free variable

Delightful:

(via Oliver Chesler)

Philip Greenspun, arguing that you should send RAW format photos directly to a competent lab for prints (rather than tweaking and postprocessing them yourself first):

Karl Marx deplored the division of labor inherent in an efficient Capitalist economy. Marx thought workers would be happier if they handled every step of a production process from taking the customer’s order to putting the finished good in the customer’s hand. Marx had apparently never suffered the frustration of being an incompetent Photoshop user.

There’s definitely an analogy between postprocessing your own photos and — for home recordists — mastering your own tracks. What’s odd is the difference between how these two are perceived; few musicians are willing to master their own songs, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t tweak their own photos.

Well, if you needed any further evidence for my claim about Myriad, I’m happy to oblige; Wal-Mart’s new branding eschews the hyphenation and is obviously based on a certain ubiquitous typeface:

Armin Vit is, I think, essentially right about the effect of removing the hyphen and all-caps:

[W]ith no reasoning or no explanation of what the new star burst stands for, or why the decision to change to a single word, all we have to go by is the logo that replaces the 16-year-old sans serif that was as thick and heavy as the beige boxes it adorned for so long…. The change to title case helps humanize Walmart with a name that reads more like John, Albert, Sarah or Wilbur….

It will be interesting to see how, or if, this new branding affects public perception of Walmart over time. I don’t have the sense that Walmart is a particularly image-conscious company — all of their current branding seems clumsily transparent and rhetorically amateurish to me. Will a new logo steer Walmart’s brand away from its current association with philistines who don’t mind melamine pet food?

In any case, removing the hyphen from “Wal-Mart” is far less jarring than it was when “Kmart” did the same thing. Honestly, “Kmart” seems like the name of a talking duck from a fake Icelandic children’s book: “Kmart was sad, because he had no more cookies and couldn’t play with his brothers and sisters. Suddenly, a friendly dog arrived!” “Walmart” at least looks like a string of letters that could be pronounced “wôl-märt” and might naturally occur so ordered in American English.

(via DF)

This arrived via e-mail this morning:

I wonder if JCPenney will be providing deep-discount durable goods to families who have been affected by flooding as well, or if they just needed an excuse to get me in-store to upsell me on ever more pictures of my family. (At least they aren’t asking me to examine and reform my life before offering the discount.)

The Amazon Current Blog asks if a new Sigma 50/1.4 lens is “the un-50mm?” The occasion is the impending release of this pricy ($500), heavy lens.

At first glance, it seems like Sigma is trying to buck the modus operandi of third-party lens makers, who usually compete with companies like Nikon, Canon and Sony by making cheaper lenses…. The new lens, more expensive than 50mm lenses from pretty much anyone besides Leica, uses fancy tricks like multi-layer coating coating and aspherical glass in apparent hope that it will be sharper than the competitors at wide apertures. It also advertises attractive out-of-focus areas, something 50mm lenses are not known for.

It would be great if this is indeed their strategy. I wouldn’t have touched Sigma glass ten years ago, but I’ve been very happy with my Sigma 30/1.4. (People have commented to me that it “looks heavy,” though — and I imagine that the 50mm monster will be even more striking.) The lens is available for preorder at Amazon.

META: Hey, this is my 800th post!

One. Is Myriad the Helvetica of the aughts? This may well be confirmation bias, but I see Myriad everywhere in corporate identities and advertising. In a five minute span this weekend in Milwaukee, I saw Myriad parking garages, Myriad Summerfest posters, and
Myriad Verizon Wireless ads — and these just walking around the block! Is Myriad becoming so ubiquitous, like Helvetica in the 1970s, that we might soon not even notice it anymore? Of course, I love Myriad and have long used it for slides and as a headline sans in print work; certainly its widespread application and “safe choice” status is well-deserved. I wonder, though: will it ascend to Helvetica’s iconic status? More generally, given the abundance of digital faces, will any single face will ever be as dominant as Helvetica was in its prime?

