Selling to the Stupid !

I couldn't believe that beat-up shoes are being sold at £55 a pop. You must have to be clinically retarted and then some to take your wallet out for one of these.

This is clearly a case for regulating retailers because people are simply to stupid to let near shops !!

Maths of beauty

“Symmetry defines beauty” .... this should not be news to most of us. Symmetry is all around us both natural and self induced ranging from the wings of a butterfly to that perfectly hung painting because the minute it’s crooked the symmetry of the frame is thrown off (lets ignore the painting for now).

People happily hypothesize about the importance of symmetry but never its driver. What drives nature, and through transitivity us, to seek symmetry? Why is it that all things must have an axis around which the object must be foldable?

My theory ... laziness ... it’s a lot easier for our eyes to process a symmetrical object requiring less process aligning the separate images received by each eye. So the easier it is to process an image the more aesthetically pleasing it is to the eye. That easy of processing is labelled as beauty.

There may also be balancing advantages to symmetry in nature.

As far as our faces go, we “distort” our symmetry through hairdos and accessories so an argument that symmetry is the be-all for all beauty is flawed. With the introduced warping of our appearances we have developed a secondary benchmark for the signs of “beauty” ... wait for it ... the “Jaw line”.

Having taken enough pictures I can definitively say that the most prominent feature of the face is its outline, defined by the jaw which frames the face. If the face is not 100% symmetrical you can always tilt it but a good jaw-line says that you are reasonably proportioned. You can be as big as the marshmallow monster from ghost busters but if you have a defined jaw-line I can guarantee that you will look good in pictures.

So a quick and easy way to look good in pictures is to suck in that double chin at the sound of “cheese” !!!

Green eye look better on TV ...

Started watching Prison Break this weekend and couldn't help but notice every other character has either blue of green eyes, except of course the tokens.

Now it's not a racist thing but green/blue eyes are better on screen. As a videographer, when I take close-ups I would like to enhance the eyes and really make them "pop". To make you audience feel like they are part of the scene you take tight shots and once you are up close and personal you want them to look the actor in the eyes to make a better connection. That also detracts from any imperfections or small marks you have on the face.

For the image above see how there is a small dark rim around the eye. This helps define the eye and enhancese it overall. If I was looking to enhance someone's eye in photoshop that is where I would start, cut it out, drop the opacity and give it an edge ... tha daa .. intant eye pop.

All in all it takes less work in the post and its more engaging to have actors with lighter colored eyes. So if you want to look good on camera or have an upcoming audition do something to make your eyes "pop" on screen and you're golden.

I took a stab at immortality ... and killed it !

As a youngling I vividly recall rocking to the “Princes of the Universe” by Queen as the intro to highlanders rolled in the background. The point of this post and the first sentence, if you are wondering, is to answer a question I get asked regularly.

Why the hell do you have a blog?

Well the short of it is ... if you are but a sum of your thoughts ... then this is my attempt at becoming a highlander without all the electromagnetic disruption and the head chopping. Plus, it gives me something to do on my commutes.

People have done this for centuries through biographies, diaries and now blogs (the cheapest of the three). Plus I am hoping to “track changes” from sanity to insanity.

Here is a link to the song if you'd like scratch that itch.

Undiscovered side effect of smoking

Why do people asymetrially squint when dragging on a fag.

Only recently observed, there appears to be a link between squinting and what I call the 'drag coefficient'. Initial research, which has mainly been though experiments, shows that the side of the mouth doing the dragging will force that eye to squint for the duration of the drag.

Potential solution would be to smoke using the center of your mouth. That seems to be the only antidote to this side effect.

Further thought experiments are underway ... until the next distraction which is probably around the corner ,,. Which is why I hate corners ... that and they sometimes tend to have shops on them.

Solar Powered Beauty

Heard this phrase the other day on 'have I got news for you' ... Paul Merton quoted a cab driver saying something along those lines, thought it was brilliant.

This rings true as I sit here at greenwich on this sunny afternoon.

Cloud Neigh

If I was to ask you to upload all your documents, pictures and goodies from you desktop to the internets your reaction is more than likely be ... 'go chew on a gum tree bark'. Well folks hate to tell you that this but the future of computing is about to take off to the cloud.

