The New Yorker has taken some trouble to find out. It all came to light when a number that had appeared in a fortune cookie came up in the US Powerball lottery and 110 people rather than the usual handful turned up to claim their reward.
Monthly Archives: June 2005
Technology and beauty
As regular readers know, I am fascinated by photography, so it’s not surprising that two articles on the subject caught my eye — both published in the New York Times.
The first was an intriguing piece by Michael J. Lewis on how popular conceptions of beauty are shaped by the photographic technology available at a particular time. Black and white film, for example, favoured faces like those of Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn.
the intense tonal range of black and white photography favored a richly contoured face, with prominent cheekbones that cast lovely form-defining shadows. An “angular face,” as Katharine Hepburn termed her own, was particularly good at casting shadows. If her face was insufficiently angular, an actress might make it more so. Marlene Dietrich is supposed to have had her upper molars removed to put shadows under her cheekbones, a story she bitterly denied.
In describing these features, people invariably resorted to the metaphor of sculpture, and compared them to a glistening marble statue lighted dramatically from one side. The director George Cukor observed that “that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes,” Joan Crawford’s face, “caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle.”
A generation later, in his essay on Garbo’s face, Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, described it as enigmatic “mask of antiquity,” that was “sculpted in something smooth and fragile.”
But the arrival of Technicolor in the 1950s changed all that. The new technology, Lewis writes,
did not take kindly to the sculptural face. The legendary Barrymores, with profiles like a map of the English coast, suddenly seemed too craggy.
There arose a new concept of film beauty. Now the distinguishing trait was not so much facial architecture as a glowing complexion. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Grace Kelly nor Kim Novak had what might be called a strong face, but all presented vast expanses of vitally healthy skin on the big screen.
Lewis thinks that one of the effects of digital technology — especially movies on DVD — is to lead to an emphasis on oversized facial features. This, at any rate, is how he interprets the findings of a poll conducted by People magazine, which asked its 500,000 readers to choose the fifty “most beautiful” people.
What is the American ideal of beauty today? To judge by People magazine’s new “50 most beautiful” issue, which came out earlier this month, it does not tend to delicate and fine features. If anything, it runs in the opposite direction, toward large and striking features: Angelina Jolie’s oversize lips; the emphatic jaw of Mariska Hargitay, a star of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”; the startlingly wide mouth of Julia Roberts.
And the reason for this? Because we see them mainly on a small(ish) screen.
The defining feature of the digital image is its smallness. A head shown on a television screen is usually life-size or smaller, a format that favors large features. Just as cartoonists exaggerate the features of their characters so they remain legible in miniature, so oversize features work well on the small screen. The more cartoonish, within limits, the better.
The other interesting NYT article was a profile of the distinguished photojournalist David Burnett, who in addition to lugging round the standard Canon digital cameras and lenses that most professional snappers use nowadays, also carries an ancient 4 x 5 Speed Graphics camera — because it produces the kinds of images to which digital technology cannot even aspire.
Delete ‘warming’, insert ‘cooling’
Well, well…
A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.
In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.
The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.
Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.
Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the “climate team leader” and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he has no scientific training.
From the New York Times. Are we surprised? There’s a nice graphic in the NYT report showing ‘before’ and ‘after’ scans of a particular document.
Before:
The challenge for the USGCRP is to provide the best possible scientific basis for documenting, diagnosing, and projecting changes in the earth’s life-support systems, and the role for CCRI is to facilitate full use of this scientific information in policy and decisionmaking on response strategies for adaptation and mitigation at the international, national and regional scales.
After:
The challenge for the USGCRP is to provide the best possible scientific basis for documenting, understanding and projecting changes in the Earth’s life-support systems, and the role for CCRI is to reduce the significant remaining uncertainties associated with human-induced climate change and facilitate full use of scientific information in policy and decisionmaking on possible response strategies for adaptation and migration.
[Changes in italics.]
Dancers
Photographed at the Bodywork show tonight in Cambridge.
The world according to RyanAir
Stansted airport, yesterday morning. Each traveller locked in his or own personal world. No interaction.
Essential equipment
Yes — it’s BananaGuard! Order yours now. Parents, you know it makes sense.
Free broadband
Seb and I are sitting in the departure lounge in Cork airport, making liberal use of the free wireless broadband service provided. Civilised country, my homeland,
Jerry Springer naked
Nancy Banks-Smith is one of the funniest writers alive. Her dismemberment of the Jerry Springer show in today’s Guardian is a classic.
In Radio Times, Jerry Springer gives the English language short shrift. “Your talk shows plod along – it could be radio. The rule on my TV show is you have to be able to watch it with the sound off. If you still kinda know what’s going on, that’s compelling.” Eager to please, I watched The Springer Show (ITV1) with the sound off.
AM I THE DAD? DNA RESULTS! What appears to be a snake-oil salesman enters. The audience rises, revealing tattoos on their buttocks. The snake-oil salesman shakes hands with the front row. Daniel, a simple soul in earrings, is sitting on a bare stage. Not spending much on production, are they? Enter Jessica. She points her tremendous breasts accusingly at Daniel, picks up her chair in a marked manner and moves it some distance from him. Two enormous women lumber in from opposite ends. Judging by their strong resemblance to Daniel and Jessica, these are their respective mothers. Absolutely no DNA test is needed. The mothers fling themselves at each other like worlds colliding. Bouncers tear them apart. The snake-oil salesman fans himself with an oleaginous hand.
Captions shed some light on all this heat. JESSICA SAYS THE BABY LOOKS LIKE DANIEL. More precisely, she screamed at her mother-in-law, “She is the spitting image of you. Poor cow!” As Jessica’s mother-in-law looks like a Sherman tank, the audience loved this.
Like his namesake, Daniel is surrounded by roaring. Springer said he felt the noise go through his suit. Sometimes intelligible insults (“Silly cow!” “Slappers Reunited!”) float free from the fracas. Silence always indicates the excision of some obscenity.The DNA results were opened on stage and Daniel, to universal recrimination, turned out to be the father of Jessica’s daughter. “One day your little girl may see a tape of this show. God forbid!” said the snake-oil salesman piously. By his standards it was all a bit tame. “If she were pregnant by another woman, that would be in my American show.”
Now let’s try watching it with the vision off.
iVideo
You can, apparently, play videos on your iPod, provided (a) you have already installed Linux on it and (b) have a PhD in comp sci. Having lots of free time would also help. I don’t qualify, alas.
Death by chocolate
An unsuspecting Cory Doctorow was lured by cruel, unscrupulous Ben Hammersley into Hemingway’s in Florence. Outcome described as follows:
Afterwards, I fell asleep for half an hour on the sofa in Hemingway’s, collapsed on one of my dining companions. My brain was overwhelmed with the tastes, and it had to shut my body off so that it could process the input. I have a feeling that from now on, whenever a little money finds its way into my pocket, the temptation to blow it on a plane ticket to Florence (cheap from London, as these things go) and have a cup of Hemingway’s Montezuma is going to be nigh-irresistible. I no longer feel the need to blow my cash on computers or gadgets — just hook an IV of this thing straight into my arm and leave me to die by chocolate.