Michael J.'s Notio: February 2008 Archives

Economics Worldview Today

Strategic Wasteland

February 27, 2008 | Governance | People & Society

Now, however, as Obama has gained steadily in the polls, the Clinton campaign has reversed field. Top Clinton aides are pleading with uncommitted super delegates to hold off making any commitments, fearful that any commitments they make would be to back Obama, not Clinton.

In language that could have been lifted from the Obama playbook just a few weeks ago, the email says Clinton backers should make the case to super delegates that: "If House, Senate and DNC members try to end this process now, it would be very damaging to those institutions, the Democratic Party and our chances in November."

It's kind of sad, at this point, as long as that sympathy doesn't earn her votes. She and her advisors (and her, um, husband, not to put too fine a point on it) were completely, utterly, and devastatingly out-smarted at every turn. Next Wednesday Clinton's entire staff should immolate themselves so we never have to watch this level of bumbling incompetence again.

I have watched this race up close here in NH for over ten months. From feet-on-the-street, to backoffice technology; from knowing when to hold your cards to knowing when to take the high road, Team Obama's bottom-up decentralized aim-high campaign has won the competition for ideas, if not quite yet the nomination. This win came from a virtually unknown young man with a funny name, against the most powerful political couple of the past 20 years. One million people have donated to his campaign. Obama is not creating our desire for a new way, he is simply channeling it.

Reactionaries

February 25, 2008 | Governance

Texas A & M students shut down a major highway as they march seven miles from campus to vote, where the Republican political machine had located the polls. I love YouTube.

And Then Came New Hampshire...

February 25, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society

The maker of that video has a new project alive. You can add your own photo to the montage of video. Very innovative. And beautiful heartfelt text on the Creators page. Bravo.

iPod Makes the NordicTrack Just Barely Tolerable

February 25, 2008 | Life

Headline says it all.

Your Links For The Day

February 24, 2008 | People & Society

Ms. Pac Man: Feminist Hero

Call him Doctor 'Orgasmatron'

Programmatic Color Palettes From Images

February 18, 2008 | Software

You may recall that I wrote a Ruby program about nine months ago to programmatically generate a color palette. In that version, I manually measured the colors from an image on screen, and typed them into a text file, and the program generated color squares from the text file.

When I finished I wanted to automatically generate a color palette from the image, but I didn't have any more time to experiment, and my chops weren't really good enough to know how to approach it.

About a month ago, I happened to be cruising Shelly Powers' site, and she had this great idea to use the rule of thirds to automatically get color values in images. She's using it to dynamically generate CSS color stripes and circles on the fly, which is cool in-and-of itself, but her code gave me the clue on how to take another run at this. (Thank you!) And, in the last nine months, my chops got better, having written all the CSS and a lot of Rails view code for Gift Ecology.

I now have a new program, palettegen.rb, taking photos in and putting palette images out, more or less how I want it to work. You can see the code here. Now, don't laugh – my chops have improved but they're not pwning you yet!

If you have a Unix machine with a decent Ruby, RMagick, and ImageMagick installation, you type:

ruby palettegen.rb InputImage OutputImage SwatchSize AperatureSize

IOW, you point it to an image, and tell it what to call the output image. You set a size for the color swatches it will generate. And you tell it what aperture to use when selecting pixels. The aperture is on the end of the line because you might want to experiment.

The program finds the center of the image, and also divides the image into thirds, horizontally and vertically, then finds the intersection points of those four lines. At each of the five points (intersections plus the center), it selects a small "window" of pixels based on the aperture setting, and then quantizes those pixels down to a single color. This aperture size turns out to be important – you can imagine the color variation between, say, 5 pixel and 500 pixel apertures. Then it makes eight color variations for each of the five sampled colors.

Examples

Vienna Candy Shoppe Window

Here's the original photo:

And a palette (swatch=35, aperture=10)

The first thing that jumps out at me is, Wow, that's a beautiful palette. The next thought is, They're not the colors I would have guessed from looking at the photo. But beautiful nonetheless.

Here's how to read the palette image:

Each row represents a palette based on one of the five points sampled in the image.
The actual color selected from the image is the center swatch of each row (#5).
To the right in each row we're adding white. 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%.
To the left in each row we're adding black, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%.

Let's look at the same image, with aperture=100

Another really interesting set of colors. What about a very small aperture, like 2?

You get the idea. Here are two more examples.

Flowers

Palettes, aperture 200, then 7

Acrylic painting by John Joline

Palette, aperture 100, then 50 (very subtle differences)

It's a simple and crude program, but it's generating pleasing results. It took about 18 hours to write. The Ruby was relatively strightforward, though I haven't made it very elegant yet. What was hard was figuring out how ImageMagick wanted me to do things. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but it took time to try to figure out how, for example, to "average the swatch and blend colors." It turned out to be a "crop" and a "quantize" – that was a few hours right there, finding those two words, and how to use them. I also spent several hours learning how to do the actual image math. I pursued one strategy, simply multiplying the rgb values, for a long time. Which not only didn't work, but was completely the wrong idea to begin with. I needed to learn how to do a "blend," which I finally arrived at via a detour through "composit." And if you're blending, and want to "extrapolate" (using values greater than one) don't forget to note the teeny tiny text that says, "Extrapolation ability was added to the "-blend" operator in IM v6.3.5-10." If your install is less than that (6.3.4 in my case), don't bother with the extrapolation research.

