kuler

Kuler (click image for a larger screen shot)

"allows users to quickly create harmonious color themes based on predefined color formulas, or by mixing their own color themes using an interactive color wheel.

Color themes can be created in multiple colorspaces including RGB, CMYK and LAB. Themes can be tagged, shared and commented on. Users can search the kuler online community for top rated colors, or search for schemes by tag word or date created.

Users of Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications can download any color theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file that can be imported in their preferred creative application and can be applied on their artwork."
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Is it me?

Can't decide what to get your kids for Christmas? For just £12.99 from Argos or Amazon (other re-sellers are available), your child could be the proud owner of the GR8 Tat2 Pen kit.

Yes, your progeny (as long as they are '6 years or over') can 'Open up [their] very own pretend play tattoo parlour. This easy-to-use tattoo maker kit includes an electronic tattoo pen and funky stencils. Using soft, safe pulsating action, the tattoo pen creates realistic, washable designs with dramatic effects'.

Batteries not included, natch.

Look out next year for the 'GR8 PiercN Plierz & 4Cepz' kit.
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Nokia 95 - convergence continues to converge

The soon-to-be-released Nokia N95 boasts an impressive feature-set, including a 2.6" 240x320 pixel display, 5 megapixel camera, WiFi, stereo Bluetooth, infra-red and GPS satellite navigation.

Sensible extras include hot-swappable micro-SD memory, an FM radio (what, no DAB?), a standard (hurrah!) USB port to connect to your computer and a 3.5mm headphone socket (hip, hip hurrah!), so you can use any brand of earpiece without an adapter.

This is all packaged in a two-way slider design. Move the screen up for a conventional mobile phone keypad. Move it down and you get a set of multimedia keys, and the screen switches to 'landscape' mode.

The N95 has Symbian S60 as its operating system, with a range of programs to capture, manipulate and share images and video clips, a multimedia player, Visual Radio, an advanced web browser, email client, file viewer and personal information management tools.

All in a package that weighs less than 120 grams with the dimensions of a credit card (well, a chubby credit card... OK, a morbidly obese, 21mm-thick credit card).

With the rumours reaching hysteria levels over Apple's (allegedly) forthcoming iPhone, I won't be buying one until next year. But if nothing emerges, or it turns out to be little more than an iPod with a SIM card, this is nearer to the kind of compromise i would be willing to make, especially if it synchronises with my Mac's address book and calendar.

Now if ONLY they could make it a bit slimmer!
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Virtual economy faces real threat

I've mentioned Second Life, an online virtual world, in a previous blog.
CNET reports that its burgeoning economy faces a threat that will be all too familiar to many in the 'real' world. [edited]

Linden Lab, which publishes Second Life, posted a blog alerting residents of the virtual world to the existence of a program called CopyBot, which allows someone to copy any object in Second Life. That includes goods such as clothing that people purchase for their in-world avatars, and even the virtual PCs that computer giant Dell announced Tuesday it is going to sell in the digital world.

Second Life users can purchase virtual items with a pretend currency called Linden dollars. But they use real-life currency to acquire that virtual coin. In fact, there's an exchange rate between the two: One U.S. dollar will buy 271 Lindens, enough to buy a basic outfit for an avatar, which is the digital representation of a person.

Problem is, it's not clear yet if there's anything Linden Lab can do to stop people from using the bot. Linden Lab said Second Life content creators who had their wares stolen had few immediate options for stopping the thefts and that the best recourse for them could be to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint - in the real world - against offenders.

Some virtual entrepreneurs now worry their livelihoods are at stake, and some are threatening to shut down their in-world businesses before they get fleeced.

Residents have also complained about other issues, such as problems with the user interface and previous issues related to the security of created content.

To 'Baba Yamamoto', the Second Life name of one of the members of the group that created CopyBot, the uproar over the software is understandable but disappointing.

Yamamoto told CNET News.com that CopyBot was created as a tool for testing and demonstrations and was never intended to be used for illegal theft. But because the tool was created using an open-source license, some Second Life users are now freely using and distributing it.

And many residents are very unhappy about that.

"The essence of the creativity in this world is largely because of creators and their work being protected," Mallon said. "This tool defeats all protection. So if you labour to build a business like we all have, your work can be stolen."

(Thanks to Conrad for the CNET article link)
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geoGreeting

Bored with lacklustre BlueMountain flash-animated eCards? Ever had a strong desire to send someone a greeting spelled out with aerial views of large buildings? Well geoGreeting is the place for you.
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Five free fonts

1001fonts.com has a large, and regularly updated range of typefaces.

WC Wunderbach is an interesting variation on the 'stencil' theme.

Fontleroy Brown manages a 'deco' look better than many.

Porky's is informal and bold, oh, and extra bold!

Echelon is a condensed, calligraphic serif.

Sanuk Fat is a modern, professionally-drawn display face. It is available free (for a limited time) from fontfont.com, complete with three different number styles.
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My mum was right, YET again!

You're a 5-year-old kid out for a walk in the local park, and you spy the primary colours of the play area. "Don't come running to me when you break a leg!" yells your mum as you hurtle toward the climbing frames. Do you listen? Hell no! And do you fall over? Hell yes!

