• A Field Guide To Typestaches (torweeks)
• Yo, ocean, bro? You are like so totally over. (TarpSurfing)
• Growth opportunities in the Inuit bathing suit market! (NOAA)
• Many mightily massive multipliers (greg.org)
• God hates Jedi and other revelations (ComicsAlliance)
• My god, it’s full of conifers! (TreeHugger)
• Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (Vittone)
• “Refute” and “repudiate” sittin’ in a tree… (dictionary.com)
• Breakout taken to its logical extreme (Wonderfl)

They say that a moving picture is worth about 30,000 words per second, so check this out:

Click to read more…

They’re different!  Why?  As the story goes, after one too many blind Tokyo alleys, Iwatani expunged dead ends from the prototype.  A fortuitous accident in modulo-28 space created the tunnels.  And the more expansive overall feel of the final maze?  The details are hazy, but my sources whisper something about a retreat to the American Southwest.  And peyote.

Of course, I made the last paragraph up, but whatever happened, thank you lucky star!  For without Pac-Man’s addictive gameplay – amplified by the improved maze, no doubt – I might have never met his girlfriend: Ms. Pac-Man.

Oh, Ms. Pac-Man, and the crazy bowling alley days that we spent together!  To preserve those precious memories, I shall model my labyrinthine countryside manor after her immaculate first level.  Every detail will be included, from the power pellets and food on the floor to the roaming fruit and ghosts!

Except for Blinky.  That dude’s a flippin’ bastard.

Wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka…

Back in 1884, Wright Street was just another new road on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  Bungalows quickly filled its freshly-surveyed lots, and as the city grew, apartments and commercial buildings soon followed.  In 1954, California’s first superhighway, the Harbor Freeway, passed two hundred feet westward, and a scant seven years later, the Santa Monica Freeway encroached from the east.  Construction began on the connecting ramps, and Wright winced as road workers halved its length, blocked off one end, and encircled it with concrete pillars topped by pavement.

Click to read more…

For those unfamiliar, XKCD is the popular webcomic, and on its sister blog, author Randall Munroe announced his survey as follows:

I’d like your help for a color name survey!  The survey shows you colors, and you type a name (word or phrase) you might use for that color.  The names can be as broad or specific as you want.

During the next two months, over 200,000 people named more than 5,000,000 random hues.  Soon thereafter, Randall delivered a frequently side-splitting analysis of the results, artfully punctuated by his wonderful Color Map: an illustration detailing the territorial dominance of each name in fully-saturated RGB space.  The kicker was that the magnanimous Munroe made the individual survey responses – possibly the largest body of such information in existence – publicly available for anyone to use.  Kudos for freeing the data, dude!

Now, deep in the cockles of my drama queen heart, there’s always been a little shrine for the colors with the charismatic, less-spoken names.  Could periwinkle roll off the tongue more adorably?  Maroon?  Aye, there be pirates about!  And yeah, burgundy and chartreuse do sound a bit boozy, but they’re hella more fun at parties than “dark red” and “yellow-green.”

Their Achilles’ heel?  The lack of a verbal tether to the common colors, causing the occasional mix-up about what they mean.  Case in point: until yesterday, I thought that khaki was an olive-type of green, but per my wife and other experts, it leans more towards beige and brown.

Egads!  I’d been afflicted by the embarrassing scourge of color confusion!  So that no one else should suffer it – or have to wear Dockers to know what “khaki” means – Weather Sealed’s design team went to work on a cure.  The resulting visualization, borne of the XKCD data, shows the primary color names, their lesser-used brethren, and the relationship between them:

The Color Strata includes the 200 most common color names (excluding black-white-grayish tones), organized by hue horizontally and relative usage vertically, stacked by overall popularity, shaded representatively, and labeled where possible.  Besides filtering spam, ignoring cruft, normalizing grey to gray, and correcting the most egregious misspellings (here’s looking at you, fuchsia), the results are otherwise unadulterated.  As such, similar color names, like sea green, seafoam green, and seafoam, each appear separately.  They’re synonymous… or are they?

Anyways, once you’ve had your fill of that, bliss out on this:

It’s the same basic graph, but with flipped shading, label-free, stretched to fill the vertical, and whipped until creamy smooth.

Ahhhh.  On that note, we conclude today’s episode of color research.  Subscribe to stay tuned for more – we might even pull Crayola crayons back into the mix – coming soon!

Hooray!  It’s the first of June, and long gone are winter cold and spring gloom.  We’re footloose and parka-free, baby birds chirp with glee, green lawns and mowers duel endlessly, and he intercepts the puck at mid-ice, shakes a defender, speeds over the blue line, fades right, jigs left, cocks his stick, lets loose with a slapshot, and scores!  Goal!!!

What in tarnation?  They’re still playing ice hockey?!?!

You betchya, as illustrated by the following graph, which shows the calendar dates of the NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals for each season from 1927 to present:

After hanging back for nearly forty years in the chilly territory of April, the finals skate past the May 1st center line in 1965 and dart offsides during the ’92 playoffs.  Since then, they’ve lingered there, ending latest on the warm June 24th evening that capped 1995’s lockout-delayed season, three days past the official beginning of summer!

Now, call me a hopeless nostalgic, but remove something far enough from its natural state – say from a frozen pond to a climate-controlled ice rink in the summertime – and gone is the gravitas that made it interesting in the first place.  Hockey playoffs in June have the same emotional pull as the World Series – played indoors, on Astroturf, in February.

