Omega Point

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics Part 2: The New York Times gets it right

While I found the CBC’s efforts lack­ing, the New York Times uses “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” very effectively.

For instance, this info­graphic from last year uses area and two states to visu­al­ize the loss of over $88 bil­lion in value dur­ing the col­lapse of the US bank­ing sys­tem. It’s very effec­tive, con­veys the mas­sive drop in value well, and frankly, it works bet­ter with an ani­mated tran­si­tion than a sta­tic image would have.

This is an impor­tant point: just because you can make some­thing “inter­ac­tive”, it doesn’t mean you’re not bet­ter off with a nice, standards-compliant JPEG. (Hey, how’s it going, Cana­dian Press?)

On the other hand, there really isn’t a bet­ter way to rep­re­sent the data avail­able than how the NY Times has here. Colour me impressed.

Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy

So I’m a giant typog­ra­phy nerd, as any of my friends can attest:

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every sin­gle other per­son I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analy­sis of the fonts and brand­ing fea­tured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugeni­cist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Get­ting Paid”: finally, the reli­gious right and “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” peo­ple can agree on a slo­gan to print on currency.

A quick syn­op­sis of Idioc­racy: stu­pid peo­ple out­breed the yup­pies and nerds. Con­se­quently, the aver­age IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sex­u­al­ized mod­els as anchors, all enter­tain­ment is lowest-common denom­i­na­tor, and cloth­ing is cov­ered with cor­po­rate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an enter­tain­ing movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Star­bucks, home of Exotic Cof­fee for Men.

Any­way, I ref­er­enced Vancouver’s own typog­ra­pher Ray Lara­bie above because many of the design choices in Idioc­racy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idio­cratic Design at Under­Con­sid­er­a­tion now!

#Amazonfail

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by hav­ing it shipped to her address in Wash­ing­ton to take advan­tage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offer­ing to US-based cus­tomers. I ended up sav­ing some­thing like $60. Sweet. Deal.

So, my first Ama­zon sale com­pleted, I was feel­ing pretty pos­i­tive about them. Until yesterday.

Sun­day morn­ing, I was alerted to news of a some­what poorly-planned deci­sion at Ama­zon: to bet­ter cater to America’s “moral major­ity”, Ama­zon decided to excise the pop­u­lar­ity rank­ings of LGBT books, delist­ing them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by search­ing for an unre­lated title and click­ing on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selec­tions have been delisted.

Accord­ing to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer com­mu­nity, Ama­zon has de-ranked such titles as Broke­back Moun­tain, Tip­ping the Vel­vet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the ques­tion: what on earth are these shel­tered, big­oted Ama­zon cus­tomers search­ing for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon dis­cov­er­ing those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spit­tle fly­ing forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay his­tory of Broke­back Moun­tain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the sub­ject, Raul (Hummingbird604) com­pares the move by Ama­zon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” deba­cle. He also raises the ques­tion, is Easter Sun­day a good time to be orga­niz­ing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sun­day an okay time for Ama­zon PR to take the day off? Obvi­ously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult con­tent” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demon­strated any cohe­sive strat­egy to man­ag­ing their response, and con­tinue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since break­ing Sun­day morn­ing, the #ama­zon­fail and #glitch­myass hash­tags on Twit­ter con­tinue to trend highly a day later, invit­ing responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of sug­ges­tions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Pow­ells Books’ Twitt­ter account notes that they will def­i­nitely not cen­sor the pres­ence of LGBT mate­r­ial on their site.

@cin­e­mae­stro That cer­tainly is dis­turb­ing. For­tu­nately, Powell’s will never cen­sor this mate­r­ial #ama­zon­fail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zenti­nal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is some­thing we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Mon­day morn­ing, the main­stream media was already report­ing on the issue:

• Ama­zon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rank­ings, CBC
• ‘Gay writ­ing’ falls foul of Ama­zon sales rank­ing sys­tem, Guardian.co.uk
• Ama­zon web­site cen­sor­ship row, Chan­nel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Ama­zon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, repro­duced by the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Ama­zon­fail as “an embar­rass­ing and ham-fisted cat­a­loging error for a com­pany that prides itself on offer­ing com­plete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books out­side of the Gay & Les­bian cat­e­gories were der­anked and that they’re in the process of rein­stat­ing them.