And as you lay there, your knees throbbing, and your chin grazed, you know that the worst is yet to come. First there will be the humiliation of the 'I told you so' look on your mother's face, and then, horrors! She produces a hankerchief from her pocket, LICKS it, and pinning you to the floor to stop you wriggling away, begins applying it to the mud and cuts! Aarghhh!

Well, as if to reinforce a previous blog , New Scientist reports: [edited]

Saliva from humans has yielded a natural painkiller up to six times more powerful than morphine, researchers say.

The substance, dubbed opiorphin, could spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.

When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 milligram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 milligrams of morphine.

Rougeot and colleagues discovered that opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there, called enkephalins.

Opiorphin is such a simple molecule that it should be possible to synthesise it and produce large quantities without having to isolate it from saliva, Rougeot explains. Alternatively, it might be possible to find drugs which trigger patients’ bodies to produce more of the molecule themselves.
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Digital fragility

Saw this posted on the gym wall this morning.

Made me wonder how many years of work are sitting on flash memory. The millions of 'priceless memories' that exist as JPEGs on digital cameras and mobile phones. Entire music collections on MP3 players.

Most of them won't be backed-up. Terabytes of data, all of it an absent-minded moment, or a 'format this drive' away from oblivion.

I haven't backed up my laptop for weeks.

I'll be doing it this evening.
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Paying for your excuses

Alibi Network is:

"a cutting edge full service agency providing alibis and excused absences as well as assistance with a variety of sensitive issues. We view ourselves as professional advisors who understand our clients’ unique situations. We explore various approaches with our clients and implement the best solution based on the individual case. We understand your need for privacy and we are completely discreet and confidential."

And no, it's not a spoof site. *deep sigh*
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Forgotten Spaces

I've never been sure about what constitutes 'art'. And having spent a weekend with my son looking at some of the Turner Prize entrants, I'm even more confused. However, in my not-so-humble opinion, Sarah Delany creates original abstract images that are contemporary and extremely pleasant to look at. And she sells them at very reasonable prices.

Her first exhibition 'Visually Speaking' sold out within a few days. Her second set of original works 'Forgotten Spaces' is available online. If you're in the market for an original piece of art to grace your living space, or just fancy browsing some attractive paintings, her site is worth a visit.
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Academics do something useful shock

New Scientist reports [edited]:

The art of cake-cutting requires great care and skill to ensure no party is left feeling cheated or envious. Now, however, parents and party hosts can approach the task with confidence – as mathematicians claim to have found the perfect way to cut a cake and keep everyone happy.

“The problem of fair division is one of the oldest existing problems. The cake is a metaphor for any divisible object where people value different parts differently,” explains Christian Klamler, at the University of Graz, Austria, who solved the problem with fellow mathematicians Steven Brams and Michael Jones.

According to Klamler, for any division to be acceptable, it must ideally be equal among all parties, envy-free so that no one prefers another’s share and equitable, where each places the same subjective value on their share.

Traditional methods, such as the "you cut, I choose" method, where one person halves the cake and the other chooses a piece, are flawed because though both get equal shares and neither is envious, the division is not equitable - one piece may have more icing or fruit on it than another, for example.

Enter the “Surplus Procedure” (SP) for cake-sharing between two people, and the "Equitability Procedure" (EP) for sharing between three or more. Both involve asking guests to tell the cake-cutter how they value different parts of the cake. For example, one guest may prefer chocolate, another may prefer marzipan.

Under SP, the two parties first receive just half of the cake portion that they subjectively valued the most. Then the "surplus" left over is divided proportionally according to the value they gave it. EP works in a similar way: the guests first get an equal proportion of the part of the cake they each value the highest – a third each if they are three; a quarter each if they are four, etc – and then the remainder is again divided along the lines of subjective value.

The result is everyone is left feeling happy, Klamler says. Two people, for example, may feel they are each getting 65% of what they want rather than just half.

“These procedures are new and have never been tried out in real-world applications,” says Brams. “But where there is a divisible good like land or water, which players value differently, the procedure could be used to allocate more-than-proportional shares, making everybody as happy as possible.”

Intriguingly, the procedures are "tamper-proof" – people cannot manipulate the process and must be truthful with the referee, or else they could end up with less than makes them happy.
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Absorbing more information

The Register reports: [edited]

A British company claims that its software enables users to at least double their reading speed by making use of the way the brain interprets text. It says reading speeds as high as 1200 words per minute (WPM) are possible, compared with a typical speed off the page of 150 WPM.

BookMuncher uses a technique called Rapid Serial Visualisation Presentation (RSVP) which displays a document word by word mid-screen. The idea is that as the words flash by, your brain recognises their shape or outline, rather than trying to decode their sound or spelling.

"The science behind it is word shape recognition, rather than the relationship between the letters," said BookMuncher development director Jon Bunston. "As you increase the amount you read, you recognise more word shapes and can read faster. It can get you reading at 300 WPM in hours or 600 to 700 within days."

He added that as well as a £20 program for PCs, capable of handling Word or RTF documents and text files, BookMuncher has developed a version for mobile phones. He said the technology is a good fit for small screens which aren't well suited to displaying continuous text.

