Today’s links, all photography related it seems…

• How to Take Great Photos of an Electronics Product with a Digital Camera

• Photoshop tutorial to make an angel from Jessica Alba

• Limburgs Museum exposeert kleurendia’s van Alphons Hustinx uit WOII colored WWII pictures exposition.

• Free image denoising, inpainting and resizing software e.g. removes overlayed text from images.

Sparklines

I’ve always been some kind of a fan of Edward Tufte since I discovered his beautiful exquisite books. You have to check it out if you are interested in visual representation of information.

Today I was searching for a blog by or on Tufte and I stumbled upon the sparklines idea, it’s already a few years old, but there’s now a new draft of the sparklines chapter from Tufte’s forthcoming book “Beautiful Evidence“.

Implementations:

• Computer implementation of sparklines on Tufte’s website
• Web implementations in Python, Javascript, Ruby
• Javascript and Photoshop
• Javascript and XBM
• Javascript and SVG
• Java and Javascript
• CSS (Python code to generate it)
• and more if you google for it…

Sparklines are apparently becoming popular. There’s even a Sparkline Wiki and sparklines.org directs to Tufte’s home pages.

today’s (and yesterday’s) links

Tim Berners-Lee’s post on creating a URI for yourself with FOAF

Unreal pictures of reality by Olivo Barbieri, the post’s comments have links to other unreal photographers like Loretta Lux.

Homo futuris

Last december I saw a feature on television (“Overleven” on Canvas, Belgium) on the continuing evolution of the human species, they (Marie-Josephe Deshaye and Anne Dambricourt) stated that evolution is a consequence of changes in the human body, specifically one bone at the base of the skull. And we would get higher foreheads and a ‘withdrawing’ [I don't know if that's the correct word] lower jaw.

Now there’s an article on BBC News on the higher foreheads since the middle ages: Time changes modern human’s face: “modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors”.

This is the original article:
W. P. Rock, A. M. Sabieha and R. I. W. Evans. 2006. A cephalometric comparison of skulls from the fourteenth, sixteenth and twentieth centuries. British Dental Journal. 200, 33-37. (abstract)

Looks like our children will have high foreheads and look like aliens

Update 19-02-2006:
I added more references to the text above.
Findings of the Global History of Health Project support exactly the same development, there is an article about it in The Sunday Times Scientists show we’ve been losing face for 10,000 years. The article also mentions other studies that find the same effect.

Another related interesting study:
Johnston, D. J. et al. 2005. The influence of lower face vertical proportion on facial attractiveness. European Journal of Orthodontics. 27 (4) pp. 349-354(6).
(abstract)

Update 23-10-2007:
The documentary was on television a second time on 29-07-2007.
More information, background, discussion and critique on 2 forums (in dutch):
freethinker.nl
skepp.be

Update 19-02-2008:
Canvas has a new website, the old links don’t work anymore so I removed them. I also added pictures that I saved from the Canvas page before it went down.

Google maps on mobile phone

Google Maps for mobile phone
And Opera mini browser for mobile phone