bought them, they are your own, but not really, they seem to never end and you never see them die. Or maybe yours made it till the end?

Really, how many lighters that you owned did you actually manage to fully deplete?

Last Flame, initiated by me and Merel Karof over a couple of pints, which excuses everything forever.

On per-customer editions:
Time Inc.’s Mine Magazine is a Printed RSS Feed
Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back? – NYTimes.com

On business models, a great triplet from Clay Shirky:
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers

And two final ones:
European Newspapers Find Creative Ways to Thrive in the Internet Age
It Is Anti-American to Try to Keep Newspapers Afloat

I’d argue that “square miles” and “square kilometers” really have no place in popular journalism, because we have little connection to what they mean.

I am not really getting this one, mentioning popular journalism in a post about the use of hyphens and correct word order. Moreover, while it is true that most people don’t instinctively judge area size in square miles or kilometers, how else would you express the same concept? There is no way I am aware of to provide a rough indication of how large a very large area is other than using an international system that most people should have a grasp of. Using any other parallelism such as “1/6th the size of Rome” may work for a few but not the majority. One far from perfect solution, would be to use Los Angeles as a comparison metric, since the article refers to the LA Times. But this article appears online, not just on a local paper. Oh, I know. We should say 1/2.000.000.000 the area of the Internet. That may work; everyone knows how big the Internet is.

PS now preserves pressure beyond 8-bit throughout the painting code, whereas before CS4, only 256 levels (8-bits) made its way to this code.

For as much as I could find out in a two minute search on Google, the Wacom Intuos from 1998 already supported 1024 pressure levels. Photoshop supported 16bit colour to a certain extent since version 2.5. God only knows how many people bought professional Wacoms in the last ten years, convinced that their tablets were actually doing something more than moving the cursor around. What took so long to actually pass those 1024 levels on to the PS brushing engine?

This is from an Intuos datasheet; it’s quite puzzling or maybe I just misunderstood the whole thing:

The solution: ɯosıɹ suǝɾ puɐ sǝɯɐǝ sǝlɹɐɥɔ 'ɐıoʇɹǝq ʎɹɹɐɥ 'uǝuıɹɐɐs oɹǝǝ 'ʎǝlɯɹoʍ pɹɐʍpǝ 'uoslǝu ǝƃɹoǝƃ

[...] I merely go out into the world, I wanna make a photograph, I come across something that excites me, I see the picture in my mind’s eye and I make the photograph; then I give it you as the equivalent of what I saw and felt. The whole key lies very specifically in seeing into the mind’s eye which we call visualization and the picture has to be there clearly and decisively and if you have enough craft in your work and in your practice you can then make a photograph to desire.

Far from trying to trace a parallel between me and a giant like Adams, this interview – which is more of a quote – summarises perfectly the process I instinctively applied to my Playgrounds project.

Next to-do/to-learn in Rhinoceros, at least for me. It seems like Grasshopper might be of some help here.

When users install Windows Internet Explorer 8, they have a choice about opting in to a list of sites that will be displayed in Compatibility View. Compatibility View helps make Web sites that are designed for older browsers¹ look better in Internet Explorer 8.

True, it sounds like such an elegant solution. I am sure The Average User will have a lot of fun deciding whether to browse in compatible mode or not. They could have labeled the button as “Sorry, We Messed it All Up Mode”. Can some leading web expert explain Microsoft the meaning of the word “standard”?

It Just Plain Sucks

While coffee quality may be a nano-notch above similar chains, the way they serve coffee is sad. I mean it. Queuing up at the till, looking up that abomination of a menu with those uber-silly names, dealing with a depressed “barista”, waiting for your paper cup at the end of the counter sucks. Sucks if you have experienced coffee in a wholly different way, fast served at a banged-up steel counter, in smoking hot thick and chipped ceramic cups in a real no-name family ran bar. Sure these no-name places are the standard in Italy, but I found great coffee bars elsewhere, including the US, and I am sure you know what I am talking about.

True, your post is not much about Starbucks and more about instant coffee (which makes me think of it as drug assumption rather than an experience)… But I had to let the SB rant go, I had to let my fingers drop on the keyboard for this one. It’s a twitch I got, or maybe a natural reflex, ∞ may know. It’s coffee my friend, you don’t do bad things to coffee, coffee likes you.

Hope you understand,

Tomm

I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten.

Andrew Lahde farewell letter is a must read. Either see the original linked from the title of this post or fetch this loosely re-typeset version which is a bit easier on the eye. At any rate, read it.