The software is the latest attempt to commercialise research done over the last two decades or so into reading speed. What the researchers found is that there are two blocks to faster reading - how long it takes us to move our eyes across the page or screen, and our tendency to subvocalise - reading the text silently to ourselves. RSVP breaks those blocks by displaying words sequentially at a speed too fast for us to read out.

Bunston acknowledges that BookMuncher is not unique, but pointed out that none of its rivals had achieved a breakthrough in the market. He claimed that the key to that could be getting RSVP onto mobile phones, with e-books as downloadable content alongside games and MP3s.
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Ars Magna*

Jim Kalb's site is a cornucopia of wordplay-related stuff. Listed below are some satisfyingly apposite anagrams I hadn't come across before.

astronomer = moon starer

circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim

intoxicate = excitation

parishioners = I hire parsons

schoolmaster = the classroom

semolina = is no meal

Statue of Liberty = built to stay free

Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring = "Time's running past", we murmur

The United States of America = Attaineth its cause: Freedom!

War on terrorism = Swarm into error

Western Union = no wire unsent

William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller

*'Ars Magna' is Latin for 'Great Art', and an anagram of 'anagram'
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My dream PDA moves a step closer

For many years 'convergence' has been a buzzword bandied about by pundits in the computer industry, and by just about anyone who has ever thought 'Wouldn't it be nice if I could carry just one compact, easy-to-use, stable, attractive, sturdy, cool device that allowed me to manage my contact details and diary, browse the web, 'phone, 'skype', MSN, text and email my friends, capture, store and view images and video, control my hifi, plan and navigate my journeys, store, organise and listen to my music collection...'

It's not JUST me who has thought that is it?

Oh, OK.

Well, anyway, back in April I blogged on this, using the then soon-to-be-released Mio A710 as an example of how close we were to a device that fulfilled these requirements.

The main areas where the Mio fell short was flaky software/hardware implementation, no built-in WiFi, and too much bulk (150g).

HTC are a Taiwan-based smartphone/PDA designer/manufacturer. Up until recently they have produced phones that mobile networks put their own badges on. However, recently HTC have started marketing a number of 'own-badged' products.

The soon-to-be-released HTC P3300 is their most advanced offering to date, boasting:

- Windows Mobile 5 *meep!*
- 320 x 240 pixel colour screen
- Quad Band GPRS/EDGE
- GPS
- FM radio
- MicroSD smart card
- 2.0 megapixel camera
- Bluetooth 2.0
- WiFi

All in a 58x108x16mm (not much bigger than this picture), 127g package.

Early reports indicate that the HTC P3300 is less than perfect. The camera is average, the processor a little slow, the screen not bright enough in direct sunlight, nobody seems to like the 'rollerball' pointer device... and did I mention it runs Windows? Not something I'd be willing to part with £450.00 for.

But the important thing is that this is not a 'concept machine'. It IS possible to put all the components that I want into a box that is light enough to carry around in my shirt pocket.

Now, imagine if Jonathan Ives' team worked its magic on this thing. Slapped one of those new Samsung 640 x 480 pixel LCD panels on it. Shaved a few grammes and millimetres. Added a couple of memory slots. Then finished it off with a decent operating system, Bluetooth earbuds and a drop-dead gorgeous casing. Now that is a product that would have me parting with (over) half a grand.

Ah well, that's me dreaming...

but Christmas IS coming.
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Mobile banking

Dave Richards runs an excellent blog called Defeating Global Poverty. In a recent article he reports a significant South African financial initiative. [edited]

The Economist published a report on how mobile phones are starting to become banking tools for the poor. In South Africa, 16 million people, over half of the adult population, have no bank account. Yet 30% of those people have mobile phones almost all of which are used on a pay-as-you-go basis.

You might think - why do poor people need/want bank accounts? The report highlights Andile Mbatha, who owns a hair salon in Soweto. He used to have to travel more than 2 hours by minibus to send money to relatives... a personal delivery. He also used to have to keep what ever cash he had on hand at the salon or with him as he travelled.

He now uses a new mobile banking service called Wizzit which enables him to instantly transfer money to his relatives for a very low fee which enables him to spend more time earning money. He also now receives payment for services at his salon via mobile phone from more than half of his customers which means that he doesn't have to manage a lot of cash.

The reality is that the poor, with by definition fewer resources, have needs (often more so than wealthier people) to transfer their monies to support other dependants and family members who out of necessity live significant distances from each other.

Without bank accounts, the transaction cost of making these payments (recurring ones are often referred to as remittances) are very high... even higher than what it costs wealthier people to transfer even much larger sums.

This is often referred to as the the "poverty tax" where the less well off pay a premium because they are not able to use more economical service options due to their economic and/or social status.

Scalable models like this enable increased productivity and earnings capability which is a core element in increasing wealth (another way of saying decreasing poverty levels).
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300 miles of music: 7.30pm-12.30am, 3-11-06

My taxi duties to and from Lincoln have become less frequent, thanks to Brook and Sky sharing driving duties, with Cyan and Zak as passengers. However, this weekend Brook was exhausted from a college trip to London, so I made the trip on Friday night to pick them up.

