Awesome How-To Video

There's a great how to video currently up on the new NYT photography blog Lens.

In this video, photographer Tony Cenicola explains how he created the "exploding pie."

The assignment: illustrate an article on the cover of Thursday’s special section, Wealth and Personal Finance, on how the customary asset-allocation pie has been upended by the recession. Tony Cenicola, the master of The Times’s basement photo studio, shows us how he did it.

Mr. Cenicola’s imagination and ingenuity are evident in this four-minute video, which reminds us — in the age of computer-generated imagery — just how convincing three-dimensional objects can be and how they seem much more “realistic” (if you can use that word in discussing a studio shot) because of their unpredictable properties. He also reveals more about his eating habits than we may have cared to know.

Go check out the video on the blog page, it's short and offers a step by step process for blowing up a pie.

Wolfram Alpha

There's an interesting new kid on the block here on the internet, Wolfram|Alpha. Being the nice guys that we are, the House of Spode decided to go check out Wolfram Alpha.

What is Wolfram Alpha? Wolfram Alpha, which was released just a few days ago (officially launched May 18, 2009), is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram research. What makes it different from Google and other search-engines is that rather than providing a list of web pages that might contain the answer, Wolfram Alpha instead answers factual queries directly through computing the answer from available data.

Here is one very simple example of what Wolfram Alpha can do.



Searching for more complicated things like "caffeine," "IBM," or "war" give you much more intricate and interesting answers, as Wolfram Alpha compiles all available date on the query to calculate a quantitative solution.


Verdict: The House of Spode recommends that you go check it out. It's definitely cool enough to spend a few minutes on exploring. As to actually utility, that remains to be seen. Sure, if the House of Spode ever needs to do some calculus again, Wolfram Alpha will be the first place we turn to. Actually, we'll probably turn to Wolfram Alpha any time we have any science or economics based question, as the answer is guaranteed to be more concise than anything google or wikipedia can bring up. For other types of information ("what were the causes of the civil war?" or "what is pointillism") we'll stick with the tried and true methods.

Tilt-Shift Fun

This is a great little video I found on vimeo the other day. It does an awesome job showing what tilt-shift photography and effects can do for a film.

Note: This is an actual monster truck rally, not a stop motion film with little figurines. The tilt-shift just makes it look that way, which is pretty awesome.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Why are texts only 160 characters long?

I saw an interesting article today in the LA Times on "Why text messages are limited to 160 characters."

I thought it was particularly interesting that their research into message lengths involved both looking at old postcards and typing out random sentences.

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand's magic number -- and set the standard for one of today's most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

"This is perfectly sufficient," he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. "Perfectly sufficient."

First, this strikes me as a particular German thing to say. I can picture a John Cleese caricature of a German blandly exclaiming "this is perfectly sufficient" during all sorts of typical German activities. Which apparently involve inventing both text messaging and counting the number of characters in a sentence.

What I was wondering when I read the article was whether Mr. Hillebrand was typing in English or German when he was conducting his research on that trusty type-writer of his. I would assume there could be a significant difference between sentence lengths in the two languages. German, after all, is the language that prides itself on have octosyllabic words and sentences that can run a page long.

Clearly Mr. Hillebrand wasn't typing out sample sentences from Adorno, but was that something that they were taking into account back when they were inventing the text message?