Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Divergent artifice

And so the academic year is done. Welcome to my Robinson Crusoe-esque getaway island for extremely wealthy patrons, built on the premise of a new kind of abstruse visibility unfamiliar in Dubai, a city where everything is a spectacle to be understood on sight. In mitigating the city's supremely visual culture, it points to the potential for images in Dubai's mirror glazed world to resist instant consumption.


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posted by Hong at 1:25 am | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, June 26, 2006
Ha-ha in the sea of consciousness

The shade of all places that shall never be lies in plain view, obscured not by invisibility (that panacea eternally sought after by the wicked, for only the wicked and Waldo need to hide) but by mere artifice. Anamorph, o stretchy anamorph! Break the dexter from limb to limb across your grid, leaving a face that only a cylinder could love. Consider! Or better yet, reflect! And you shall see the alfalfa-lined path of return.


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posted by Hong at 1:32 am | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Print quality
How large can one print a 3 megapixel digital picture before it loses true photo quality and gets all blurry and messed up? 3 megapixels is 3 million pixels is 2048 × 1536 pixels (which equals 3,145,728 pixels) and if 'true photo quality' were defined as printing at 300 ppi, then said image should not be printed beyond the standard 5 × 7 inch photo format. Just divide the pixels by the ppi count to get the maximum printable size, e.g. 2048 / 300 = 6.83 inches and 1536 / 300 = 5.12 inches.

Working backwards: Say you want to blow up that picture of Granny to A2 size (420 × 594 mm or 16.54 × 23.39 inches) while keeping true photo quality so that all her liver spots stand out, you would need a whopping (16.54 × 23.39) × 300 pixels, or 4962 × 7017 pixels, which equals 34,818,354 or 34 megapixels. Or you can wuss out and print it at 200 ppi, in which case you would only need the same image at 15 megapixels.

Someone should really metricise all this. In the meanwhile, go here for a megapixel calculator and here for a handy pixels-to-print chart.


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posted by Hong at 5:35 am | Permalink | 1 comments
Friday, June 23, 2006
Ode to ISO
There is an ISO standard for all things,
From punching filing holes into paper to metric screw threads
To the method of brewing tea for the purpose of sensory tests (ISO 3103).
And where would we be without a reliable standard against which to measure
The mechanical properties of corrosion-resistant stainless steel fasteners?
Without it structures might fall at an unacceptably uneven rate.


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posted by Hong at 1:32 am | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
I speak in song
Homage to an underrated band: lyrics from various Blind Melon songs spliced together in a mélange of depression, existentialism and general whinginess:

See everything through my eyes. My mind is a mind that I have come to know. Don't even say a word, it confuses me. Nobody here really understands me. It seems they don't really know me. What do you think they would say if I stood up and I walked away? Oh well, I think it's timefine time we all crossed lines. It looks like rain up ahead. Let me find my own way to let you know that I am real.


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posted by Hong at 3:12 am | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Closet knitters all
Pavandeep on the social event that is watching footie:

Maybe they pretend to be interested and feel obliged to watch because they think their colleagues will think they are boring otherwise, but actually they all feel the same and are really thinking about the wonders of knitting whilst watching the match and that they really want to try and knit a new scarf with that latest cross pattern-hatch effect thingy.


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posted by Hong at 12:07 am | Permalink | 0 comments