Cloud computing

A concept that's been around for longer than I'd like to admit my ignorance to it, claims that the processing power should live in the cloud, another word for the internets, as a result of which people share the processing power allowing for a bigger and meaner processor to churn the binary than just little piddly things we call desktop processors.

One of the oldest and well known example of cloud computing application is, or should I say was before the re-branding ... Hotmail. The email voo-doers ran a server that managed all your e-mail, plus spam and those days had some real spam, with you accessing it all through a web browser.

What people take for granted is the fact that in order to receive emails you need a dedicated machine, listening for that ring tone and picking up all your messages while you are out (your computer being switched off), a lot like an answering machine. This function is performed by an email server (no relation to me) brought to existence for the sole purpose of listening for your emails. Technically speaking there is no requirement for google, yahoo or microsoft to provide free email management, but they do because their business model makes money through adverts.

Pros
If you have not yet deduced the pros let me give you some hints:

a) you will never have to upgrade your computer again, U'll just need a machine with a fast net connection and a browser, all applications will be processed remotely on a server with you interfacing with the results through the browser.

b) you will be able to access your computer from anywhere ... so every computerhas a 'memory' of your computer.

c) never have to worry about backups or data loss as many of these server farms are based in a range of locations.

Cons
The most obvious one I hear you scream is ... Security ... And I totally understand. But consider this, how safe is your data on your machine and are you, average Joe/Jane, better at fighting off Trojans than a team of geeks who's idea of Friday night is some good only OOP (object oriented programming).

The other thing to consider before you fully write the cloud off is that most of your sensitive data already lives online in a form of an email of sorts.

The only true limitation at the moment is the reliability of net access ... You do not want to be caught in the headlights with your pants down and without a connection. That said, with multiple mediums allowing online access these days (mobiles, hotspots, etc) its only a matter of time before we put our faith into the net ... like we did for electricity back in the day when we made a leap of faith from a largely mechanical to electiral based world.

Winds of change
The winds of change aren't just blowing but hurling things all over the place and then some. People are slowly getting used to, and in many cases addicted to, life of the net.

Forces at work
There are two forces of at work here Push, pushing us up to the cloud from our desktop, and Pull, lifting us uo into the cloud. Google(pull), Adobe (pull) and Microsoft (push) are just a few of the names behind these forces.

> Google is pulling us up in the cloud with offers of its services like google mail, docs, picasa ...

> Adobe AIR; is a very clever initiative, allowing developers to create desktop applications that brings the online experience to you desktop, leveraging some of the local machine's processing power to enhance the web experience ... A step towards the cloud.

> Microsoft Silverlight (push); this a move by Microsoft to push information from the desktop to the cloud, similar in nature to AIR. Another initiative by Microsoft is its Live MESH project that let you synchronize several machines to each other so for instance allowing your home machine to replicate the assets on your office machine, this is a oversimplified view of MESH.There are many other pulling forces about with the likes of getdropbox and amazon offering online storage as ways of backup, enticing you to get used to putting you data online.

If you think about it, these titans, namely google, microsoft .. Are laying down the ground work to ensure their place on the network for the future .. probably when the machines rule the world. This is especially essential for Microsoft because the direction things are heading, operating systems are soon to be a thing of the past, time when tyrants ruled the world, which just happen to be their core product.

Our involvement with the development of the cloud is reminiscent of a forg in a boiling pot. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it'll jump out but if you put the frog in the water before firing up the stove it will merrily sit there in its own stew as it slowly gets cooked.

The water is about to reach boiling point, are you ready.

Sound of Smells

A though occurred to me today as I was waiting for my scolding coffee to cool down for my consumption. Do smells have a sound?

Allow me to elaborate;
a) Does one sound older or smarter if their breath smells like coffee?
b) does alcohol breath sounds like you are having fun, or you are a fun person to hang out with?

The answer is yes .. generally speaking .. but depends on the experiences you have had with those smells and the association of your neural network.

Its a safe generalization that coffee makes you sound smart because most hard-core coffee consumers tend to be white collar office workers with higher than average intelligence (excluding outliers that come with all data sets). Therefore majority of the public has associated coffee smell to intelligence, vis-sa-vi drinking coffee makes you sound smart.

Next questions: do colors have a smell ? I for one hate the smell of blue.