Anyway, for playlist anoraks everywhere, here's what I/we listened to:

London to Lincoln:
Soldier Man - Shack
Linger - Jonathan Brooke
Trash Can Fun - The Bran Flakes
Warm Panda Cola - The Boy Least Likely To
Dear John Letter (To the Devil) - Keith Green
Crash - Gwen Stefani
Word Up - Cameo
A Sweet Little Bullet From a Pretty Blue Gun - Tom Waits
Bullet in the Head - Rage Against the Machine
Me Plus One - Annie
Redwing - Hem
Land of Confusion - Genesis
In the Air Tonight (Ft. Phil Collins) - Tupac
Highway 49 - Yardbirds & Sonny Boy Williamson
From a Late Night Train - The Blue Nile
Shuckin the Corn - Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs
Serious - Gwen Stefani
Keep Yourself Alive - Queen
At the River - Groove Armada
The Tide Is High - Atomic Kitten
Icebound Stream - Laura Veirs
Ice Ice Baby Vs the Real Slim - Eminem & Vanilla Ice
Robbery, Assault and Battery - Genesis
Sensitive Children - Mike Scott
Peace on Earth - U2
That's No Way to Treat a Girl - Marie Knight
We Won't Need Legs to Stand - Sufjan Stevens
Into the Deep - Kula Shaker
Laredo - Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez
Window Licker - Aphex Twin
If You Ever (Featuring Gabrielle) - East 17
I'll Make It All Up to You - Jerry Lee Lewis
Mississippi - Pussycat
Prove My Love - Lucinda Williams
Duel - Propaganda
J for Jules - 'til Tuesday
Stood Up - John Hiatt
Delia - Spider John Koerner & Dave Ray
Cousin Chris - The Fiery Furnaces
You're Sixteen - Ringo Starr

Lincoln to London
Take Me Back to Your House - Basement Jaxx
Generator - The Holloways
Dance Like a Monkey - New York Dolls
Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour) - Dollar
Rehab - Amy Winehouse
We All Stand Together (Frog Song) - Paul McCartney
I'm Shakin' - Rooney
Jump (For My Love) - Pointer Sisters
Stupify - Disturbed
A Town Called Hypocrisy - Lostprophets
Jolene - Me First & the Gimme Gimmes
Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep - Middle of the Road
When You Were Young - The Killers
Rippy the Gator - The Arrogant Worms
Suspicious Character - The Blood Arm
Touchdown Turnaround (Don't Give Up on Me) - Hellogoodbye
Toop Toop - Cassius
Pump Up the Jam - Technotronic feat. Felly
Twins - Paul Evans
Reggae Merengue - Tommy McCook & the Supersonics
Once & Never Again - The Long Blondes
Goodnight Goodnight - Hot Hot Heat
Take a Chance - The Magic Numbers
Commercial Breakdown - The Sunshine Underground
Give Me Back My Heart - Dollar
Girlie Girlie - Sophia George
It's My Life - Talk Talk
The Mummy - Rod Mckeun
America - Razorlight
I Don't Feel Like Dancin' (Radio Edit) - Scissor Sisters
Sunshine, Lollipops, Rainbows - Lesley Gore
Idlewild Blues - Outkast
Become the Enemy - The Lemonheads
Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
Love It When You Call - The Feeling
I Can't Get Enough of You - Erkey Grant & the Eerwigs
Poison - Alice Cooper
The Twist - Fat Boys & Chubby Checker
Like a Pen - The Knife
This Pullover - Paul Evans
In My Head - Queens of the Stone Age
Pour Some Sugar on Me - Def Leppard
Johnny Came Home Headless - The Arrogant Worms
I'm a Hog for You Baby - Erkey Grant & the Eerwigs
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Scrybe: it could be very good indeed

Scrybe is causing a lot of buzz on the web right now. Little is known about it, except that, based on its promotional video, it is an attractive and intuitive online (and offline) organiser that works on PCs and Macs.

If you've got 10 minutes, the video is worth a look. In the words of one of the many quotes featured on their site:

"Either these guys have pulled off a marketing hoax that is complete and beautiful, or they have created an app that will be the first in the wave of 'solve everything beautifully and elegantly once and for all'."
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Things that make you go, 'Why?'.

The Triumph Rocket III is the largest capacity production motorcycle in the world. 320kg. 2294cc. 147lb-ft of torque at 2,500 rpm. 140 bhp. 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. 0-100 in 7.

The kind of two-wheeled behemoth that has even the most loyal Harley-Davidson fan questioning their brand-loyalty. Zak and I took one for a test ride last year, and we still talk about the experience.


The question I have is, why is it available as a cross-stitch pattern?

Pogue reviews Sony eBook

David Pogue has written an excellent article about Sony's new eBoook in the The New York Times: [edited]

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

Whoops.

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.

Not everybody, however. Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.

There’s no backlight, however. Sony would probably argue that this trait makes the Reader even more like a traditional book, but it also means that you can’t read in bed with the lights off, as you can with a laptop or palmtop.

The Sony Reader has a few kinks to be ironed out.

