Hasta La Ideas

Yesterday’s viral internet event quickly went from neat to depressing. For those who stayed away from a computer yesterday, this Tumblr photo of a dress went viral as people began to realize: Some of us see the dress as white with gold stripes. But others see the dress as dark blue with black stripes. A third set of people saw first one, then the other, as they revisited the photo later.

Wired spelled out the scientific explanation, and even went so far as to extract the RGB values in Photoshop:

In a nutshell, the explanation for our perceptual differences has to do with the way our eyes and brain interpret light and reflectivity, filling in blanks that aren’t there to generate our notion of what a color is. Apparently the particulars of this photo just happen to ride on some kind of perceptual cusp, where the readout in some peoples’ brains is white and gold, whereas others’ brains fill in blue and black. Here’s what the same dress looks like on its online shopping page, by the way:

The depressing part, as always, was the human reactions: The all-caps crowd stating what colors they saw and following up with ARE YOU BLIND, GET YOUR EYES CHECKED, et cetera. It reminded me of reading reviews of Apple’s first earbuds. One reviewer would say they fit perfectly; another would say they’d always fall out. The first reviewer would retort with DONT LISTEN TO THIS PERSON THEIR AN IDIOT THESE EARBUDS FIT PERFECTLY and I thought Wow, we’ve become so stupid that we can’t even comprehend that peoples’ ear canals have different shapes. These guys are presumably descended from the folks who told Christopher Columbus he was going to fall off of the edge of the world.

As industrial designers, we learn early on about trying to fit one thing to match millions of different people. We’re taught in school that the challenge of mass production is coming up with something that everyone can use. Which is of course impossible, so we consult our little bibles—who can forget the pain of having to spend $40, on a student’s budget, on Panero & Zelnik’s Human Dimension & Interior Space to work out the 95th-percentile human measurements for a chair—or we just take our best guess.

But come crit time, certain things became pretty clear: Few folks can get universal consensus on what’s pretty and what’s ugly, what works and what doesn’t.

What’s sad is how this plays out in society. When we can’t reach a majority consensus, or even when folks have the temerity to disagree with us, the next step in the “debate” is These people are all idiots.

The extensive, alluring worlds of whiskey, Scotch and bourbon can feel daunting to novice drinkers—especially when there’s an expectation to drink it neat or with a bit of water. For an easier entry point into one of the most nuanced areas of the spirits……

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Julio Ojeda-Zapata, a technology reporter and blogger with St. Paul, Minnesota’s Pioneer Press, dug into his newspaper’s archives today upon learning of the sad news of Leonard Nimoy’s death. He wrote a couple of articles about Spock back in the day, beginning with a locally flavored piece that must be logged at the opposite end of the technology spectrum celebrated in Star Trek.

As the reporter wryly notes in his blog post, the article dates back to a time when the Internet was known as the “World Wide Web.” Here’s an excerpt:

Nimoy is among a growing number of photographers who are pursuing a digital strategy for achieving greater [photographer] exposure.

This month, about a dozen of Nimoy’s nudes are being exhibited on a St. Paul-based World Wide Web page dubbed “F-64” that is the online equivalent of an art gallery – a site that selectively displays the works of accomplished photographers in a gallery-like environment.

“Some [photography-oriented] sites sell space like a mall,” posting the work of any amateur for a fee, says F-64 creator Scott Bourne, a photographer and a former Internet-oriented entrepreneur who recently opened a photo studio in St. Paul’s Lowertown District. “But they can’t buy their way onto F-64.” In this regard, f-64 is similar to a “real-life, street-level gallery,” Bourne says. “Its precious retail space wouldn’t be available to just any photographer.”

F-64 has drawn kudos from the likes of Chuck Delaney, dean of the prestigious New York Institute of Photography, who calls Bourne “a visionary” and says, “Exhibiting photographs in a cyber-gallery is an innovation that is here to stay… Though the sale of fine-art photography (online) is in its infancy, others will follow.”

Ojeda-Zapata is promising to share the other Nimoy piece he wrote shortly. Read the rest of the first one here.

FYI, the publishing use of the photography lens-aperture term “F-64” (or f/64) dates back many more decades. To wit, check out this manifesto published on behalf of a 1932 group that included Ansel Adams.
 
[Photo: Carla VanWaggoner/Shutterstock.com]

Today in the Louisville Courier-Journal, the paper’s former education editor Charles Whaley jumps back to the post-World War II days. In the summer of 1949, he had just graduated from the University of Kentucky and was looking to spend a useful summer in New York before starting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Whaley wound up at The School Executive, a now defunct NYC publication where one Nelle Harper Lee had been hired earlier that same year by editor Dr. Walter Cocking, who also engaged Whaley. Intriguingly, when author Charles Shields published his 2006 biography of Lee, titled Mockingbird, there was no mention of her The School Executive days. It was Whaley in fact, post-publication, who made Shields aware. From the Courier-Journal article:

Shields asked me to share my memories of Harper from those days for a future revision of his biography Mockingbird.

“I remember Lee as being very friendly and outgoing, chipper with a warm smile and friendly greeting as she walked through the office,” I wrote him in part. “I also have a recollection of her being with a young man of her age (name escapes me; was it John?) as they chatted with me. Did he work there, too? Not sure. But this chat did take place in the office on Park Avenue South. Was he a boyfriend or just a friend? He was Southern, I’m pretty sure.”

Shields, I believe, was the first to reveal the huge role that Nelle’s New York friends Michael and Joy Brown, whom I also got to know years later, in the creation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Truman Capote, her hometown friend, had asked them to befriend her when she moved to New York.

Go Set a Watchman, the very belated sequel to Lee’s seminal 1960 novel, will be released July 14. Whaley meanwhile has been working on a biography of Ben Bagey, a New York record producer who spearheaded off-Broadway revues.
 
[Jacket cover courtesy: HarperCollins]

Hidden below a thriving maraschino cherry business in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Arthur Mondella was secretly running the largest pot operation in New York City history. When inspectors arrived at the factory to investigate possible cherry-related pollution……

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