So what hap­pened? Did some mid-level man­ager enact some crazy new pol­icy? Can Amazon’s rank­ing and report­ing mech­a­nisms be gamed?

Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gulliable”.

As seen on Digg: Did you know that Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for “gul­li­able”?

Events of September, 1983

From Wikipedia:

• Sep­tem­ber 16 — Donna Grif­fiths of Per­shore in Eng­land stops sneez­ing after a con­tin­ual series of sneezes for 978 days (since Jan­u­ary 13, 1981).
• Sep­tem­ber 17 — Vanessa Lynn Williams becomes the first African-American to be crowned Miss Amer­ica, in Atlantic City, New Jersey
• Sep­tem­ber 25-September 26 — Soviet mil­i­tary offi­cer Stanislav Petrov averts a world­wide nuclear war.
• Sep­tem­ber 26 — Aus­tralia wins America’s Cup

But you know, whatever.

LOLcat art show? I am definitely going to this.

Read­ers, I ask you: how many times have each of us stared wist­fully out into space, lost in thought, hop­ing against hope that one day, some­how, there would be a local exhi­bi­tion of pen-and-ink LOLcat-inspired art? I know that I myself have lost too many hours to count. Finally, just when things seemed at their bleak­est, with moral­ist crack­downs on LOL­cat macro images tak­ing place across the globe, the day has come at last!

Van­cou­verites, LOL­cat con­nois­seurs and art enthu­si­asts rejoice!

This Mon­day, July 21st, Clack­Clack Empire in Vancouver’s Chi­na­town hosts the open­ing recep­tion for I can’t believe we both got cats: LOL­cat art, fea­tur­ing works by Seattle-based artist Mar­i­anne Goldin! Sweet!

For details, check out the list­ing on Upcom­ing, or con­sult the artist’s state­ment. I liked this part:

LOL­cats can take on a mer­i­to­cratic tone, since not all cats are made equal — an ideal model oozes with pathos and pho­to­gene­ity. There are even Weber­ian “ideal types” to be found — styles and fam­i­lies of LOL­cat: the terse Zen koan, the Invis­i­ble (fill in the blank), and the var­i­ous motifs of Ceil­ing Cat. Many instances use cats to alle­go­rize human frus­tra­tions with technology.

You should def­i­nitely come. It’s free! Also, LOL­cat art.

I CAN HAS HYPOTHESIS?

Just recently, I was lament­ing the fact that there are likely orders of mag­ni­tude more peo­ple who under­stand the “turn it off and then on again” method of trou­bleshoot­ing than the sci­en­tific method.

To back up my the­ory, this month’s Wired Mag­a­zine sees edi­tor Chris Ander­son con­fi­dently stroll into Crazy­land with his essay The End of The­ory, assert­ing that the age of the sci­en­tific method is over, replac­ing hypoth­e­sis and test­ing with sta­tis­ti­cal number-crunching of mas­sive databases.

Need­less to say, there exist a vari­ety of reac­tions to this idea, most of which can be sum­ma­rized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s cri­tique of Anderson’s arti­cle was par­tic­u­larly effec­tive, point­ing out that recog­ni­tion of cor­re­la­tion is not the goal of sci­ence; rather, it pro­vides a start­ing point for sci­ence to begin from:

Notic­ing a cor­re­la­tion between fac­tors is the START of sci­ence, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a sci­en­tist.  When you just record a mil­lion tri­als you’re an accoun­tant.  When you say “It hap­pens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answer­ing a five-year-old’s for­ti­eth ques­tion in a row, or unin­ter­ested, or pos­si­bly religious.

The “you are not qual­i­fied to make this asser­tion” style of crit­i­cism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems par­tic­u­larly accurate:

This com­bines with his sec­ond error: Belief that the Inter­net is the entire world.  This is an easy mis­take for some­body like a Wired edi­tor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shout­ing “LOLCAT” most peo­ple wouldn’t know what the hell you were talk­ing about.  This is impor­tant.  In fact, a species where every­body knows about LOLCATS is one whose via­bil­ity needs severe re-evaluation.

To My Web 2.0 Valentine…

This is what we came up with at Social Sig­nal for Valentine’s Day this year. It’s the per­fect way to say “I love you” to that spe­cial some­one with 800 pic­tures on Flickr. See? It’s not such a bad hol­i­day after all!