Like an Etch-A-Sketch, the Reader’s screen has to wipe away each page before drawing the next one. Unfortunately, the result is a one-second white-black-white blink that quickly becomes annoying.

Sony has dreamed up some baffling controls — not an easy feat on what should be a very simple machine. For example, the next/previous page buttons are at 2 and 8 o’clock on a dime-size desk. A circular control might make sense if it had buttons at all four points of the compass — but only two?

There’s no search function, video or clickable links, either. So much for those key e-book advantages.

Still, Sony got the big stuff right: the feel of the machine, the pleasantness of reading, the clarity of type.

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped.

You know: p-books.
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MainMenu, making Mac maintenance more manageable

SantaSoftware has released MainMenu (Mac OSX only). The blurb on the homepage reads:

Don't have time to run all the various tools and scripts to keep your Mac running smoothly? MainMenu makes these tasks quick and easy, right from your menu bar.

Rebuilding your Spotlight library for faster searching, repairing permissions, cleaning caches to improve application performance, and even more advanced settings — such as enabling and disabling the Dashboard — are no more than two clicks away.

MainMenu is full of powerful maintenance tools to keep your Mac running like new, within a slick, simple interface.

It doesn't do anything that can't already be achieved using freeware utilities, but it does bring a lot of useful functions under one easy-to-find/easy-to-navigate menu. I've been using it for a while now, and it does all the above functions, along with a number of others I would otherwise have to use a separate utility for, including 'force empty trash'.

And it is free. Thank you Santa Software for my early Christmas present.
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12 USB devices you might not want

PC Magazine has collected 12 of the weirdest USB-powered devices, and displayed them on a page titled '10 Weirdest USB Devices'. Curiously, they fail to mention which 2 of the 12 items they don't consider weird.

Amongst the gems are memory sticks made of real sticks, the fondue (sorry, FUNdue) set pictured, a disco ball and a hamster wheel.

It seems to me that the hamster wheel was a wasted opportunity. Surely it would have been better if they had installed a mini-generator in the wheel's hub, the hamster (not included) could then earn its sunflower seeds charging my PowerBook's battery.
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Hyper-photos

Rauzier sees his 'hyper-photos' as the photographic equivalent of hyper-Realistic paintings, popularised in the 1970s by artists like Richard Estes). Rauzier 'wants the viewer to have to make an effort to tell if it’s a photo or a painting'.

He starts with 600-700 photos of a single scene taken over a period of at least 1-2 hours. He then stitches them together using Photoshop (the only program he could find that was capable of managing the 10-15 gigabyte files).
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Microexpressions

Scientific American Mind reports: [edited, the original article is long, but worth a read]

We do it automatically. As soon as we observe another person, we try to read his or her face for signs of happiness, sorrow, anxiety, anger. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong, and errors can create some sticky personal situations.

Yet Paul Ekman is almost always right. The psychology professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent 40 years studying human facial expressions. He has catalogued more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial muscle movements that reveal what a person is feeling inside. And he has taught himself how to catch the fleeting involuntary changes, called microexpressions, that flit across even the best liar's face, exposing the truth behind what he or she is trying to hide.

Does his talent make him a mind reader? "No," he says. "The most I can do is tell how you are feeling at the moment but not what you are thinking." He is not being modest or coy; he is simply addressing the psychological bottom line behind facial expressions: "Anxiety always looks like anxiety," he explains, "regardless of whether a person fears that I'm seeing through their lie or that I don't believe them when they're telling the truth."

The professor calls the ever present risk we all take of misreading a person's visage "Othello's error." In Shakespeare's drama, Othello misinterprets the fear in his wife Desdemona's face as a sign of her supposed infidelity. In truth, the poor woman is genuinely alarmed at her husband's unjust, jealous rage. Othello's subsequent decision to kill Desdemona is a fatal error, and Ekman wants to make sure that police, security personnel and secret service agents do not make the same mistake.

Ekman in 1967 visited extremely isolated tribes living in the jungles on the island of New Guinea. He found that the basic emotions he had postulated, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust, were associated with universal facial expressions. [Ekman is certain that] the language of the face has biological origins, and culture has no significant effect on it.

By paying close attention to microexpressions, people can learn to read signals that previously would have been perceptible only in slow motion. And here Ekman hit on another interesting phenomenon: most people - including law students, police officers, judges and prosecuting attorneys - find it difficult to expose fakers, but a small number of people seem to be able to correctly interpret microexpressions intuitively. Apparently, some of us are born with handy lie detectors.
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Biggest online picture ever (probably)

robgalbraith.com reports: [edited]

HAL9000, an Italian group that specializes in art restoration, preservation and high-resolution art photography, has created an 8.6 gigapixel image of the 1513 work entitled Parete Gaudenziana, which is over 35 feet wide and graces the interior of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Varallo Sesia, Italy.

A total of 1145 frames were captured during a 13-hour shooting day on January 30, 2006. The images were then assembled and cropped to create the final image of 96,679 pixels x 89,000 pixels

The online version of the photo allows zooming and scrolling right up to full resolution.
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More free typefaces

Apostrophich Lab have a number of well-drawn typefaces available for free download. Amongst my favourites are:

Day Roman is a balanced Gill-influenced face, with shades of Joanna and Aries. It has 'proper' numerals, and a complementary 'expert' set.

