17th
November
1999
“…is a community-based, private institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all its glory. The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.”
posted in Art | Permalink |
17th
November
1999
“What is it that makes a face beautiful? Average faces obtained by photographic or digital blending are judged attractive but not optimally attractive, — digital exaggerations of certain deviations from average face blends can lead to higher attractiveness ratings… Instead, the image of a female face with high ratings is composed from a fractal geometry based on rotated squares and powers of 2. The corresponding geometric rules are much more specific than those previously used by artists such as Leonardo and Durer. They yield a short algorithmic description of all facial characteristics, many of which are compactly encodable with the help of simple feature detectors similar to those observed in mammalian brains. This suggests that a face’s beauty correlates with simplicity relative to the subjective observer’s way of encoding it.”
posted in Art | Permalink |
17th
November
1999
“The number of mobile phone subscribers is projected to reach 500 million worldwide by 2003, and by that time 75 percent of all cellular phones will be Internet-enabled. Thanks to the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and the Short Messaging Service (SMS), mobile phone users can now access Internet content and services. That means Web developers and content providers will need to deliver relevant, formatted content to a variety of the second-generation “smart” phones that will come into widespread use over the next few years.”
posted in Communications | Permalink |
17th
November
1999
Find out “where everybody who was anybody is buried.” Search for celebrities’ final resting places. Or see how long you have to live.
posted in Et cetera | Permalink |
17th
November
1999
posted in Photography | Permalink |
