firehose

The Fifth Element

When in The Fifth Element the Mangalore Aknot calls Zorg to report that the “mission is accomplished,” we get a few seconds of screen time with Zorg’s secretary who receives the call. During this moment, she’s a bit bored, and idly shoves a finger into a small, lipstick-case sized device. When she removes it, the device has colored her fingernail a lovely shade of #81002c.

The small device is finger-sized, the industrial design feels very much like cosmetics, and its simple design clearly affords inserting a finger. There’s also a little icon on the side that indicates its color. This one device speaks well of what the entire line of products might look like. All told, a simple and lovely interaction in a domain, i.e. cosmetics, that typically doesn’t get a lot of attention in sci-fi.

But what is even more remarkable is that this isn’t the only fingernail interface in the Make It So survey. There is one other, 7 years earlier, and it happens to be used by someone with the exact same job. This other interface comes from the 1990 movie Total Recall.

Total Recall (1990)

As you can see, this receptionist has an interface for coloring her nails as well, but the interaction is entirely different. This device has something like a a tablet with a connected stylus. It displays 16 color options in a full screen grid. She selects a particular color with the tap of the stylus. Then when she taps the stylus to a nail, the nail wipe-transitions to the new color from the tip to the cuticle.

This device is cumbersome. It’s not something that could fit into a purse. Does she just leave it on her desk? Doesn’t her supervisor have opinions about that? My sense is that this is something better suited to a salon than an office space.

As a selection and application mechanism, the stylus is a bad choice. It requires quite a bit of precision to tap the tip of the nail. Our old friend Paul Fitts certainly would use something different for his nails. Since the secretary has to have to have some kind of high-tech coating, perhaps similar to electrophoretic ink, why is the stylus necessary at all? Can’t she just tap her fingernails to the color square of her choice? That would disintermediate the interaction and save her the hassle of targeting her nails with that stylus, especially when she has to switch to her off-hand.

The color display poses some other interesting problems as well. It needs to show colors, but why just 16? We don’t see any means of selecting others. Are these just this season’s most popular? Why not offer her any color she likes? Or some means of capturing her current outfit and suggesting colors based on that? Even the layout is problematic. Because of the effect of simultaneous contrast, the perception of a color alters when seen directly adjacent to other colors. These squares should have some sort of neutral border around them to make perception of them more “true.” But why should we burden her with having to imagine what the color will look like? Show her an image of her hand and let her see in advance what the new color will look like on her fingers. Any sort of low-level augmented reality would help her feel less like she’s picking paint for her living room wall.

And the winner is…

Comparing the two, I’d say that The Fifth Element fingernail-o-matic wins out. It’s more personal, more ergonomic, fits into the user’s lifestyle more, feels more fashionable than techy (which that receptionist clearly cares about). Yes, it’s more restricted in choices, but I’d much rather figure out how to augment that little device with a color selector than try to make a stylus and tablet fingernail-o-matic actually work.

C-Stunners 2012 Series


Columbian Army


Miss Kenya


European Mask


African Mask

artmusicvegan:

Cyrus Kabiru is an artist based in Nairobi, Kenya best known for his C-Stunners,“an ongoing work where Cyrus creates and wears artistic bifocals. The work sits itself between fashion, wearable art, performance, and one of a kind commodity objects.”

I love the fact that Kabiru recycles found materials to create these futuristic pieces. His C-Stunners inspire so many visual connections, so whenever I see them I imagine different people wearing them—- for example Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Asha, the lead character in the post-apocalyptic African short film Pumzi, Janelle Monáe as Cindi Mayweather, Grace Jones in her video for Slave to the Rhythm as well as her Citroën commercial (directed by Jean-Paul Goude),Erykah Badu lost in a deserted landscape in her video for Didn’t Cha Know, or artist Karen Seneferu’s piece Techno Kisi. More HERE. 

Handbags are also used for fashion just not holding coins so when people pick out handbags they must make sure that it matches, or else it will look more awkward than fashionable.

Link

A massive explosion occurred Wednesday night at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, about 20 miles north of Waco. YouTube users zidyboby and Meteorito Russia 2013 caught the powerful blast on camera. More coverage on the explosion is available from Reuters, The New York Times, and Dallas News.