Hadley (and Hadley Alternate) provides a well-kerned, surprisingly legible art-deco typface with a number of letter-shape options.

Republika would be equally at home on a techno album sleeve or the bottom of a skateboard. And there is a bewildering range of widths and variations available, including italic.

Scriptina captures the spirit of beautiful handwriting, and includes a range of alternate characters.

Sedillo is a legible 'hand-formed' font, with the lower case providing alternative shapes.
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Pictures from Saturn 'a big disappointment'

A total of four NASA spacecraft have been sent to explore Saturn. Pioneer 11 was first to fly past the planet in 1979. Voyager 1 was next, followed by its twin, Voyager 2, in 1981.

The Cassini spacecraft is the first to explore Saturn's rings and moons from orbit. Cassini entered orbit on 30 June 2004 and has been sending data and images ever since.

The total cost of the Cassini-Huygens mission is about $3.26 billion. The image you see above this text was created by combining a total of 165 ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images.

And what do you know, THE RESULTING PICTURE IS INDISTINGUISHABLE TO THE 'ARTIST'S IMPRESSIONS' I USED TO LOOK AT IN MY SCHOOLBOOKS OVER 30 YEARS AGO!

Mind you, Cassini was 1.3 million miles from Saturn when the images were taken.
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Enviga; going even lower than Zero

From Coca-Cola's press release [edited]

The drink proven to burn calories – Enviga – hits the U.S. market in the Northeast in November and will roll out nationally in January 2007. A carbonated drink containing green tea extracts, calcium, and caffeine, Enviga is a joint venture of Nestlé and Coca-Cola.

“Enviga increases calorie burning. It represents the perfect partnership of science and nature,” said Dr Rhona Applebaum, chief scientist, The Coca-Cola Company.

“Enviga contains the optimum blend of green tea extracts (EGCG), caffeine and naturally active plant micronutrients designed to work with your body to increase calorie burning.

“The accumulated body of scientific research shows the ability of green tea’s powerful antioxidant EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate) to speed up metabolism and increase energy use, especially when combined with caffeine” said Nestlé researcher Dr Hilary Green.

Studies have shown that when EGCG and caffeine are present at the levels comparable to that in three cans of Enviga, healthy subjects in the lean to normal weight range can experience an average increase in calorie burning of 60 – 100 calories.

“We’ve seen a shift in consumers’ attitudes toward diet and health and wellness, with more consumers seeking product choices that support active lifestyles, rather than just eliminating things from their diet,” said John Hackett, senior vice president, Coca-Cola North America Marketing.
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Another input device, another awful name

Logitech have announced a new computer control device. The NuLOOQ (eughh!) navigator is a stationary control device, about the size of a bisected tennis ball. It has a multi-dimensional 'navring', allowing 360 degree pan and zoom and a touch sensitive circular disk, called the *cough* tooltuner for fine control.

Using the hand you don't use to control your mouse, it allows you to adjust brush sizes by 1 pixel increments in Photoshop, or text attributes in InDesign, timelines in video/audio apps or control your system volume using the touch sensitive circular disk.

Nudging the grey ring forwards, backwards, up, down, or twisting it clockwise or counter clockwise, allows you to instinctively navigate your way around your digital pictures, illustrations, documents and (if that's your thing) spreadsheets.

A click or tap on the top plate can execute undo and redo commands, access Photoshop tools, or play/pause a video/audio track. Pre-programmed macro commands could also be triggered using this method, for regularly-used keyboard or mouse-click sequences.

The NuLOOQ's web page has more information, and an interactive demo. As someone who spends a lot of time working on documents that demand a mixture of mouse and keyboard input, I will be very interested to give this device a try.

One important question the Logitech site doesn't seem to address is, with both of my hands now being used to control my computer, how am I going to supply my face with sandwiches and coffee?
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And now for some good news...

New Scientist reports: [edited]

African farmers are reclaiming the desert, turning the barren wastelands of the Sahel region on the Sahara's southern edge into productive farmland.

Comparison of satellite images taken this year and 20 years ago show that the desert is in retreat thanks to the replanting of hundreds of thousands of Ana trees, a type of Acacia. And wherever the trees grow, farming can resume.

Tree planting has led to the re-greening of 3 million hectares of land in Niger, enabling 250,000 hectares to be farmed again.

The land became barren in the 1970s and early 1980s through poor management and felling of trees for firewood, but since the mid-1980s farmers in parts of Niger have been protecting them instead of chopping them down.

"The results have been staggering", said Chris Reij of the Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
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Glitches, clicks and cuts

Glitch (also known as Clicks and Cuts) is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the late 1990s. It is produced by mixing and sequencing tiny samples of music with beats comprised of electronic pops, clicks and erm, glitches.

William Fields has been experimenting with sound since 1993. If your local HMV has it as a category, his work will be filed under 'Glitch' (incongruously snuggled between 'Garage Rock' and 'Gospel') but, in contrast to the majority of the music in this genre, Fields' compositions are exceptionally emotive, warm and melodic.

