Woah. I don’t often bother with movie reviews, but “Never Let Me Go” will affect the way you live your life. Part ethereal, part horrifying. Are you part of the machine or will you demand more? I won’t do spoilers, but this is the best kiss you will see in a long time. This kiss tempers time and longing and finality. An amazing a plot line unfolds through the lives of humans who are ultimately limited. But aren’t we all? It is an alternate history that begins in 1967. It is Orwellian in nature with buzzers and misplaced technology. It’s a story of love unvanquished; it is ungrim given the climate created. It is also awful, the results of a wayward history. From the moment that the pastel colors are put on the screen, you will be transported to a world that never was; is horrible—and love survives it. It is not just science fiction of the past, it is a fairy tale the likes of which the Brothers Grimm could not have imagined. Watch this movie and then go to the closest park you can get to and watch the trees in the breeze.

I love the commentary on literacy that aspects of graphic design seem to communicate in opposition to the message. Despite a US literacy rate of 99%, the US adult population can be categorized into “half readers and half non-readers“. Reading is not exactly an American past time, and Britney Spears (as opposed to a famous author) is not exactly the best spokesperson choice. And I wouldn’t have pointed out the US states reading stats but it’s sort of irresistible given the patriotism stretched across her chest. And I suppose that Harry Potter is the pop fiction of the age, but aren’t there more literate choices?[^1] “Hey!” (comes the inevitable disagreement) “Other options wouldn’t make reading as exciting and cool for kids.” Yeah! I agree! In fact, we should put the word “Read” right in the poster in an overly used trajan-like font that looks like daggers, cuz reading will cut you, man! And Britney Spears is more than an awesome spokesperson—–she is so radical that she should have an angelic light spilling down on her! And don’t tell kids to go to the library tell them it’s “@ your library,” because @ is cool or something. I am certain—certain, I tell you—that kids read because of this thing.

[^1] Yeah. I’m a nerd.

How far away from your computer do you sit? If you’re being good to yourself, you’re not slouching, but sitting up straight with the screen about arm’s length away. But if you’re reading a book or a magazine, do you hold it at arm’s length? So, it might be reasonable to argue that computer apps and web sites might be more legible/accessible by using a larger font size than the typical 12 point font found in books and magazines. That’s a large part of the argument that D. Bnonn Tennant—information highwayman—makes over at Smashing Magazine. I’m not going to rehash his arguments, he makes an excellent case. Go read it. Take a look at the font size on this web site. Obviously I agree with him. I also noticed that the larger font makes my site a hell of a lot better looking and more legible on an iPad. Hopefully more people will take this advice and I can stop paying readability (they have a free service as well) to make web sites legible. Because, let’s face it. The average web site, with all it’s visual noise, pop-up ads, tiny fonts and unnecessary pagination, is anything but legible.

I never watched the show “Lie to Me” because I had enough police procedurals on my plate (read: one—Castle) and because I have never bought into the idea of a fool-proof or even mostly-proof method of lie detection. I have especially never thought that there was any decent proof for microexpressions—the idea that there are split-second facial muscle “tells” that can be analyzed for lie detection. I’ve mostly never bought into it because I can’t imagine a reasonable explanation for such an adaptation.1 Now, it turns out, there’s another reason not to bother watching the show (other than it’s cancellation): watching it makes you worse at lie detection!

In a study I first encountered via Mindhacks, authors, Timothy Levine, Kim Serota, and Hillary Shulman show that individuals who watch an episode of “Lie to Me” and then attempt a lie detecting task perform much worse than people who watch something else or watch nothing at all (Levine et. al 2010). I’m not terribly surprised by this result given an additional study on individual trust-levels and how that affects lie detection. In their paper “Not Pollyannas,” Nancy Carter and Mark Weber show that individuals who have high-levels of trust (so-called Pollyannas) are better at detecting liars that individuals with a low-trust threshold of strangers (Carter and Weber 2010). So, it seems clear to me that what the television show accomplishes is inducing cynicism. After being saturated with story and imagery that focuses on liars and their “tells” people walk out into the real-world retaining some sense that A) a lot of people are liars and B) It’s really easy to catch them. I imagine these people focusing in on meaningless gestures or speak-os, mostly disregarding any compelling reason for a person to be lying to them. I believe the effect is not dissimilar to what Marshall MacLuhan pointed out, which is that if you only watch the local news, you’d think the world was a horrific place.

Mind you, I would’t consider a good evolutionary explanation as any kind of proof; just that it would give me a reason to look more closely at the evidence for microexpressions. The fact is, we aren’t bad natural lie detectors without using facial expressions and only using information available to us (see Montague et. al 2011). ↩

Only in this case, the desktop is not a metaphor. Rather, this Luxo-style robotic-arm-projector called LuminAR—why the capital AR and not go whole-hog for Luminarm?—will actually light up your desktop as a screen. Here’s a video. Clearly, the projector needs some more muscle, but just the fact that you can get something like this working in a regular adjustable lamp is intriguing. This is another great example of the fact that utilizing reality around us

As a blog concerned with the effect of the media on the mind, it’s hard not to be concerned with the effects of fame on the populace and the individuals that enjoy fame. My niece is currently loving Calvin and Hobbes which caused me to look into Bill Watterson, the author. In a question and answer session, upon the release of his “Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Amazon link)” publication, readers posted questions to him and he answered. The pragmatic nature of the answer to this reader’s question impresses me.

Alan Taylor from Lubbock, TX writes: “You have been very persistent in not becoming a public figure, and I respect that a great deal. Is there anything you would wish to tell the fans who do not understand your wishes and why it is important to you not to claim the spotlight?”

Watterson: My impression is that those who don’t get it, don’t care to get it.”

I wish reclusiveness would become a useful marketing strategy. To not have to hear the Famous pine would be a silence we’ve not known in generations. I don’t think we’d recognize the peace for what it was.

Filed under “Things I never expected to say” by more-left-than-me-but-highly-respected John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

“I agree with Grover Norquist.”

This was in response to statements by well-known conservatives: former Republican Congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; in which, they cautioned against scaremongering with regard to trying terrorists in the US. This is just more evidence to the contrary that, despite their claims of a “win” this last election day, the Republican party is very much in danger of becoming a jingoist fringe party. As an independent, I worry more about that. Two corporate-run parties is bad enough, but a lame, irrelevant we’re-really-mad party and the corporate-run Democrats would be a much worse situation. Where is Buckley!?

Now and then Daring Fireball throws a link my way that, for the thousandth time, reminds me how glad I am I don’t deal with Adobe software anymore. They have literally reached the heights of Microsoft-level disdain for ugliness and shoddiness. I mean, when an entire blog is dedicated to illustrating how much your software stinks, how do you not make a clean-up effort? Photoshop started doing SO much that I didn’t need it to do and started getting in my way so badly version after version that I finally made the permanent switch to Acorn. Photoshop and Illustrator were the only programs on my machine that crashed with any regularity (and it was regular—almost clockwork). I probably wouldn’t have been able to rid myself of those curses if I were still a professional designer, but as a free-ranging artist, I have the pleasure of not running any of Adobe’s bloatware on my machine anymore.

To quote Jon Gruber: “The intersection of horrifying and wonderful.” This is a massively high resolution image of an ant that you can zoom in on to an extraordinary degree—positively awe-inspiring.