Sprint still has plenty of work to do before its LTE network can match the coverage Verizon and AT&T offer, but the carrier's latest rollout manages to scratch a few major cities off the list. The carrier has announced that it's today lighting up service in 21 cities including Los Angeles, Memphis, and Charlotte, North Carolina. From there, the new markets get a bit smaller in scope and population. In all, with today's additions Sprint's still-young LTE network is now available in 88 markets. America's number three carrier is also mapping out new destinations where it will enable high-speed data by the end of 2013. 34 markets in all have joined Sprint's existing roadmap, including Orlando, Portland, and Spokane.

• Source Sprint
• Related Items sprint lte 4g expansion cellular network coverage

A heated Twitter conversation that began Wednesday with Jimmy Palmiotti saying it was “a crime” Amanda Conner didn’t receive an Eisner Award nomination for her work on Silk Spectre took an unexpected turn when Landry Walker pointed to a blog post by Eisner judge Frank Santoro in which he lists all the creators who contributed to Before Watchmen and says, “I refuse to buy or read anything by these folks.”

“HOLY SHIT… how could he be a judge then??” Palmiotti replied.

The easy answer is that if everyone who expressed an opinion was eliminated from consideration, there would be no one left to be an Eisner judge. However, Josh Flanagan of iFanboy went straight to Santoro for a response:

I definitely had strong feelings about Before Watchmen when it was announced. However, once I became an Eisner judge, I took my responsibility seriously, set my feelings aside, and considered the books that were submitted—as did all the other judges. (And I don’t believe any of the other judges had actually seen that particular blog post.) These titles and creators were up against strong competition in all the categories for which they qualified, and ultimately none of them made the final nominations list. I actually went to bat for Steve Rude and Darwyn Cooke specifically. Some of the creators I listed in the posting are indeed nominated for Eisners for other work they did. So no, it did not affect the judging decisions.

I don’t know Santoro, and I wasn’t in the judging room, but as a former Eisner judge, this rings true. There’s a world of difference between putting something on your personal blog in the heat of the moment and making a considered decision in a roomful of your peers, and I find it hard to believe that any Eisner judge would take the responsibility so lightly as to allow personal prejudice to interfere with the process.

There are a couple of reasons for this: Being a judge is an honor, and, as Santoro says, we take the responsibility seriously. But you’re also one of six, and the other judges are taking it seriously, too. So even if I were to walk into the room with an agenda, it wouldn’t last. Eisner judging is a collaborative effort; the judges have extensive, sometimes heated, discussions before voting. It is possible for one person to sink one book, maybe two, but maintaining a blacklist that long, and with that much talent, would be impossible, simply because the others wouldn’t stand for it. I’m no apologist for Before Watchmen — haven’t read it, don’t care to — but I couldn’t take seriously any process that eliminated the likes of Darwyn Cooke and Jill Thompson from the get-go. Nobody would.

What Santoro reads on his personal time is his business, but once he became an Eisner judge, his status changed. Trust me, there is no way in hell you could have gotten me to read The Art of Doug Sneyd, or even Daredevil, if it wasn’t for a higher calling, but I ended up liking both of those a great deal and advocating for their nomination. Ultimately, as my fellow judge Larry Marder put it,

All the hoopdee-doo, the hype, the heat, the raving complimentary blurbs on the back cover, the placements on year’s end top 10 lists, previous award-winning reputation of publisher and creative teams went out the window. It came down to the story I was reading at that moment and how that story filtered through my brain.

One final point: Flanagan raises the possibility of a conflict of interest because Santoro writes for The Comics Journal. Santoro refrained from voting in the comics journalism category, as I did when I was a judge. Eisner administrator Jackie Estrada states the general case: “In fact, if a conflict of interest occurs, whenever a judge has some kind of involvement in a potential nominee, that person is recused.” Eisner judges come from a variety of areas: Creators, librarians, commentators, academics, retailers and administrators, and all are involved deeply in comics in some way. Conflicts of interest are inevitable. What’s important is how they are handled, and I think Estrada and the Eisner panel have done a good job of that. It’s not just requiring judges to abstain from a single vote, it’s having a balanced panel of perceptive judges with different areas of expertise and setting up a collaborative process for them to make their choices.