Aehm… After Effects? Encore? Media Encoder? Premiere Pro? Soundbooth? The folders are full of “recommended” files (watch your language there Adobe!). They do not actually contain the executables or full installs of the aforementioned. Dirty, dirty, cheeky mess. So hard to figure out what components are shared and place them in a Shared components folder? Oh, and Mocha. Mocha for After Effects, I will surely need it for some hardcore planar tracking in Illustrator, thanks for thinking about that, I would have surely missed it otherwise.

UPDATE: To make things clearer, this is the contents of the CS4 package I was trying to install.

1. Photoshop
2. Illustrator
3. After Effects
4. Premiere
5. InDesign
6. Fireworks
7. Flash

From the project’s website:

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.

Military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong. Related to “SNAFU” (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”) and “FUBAR” (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair).
In radio communication or polite conversation (i.e. with a very senior officer with whom you have no prior experience) the term “clusterfuck” will often be replaced by the NATO phonetic acronym “Charlie Foxtrot.”

And 53 more definitions on UrbanDictionary.com. Wiktionary.org reports the etymology of the term.

Reminds me of this great one from the Dopludo Collective.

1. Begin with an idea, a string of ideas.

Ex: Mario had help with his movie. He did a lot of the work himself.

[1 to 8]

9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ’shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’? Ahem:

It’s obvious someone else had a hand in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without question, Mario’s little square Hush Puppies on the H^4’s operant foot-treadle, the Bolex itself mounted on one of the tunnel’s locked lab’s Husky-VI TL tripods across the over lit closet, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame’s borders on either side of the little velvet stage.

10. Practice. Take one sentence — any sentence — and Wallacize it. Turn ten boring words into a hundred good ones.

Worth a study, linked from Kottke.org

The other thing we’ve added to him, which may be fun, is a bull whip. That’s really his trade mark. That’s really what he’s good at. He has a pistol, and he’s probably very good at that, but at the same time he happens to be very good with a bull whip. It’s really more of a hobby than anything else. Maybe he came from Montana, someplace, and he… There are freaks who love bull whips. They just do it all the time. It’s a device that hasn’t been used in a long time.

I am speechless.

Backup copy of the transcript here, just in case it vanishes in a puff.

Sony Bravia adverts, this is the real thing, get it?

[...]the Genius climbed up to a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace, but he approached it slowly from behind a large, homemade polyester shield. The low thermal conductivity of the polyester blocked his body heat from reaching the sensor.

The Mafia, The Monster, The Genius, The King of Keys, Notarbartolo and Speedy. Is this the best story ever published by W I R E D ? A great narration, by Joshua Davis of what happened before, during and after the Great Heist worth $100 million in diamonds against the Diamond Center in Antwerp, Belgium; the safest deposit in Europe. The thieves were all Italians; this is the kind of stuff that makes me proud of being Italian.

Like the Periodic Table of the Elements, this system holds ample opportunity for mixing proportions, creating alloys, and adding impurities. We propose that this visual paradigm has room to house all the things that have been, and the things yet to be.

It might be a bit premature to propose the above as an all-encompassing system, as it feels more like a good starting point for a PhD proposal than a mature piece of research. Nonetheless it is a nice article to read with some sharp parallels between CAD and natural forms.

Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe.

ahem… Worst thing of the article is that he’s actually right and not just about the above, which sort of regards me, as I do ride fixed, but with no skinny jeans.

Best post so far, from the previously linked Adobe UI Gripes.

So J.G. Ballard. By Teruhiro Yanagihara.

Dieter…♥ Or as Gunnar says, Detail Rams.

Insert floppy. Mind you, you are going to need Windows for this. And I would not be too confident running this stuff in emulation as it is all real time graphics and GPU squeezing to the max. If you dig around, there are some demos for “older” systems as well: VIC20 and C64. Hearts to the demoscene.

[...] This problems are relatively frequent, I usually ignore them as they don’t last very long, but frankly this time it’s just not what I needed. Please let me know what’s going on, as mail service needs to be more reliable than it currently is. BTW, Google “says” that your Grid is in fact still giving problems to a number of customers…

Mediatemple service had been a bit scatty for me in the past year. I didn’t care much about it, as running this website can’t really be defined a critical operation and the rest of the service is awesome. Sure enough though, the rest cannot make up for long for a core hosting server that is acting weird. The problems I found and did not care to report each time they happened – blame my laziness or praise my patience – mostly ranged between the following:

• Very slow response times from the server.
• Seemingly slow execution time of some PHP scripts (this one is based on gut feelings and may be simply caused by the first).
• Interrupted mail service via POP/IMAP. This one has been quite frequent lately, hence the support request.

