True, false, or a conspiracy? There’s only one way to find out.

A crowd-sourced collection of photos taken from aeroplanes… in a word, spectacular

And on the subject of high attitude – to be precise, very high attitude – photography, Blue Marble is a composite image of the Earth, made up of many photos taken by the “Suomi NPP” satellite, a few days ago. See the also the full size version (warning: this is massive).

The use of apostrophes is in slow decline, but is this a result of carelessness, or might some other factor be at play?

So is there a politics of punctuation? Well, in a way, there is. We’re talking here about ‘orthography’ – the appearance of the written text. Those who state that a) there are rules and b) they should stay the same way, don’t have history on their side. The history of how the apostrophe has been used and not used makes for a little essay in itself. As it happens, most people find the detail of such histories deeply boring, but the story of irregularity and inconsistency in those stories is the interesting thing here.

US photographer Dennis Manarchy has built a camera that is some ten metres in length. While the two metre high negatives it produces may be too much for some photographers to handle, the resulting images are said to be highly detailed.

Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet, and are so large that windows must be used as lightboxes to examine them. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative.

If a tree’s year rings could be converted into musical notes, what songs they could sing.

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

When certain smells evoke certain memories, usually from our distant past, it’s called the “Proustian phenomenon”, named after French novelist Marcel Proust, who died in 1922. But how effective are smells, or odours, when compared to other “triggers”, such as music, in the recalling of memories?

“It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odours are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers,” the researchers said. “Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odour is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odours.”

Paper books win out when compared with ebooks, argues Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

I am not against ebooks – I believe that their mass use is not only inevitable but will change the ways that we think and learn. I am, however, deeply concerned about ebooks when compared to paper as a technology. Make no mistake, paper is a technology just as much as an LCD screen is, and as a technology it has several important advantages over e-readers that I am loathe to see disappear.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them… call centres that is. I am abundantly thankful that I haven’t had to deal with too many of them recently.

Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user – because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan’s terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you’re providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site.

The premise

J. Edgar (trailer), a biography drama, the latest feature of US actor and director Clint Eastwood (“The Bridges of Madison County”, “Million Dollar Baby”), casts a spotlight on the life of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), the first, and longest serving, director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who retained the post until his death in 1972.

At one point a household name even outside the US, Hoover, who was considered the second most powerful person in America, was both feared and admired by presidents and people on the street alike. He became an increasingly controversial figure later in life however, as his often underhand practices began coming to light.

The play

In his later years in office, Hoover, determined that the next generation of agents understand his work and principles, began transcribing the events of his career to junior agents, recalling the supposedly significant parts he played in incidents such as the killing of gangster John Dillinger, and investigating the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s young son.

During his 48 years as FBI director, Hoover also assembled secret dossiers on government and public figures, and at times released, or threatened to release, the information he had, as a way of manipulating people such the US Presidents he served under, or to undermine the activities of those he considered subversive, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

He never married, but was very close to his domineering mother (Judi Dench) until her death. Hoover briefly dated Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), who later became his personal assistant, and possibly also saw Lela, mother of Ginger Rogers, but had a much closer relationship with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), who he went on to make an associate FBI director.

The wrap

“J. Edgar” is an intricate portrayal of the long serving FBI director’s life, seen from the inside, or Hoover’s perspective, looking out. It attempts to reconcile the often contradictory image he presented to the world, against the life he led privately, even if some of what is presented is contentious, particularly the suggestion he was homosexual.

Fact is often difficult to distinguish from fiction though, such was the perception Hoover crafted of himself, and even he was all too willing to accept his own distortions of reality as truth. And while “J. Edgar” covers a lot of ground, and makes numerous jumps back and forth through a 50 year span, the story remains coherent and intriguing throughout.

Recent attempts to enact heavy handed laws in the US to curb online piracy have only served to expose Hollywood’s weaknesses, according to startup funder Y Combinator, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop new ways of producing and distributing entertainment:

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?