Boing Boing reader Kumar Corcoran did this sweet Photoshop of a well-armed Lord Jesus. I blogged a crappy, low-res copy found on a third-hand image hosting website months ago, and he kindly rooted around in old hard drives out in the garage and found the original, along with some other 'shopped delights I'll save for future posts. Thanks, Kumar. 
Susannah Breslin has posted a new story to The War Project website, her independent online project featuring first-person stories of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Every as-told-to story is based on an in-person interview Susannah conducted with the veteran, and a photo portrait she took of the veteran. About today's story:
Sgt. George Zubaty, whose father was a Vietnam War veteran, grew up in a small southern town and was deployed as an Army infantryman to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. In his story, he talks about being among the first to enter Baghdad, what Iraq and Cormac McCarthy's The Road have in common, and why some soldiers have more problems than others.
'Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you're looking in a car, and there'll be mom, dad, kids, everything's burnt, everything's torn up. Remember, it's 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn't soft and nice. It was, you've been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops.'
You can follow The War Project on Twitter.
I love this shot of Survival Research Laboratories founder Mark Pauline operating the 'Big Arm,' which is about to pick up the 'Running Machine' in its mecha-maw, then slam it back down to the ground. Lots more images and archived video here.
On August 18th, an expedition team will be heading out to the Titanic site to create a 3D map of the wreckage 2.5 miles beneath the sea. 1,522 people died in the Titanic shipwreck in 1912; oceanographer Robert Ballard discovered the remains in 1985, and since then a bunch of different expeditions have headed out there in an attempt to salvage artifacts or take photos. But this one appears to be by far the most technologically intensive and expensive mission.
The 'dream team' of archaeologists, oceanographers and other scientists want to get the best assessment yet on the two main sections of the ship, which have been subjected to fierce deep-ocean currents, salt water and intense pressure.
...The expedition will use imaging technology and sonar devices that never have been used before on the Titanic wreck and to probe nearly a century of sediment in the debris field to seek a full inventory of the ship's artifacts.
'The Lost Children of Hamelin'
...Folklore has assimilated the figure of the Pied Piper with that of a rat-catcher. The first surviving reference to rodents appears in the 16th-century Zimmern Chronicle (c.1559–65), followed by Weyer’s aforementioned Delusions of the Devil, both written almost three centuries after the tragedy.
If the rats were most likely a later addition rather than an original element of the Hamelin episode, they gave depth to the tale and resonated in the popular imagination thanks to a play of macabre symbolic associations. The image of a rat-infested mediæval town instantly brings to mind thoughts of the plague. Plagues and epidemics have had a continuous impact on the collective imagination, taking us back to the Ten Plagues of Egypt in Exodus: biblical plagues were a punishment from God. The Piper, able to defy the curse with the power of his music, is thus invested with supernatural abilities.
In mediæval representations, Death presented himself as a skeleton wearing a colourful pied attire, a jester who always laughs last (perhaps the reportedly widespread fear of clowns – see FT226:34–41 – might even derive from this image). The Pied Piper thus becomes the lord of the rats, the Black Death (known at the time as the Great Death or simply the Pestilence) personified, and the one responsible for taking the lives of the 130 children of Hamelin.
 New Zealand Herald | Are the police beyond the law? The Guardian I am writing you regarding the disturbing circumstances surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson (Report, 23 July). If you or I launched an unprovoked attack on a fellow member of the public, in front of numerous witnesses, and the act was captured on ... Ian Tomlinson coroner is urged to stand asideThe Guardian SUZANNE MOORE: Protests are part of our heritage, but after this who'd dare to ...Daily Mail Ian Tomlinson's family 'not giving up' over G20 deathBBC News The Press Association -Mirror.co.uk -This is London all 636 news articles » |
The media really, really, really loves to write about Apple and the iPhone these days. It reminds me of Google in 2004, when the media fell in love with the concept of search.
Besides the antennae story, which I find hopelessly over reported, the latest iPhone rhapsody has been how many iPhone 4s Apple has sold - apparently, 3 million as of last Friday. Friday was July 16th. The iPhone 4 launched on June 24, so that'd be 23 days to reach the 3 million mark.
3 million phones in 23 days - that's a pretty strong clip, the fastest sales of an Apple phone to date, Mashable reports. If I do the math, that's more than 130,000 phones a day.
But did anyone in the press notice Google's little announcement, the day before Apple launched its iPhone 4? This one? The one where Google said, and I quote:
'Every day 160,000 Android-powered devices are activated -- that’s nearly two devices every second.'
Yep, that'd be 30K MORE phones a day than Apple. And my guess is that Android's pace is accelerating, while the iPhone 4 is probably sliding downward, given how many folks bought it at launch (Mashable reports that 1.7 million were sold in first three days, so 1.3 million the next 20 days). In fact, if you do THAT math, and divide 1.3 million by 20 days, you get 65,000 iPhone 4s sold each day, which is nearly 100,000 less, PER DAY, than Android phones.
Is that story anywhere in the press? Not that I see.
As far as I can tell, Android-based phones will far outnumber any other smart phone by year's end. Apple, meet your new Windows. It's name is Android.
As with great works of art, you must look into the past to appreciate the future. With roots as far back as the 1970′s, the humble icon has come a long way. Following is a collection of icons though history. Although there have been many other operating systems in the time between 1981 – 2010, I’ve hand picked the ones of the most significance to modern icon design. These designs show just a small fraction of the icons in the many and varied User Interfaces throughout the years. To learn more about the history of User Interface Design you can find a comprehensive article on the subject on Wikipedia.
