I like how MAD Magazine’s ‘fold-ins’ were used to bring another dimension to the illustrations…
A classic feature of MAD magazine, and arguably the best thing in it, fold over the pages to reveal a hidden image and message by artist Al Jafee. We were left a bit confused by some of the more US-centric references, but it’s all very clever stuff indeed.
I love the interactive presentation method The New York Times has chosen to present these; very innovative.
via b3ta
LifeHack has just started what I hope will become an informative and useful series entitled Presentation Masterclass, courtesy of Rowan Manahan.
Audiences are so deluged with advertising messages and radio jingles, with phone calls, voicemail, email, SMS and IM, with… stuff in their personal lives that unless you, the presenter, are wowing them with every word, you will lose their attention in a matter of seconds.
I am always striving to improve my public speaking and my presentation style, so this series is a welcome addition. I just hope it continues to be as good as the introductory article.
As a starting point, I recommend some detox to clear your body and mind from a lifetime of exposure to sucky presentations. I strongly recommend that you expose yourself to some great presenters:
- Check out Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs, and Dick Hardt on YouTube.
- Have a look at some of the wizards on TED.com – Rives, Hans Rosling, Barnett Thomas, Lawrence Lessig and Ken Robinson all stand out, but there are reams more on this invaluable resource.
- Go over to Common Craft and have a look at their ‘plain English’ tutorials on aspects of Web 2.0
The one common theme that emerges from this tremendous diversity of presenters, topics and styles is RESPECT. By every word and deed, they demonstrate absolute respect for both their audiences and themselves.
BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data:
- Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like the Beatles, indeed bigger than Jesus. Harry Potter still wins even if you add “The Bible” and “The Holy Bible” together.
- The smartest religious book is “The Book of Mormon”. The dumbest religious book is “The Holy Bible”. I’m sure this pleases the Mormons immensely.
- The dumbest philosophy book is “The Five People You Meet In Heaven” and the smartest philosophy book is “Atlas Shrugged”.
- “Lolita” is the smartest book.
- The top/bottom 20 books are remarkably stable. I tried 5 different weighting algorithms and their only variation was in the middle. The dumbest books were always at the bottom, and the smartest books were always on top. This is even further corroborated by the fact that the extremes change remarkably little with increasing m.
- This is slightly specious, but if you wanted to you could consider “I Don’t Read” as a control variable. Thus, if “I Don’t Read” is smarter than 13 books, then you’d think these bottom thirteen books could in fact, make you dumber than not reading at all.
Also worth a browse is the not-so-impressive MusicThatMakesYouDumb and the beautifully addictive WikiScanner.
Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in various IRC channels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nostalgia reading the great quotes at Bash.org.
<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls
I’ve always loved these quotes but also always forget to bookmark them – never again!
IronChef Foicite: well, there’s a lot of reasons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that’s if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like saying
IronChef Foicite: “my love for you is transitory and based solely on your appearance”
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol
IronChef Foicite: but there’s more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a battery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that’s like saying “i have many ways in which I show my love for you”
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they’re still awesome
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like saying “it doesn’t matter at all what you look like, I’ll still love you”
That’s photoshopping to you, Mr Layman.
Yesterday, Adobe released the long-awaited, online version of the coveted Photoshop; Photoshop Express. At first glance it looks impressive and offers many neat features.
Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser. Not nearly.
No layers here, no fancy pants masking. But for 95% of your photos, it offers pretty much all you need to fix ‘em up, and it does it with style.
Whether adjusting exposure, white balance, or hue, touching up blemishes, or distorting your image, Photoshop Express provides an easy slider and thumbnails to give you an instant preview of your image at various settings. Even undo is better than you’d expect.
As one who occasionally needs to edit images while in work (on my lunch-break, natch), it looks like there will be some tough competition between Photoshop Express and my current favourite online editor, Picnik.
via Photojojo
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read.
…there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cognitive bias that overestimates threats against our children, so it all makes sense.
To the right is a thumbnail of a picture showing the allowed wanderings of the children in one family through recent generations. It’s a fascinating comparison.
Thanks for the image, Carl (originally from the Daily Mail)
By now everyone knows that Sir Arthur C Clarke recently passed away – a truly sad event. However, you may not have watched his ‘final message to earth‘.
Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we’ve learnt something from the most barbaric century in history – the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation…
He continued his communiqué with three final wishes, the second of which was:
I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I’ve been monitoring various new energy experiments, but they have yet to produce commercial scale results. Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can’t allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet…
via Wired Science
Lots of people have been saying how impressed they were by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk at this year’s conference. None, however, have summed it up better than Vaughan:
It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the “deep inner peace circuitry” of the right hemisphere.
Neuroanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psychologists describe something as a ‘frontal’ function.
The talk is gripping, however, and the highlight is her description of the day she had her stroke which is both insightful and very funny.
via MindHacks