Three Maps of the Proposed Panama Canal (1895)

Map of the proposed route of a Panama Canal, from 1895, Part I. Map of proposed Panama Canal I Date: 1895 Author: unkwn Dwnld: 01, 02, 03 Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other engineering maps that you might want to check out. Three maps illustrating the French plan for a proposed Panama Canal between Nueva...

the BIG Map Blog - Interesting maps, historical maps, BIG maps.

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. – Matt Hardy

thedarkhare:

Morocco, 1930

FOREVER REBLOG

8 Pretentious Latin and Greek Plurals: OCTOPODES (octopus) RHINOCEROTES (rhinoceros) ...

bohemea:

Tilda Swinton: Stranger Than Paradise - W by Tim Walker, May 2013

“Do I get stress headaches at work? Yes, definitely. From the moment I get in, it’s “Denise we need this! Denise we need that!” Which is stressful… ‘cause my name is Linda. Denise is the other black woman that works here. By 10am, someone in the copy room makes a joke about Kobe Bryant, and everyone looks at me to make sure it’s ok. And I smile like it’s ok. But really, my head and neck are starting to throb. Then I spend the rest of my afternoon training my interns, and answering their questions, like, “Yes, black people use shampoo”, and, “No, I don’t know any good reggae clubs around here”, and, “Yes, Condoleezza Rice is very articulate, why do you sound so surprised?” And, “No, I can’t tell you where to buy weed!” And that’s when I reach for Excedrin.”

ha! take that evolutionists!!!1!

Kodachrome

The rebellion persisted for more than four decades, costing tens of thousands of lives. But last October the government and the main rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), signed a preliminary agreement to give Muslim areas greater autonomy in exchange for peace.

People who write 100 or more text messages a day tend to be "less reflective," and more likely to exhibit prejudice against minority groups. Those are the puzzling findings of a three-year longitudinal study in Canada.

Read more...

judgecorp writes "Samsung Taiwan has been accused of paying to have negative reviews of HTC products put online by students who recommended Samsung devices instead. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission is investigating Samsung's advertising agency in Taiwan, and Samsung Taiwan has responded by cancelling all Internet marketing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Winer introduces Fargo.io, a web-based, ad-supported outliner that stores to Dropbox. It looks nice and it sounds like just the beginning to a bigger project and importantly, it uses OPML for import and export.

By way of Taking Note

ifyoulikemovies:

New pictures from Monsters University

in theaters June 21st

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale

As part of the ridiculously overloaded Nintendo Direct this morning, Nintendo revealed that the Guild02 games are coming to the eShop in North America and Europe!

And that means we get to play this game by Boku no Natsuyasumi creator Kazu Ayabe, about being a 10-year-old boy living an everyday life in a small Japanese town… that is overrun by kaiju every Friday afternoon.

Other games in the collection include Bugs vs. Tanks, a shooter about a tiny, tiny tank by former Mega Man series producer Keiji Inafune, and The Starship Damrey, a suspense adventure game by the Kamaitachi no Yoru creators, in which you’re an amnesiac who wakes up in the dark on a spaceship. Man, the Guild series is so eclectic! That’s awesome!

If you’re missing out on any of the previous Guild games, they just happen to be on sale this week! And if you’re interested in Ayabe, you should maybe look forward to Scroll #10!

BUY Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL consoles, upcoming releases