Leopard Might Be Ready

February 12, 2008 | Software

When Betalogue says Mac OS X 10.5.2 is a very good release, it may be ready to use.

So, it’s not all rosy and there is of course still plenty of room for improvement. Still, I must say that the combination of the improvements that Mac OS X 10.5 brought (particularly in Spotlight and Safari) and the fixes provided by this latest update make for a very satisfactory experience, and I am particularly pleased that we already have, so soon after the initial release of Mac OS X 10.5.0, a system that is indeed already very usable and reliable and quite well designed.

Pierre Igot writes some amazing in-depth public bug reports. Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4.

The Point and Pixish

February 12, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Software

The Point looks really interesting.

The Point is a social platform for people to solve problems they can’t solve alone. Start an ultimatum, fundraiser, or social contract. Whatever the cause, use a campaign to bring it to the tipping point.

Also, beautiful minimalist design.

Bonus link: Pixish, Visual Assignments For Creative People. Less beautiful design, but still very nicely done. It was this week's favorite new website design, until I saw The Point. Not a bad week for web design, when you've got two solid choices in the first two days.

Just Three Words

February 11, 2008 | People & Society

I've watched this video called john.he.is a few times today, and lol each time (1:40). Very amusing guys, thanks. It's in response to, and generously parody's, the Yes We Can video from wll.i.am that appeared last week (4:26).

Blueprint for Change

February 11, 2008 | Governance | People & Society

A lot of people say, "I don't know what Barack Obama stands for; he's all vague and lofty and aspirational. What are his actual policies?"

Well, he's got this thing called a website, maybe you've seen one? Even better, here's a 64-page pdf you can download and print out and read in the water closet that lays it all out in bullet points and details.

But for me, it hardly matters what the specifics are, because getting law through Congress is non-trivial – plans will change. I'd rather learn how someone thinks, how they approach problems, how they evaluate their options. From that point of view the website and the Blueprint are useful. But if you disagree with anything in it, don't worry too much, it's unlikely to end up as it begins.

Lessig on Obama

February 5, 2008 | People & Society

Wonderful passionate 20 min presentation by Stanford's Lawrence Lessig on why he supports Obama.

So I want you to shut your eyes and imagine what it will seem like to a young man in Iraq or in Iran, who wakes up on January 21st, 2009, and sees the picture of this man as the president of the United States. A man who opposed the war at the beginning, a man who worked his way up from almost nothing, a man who came from a mother and a father of mixed cultures and mixed societies, who came from a broken home to overcome all of that to become the leader in his class, at the Harvard Law Review, and an extraordinary success as a politician. How can they see us when they see us as having chosen this man as our president?

Clinton's Feminism

February 4, 2008 | Governance | People & Society

NY Times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a teary-eyed moment on the campaign trail today during a nostalgic visit to Yale, where she graduated from law school nearly 35 years ago. [...] Mrs. Clinton, looking teary, raised her left hand to her cheek and brushed something away with her finger.

Wow, teary-eyed, the very day before a critical election. What a coincidence. This happened one other time, here in NH:

The emotional moment echoed a similar one in New Hampshire last month, when Mrs. Clinton’s eyes welled with tears as she talked about the tensions of running for president.

Funny, with 35 years in public service (sic, coughwalmartboardcough) you'd think these teary episodes wouldn't happen so much when the chips are down and everyone's watching. Unless, of course, it's part of the sell.

Hillary Clinton's definition of feminism: Cry when you want to get your way, and when the going gets tough send your husband out to bully the mean kids (coughfairytailsouthcarolinajessejacksoncough).

I am all for heartfelt emotion, but not for strategic emotional cues designed to manipulate other people. With all that's happened to Hillary Clinton, if she were genuinely a heartfelt person, she would tear up more often then just the day before an election when all the media are watching. Gag me.

Andrew Sullivan says it better than I can.

Thanks Bro

February 4, 2008 | Life | People & Society

Got a helpful Twitter tweet from my brother last night:

@notio: Super Bowl is starting. Just wanted to make sure you know what the rest of the country is doing right now.

Thanks bro – I had a head's up from Fake Steve on Friday...

I noticed that many of the proles seemed to be talking about some big sporting competition that will happen in the next few days. Football, apparently. I don't much care for the game -- I'm more into European sports like cycling and cross-country skiing, and I still think it's outrageous that we don't have tai chi on television in this country the way they do in every country in Asia.

Since I don't have TV reception, I couldn't verify the lack of Tai Chi, or watch the Super Bowl. (But go Pats!)

Fully Immersed in Something

February 1, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

For when you truly have money to burn, Ultra Geeky Home Cinemas.

Instead, perhaps consider this? (All 4:21 are worth it, lyrics and images.)

Jeffrey Hart???

February 1, 2008 | People & Society

I find it unbelievable that Jeffrey Hart and I are on the same side of any issue, ever. Thus is the power of Barack Obama's political campaign. Amazing.