Two. Also from Milwaukee, this sign made me laugh. My first thought was: hm, looks like someone failed to use a supported printer font. (My second thought was: crumb, I’m old.) If you also thought the parking sign was funny, you may appreciate “How did he do it?” from Mark Simonson.

My father and I went to see the Madison Mustangs host the West Allis Predators this weekend. Both teams are members of the IFL, a Milwaukee-based semipro league; admission was $6 and included a meet-and-greet with Ron Dayne. (I saw Mr. Dayne but did not chat with him.) You can see some of my photos from the event if you’d like; a brief review follows.

The game wasn’t particularly competitive — West Allis got shellacked, with their only score coming on an interception return — and the technical quality of play didn’t compare favorably with well-known synthetic football substitutes like Arena League ball (indeed, one might see more technical acumen in the occasional nationally-televised DIII college game). Some series were thick with penalties, to the point where the drive time was overwhelmingly dominated by officials congregating and re-spotting the ball rather than by huddling and play execution; some special-teams plays in particular saw the FieldTurf transformed into a silk tulip patch. Finally, the stadium’s use of incidental music seemed more accidental — too-long silences followed by pastiche-like, sub-phrase snippets of pop song hooks, with the end result being that it was never clear that the sound board was operated deliberately.

These are quite minor complaints, though, and almost irrelevant. The important question is: is it worth going? I can’t really say “yes” emphatically enough. The game was a whole lot of fun. The players approach the game with the sort of palpable zeal you can only rarely detect in pro sports; I didn’t see anyone taking plays off. The playcalling schemes are in general rather less complex than in pro or college ball, but the coaches seem far more willing to resort to trickery. In Saturday’s game, for example, I saw a fake extra point pass successfully converted and — even more impressively — a fake punt run attempted with about 22 yards to go. (The latter wasn’t successful, but the punter came close enough to make it exciting.) The crowd (over 1,000, I’d guess) was enthusiastic and the overall experience seemed kid-friendly (if your kid has a later bedtime than mine); there were a lot of kids in attendance. I’ll definitely go to another Mustangs home game.

Well, this entry into the “themed-snack” marketplace is basically the dumbest thing I’ve seen since I learned that Sony was bankrolling “Are We There Yet,” a PG-rated children’s comedy starring Ice Cube:

Next up: “United States Currency-O’s,” “Fruit-Flavored Powerbook Keycap Snacks,” and “Whole-Grain Picture-Hanging Hardware Kit.”

(via Wolf Rentzsch on twitter)

Choppy Goes To School, by Wenceslaus Davies-Jones. (Spanner Juvenile, 2008)

Many authors of juvenile literature have made great contributions to mollifying troubled children in various situations: going to bed, going to the doctor, the arrival of a new sibling (cf. Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon, Søren Tyggegummi’s Zoltan Pays For His Parents’ Vaccine Panic, and Eric Carle’s The Very Lonely Toddler, respectively). The best of these sorts of didactic books are cherished by children and parents alike, and one gets the sense that Wenceslaus Davies-Jones envisions Choppy Goes to School as a new representative of this fine tradition. Unfortunately, one also gets the sense that he is almost totally wrong.

This treacly tale more-or-less details the antics of Choppy Chipmunk as he prepares to attend school for the first time. The colors are bright and garish; the overall presentation is crude, unrefined, and amateurish. Indeed, if we were not told that Choppy was intended to be a chipmunk, it would be difficult to determine as much from his likeness. One sincerely hopes that Davies-Jones’ incompetent illustrations are meant to evoke the finger-paintings of untalented children, but this conceit cannot excuse the dismal typography, which appears to employ Comic Sans.

