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“I fell asleep watching this movie. Completely stupid. I found myself thinking of my grocery list when I woke up. I accidentally stepped on my cat.”
— ztb 1127774, a Netflix review for Sweet Home Alabama
- “Jeb Bush believes President Obama could learn something from his immediate predecessor.”
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One in 16.7 Million
As I approach the midpoint in the development of Alkaline, the time has come to develop some of its more awesome (or superfluous) features. One of those features is Alkaline’s proprietary color analysis algorithm, Colorcode.
With the surge in popularity of services like Adobe’s Kuler and Colour Lovers, I wanted Alkaline to not only recognize generic colors (for say, searching) but also generate palettes. Colorcode does just that. It finds and groups a photo’s core colors while giving preference to the most vibrant shade and organizing by color dominance.
Alkaline users will be able to select how many colors are in a palette and the level of color likeness (similar, core colors v. dissimilar, peripheral colors). Results are stored as RGB values1 along with their respective percentage values.
The two examples below were generated by the latest build of the Colorcode algorithm. Processing took <1 second per photo on import. I used Illustrator and Photoshop to generate palettes from the results, but Alkaline will produce CSS output.
(Photo by Thomas Hawk.)
(Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt.)
1 The RGB color model supports 16.7 million colors, hence the title.
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Fuck yeah, Brooklyn in two months. (Photo by Kenny Louie.)
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Network Neutrality and the Marketplace
NYT’s Op-Ed “How to Regulate the Internet Tap”:
When it comes to the Internet and net neutrality, ensuring transparency promises to enhance the evolution of this dynamic market. Imposing heavy-handed rules about how providers can operate will only hinder it.
The Internet needs to be regulated just like traditional phone companies have been for decades. Why? Because broadband Internet access is an oligopoly, most people can only choose from one of two providers: their local phone or cable company.
Throttling users based on traffic type (e.g., downloading HD video for days at a time) is far different from what providers would really like to do: build tiers of service that would force Web site operators to pay for “priority” access. They would like to be able to discriminate against Web operators (and play them off one another) in exchange for kickbacks.
This is a raw deal for individuals and businesses alike. In such a scenario, consumers would have to pay more to receive access to the entire Internet at the same speed (if such an option were even made available by your provider). Current content juggernauts including YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix would face increased operating expenses. Emerging technology companies wouldn’t be able to pay the tariffs imposed by providers.
Network discrimination stifles access and innovation. The Internet should be free, as in speech. Congress needs to give the FCC the authority to regulate Internet providers. Help save the Internet.
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"The TV" by Ben Loory
Could it be, the New Yorker is actually publishing fiction worth reading again?
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“I picture Karl Rove sitting there in his underwear, staring at [the New York Times’s bestseller] list. I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Who the hell is Chelsea Handler?’”
— Chelsea Handler, “I’m Chelsea Handler. And You’re Not.” (NYT)
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Mean Girls
The Times’ Op-Ed piece yesterday “The Myth of Mean Girls” by Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind completely missed the ball.
This mythical wave of girls’ violence and meanness is, in the end, contradicted by reams of evidence from almost every available and reliable source. […] Why, in an era when slandering a group of people based on the misdeeds of a few has rightly become taboo, does it remain acceptable to use isolated incidents to berate modern teenagers, particularly girls, as “mean” and “violent” and “bullies”?
While the death of a young woman as a result of her classmates’ harassment may be extraordinary, the bullying precipitating Phoebe Prince’s suicide was anything but. The very crux of the “mean girls” argument is that the tormentors’ abuse leaves no scars, and therefore oftentimes goes unnoticed and unpunished.
Even when adults do become involved, they struggle to gauge the extent of the abuse and to understand how to best diffuse the conflict. The prevalent “toughen up” mentality only further ostracizes the victims of verbal abuse, who are already made to believe they are at fault for their own abuse. Moreover, victims are reluctant to enlist the help of their parents, teachers, and administrators for fear of reprisal.
Academics and researchers should be wary of shielding themselves behind improving school crime statistics, regardless of gender. If this tragedy should teach us anything, it is that many victims go unaccounted for.
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Department of Happiness
Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Everybody Have Fun” for the New Yorker:
Over the past three and a half decades, real per-capita income in the United States has risen from just over seventeen thousand dollars to almost twenty-seven thousand dollars. During that same period, the average new home in the U.S. grew in size by almost fifty per cent; the number of cars in the country increased by more than a hundred and twenty million; the proportion of families owning personal computers rose from zero to seventy per cent; and so on. Yet, since the early seventies, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” has remained virtually unchanged.
It’s interesting how happiness is never discussed in marketing classes, even though the underlying assumption—that goods and services make people happy—is intrinsic to what marketers do. Also food for thought:
[In the chapter entitled] “What to Do About Inequality,” [the author’s] answer is, in a word, “Nothing.”
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I tried unsuccessfully to install SimTower yesterday. I’m still upset.
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