Photoshop Disasters

Forget gels, check out these photo disasters!

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

R.I.P.?

An Elegy for Copy Editors: "The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds." (N.Y. Times)

Link roundup

• Why You Should Carry a Digital Camera At All Times "Last Tuesday, Lori Mehmen looked out her front door in Orchard, Iowa and this is what she saw." (gizmodo)


• Charles Darwin: 'Is man an ape or an angel?' "A hundred and fifty years ago this month, one great stink was about to replace another." (telegraph)


• And, lest I be accused of a Darwin bias:

Science marches on

Science of Mentos-Diet Coke Explosions Explained: "The startling reaction between Diet Coke and Mentos sweets, made famous in thousands of YouTube videos, finally has a scientific explanation. A study in the US has identified the prime factors that drive the fizzy plumes from Coke bottles: the roughness of the sweet and how fast it plummets to the bottle's base." (ABC News)

Link roundup

• The Neuroscience of Selling Your Stuff: "We sometimes say that it "hurts" to part with our stuff even if it's junk, and we know it's junk. Behavioral scientists call it the endowment effect, a theory that people put higher values on things once they own them. Turns out though that it actually does hurt to sell something you own, and it has nothing to do with overvaluing. Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania psychologists recreated the endowment effect in volunteers while scanning their brains with MRI." (boingboing/NatureNews)


• Mystery of Infamous "New England Dark Day" Solved by Tree Rings: "At noon, it was black as night. It was May 19, 1780 and some people in New England thought judgment day was at hand." (NASA)

Bad reasons to redesign

From the book Designing Magazines, Jandos Rothstein, 2007:

Staff boredom: "There is no better reason to redesign than reader boredom. Staff boredom, on the other hand, is best ignored — at least for a while.... The typical reader will spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to three hours with [your magazine]. It is likely that the staff will be tired of a new design before its premiere, thanks to all the hours that went into the format's preparation."

Staff changes: "There are lots of times when a new publisher, editor, or design director will come into an organization and leverage his or her outsider perspective and energy to become the driving force for an overdue or otherwise needed redesign. There are other times when a new person advocates changes to make the publication more personally comfortable or simply to be able to point to a major accomplishment under his or her stewardship....How can you tell the difference between ego and vision? ...Arbitrary changes are likely to be poor changes."

Link roundup

• Intelligent People 'Less Likely to Believe in God'


• Men Are Boring


• Oh, Are We? (all from Telegraph)

Link roundup

• Time travel back to 1000 A.D.: Survival tips "I hope you have a strong back and an up to date smallpox vaccination." (marginal revolution)


• The Bikini Effect Makes Men Impulsive: "Bikinis and other sexy stimuli can make men more prone to seek immediate gratification -- leading to blown diets, budgets and bank accounts, new research suggests." (LiveScience)

Link roundup

• The Sky from Above: 15 photos by space shuttle astronauts (boston.com)


• Is Google Making Us Stupid? Or is it just this blog? (atlantic monthly)


• A big, big snail (wackyarchives)

Monday inspiration

Black and white photography (Smashing Magazine)

Stop, thief!

I dunno how many of you use FaceBook, but someone named Rob Mariani created a Facebook group called URMA (United Rob Mariani Association, for "all people named rob mariani or [who] want to be named rob mariani"), which, in and of itself, isn't all that interesting. More interesting is the fact that he stole the URMA logo.

Three words that could overthrow physics

What is magnetism? "I set out on what I assumed would be a minutes-long odyssey to understand the phenomenon [of magnetism]. Seventy-one days later, I am here with astonishing findings.

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another -- more astonishing still, perhaps -- nobody seems to care." (Discover magazine)

Link roundup

• Senate Begins Largely Symbolic Climate-Change Debate: "The era of climate-change legislation is finally upon us -- sort of." (wired)


• Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered: "Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions." (livescience)


• NASA Scientists Make Magnetic Fields Visible, Beautiful: "Magnetic fields are invisible, at least usually. But Scientists from NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory have made them visible as "animated photographs," using sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing. It makes the fields, as explained by the scientists, dance in an absolutely gorgeous movie called Magnetic Movie." (gizmodo)


• Gun T-shirt 'was a security risk':
  "A man wearing a T-shirt depicting a cartoon character holding a gun was stopped from boarding a flight by the security at Heathrow's Terminal 5." (BBC)