Here is a link to the System Status weblog, acknowledging the issue.

What happened after my grumpy support request? They replied super quick as usual, as I found out this morning. I had three emails in my inbox. Two were from the support team, acknowledging the problem and kindly asking to perform some simple troubleshooting tests; the third one was from the CEO of Mediatemple. It was addressed to all customers – only those reporting the problems? – and mentioned something about a downtime on the 28th of February, which I didn’t even notice, but apparently serious enough to trigger that response in the first place. I’ll leave the good PR bit out as Mediatemple does that already quite well on their own, but at the end of the email there was this link. It took about two years to publish that, but at long last we now have a decent half technical, half PR-y, four screen long (maximised at 1080px vertical) explanation of what happened inside The Grid. For now I think this will keep me reassured and going for a little while longer. In the long term (months, not years), it just has to happen as soon as (super)humanly possible.

I can feel the wind, the screams, the vibrations of the train passing above from these stunning pictures and story. More pictures also on the original Russian blog.

I’m exploring ways to achieve zero food waste. I will employ a wormery and implement an ‘urban grazing’ experiment where I hang excess food that is still good out of my window for passers by to enjoy.

This system works at the very end of the production chain, or in LCA terms just moments before the product’s end of life. As we haven’t yet found a way to recycle excess food that we can hardly avoid purchasing – composting doesn’t count – Cathrine has found a way to pre-cycle it: hang it off your window, if you have one. This idea reminds me of Freecycle or “clothing-exchange days” with a touch of Middle Ages flavour; the nice thing about it is that it could never work as an online free-listing; it would be too impractical to list an ad for “two bananas” or “one apple” or anything else we feel we might not eat. It would be nice one day to walk on streets and be surrounded by dangling boxes full of free excesses.

0 milliseconds – An external object touches the driver’s door.

1 ms – The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.

2 ms – An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.

2.5 ms – A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations.

5 ms – Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.

6.5 ms – Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.

7 ms – Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.

8 ms – Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.

8.5 ms – Side airbag system fires.

15 ms – Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.

17 ms – Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load. Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.

20 ms – Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.

27 ms – Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.

30 ms – The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.

45 ms – Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.

50 ms – Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.

70 ms – Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car. Engineers classify crash as “complete”.

150-300 ms – Occupant becomes aware of collision.

Wow, at least something cares about you before you die.

f/1.4 lenses that can turn night into day and let photographers focus on only the details they want, throwing unwanted backgrounds into blurriness.

And this, the real spoiler:

Be merciless with your photos. If right now you’re showing almost everything, try showing half. If you’re showing half, try showing a quarter. Try showing your best five of the day. Best one of the week. Depending on your uses, editing alone will immediately improve your work.

Full article here (via kottke.org, via Beebo.org)

Beautiful collection of pictures of intricately carved wood windows and old russian houses.

Dynamic range double shot mode expands the camera’s dynamic range up to a maximum equivalent of 12 EV.

Nice one, Ricoh.

Frankly I’m surprised by how many sequels were better than the original. And I’m not surprised that the 3rd movie is never the best.

I personally agree with most but Lord of the Rings, which for me should have a negative value rating rather than an even high positve. Via FlowingData.

We don’t always floss our teeth. We’ll pick the burger and fries instead of the salad. We’ll have one more beer. And sometimes we just don’t feel like dealing with the Save dialog box yet so we’ll put it off.

My current work, Playgrounds, is now online. This is the first visible product of an ongoing project; in many ways it is a “reality check” of the concept. It is a series of three shots, 90 seconds each, simulating over-cranked exposures of unsettling office environments. For now, I will leave any further interpretation open, hoping you will enjoy watching it.

I haven’t seen this movie yet, but now I will watch it under influence.

Major r3Zpekt goes to whoever Arnell’s designers who had the guts to share their fine thinking with The Rest Of The World.

Had some fun with a hacksaw.

The White Room

Highly emotional content from Design Interactions at the Royal Albert Hall.

Click on the image to get the full PDF flyer. More info coming later. See you there!

I recklessly agreed with Will to be woke up at an indecent time (not telling you :-) this morning to pay a visit to Smithfields meat market. He had to go a few rounds to get a permit to get us in during “office hours”, but it was definitely worth it. We were seeking for slaughter and blood; we got a bit of blood and lots of chopping. All of this in the lovely context of the Bio brief that dear Elio and Tobie threw at us two weeks ago.