Hany Farid keeps an archive of photo tampering throughout history. Altering photographs to tell a different story is nothing new, it’s been happening for more than a hundred years. Stalin, Mao and Hitler removed their old friends from photographs too.
Category: links
Sledgehammer and whore
Sledgehammer and whore, a great story from a screenwriter named Josh, which details an unusual break-in at his office and how it could be pitched as a show.
Vintage firing control computer
A US Navy training film describing the mechanical computing involved in vintage firing control mechanisms.
Street-fighting Mathematics
Sanjoy Mahajan’s book, Street-fighting Mathematics, is about the art of educated guessing and opportunistic problem solving.
In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don’t just stand there! This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.
The book is available in traditional dead-tree format and also for download under a Creative Commons license.
Dieter Rams ethos
A video about the design ethos of Dieter Rams.
MacPaint source
Apple has donated the the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. Bill Atkinson was responsible for the code, including QuickDraw, which formed a large portion of the MacOS.
A reporter asked Steve Jobs, “How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?” Steve asked Bill, who said, “Well, I worked on it on and off for four years.” Steve then told the reporter, “Twenty-four man-years”. Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years.
The main source is written in Pascal, and is quite beautiful to read — you can tell that he took pride in it. The rest of the code is written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.
Riepl’s Law
In 1913, Wolfgang Riepl, chief editor and a Nuremburg daily, made this statement in his dissertation concerning ancient modes of news communications.
New, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.
The old doesn’t necessarily die out. In some instances, the old methods are absorbed or recycled into a new form. In others cases, those methods are refined and distilled down to their essence.
SEO optimized headline
Gene Weingarten on the current state of print journalism and its bastardization online.
Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
The article skewers the online practice of writing headlines for machines, rather than readers. A good headline will likely garner just as much attention after being picked up by a human, and subsequently blogged, liked, retweeted and carrier-pigeoned, as it would from being a top search query.
Tetris origins
Let the Game Continue, for those that were curious where Tetris pieces originated. The graphic is from a t-shirt by Eduardo San Gil at Threadless.
Dueling Carls
Talking Carl is an iPhone app that will record some audio and play it back at a higher pitch. This is what happens when you place two of them beside each other.
There’s something about this video that had me doing a deep belly laugh. It’s probably the slight pause before it becomes unintelligible. It reminds me of watching Gir from Invader Zim
On teaching design in Mozambique
From an interview with designer Barbara Alves about teaching in Mozambique.
For example, students in the graphic design course asked me to give them lessons in color, insisting they knew nothing about it. This really surprised me. My immediate answer was, “But you should teach me! You’re surrounded by color and use it in such powerful ways in every aspect of daily life. I admire you for it!” Their response was to laugh and say, “But Teacher! That’s not design! We need to use design colors.” From talking to my students and people in the cultural sector, I got the impression that design was this distant, quite artificial, field they had to adapt to.
Fat in London sewers
Walls of fat removed from London’s sewers.
Enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses is being removed from sewers under London’s Leicester Square. A team of “flushers” equipped with full breathing apparatus has been drafted in with shovels to dig out an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat.
Pleasant.
Update: Just in-case you wanted to see some video footage of the fat removal.