His use of looped samples bring to mind the ambient works of Brian Eno (especially 'Music for Airports') while the complex, unsettling rhythm changes have echoes of Drum'n'Bass and Jungle recordings.

A number of his pieces are available for free download at his site. 'Branches' and 'Asoka' are a good place to start. If you have a 20 minute journey some time in the near future, 'Twenty Four' (track 6 on Asoka) would make a marvellous companion.

Thanks to Conrad for bringing Mr Fields' work to my attention.
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Is our sense of justice hardwired?

New Scientist reports: [edited]

Using a tool called the 'ultimatum game', researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Subjects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to offer any amount – if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share.

In purely economic terms, the second partner should never reject an offer, even a really low one, such as $1, as they are still $1 better off than if they rejected it. Most people offered half of the money. But in cases where only a very small share was offered, the vast majority of "receivers" spitefully rejected the offer, ensuring that neither partner got paid.

Previous brain imaging studies have revealed that part of the frontal lobes known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, becomes active when people face an unfair offer and have to decide what to do.

They used a burst of magnetic pulses called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – produced by coils held over the scalp – to temporarily shut off activity in the DLPFC. Now, when faced with the opportunity to spitefully reject a cheeky low cash offer, subjects were actually more likely to take the money.

The researchers found that the DLPFC region's activity on the right side of the brain, but not the left, is vital for people to be able to dish out such punishment.

"The DLPFC is really causal in this decision. Its activity is crucial for overriding self interest," says Fehr. When the region is not working, people still know the offer is unfair, he says, but they do not act to punish the unfairness.

"Self interest is one important motive in every human," says Fehr, "but there are also fairness concerns in most people."

"In other words, this is the part of the brain dealing with morality," says Herb Gintis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, US. "[It] is involved in comparing the costs and benefits of the material in terms of its fairness. It represses the basic instincts."

Psychologist Laurie Santos, at Yale University in Connecticut, US, comments: "This form of spite is an evolutionary puzzle. There are few examples in the animal kingdom." The new finding is really exciting, Santos says, as the DLPFC brain area is expanded only in humans, and it could explain why this type of behaviour exists only in humans.

Fehr says the research has implications for how we treat young offenders. "This region of the brain matures last, so if it is truly overriding our own self interest then adolescents are less endowed to comply with social norms than adults," he suggests. The criminal justice system takes into account differences for under-16s or under-18s, but this area only fully matures around the age of 20 or 22, he says.
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Nokia's concept phone

Nokia has released images of Aeon, a concept phone that combines two touch-sensitive panels mounted on a fuel-cell power pack.


Each of the panels is capable of being used independently. The touch-screen displays man that all 'buttons' are virtual, so in one situation one panel could operate as the display, the other as the keypad. In another the roles could be reversed. Or each display could serve both functions.


Devices like this are all part of Nokia's vision of 'wearable technology'. Users could wear the lightweight panels as a badge, or connected to a wrist-strap.

Nokia are also keen to establish a new wireless standard. Wibree is basically an upgraded bluetooth which would allow the Aeon to be a 'thin-client', farming out processing and storage tasks to static servers.
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Useful ideas to save you money...

well, if you lived 60 years ago, and were 'good with your hands'!

JavaMoose's flickr site contains 105 lovingly scanned pages of a 1945 copy of Popular Mechanics, an magazine that has published articles devoted to science and technology since 1902.

I can remember flicking through battered, musty-smelling copies that my dad had kept, marvelling at the fact that he grew up in an era when people built aeroplanes in their garages from sheets of plywood and lawnmower engines!

The articles range from the practical to the bizarre. My personal favourites are the 'Monogram Guide' (p9) and the 'Condiment set with sailboat cutout' (p11), while headlines like 'Scrub Brush Is Handy Stroker for Long Belt Sander' (p12), 'Jigsawed Dutch Boy Holds Your Pipe with Both Hands' (p23) and 'Everyday Uses for Rubber Suction Cups' (p33) would all make excellent Monty Python sketch titles.

If you can't be bothered to view each scan individually, click here to download/view a PDF of all the pages.
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Google & Amazon boosting book sales

Reuters reports: [edited]

Publishers are starting to report an uptick in sales from Google Inc.'s online program that lets readers peek inside books, two years after the launch of its controversial plan to digitally scan everything in print.

Google has been enlisting publishers to voluntarily submit their books so that Web searchers can more easily find titles related to their interests, but some fear the project could lead to piracy or exploitation of their copyrighted content.

"Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers," said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.

She declined to provide specific figures, but said that sales growth has been "significant." Scollans estimated that 1 million customers have viewed 12,000 Oxford titles using the Google program.

Book search results from Google provide short page snippets and links to buy the books from online retailers or directly from publishers.

Some of the same publishers participating in the program have also united to file a lawsuit against Google alleging copyright violation over a separate plan by the Web search leader to digitize the world's libraries.

Specialty publisher Springer Science + Business reported sales growth of its backlist catalog using Google Book Search, with 99 percent of the 30,000 titles it has in the program getting viewed, including many published before 1992.

