Last month an article appeared in The New York Times Magazine praising how-to websites. Now it’s acting as my personal list of how-to websites, helping teach me everything from Chinese dining etiquette to surviving zombie attacks and plating fettuccine Alfredo.
That reminds me, I need to learn how to do the robot.
I think I could easily spend an entire day watching well directed TV commercials. This compilation of the top 10 commercials by movie directors, however, saves me some wasted time and gets straight to the point.
Back in 2001, a genius pen-chewing BMW marketing exec stumbled on a belter of an idea – fling bundles of money at high-class filmmakers in exchange for short films based on their automobiles. Directors of the series ‘The Hire’ ranged from the classy (Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai) to the not-so classy (Guy Ritchie) but by far the most entertaining episode was Tony Scott’s ten-minute tease, which saw Clive Owen’s ‘Driver’ race Gary Oldman’s devil for the prize of James Brown’s eternal soul. Hell, just watch it, it’s awesome.
via Kottke
Google’s newest offering, the Chrome browser, is due to be released today. The initial ‘press release’ was in the form of this rather nifty comic book created by Scott McCloud.
The Official Google Blog gives us the low-down:
All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.
Blogoscoped has a good overview of the browser and points us to the page where the browser will eventually be available to download.
via Link Banana
These North Korean Propaganda Posters are fascinating. I’ve always loved the design of propaganda posters and this book compiles a great selection from DPRK.
Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!
via Kottke
The documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris, interviews Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography, on using photography as a weapon.
Of course, we all know that doctoring (photoshopping) photographs to make them dramatic, misleading, or politically controversial is a widespread issue (problem?), but what about using captions to influence?
The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.
The company who produce the animation for Grand Theft Auto, Image Metrics, claim to have create photo-realistic animations that break through the ‘uncanny valley‘ barrier. The Times is a believer, giving us a sample video and stating that IM’s lifelike animation heralds a new era for computer games.
“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real, […] the subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry – for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren’t that significant but they are what makes people look real.”
Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video, meaning that the subtlest variations – such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.
The Personal MBA is a site dedicated to helping people gain an MBA education without the expense of business school. It’s a self-study guide to advanced business topics and concepts. As Kevin Kelly—the founding executive director of Wired—says:
No matter what they tell you, an MBA is not essential for landing or handling a good business job… Pursue your own Personal MBA in tandem with actual experience doing some kind of business. If you combine study with actually trying stuff, you’ll be far ahead in the business game.
An impressive introduction comes in the form of the Change This Manifesto, and one of my favourite pages on the site is the book list: The 99 Best Business Books.
This interview between Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers—the entrepreneur who founded CD Baby—concentrates on The 4-Hour Workweek and provides a good recap and overview of the concepts. The following quote, however, feels more relevant to me now as it was when I originally read the book:
To learn anything quickly, I approach people who did it correctly and say, “I have an idea, but I don’t know anything, so can I buy you a beer and pick your brain? I’m really ambitious but kind of ignorant.” Whether it’s language learning or tango or kickboxing. That’s how I did all of it. That’s how I identified the rules of engagements, so I could deconstruct them.
Voting America consists of a series of animated and interactive maps (with commentary) visualising how Americans have used their votes since 1840.
Voting America examines the evolution of presidential politics in the United States across the span of American history. The project offers a wide spectrum of cinematic visualizations of how Americans voted in the presidential election at the county level, from the beginning of the American party system though the modern day. Here you can see historical developments in American voting patterns as they moved across the landscape of the United States.
via MeFi
