Aesthetics: August 2008 Archive Page

Am I a bad person because I found this Language Log posting hilarious?

Which word is grosser?

#27	Moist	Used
Men	48%	52%
Women	56%	44%

If my old shoebox of Meego Star Trek action figures turns up, I'll consider myself very happy. Seton Hill's librarian, David Stanley, reports an even more significant historical find. From the Reeves Library blog.

Kelly Addleman, our public services librarian, received an email from a researcher in Germany who has been making a survey of the illumination appearing in early bibles published by Anton Koberger. Well, it turns out that we have one in our possession. We own a Biblia Latina which was published in 1478. The illuminations are so beautiful that I thought I would share some with you. I am also including a letter that establishes its provenance.

I've cropped part of the letter (apparently written about 60 years ago).  Click the image for a slight enlargement, or see the full original.

Excellent example of effective journalistic use of a striking detail. This made my morning.

The gnome, about a foot tall, wore a hat, a blue shirt over a bulging stomach and a wide grin as it sat on a table in open court throughout the two-day trial. Morrison and the weapon were separated by about 2 feet of table, with the gnome facing the defendant. --Rich Cholodofsky

Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps.  This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT)

Ellen Robinson, a volunteer college trustee in Denver, commissioned Sara Frances, a local photographer, to shoot a formal family portrait to hang prominently in their new house. Working for $150 an hour, Ms. Frances changed expressions of family members and swapped the dog's head between images. She slenderized bodies, adjusted skin tones and changed the color of several outfits to make for a more unified palette. She even straightened the collar on one son's shirt.

"You're spending a lot of money on these portraits," Ms. Robinson said. "They're supposed to last a lifetime -- generations, really. So why not get a helping hand to do it right?"

Photography has always represented, to some degree, a distortion of reality, said Per Gylfe, the manager of the digital media lab at the International Center of Photography in New York. A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

"We've always taken photographs as proofs of events, and we probably never should have," Mr. Gylfe said.

I need a new office chair.