The unattractive construction of this slim volume does little to hide the total lack of any redeeming value in the narrative. Choppy is basically a sciurine Werther (note his day-glo coat and the “Lotte Lemur” character), whining his way through a wholly unremarkable first-day-of-school scenario and demonstrating baleful self-pity grossly disproportionate to his circumstances. Unfortunately for the state of children’s literature, Choppy fares rather better than his young German counterpart, although the saccharine ending, in which a cliched, uncritical feel-good-about-yourself message is cheapened by the protagonist’s reliance on particular name-brand toys, might leave parents wishing that Choppy had instead told Lotte Lemur that he was going on a journey.

Yesterday, All Things Considered chose to broadcast one of the most absurd comments I’ve ever heard. NPR listener Brynn Matthew of Los Angeles wrote in response to a story about flooding in Iowa and its impact on agriculture; here’s how Robert Siegel read Matthew’s comment:

“Another story about floods or drought has come and gone without a single mention as to why we’re having this extreme weather,” he writes, suggesting that climate change is to blame. “It’s a missed opportunity to ask Americans to come to terms with their choices. The next time you interview a farmer who’s suffering because of flood or drought, I’d like to know whom he voted for, what kind of car he drives, and how big his house is. Don’t like the weather? Well, you reap what you sow.”

(I have excerpted the broadcast here.)

Matthew’s comment is notable for deftly compressing a staggering number of fallacies and faulty inferences into such a small number of words — consider his apparent confusion of “climate” and “weather” and his risible implication, which neatly ties up a number of nontrivial assumptions, that individual votes constitute acts with measurable environmental impact.

I won’t address the propositional content of Matthew’s claim — nor will I consider how many Priuses are currently underwater in Johnson County, IA — since the comment is transparently ridiculous along so many dimensions. Rather, I’m interested in the form of his letter, which transcends standard self-righteous letter-to-the-editor puffery in order to inhabit the most callous neighborhoods of careless speculative theodicy.

This sort of rhetoric is awfully risky. Even if you agree with all of the speaker’s presuppositions about causality, justice, and agency, you might not agree with the particular application of these to single out actual humans for retribution. Just as with all attempts to explain complex events by ascribing them to deliberate acts of powerful agents — powerful agents whose intent happens to coincide with one’s particular biases, values, and morals — blaming disasters on a wrathful Gaia provides little actual explanation for anything; it merely provides evidence of Mr. Matthew’s prejudices and lack of tact, logical rigor, and basic human compassion.

Theodicy-based explanations of disasters (for example, Jerry Falwell on 9/11 or Sharon Stone on recent earthquakes in China) suffer because they often imply absurdities: how is it possible that the speaker is able to discern the precise will of God (or of “karma”), down to the level of finding specific acts that demanded some act of retribution, but only in this case — and can we then ascribe other, similar problems to God’s will (or to karma, or to a wrathful Gaia, or whatever) in a consistent manner? Returning to Matthew’s claim, might we imagine a young girl in Los Angeles who has asthma in part because she has admired the private jets of celebrities? Or could we blame one’s sunburn on consuming agricultural products — even at some point in the distant past? Finally, what of those in the developing world — who, with mosquito-borne disease and no indoor plumbing or air conditioning are disproportionately affected by climate change — what, beyond faint aspirations at the quality of life enjoyed in industrialized society, have they “sown?”

I’m not particularly insulted by Matthew’s opinions, since it is obvious that they were arrived at without much effort or reflection. (Indeed, the repeated presence of “drought or flood” in the letter seems to imply that this missive was not penned as a reaction to this particular flood but instead had been filed away for quick response to nearly any natural disaster affecting agriculture in the flyover states.) However, I am a little baffled at NPR’s decision to give airtime to such a screed.

Drivers of vehicles with bumper stickers may be more aggressive than other drivers, according to a recent study from Colorado State:

Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage — by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

I’m eagerly awaiting a follow-up study that rates drivers on the “reductive,” “boorish,” and “hit at a party” spectra, perhaps binned by number or density of stickers. RIYL: more on bumper stickers.