This, believe it or not, is a two-dimensional pavement drawing. Julian Beever specialises in astonishing anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of three dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint. Lots more examples (many equally hard to believe) on his site.
Leading-edge Uselessness Department. Playing Xbox Live over Google WiFi While Driving.
I’m reading a lovely book — Vol. 1 of The Paris Review Interviews. What’s lovely about it isn’t just the content (though some of the interviews are terrific), but also the feel of the volume: it’s a softback printed on matt paper with uncut edges — just like the Gallimard books of my adolescence.
It’s amazing how much tactile pleasure a nicely-made book gives. This one is, as the saying goes, hard to put down. Don Norman is right: attractive things work better.
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”.
Dorothy Parker, The Paris Review Interview.
One of the funnier aspects of digital photography is listening to retail sales personnel explaining megapixels to customers. Basically the line seems to be that the more megapixels you have, the better. How come then that my Nikon D70, with its 6.1 megapixel sensor, produces consistently better images than my Leica D-Lux 3 compact, which boasts 10 megapixels?
The answer, crudely, boils down to two factors: a larger sensor and better lenses. When I was talking about this with a colleague, Dave Phillips (also a D70 user), he pointed me to this useful tutorial by Sean T. McHugh, whose site also includes some terrific photographs of Cambridge.
Wow! Interesting New York Times report…
Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury yesterday to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom. If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.
The ruling, in Federal District Court in San Diego, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the big networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.
At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.
Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved, along with the French electronics company Thomson and Bell Labs, in the format’s development.
The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3…
I had always assumed that Fraunhofer owned all the relevant rights.
Suddenly Ogg Vorbis looks more interesting.