On the other hand, the NHL’s still solvent, so maybe, on balance, the late season is a draw?  Does the average person find hockey irresistible when dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top?  God, it’s hot… and that ice looks so cold and refreshing… come to mama, so she can belly-flop onto the rink like an octopus?

Next thing you know, the National Hockey League will be doling out teams to cities where it never snows, and naming them after those “warm-weather” animals… like sharks and panthers!  Hey hoser, how silly would that be, eh?

What’s with the 350 pumpkin?  Is that your house number?

After a brief dramatic pause, the man spoke passionately of greenhouse gasses and global warming, the well-intended but woefully-inadequate Kyoto Protocol, and that we must swiftly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to a level that scientists have determined will spare the planet:

350 parts per million!

We thanked “350 Guy” for the information and candy and continued on our way.

Later, to avoid another such embarrassing intellectual faux pas, I began to bone up on my climatology.  Now, for example, I know that the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from a pre-Industrial 280 parts per million (ppm) to around 390 ppm today.

Some straightforward calculations reveal that this additional 110 ppm of CO₂ amounts to a mass of 564,000 metric megatons and volume of 437,000,000 gigaliters – the shocking equivalent, per capita, of one bubble of pure carbon dioxide, 163 feet in diameter, for each man, woman, and child on the face of this earth (*):

That’s 6.8 billion enormous spheres of greenhouse gas, each large enough to swallow the entire 129-foot length of a Boeing 737-800 airliner with room to spare.

On that note, please allow 350 Guy and Yours Truly to announce a collaborative effort – our Fall 2010 line of giant-CO₂-bubble jack-o’-lanterns – coming in five months to a front porch near you!

You know the angelic “ahhhhhhh” chorus sound that plays whenever someone “sees the light” in the movies?  It rose to a crescendo in the background.

Because, like a first kiss, nothing can completely prepare a photographer for his or her initial encounter with a gigantic disc of aluminum and precision-ground optical glass:

That’s all 5.3 pounds of it, standing on edge, seven inches across and two inches deep, next to a twelve-ounce soda can and a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens for the sake of scale.  Oooooh, baby.

Owing to its pancake shape – the opposite of the typical long-and-slender lens – it soon became known as the Glass Frisbee.

I bought the Frisbee for its incredible combination of 200mm focal length and f/1.3 aperture, which I’ll use to push the limits of narrow depth of field.  By the laws of physics, once shoehorned onto my large-format 4×5 monorail camera, it’s the optical equivalent of a 50mm f/0.35 lens on a full-frame SLR.  From there, I begin an epic journey into a dreamy portrait-esque frontier, with triple the background blur of any currently-available off-the-shelf photographic system!  All theoretically, at this point, of course.

In the meantime, the Frisbee will help with a handful of other projects.  When I’m feeling Evil, it’ll focus the Death Ray.  My respectable, gentlemanly side shall enjoy a Cyclopean monocle of remarkable refinement.  And, should the situation become particularly funky, as it does from time to time, well, damn yo, the Frisbee’s got it covered.

Accessorize with three feet of decorative gold chain, and the Frisbee transforms into a lens necklace mega-medallion that’d make Flavor Flav proud:

Blingetty blangetty blong, playuh!

To receive updates on future experiments with the Glass Frisbee, please subscribe!

Spoiler: It’s one of the rare blog posts that includes both an in-depth discussion of the RGB colorspace and the word “penis!”

“Use us!” they implore, as traffic flies by.

In real life, we’d probably shy away from scavenging freeway litter, but recycling Tweets, online?  Maybe… because it’s easy, clean, safe, and Twitter actually encourages us to do so in their Terms Of Service:

Cool beans.  Next, consider another excerpt:

So, we grant Twitter an unrestricted “right to sublicense” our Tweets, and Twitter states that they “encourage and permit the broad re-use” of them.  Hmmm…

Does this mean that every Tweet issues forth with legal permission for anyone to do with it whatever they please?

Indeed, that’s what news service giant Agence France-Presse (AFP) appears to contend in their late-March court filing against professional photographer Daniel Morel:

Here’s the backstory, in a nutshell…

After surviving January’s Haiti earthquake, Daniel Morel took the iconic photos of the immediate Port-Au-Prince aftermath, and somehow, out of the chaos, posted them on Twitter.  Shortly thereafter, hungry for coverage, AFP found Daniel’s pictures and wired them to media outlets worldwide, without his knowledge or compensation.  Within hours, they were plastered across dozens of major television, print, and online properties – incorrectly attributed to one “Lisandro Suero,” to boot!

Sacrebleu!  Unpleasantries were exchanged, lawyers got involved, neither side budged appreciably, and, in late March, AFP formally accused Morel of “commercial defamation,” amongst other things.  Daniel has since entered a copyright infringement cross-complaint.  You can read the nitty-gritty details, including Court filings, here.

In Daniel’s favor, while he linked to his photos from Twitter, he posted the actual image files on TwitPic, a separate, independent sharing site where owners specifically retain all rights.  So, while AFP may have legally reused Morel’s links, the pictures themselves were never an entrée in the hypothetical “all-you-can-eat Tweet buffet.”  Assuming that his counsel argues as such, Daniel may soon have the opportunity to administer a cathartic U.S. Copyright Code clubbing.

I love the smell of an underdog-driven multi-million dollar statutory infringement smackdown in the morning!

Please, do note that I am not a lawyer, and that this article is not legal advice.  If the title doesn’t make any sense, you probably missed the original meme.