In 1973 the Xerox Alto was the world’s first GUI (Graphical User Interface) based computing system. Designed around an "office" metaphor (also a first), the Alto was built as a research computer and therefore wasn’t available for commercial release. With 2,000 machines worldwide, the Xerox Alto was so significant, it was a source of inspiration for the Apple Lisa (1983). In 1981 the Xerox Star was released, incorporating many of the design features of the Alto. The Xerox icons demonstrate a consideration for human interaction. As you can see, Calculator, Document, Folder and Trash haven’t changed in almost 30 years.
1981 – Xerox 8010 Star
Development of the Apple Lisa started in 1978 and was heavily influenced by the earlier Xerox computers. Hoping to carve a niche in the personal computing market, Apple adopted the office metaphor to make navigation easier for new users. Lisa was an advanced GUI for the time as it had movable "Desk Accessories" (early Widgets), drop-down menus and folder based directories. You can see the icons are not much different from the Xerox, except for the size and single pixel outlines, and the use of the computer as the preferences icon (it’s now common to use cogs).
1983 – Lisa Office System 1
A year after Lisa the Apple Macintosh 1.0 was released. We now see drag and drop file copying, movable windows and fancy new icons! The Macintosh icons were designed by the now legendary Susan Kare. Susan Kare has to be the all time master of Icon design and was responsible for many icons including the MacPaint interface (fig 2). Kare’s philosophy on icon design is simple, "I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way. I try to optimize for clarity and simplicity even as palette and resolution options have increased." This philosophy is at the core of Apple’s early commercial success.
1984 – Macintosh System 1.0 (fig 1)
1984 – Macintosh System 1.0 (fig 2)
It’s important to note — for those a bit younger than us old sentimental computer users — that the GUI was not only for the Apple systems. The Atari ST had an OS called TOS which had a minimal interface also using the desk metaphor, which by then had become a computer standard. It’s interesting to see that the TOS has Isometric Disk icons (file drawers).
1985 – Atari TOS Version 1.0
The Amiga Workbench was made for the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Despite the crudely designed icons, Workbench was actually ahead of its time. Including features such as customizable mouse cursors, four color graphics and multi-state icons. You can see the two states of the "Workbench" icon in the example below. The Amiga broke with the desktop convention and chose to use a workbench with drawers instead of files.
1985 – Amiga Workbench 1.0
In 1985 Microsoft finally released its first GUI. The icons are just as crude as the Amiga but don’t include color. It’s interesting to see that the first icons for Windows Paint employ different symbols to MacPaint, in particular the Spray Painter.
1985 – Windows 1.0x
I’ve included GEOS for the Commodore 64 as, at the time, it was the second most popular GUI behind Macintosh 1.0 (based on units shipped). The icons have more character than Windows OS and share the Mac philosophy of clearly expressed metaphors.
1986 – Commodore C64 GEOS
With System 7 we saw the introduction of color to the icons. You may notice that the icons are now slightly raised to appear "clickable".
1991 – Macintosh System 7
In Windows 3.0 (1990) Microsoft employed Susan Kare (who first made icons for the Macintosh 1.0) who greatly improved the designs. In 3.1 Kare further refines the colors and designs for the icons. Windows 3.1 was the first Windows platform with pre-installed True Type Fonts.
1990 – Windows 3
Windows 95 introduces more colors to the icons and a few more isometric designs. The Windows 95 design is a complete re-build and includes elements that are still part of Windows designs to this day. The elements include, the taskbar, the menu and Microsoft’s famous Start Button.
1995 – Windows 95
In Mac OS 8 the icons are now beginning to look brighter and rendered to show a strong light source. Macintosh also starts to implement an isometric style with a strong "drop shadow".
1997 – Macintosh OS 8
Mac OS X was released around the time I was studying for my degree in Multimedia. Lovingly called the "Jelly Mac" by most of the students. We couldn’t help but notice the ultra shiny and plastic-jelly like finish of the icons. The icons in OS X are also a huge leap forward in design from the previous OS 9, which was released just two years earlier (OS 9 looks almost the same as OS 8 above.) Presumably, due to the Dock, the icons are rendered either from a straight forward point of view or slightly above. Designed around the new Aqua theme, icons show complex reflections, highlights and textures. Without the Aqua theme, I doubt that icon design would be as desirable as it is today.
2001 – Mac OS X v10.0
In 2001 Microsoft introduced, yet another, completely new OS system. Adopting a saturated color palette, the icons are rendered with a soft illustrative look that uses a single light source and a semi transparent drop shadow. They continue to use the isometric style.
2001 – Windows XP
Mac ditches the stripes and adopts a 3D reflective doc for the icons to "sit on". The use of chrome, glass and reflections is as popular as ever. The icons don’t change much from v10.0.
2007 – Mac OS X Leopard
The Windows 7 icons are completely different from Windows XP and similar to Windows Vista. The major difference between Vista and 7 is the direction the icons are facing. I haven’t been able to find any official documentation on the change, but I’m not the only one who’s asking the question. The icons in Windows 7 are also softer and more glassy than previous ones.
2009 – Windows 7
In the next installment (Know Your Icons Part 2 – Modern Icon Design) we will be delving further into the world of icons and exploring what icons mean to us today.
