Joke of the Day

So, French philosopher René Descartes walks in to a bar. The bartender asks him if he would like a beer. Descartes says "I think not.", and disappears.

Today is Descartes' 414th birthday.

Spelling & Punctuation Rant

Some time ago I wrote about an interesting (but NSFW) post on grammar at Language Log.

Today they take on spelling and punctuation. Again, it needs a Vulgarism Alert!

Photoshop CS5: Content-Aware Fill

Last week Adobe announced the upcoming release of the latest version of Photoshop, CS5, which continues Photoshop's legacy of almost unbelievable photo manipulation tools. John Nack linked to the latest "magic", content-aware fill, with this demo.

Friday he expanded the report on the uses of this new tool:

"Adobe Photoshop again proving everything you see is probably a lie"

What I Learned This Week (or, Sue was wrong, will she admit it?)

It was D. P. Moynihan who observed that we are all entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts. Last Saturday, sort of in the heat of the moment, Sue Polinsky posted about the alleged cursing of Tea Partiers at the Saturday rally in Washington. By Sunday morning it was noted by a number of sources that those events may not have happened, and I wrote Sue asking her to note that the charges were "disputed" (see comments). She demurred.

On Wednesday, She doubled-down with another post, this one entitled "Socialist. Fascist. Nazi. Fa**ot. Ni**er".

Today she adds another post on this subject: "Our own shattered glass" . This one evokes the German Kristallnacht, comparing last weekend's events to that horror. This is all very good. It's her blog and she's entitled to her opinion.

Earlier this week, the Blogfather had a reference to an almost forgotten anniversary, the German Enabling Act of 1933. I had not heard of that particular act, but then I'm not a historian. The Wikipedia article is here. This was the act that gave Hitler the power to take over the German government and led to WWII and all its horrors. I suspect at the time that very few folks saw these outcomes as a possible result of that act.

An interesting sidelight of this story is the role Ludwig Kaas played in the passage of the Enabling Act and the events of last weekend and the passage of ObamaCare. If you read the Neo-Neocon post, which you should, you'll probably be struck by this:

"I am sure that rings a small, sad bell for someone whose name is somewhat similar (hint: instead of beginning with a “k” and ending with an “s,” it begins with an “s” and ends with a “k”)."

Am I comparing ObamaCare with the Enabling Act of 1933? I am not. Neither do I think last weekend's Tea Party demonstrations have any comparison to Kristallnacht. Dr. Sue is off the deep end worried about events which may have never happened. Will she realize that?

Note: I'm having trouble getting Blogger to translate the HTML in this post porperly. I have that problem often if I try to use their Block Quote function. I'm trying to edit it to display properly so it may change in appearance for a while.

Amazing Rube Goldberg Machines

Back in 2002 (or so) there was the Honda commercial "Cog".

Then last week an old college friend sent me this link about retired engineers with too much time on their hands.

Today, John Nack added another and made reference to one he mentioned last week that I had missed.

Is Rube Goldberg making a comeback?

Note: That's 12:24 of your life you'll never get back.

The Elements of Good Design

In my previous life as a printer, I always admired seeing a designer do great graphic design using a minimalistic approach:

1. Simple, uncluttered layout
2. Effective use of white space.
3. Consistant use of font variation (bold/italic/script/etc.), type size, and arrangement
4. Avoidance of All Cap format

Or not.

From Adobe's John Nack.

The Half-Blind Side

I was happy to see that Sandra Bullock won the best-actress Oscar Sunday night for her role in The Blind Side, but I think one the important issues that has been generally missed is that the movie should really been called The Half-blind Side.

The essence of the more-or-less-true story in the movie was that the Tuohy's (a wealthy Memphis family) rescued a poor struggling black kid from crushing poverty and helped him straighten out his life and become an NFL star. One point of conflict in the movie was that NCAA wanted to penalize Old Miss, the Tuohy's alma mater, for the Tuohy's improper roll in recruiting Michael Oher. In the movie the charges were sort of ridiculed as ridiculous in the light of the Tuohy's Christian charity.

In reality, Michael Oher was an outstanding football prospect when the Tuohys adopted him ("Stevie Wonder could have seen he was a future NFLer.") and the NCAA investigation was much more justified than the movie portrayed it. Oher has distanced himself from the movie, saying last fall that he hadn't even seen it, and commentators are even today ignoring his athletic accomplishments before the Tuohys took him into their family.

I don't know that this diminishes what the Tuohys did at all, but "the rest of the story" does give The Blind Side sort of a Paul Harvey twist.