According to this, your odds of dying from a bee sting are about the same as from getting killed by a bolt of lightning.  Death from pancreatic cancer is about equal to dying in a car accident, which in turn is four times more likely than from a motorcycle accident.  You are ten times more likely to die falling off a building than falling off a cliff, and twice as likely to die because your surgeon left his Rolex inside you than from getting eaten by a shark.

In answer to the heading, both kill the same number of Americans per year.

Researchers have found a way to automatically make us more attractive.  The interesting thing is they don't just photoshop our head onto Fabio's body (or vice versa, depending on your head. Or gender.), they leave you perfectly recognizable as you, without any ridiculous airbrushing or absurd body enhancements.

Hard to say if this is really cool, or really creepy.  But I predict that digital cameras will have this feature built-in 3 years from now.

Some interesting quotes from a study of the efficacy of anti-terrorism measures (PDF):

Considerable effort has been made over the years by the Department of Homeland Security to penetrate into the mind of potential terrorists and to imagine which targets they might prefer to attack...  Although the list has remained secret, there have been a number of leaks indicating that miniature golf courses are included, as well as Weekee Wachee Springs, a roadside waterpark in Florida... a Mule Day Parade, a casket company, a petting zoo, a flea market, a groundhog zoo, and some, but not all, Wal-Marts.

(Although, to be perfectly fair, some Wal-Marts are more deserving of being bombed than others.)

Since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated by increased airport security screening measures has been estimated to result in 400 or more extra road fatalities per year. In comparison, the number of people killed worldwide outside of war zones since 2001 by al-Qaeda or by its look-alikes and wannabes stands at some 200-300 per year. 

Exercises in security theater can have counterproductive effects in the case of terrorism. One preliminary study finds that visible security elements like armed guards, high walls, and barbed wire made people feel less vulnerable to crime. However, when these same devices are instituted in the context of dealing with the threat of terrorism, their effect is to make people feel tense, suspicious, and fearful apparently because they implicitly suggest that the place under visible protection is potentially a terrorist target. In other words, they supplied exactly the effect terrorists hope to induce themselves.

...the annual cost [of federal homeland security expenditures] ranges from $64 million to $600 million (or even more) per life saved, greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. Not only do these expenditures clearly and dramatically fail a cost-benefit analysis, but their opportunity cost, amounting to $32 billion per year, is considerable. It is highly likely that far more lives would have been saved if the money (or even a portion of it) had been invested instead in a wide range of more cost-effective risk mitigation programs. For example, an investment of $200,000 per year in smoke alarms will save one life, and similar examples can be found in other risk reduction measures or regulations. 

Many more interesting tidbits at the link above.  See also Schneier's commentary. The conclusion of one section could be applied to the whole field of homeland security:

Any analysis that leaves out such considerations is profoundly faulty, even immoral.

My feeling has always been that terrorist is a useless label that betrays a political agenda on the part of the speaker.  When you get down to the nitty gritty, all you have are insurgents or criminals.  And it's easy to tell the difference:  just look at who you call in to deal with the problem.  If it is the military, you've got yourself some insurgents.  If it's the police, you're dealing with criminals.

Is Mike Arrington a dick?
I learned the answer at:   http://ismikearringtonadick.com

Unsure who Mike Arrington is or what he did to deserve this, I decided to check out Wikipedia, and learned that:


Must be true, in that case.

There's a bit of a feud going on right now between stick-up-the-ass designers and tasteless ignorati about smart quotes. (That's when your quotes go left or right depending on whether you are opening a quote or closing them.) The discussion was stirred up by a website, Apostrophe Atrophy, which finds fault with signage that uses non-directional apostrophes, and seems to think that a huge design faux-pas was committed in each case. Certain font geeks, like John Gruber, seemed to agree. Then the backlash started, in the comments section of a page that initially presented non-directional apostrophes as an "unforgiveable graphic design gaffe".

I'm going to throw my hat in with the back-lashers here (as you may have guessed by the fact that I'm not using smart quotes anywhere in this post or site).

First of all, apostrophes are not quotes! They are completely different punctuation marks, which serve a different purpose. Telling someone to use "smart quotes" in place of a non-directional apostrophe is just plain ignorant. It's like telling them to replace their minus signs with em-dashes, or their zeroes with Os because the latter characters seems to be more typographically sophisticated. Guess what? It's not sophisticated, it's dumb.

By convention, apostrophes can be represented using non-directional marks, or using right-single-quote, at the discretion of the writer or typesetter. This is simply because in the early days of type you would use economize by reusing similar glyphs for different purposes. The use of single-quote for apostrophe owes itself to this glyph multi-purposing. That doesn't make it any more correct than using lowercase L for the number 1, which was also very common. (Old typewriters didn't even have a "1" key!)

Computers need to distinguish between Ls and 1s, so we're diligent about using different characters for them now. Computers don't care about opening-vs-closing quotes, however, so we're going to be arguing about this one for some time to come. Today, we consider both versions of apostrophe to be correct, and if a particular one is dictated, it is only because of a publication's style guide, or a particular font designer's intent, not any universal design or punctuation rule.

