Facial Recognition Billboard Only Lets Women See the Full Ad
]]>On this site you get to input a drawing (a sketch) and theoretically it will return images with similar shapes from flickr. Very cool idea, but it's interesting to notice how infantile the technology is: it doesn't really work too well! Granted, I'm not a very good artist, but my simple rendition of a basic tree (brown trunk, green blob on top) returned primarily pictures with those two basic color tones, rather than anything that picked up the particular shape. This brings back thoughts of the Platonic Idealism - what shape is really a tree?
anyways..... progression of technology :o)
]]>They've taken 10 million images from Flickr that are released under the Creative Commons license, and let you search for images that have a certain color, or a certain color combination. Brilliant! Now, all I need is for someone to develop an app that lets me use this technology to search my own photos. Now THAT would be flippin' awesome.
]]>If I had some more free time on my hands I would dig into this article and put the claims to the test. and pull up some old links to articles on "perfect" 3-column design in CSS and compare. However, I don't have the time at the moment, so I will have to take the argument at face value, and accept it as possibly true. At least it's an interesting read!
"Talk But Also Listen" -- David M. Abshire
"Encourage Debate" -- Karl Rove
"Remind Us What It Takes To Be Great" -- Anne-Marie Slaughter
"Restate the Case For U.S. Leadership Abroad" -- Madeleine Albright
I have checked my calendar several times, and am at least certain that this is not an april fool's joke. So here's to spending a few bucks on salt and preventing retardation!
]]>This interesting article suggests that whereas many current politicians, finance-gurus and even historians are comparing the current financial situation to Depression in the 1920s and 1930s, the parallels between then and now really are not that strong. The crisis in the 1920s was caused in great part by
overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves.
Clearly, these are not factors in today's financial environment.
The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. [...]As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates.
It took 4 years for the panic to subside and the long-term effects of the crisis included huge layoffs in the US, violent strikes, and - somewhat perversely - the rise to great economic heights of the largest names in manufacturing (Carnegie, Rockefeller, McCormick). These large companies had enough cash reserves to survive the collapse, and to buy our their competitors at
Will this be our fate? Who knows. But the catch-phrase "cash is king" is becoming quite popular nowadays, so I for one am going to re-read this article a few times and see if I can't glean any pearls of wisdom from the European financial crisis...
]]>Pretty neat, good for simple editing. I am fascinated by the symmetry tool!
]]>The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.