Nerval's Lobster writes "These days, when something in the world goes very wrong, it seems as if everybody learns about it first on Twitter and Facebook. In the minutes after homemade bombs turned the finish line of the Boston Marathon into a crime scene, terms such as #BostonMarathon shot to the top of Twitter's Trends list; across the country, office workers first learned of the attack when someone posted a message on a Facebook page. Social networks have become this generation's radio, the default conduit for the freshest information. As first responders treated the wounded and the minutes ticked past, news organizations began vacuuming up Twitter and Facebook posts from around Boston and posting it on their Websites, along with 'regular' text updates. A Vine video-snippet of a bomb going off near the finish line, knocking a runner off his feet, ended up embedded into dozens of blog postings. When a disaster strikes, and many of those same news Websites post 'live updates' that incorporate tons of social-networking posts, they face accusations of exploiting the tragedy in the name of pageviews and revenue. That's not surprising—long before 'yellow journalism' became a term, people have charged news organizations with playing up humanity's worst for their own gain. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, online pundits lashed out against Mashable, The Verge, Wired, and other publications that had posted live updates, accusing them of stepping outside their usual coverage areas for cynical gain. In the following piece, a number of tech editors-in-chief, including The Verge's Joshua Topolsky and Mashable's Lance Ulanoff, talk about their approaches to covering the tragedy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ndogg writes "Mozilla is considering pulling TeliaSonera from its list of root certificate SSL providers. They have asked for comments on this on their mailing list. They're concerned about the use of the certificates by those governments for spying on its citizens, particularly in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — where TeliaSonera operates subsidiaries or is heavily invested. Mozilla's concern is that TeliaSonera has possibly issued certificates that allow hardline government servers to masquerade as legitimate websites — so-called man-in-the-middle attacks — and decrypt web traffic. This alleged activity would contradict Mozilla's policy against 'knowingly issuing certificates without the knowledge of the entities whose information is referenced in the certificates.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mediaite

CBS News Refutes CNN Report That Boston Bombing Suspect Is 'Dark-Skinned ... Mediaite Before reporting an arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing, then walking back their report, CNN was already raising eyebrows with an odd initial report that the supposed suspect was a “dark-skinned individual,” a description they continued to report once ... and more »

“He got fan mail.”

In the ilk of the dad-created Tumblr blog, Reasons My Son Is Crying, the folks at Team Coco have put together a funny blog that parodies the original, calling it Reasons My Talk Show Host Is Crying. In their version a whiny Conan O’Brien amusingly takes the place of the sobbing toddler. You can see “all the many many completely logical reasons that Conan cries” at the blog.

“The audience laughed really hard at this monologue joke.”

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

UnderCurrent is an Unreal-powered deep sea exploration game designed for Oculus Rift from a group of university students over in the UK. The group became fascinated with VR technology and has already put together three different levels, though the collective notes that some of the core mechanics of UnderCurrent are still undetermined.

These students are also maintaining a work blog chronicling each step of the design process, covering everything from music to artwork and team bios. The developers promise more videos and updates as work continues over the coming summer.

[Thanks, Rasmus]

UnderCurrent aims to bring deep sea exploration to Oculus Rift originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

By Michael McWhertor on Apr 17, 2013 at 8:17p

One of two alleged prototypes of a Sega console codenamed "Pluto" has been photographed and detailed on the Assembler Games forums by a poster who says he's a former employee of the company. Pluto, he says, is a variation on the Sega Saturn, with a built-in NetLink modem, that never made it to production.

The hardware, said to be about 14 years old, is reportedly in working condition, but region-locked. The poster in possession of the hardware, who goes by the handle Super Magnetic, describes the hardware in a series of posts.

"The front features two controller ports, and on top you have a flip-top drive bay, a cart slot, a Power button, and the venerable Reset button," the poster wrote. "Note that the logo still says Saturn, so I'm guessing the Pluto codename was simply that, and they were thinking of branding it with the Saturn name. (The logo is printed on production-style though, so I'm guessing they were fairly serious about this one.) The left and right sides feature beautiful-and-exotic vents, while the back is standard Saturn, save for the Netlink ports. The bottom has nothing of note except for the "PLUTO-02" sticker (which is, of course, of note)."

Sega's NetLink modem was compatible with a handful of Sega Saturn games, including Virtual-On, Sega Rally, Saturn Bomberman and a special version of Daytona USA.

Pluto was one of many reported planet-themed codenames for Sega hardware. Sega's 32X add-on was originally codenamed Mars and a scrapped 32X/Genesis combo unit was codenamed Neptune.

• Source
• Assembler Games Forums

Back in 2012, husband and wife design/build duo Carrie and Shane Caverly built a tiny trailer home for themselves that packs all the basic necessities of a house into a 204 square foot space. Architectural designer Carrie and custom builder Shane embarked on the project in order to simplify their lives and free themselves of mortgages and rent. The house includes one bedroom, a shower, incinerating toilet, kitchenette, multi-use living room, and a back deck. Carrie and Shane now run their own company, Clothesline Tiny Homes, to build tiny houses and shops for others. For more on Caverlys and their tiny home, see this post by the Tiny House Blog.

via Visual News