"This does appears to be a steady trend since 1915. Could this be related to evolution in the physical process of poster printing; what’s the effect of the economics and difficulty of producing posters over time? I also wonder whether moviemakers have become better at figuring out the 'optimal' colour distribution of posters over time, and whether we’re asymptotically approaching some quiescent distribution."
2. Zuckerberg's (supposedly) tortured turn to making money.
"Yet Mr. Zuckerberg has learned to embrace—or at least accept—the reality that he now is in charge of what might be bluntly described as the most visible advertising business in the world. It is a big leap for the college dropout who wrote in a letter to potential investors just before the initial public offering: 'Facebook was not originally created to be a company.'"
"I have been struck by a recurring theme in my interviews and observations: parents referring to the speech produced by the iPad as their child’s 'voice' and to the iPad itself as a 'talker.' There is no neat way to distinguish between the metaphorical and literal uses of voice and talk here. I’ve been looking into the history of synthetic speech (along with the history of prosthetics) in order to understand why the voices sound the way that they do, what other technologies (e.g. earlier personal computers, non-electronic devices) have been used to produce artificial speech, and for what purposes."
"This kind of dynamic representation might look odd here, but we do this sort of thing constantly, especially in the digital world. Online maps show various details – like roads, or street names – only at certain zoom levels. The act of resampling a digital image averages or extrapolates the value of a pixel from its neighbors. And every pixel in every digital photograph is the average of the light that reached that spot on the sensor.
I’ve cheated a bit here by focusing on relief maps. Every representation, in every medium, is subject to procedural artifacts and the judgements of its creators. Some artifacts are more obvious, and some judgements less expressly intentional, but all of our attempts to process and describe our surroundings must contend with these forces.
This fact echoes life in a body made of sensors, all wired to a brain – our experience is the sum of heavily-processed and filtered inputs. There are no guarantees of absolutes in the information we are exploring, and every sensor is a filter. And the more we learn about physics, the more we understand that we are afloat in a sea of statistical likelihoods, and that our ability to group sensations into a world of coherent, individual objects is a very free interpretation of the available data.
So it makes sense that we gravitate toward models. Unless you believe you have direct access to the world of pure being, models are all we’ve got. I’d like to get better at working within these constraints, and in understanding and manipulating them to our advantage."
Today's 1957 English Usage Tip:
adventurous, venturesome, adventuresome, venturous. Usage has decisively declared for the first two & against the last two. Adventuresome & venturous, when used, are due to either ignorance or avoidance of the normal.
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Models Are All We've Got
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