Esthetically speaking, directional quotes that resemble 6's and 9's also have a very crude serif feel to me. They look like fallbacks to the ancient typewriter fonts that put balls on the ends of their glyphs (such as American Typewriter Light). Why designers should feel that a design ethic that traces back to Underwood typewriters is superior to something from after, say, the Second World War is a mystery to me. When quotes must be directional, I usually prefer wedge-shaped marks. (In fairness, the non-directional apostrophe in many fonts is equally ill-conceived, being either a repurposed mathematical prime mark, or a crude rectangle that has no trace of type design whatsoever.)

Directional quotes enclose text (just like parentheses). Sometimes (often!) using a directional apostrophe is just plain bad typography, since it visually implies a closure where there is none. Example: The contraction ‘’tis’ is little used these days. Distinctive apostrophes (which usually means non-directional apostrophes) should always be used, in my opinion, to avoid typographic muddles like this.

Lastly, smart quotes look like crap on many viewing platforms. There are many reasons for this. The web is a low-resolution medium, and apostrophes and quotes occupy only a few pixels. Furthermore, the actual character codes and glyphs used vary widely, depending on whether something was pasted from Word, typed using HTML entities, referenced as Unicode, or something else. The compromises that get made in some cases to make smart quotes appear "smart" are truly awful. It often involves font- and character-set switching so that the quotes are rendered differently than the surrounding text, with faulty spacing and sizing. Reading the Wikipedia page on quotation marks on some browsers that have to jump through these hoops is enough to make you want to kill the inventor of smart quotes. Nothing looks dumber.

I recently discovered the wonder of HDRI, and it's now the most awesome thing since the last awesome thing I discovered, which was Tinhorn Creek Cabernet Franc.

HDRI, in case you didn't know, is High Dynamic Range Imaging.  It basically involves capturing a higher range of values in an image than conventional digital sensors (or film) can normally represent.  In a conventional image, with strong brights and strong shadows, either the brights will be saturated, or the shadows will be black, or perhaps both.  There is basically no way to catch detail in both the bright spots and the shadows simultaneously.

The human eye can see detail in both brights and shadows at the same time, which is to say that our eyes have a higher dynamic range than cameras do.  There are a variety of ways to simulate the dynamic range of the eye, including using fancy sensors with built-in high dynamic ranges.  But the fun way to do it is cheat, and create composite images based on multiple shots taken at different exposure levels.

A quick scoot through my camera's menus found the auto-bracketing setting, which causes the camera to take three shots instead of one, at normal exposure, below normal, and above normal.  The amount of exposure above and below normal was configurable, so I set it to the max (2 full stops), and took a picture out my living room window.  The frame contains my bookshelves in deep shadow and the sunlit sky and rooftops out the window, which were very bright by comparison.  Auto-bracketing took 3 shots which did a pretty decent job of catching the range of exposures I was interested in.  The original shots are attached below.

There are HDRI programs out there that will allow you automatically combine different exposures and perform HDRI voodoo to combine them into one.  But I am simultaneously cheap, curious, and technically inclined, so I decided to see what I could do with just the Gimp.

I layered the images, largest exposure on top, and least on the bottom.  Then I used the Color to Alpha filter on the top exposure and converted white to transparent, which effectively deleted the saturated parts of the image, and made everything else semi-transparent according to its brightness.  Then I did the same to the second (middle) exposure.  With all that removed brightness, the result was a little dark, so I compressed the levels on the top layer.  That revealed that removing the whites made all the colours oversaturated, so I also reduced the saturation on the top layer.

The end result is shown above.  It has the slightly surreal tones of HDRI, which is kind of interesting.  It's not perfect, but it's a promising start.  The Gimp's color to alpha filter seems to translate value to transparency using a linear function that I would rather be logarithmic.  And the compression of levels in the top layer really reveals the limitations of JPEG's 8-bit range.  But that gives me something to work on in all the spare time I don't have.  I'll keep you informed.

So Jen wants to know...  if you have triplets, and one of them dies, are the survivors called twins?

So... here's an interesting employment ad, copied directly off of Craigslist:


This raises a number of troubling questions.  For example:

• What are you going to do with your $1000, given that the end of the world is nigh?
• Is $5 really the going rate for hard facts about the end of the world, or are they being cheap?
  

Now, the whole thing may seem a bit flaky, but a bit of research into the employer, a Hollywood film production company, shows that it is in fact fully legit.  Take their 2006 production, Iron Man, for example:


There is a lot more, involving the Dalai Lama and Rocky, but I don't want to give away the ending.  Suffice it to say that if the quality of writing continues to meet this high standard, that I, for one, will be buying their little book about the end of the world, once it gets published.

A strange mark appeared on my living room window this weekend.  At first it looked like some kind of strange splatter-mark, but after a while I realized it was the complete imprint of a bird, pressed, Shroud of Turin-like, into the window pane.

You know that's gotta hurt.  I looked for a dead or unconscious bird below the window, but considering the number of cats who live around here, it's not surprising that I found nothing.  At any rate it appears that the bird's spirit got knocked right out of its body and was left pasted on my window.