Category: Grab Bag

Time to clean up my bookmarks… I mean, webcrumbs. Here’s a list of random links I’ve been saving for a rainy day.

• Build your own sextant from a CD
• Moving mail from MacOS X Mail.app into Gmail. Which could be interesting to do. I’m considering moving all of my mailing lists there so as to take advantage of the good searching.
• World Wide Panorama
• How chocolate works
• The Panda’s Thumb: Evolutionary goodness
• Wired’s Cult of Mac blog
• How lenses work
• Interview with Karen Armstrong by Powell’s Books.
• Design Eye for the Usability Guy
• How to Score
• Digital Black and White (i.e., no you cannot just convert to grayscale)
• 365 Days: 1 free mp3 each day
• How to Pick Locks
• The John Kerry Look-a-like Page
• The Long Now Seminars Downloads: Seminars in mp3/ogg formats.
• Lemmings are back!
• Daily Reasons to Dispatch Bush
• Treemaps
• World’s Best Optical Illusion (also my favorite example for why color matching is hard when you are just trying to eyeball something)

Tonight is the first night I’ve really sat back and actually watched the Olympics. Which is pretty sad because they’re half-done and I’ve missed so much.

Anyway, I saw some of the most interesting and some of the worst camera work and the usual NBC “painfully bad” announcing. All in a single event.

Watching women’s diving, they have some very cool cameras which drop with the divers so you can see them at their level for the entire trip down. What really impressed me is that this camera goes right into the water with them so you see them ALL the way down. Also cool is the composites they put together which are a series of freeze-frames of the dive all put into a single still image so you see the diver in a series of images reminiscent of the airplane landing picture I did some months back (see the photo section, I’m too lazy to look up the link right now).

On the “NBC bad” front, we have two examples. The first is the Canadian diver who, when she was eliminated from getting a medal, lost it and went off into a room off the pool to break down and cry, followed every step of the way by a camera that clearly went out of its way to stay on her as much as she tried to be alone. The second is the woman doing the announcing for the event who was borderline racist. Every time the Chinese diver did anything, she would say things like “She had her feet flat. The Chinese are known for that.” She pointed out that the Chinese are known for A or B quite often and never did this for anyone else. We do not know what the Australians are typically known for or what the Americans are known for. Just the Chinese. I’m glad she’s taken the time to get up to speed on the Chinese. It’s coverage like this which makes us the envy of the world. *cough*