"We suspect that Google really helps us sell more books," said Kim Zwollo, Springer's global director of special licensing, declining to provide specific figures because the company is privately owned.

Others, including Penguin, have been less encouraged by Google, and have found greater success from other partnerships.

"Our experience has been that the revenue generated from Google has been pretty modest, whereas the Amazon program has generated more book sales," Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Amazon.com's search tool also allows users to scan the contents of books and browse sample pages. For Penguin's books included in the U.S. "Search Inside" program, sales have increased by 7 percent.

Historical warfare publisher Osprey is reaping the benefits of using both Google and Amazon to boost sales.

"When we looked at the first six months of stats, we saw that 30 percent of Google Book Search clicks went directly to our site, while roughly 40 percent went to Amazon," said William Shepherd, Osprey's managing director.

"Our sales through the Web are steadily increasing in proportion to our total sales, and we're confident that Google Book Search will accelerate this growth."

Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopaedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the "buy this book" Google link.
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Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Watch

Sony Ericsson have launched the MBW-100 Bluetooth Watch. The analogue watch will go on sale globally during Q4 of 2006 with a guideline retail price of EUR 300.

Designed in partnership with fashion watchmaker Fossil, the MBW-100 sports an OLED display beneath the watch face which displays who is calling you on your mobile (well, as long as your mobile is a Sony Ericsson K610, K610i, K618, K790, K800, V630, W710, W850, Z610 or Z710). A key press on the watch rejects the call, or diverts it to the phone or bluetooth headset.

The watch also allows you to play, pause and skip to the next track on your phone's music player, notifies you of text messages received and lets you know when your are out-of-range from your phone.

And now the bad news. It weighs 190 grammes. That's 5 grammes more than my 60 gigabyte iPod Photo. 190 grammes is twice the weight of your average candy-bar mobile phone, so why not just have the phone built in to the watch? An attractive lightweight wristwatch-style phone which paired to a bluetooth headset might get me wearing a watch again!

Oh, and Sony Ericsson also get the 'Tautology of the Week' award for this excerpt from the official press release:

"Most consumers cannot do without the indispensable tools for their busy lives"

Nice.
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300

Frank Miller has been around for a long time. His first published work was in 1978 (as an artist for Gold Key Comics). He then progressed through DC Comics to Marvel where he drew a couple of Spiderman episodes, with Daredevil as a supporting character.

Miller developed Daredevil, making him a darker and more complex character, and began plotting the stories as well as doing the drawing. Elektra was his next creation, another damaged and conflicted creation, infused with Manga-inspired themes.

And he's been going darker ever since, including Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (a brilliant re-invention Batman as an older man) and Sin City (about as dark as you can get!).

In 1998 he produced a five-issue comic called '300' (written and drawn by him, and coloured by Lynn Varley). This was released as a 'coffee-table' book in 1999, and is probably my favourite graphic novel.

It is a less-than-historical portrayal of the Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army.

And now it's being made into a film! And if the trailer is anything to go by, it's going to be great, using similar techniques to those used in the Sin City movie to keep the graphic novel atmosphere alive. Hurrah!
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Baby steps for teleporting

Yahoo! reports: [edited]

Scientists have already achieved the feat of 'teleporting' similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. The information was transferred over a distance of half a meter.

"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.

Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.

"It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik whose research is reported in the journal Nature.

Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states, which include physical properties such as energy, motion and magnetic field, of the atoms.

"Creating entanglement is a very important step but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps - that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback," he added.
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Ginormous digital art

Bert Monroy has been working with digital pictures since MacPaint. His latest creation is a monster, a Chicago scene unveiled at Photoshop World in Miami on March 22, 2006. It is a panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority. Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline. The rest was created in Adobe Photoshop.

• The finished image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of fifty Photoshop files.
• The image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used.
• Over 250,000 paths were drawn.

Visit his site to have a gawp.
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Ikea gets competition

My good 'friend in the furniture industry' Andrew Smith phoned me yesterday to enthuse about a furniture store he'd just visited. Ilva have successfully traded in Denmark for over 30 years. In a 'coals to Newcastle'-style move they opened a flagship store in Sweden a couple of years ago. And now they're moving into Britain, with stores in Thurrock and Manchester open already, and others planned.

They have a high-quality PDF brochure available for downloading. However, according to Andrew, the real fun is in visiting the stores. Unlike Ikea's 'walking around a warehouse' approach, they have spent a lot of time and effort making the stores a pleasure to be in. Design and quality of the products is a few shades above Ikea as well.
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Maybe Armstrong got it right!

Wired reports: [edited]

An Australian computer programmer says he found the missing "a" from Armstrong's famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard the phrase, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, "One small step for a man..." in the version he transmitted to NASA's Mission Control. Without the missing "a," Armstrong essentially said, "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind."

The famous astronaut has maintained that he intended to say it properly and believes he did. Thanks to some high-tech sound-editing software, computer programmer Peter Shann Ford might have proved Armstrong right.

Ford said he downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong's words from a NASA website and analyzed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses.

In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing "a" was spoken and transmitted to NASA.

"I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford's analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful," Armstrong said in a statement. "I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word."
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