Broomstick (xkcd)
Month: December 2012
Bend When The Sun Moves – Out Today!
I’m excited to announce that an EP I worked on earlier this year with a group of great musicians is being released today. It’s called ‘Bend When The Sun Moves’ and our band is Vanessa Kafka & the Sunday Spins. The EP is available on iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify — and you can search for it on Pandora as well. There are also previews of the songs on Amazon. Here’s the album cover, designed by Neil Walton in the UK: I got involved with the project after becoming good friends with Vanessa while studying at Sloan. She was a classmate of mine, and we first played music together as part of the Rolling Sloans, a Sloan cover band that’s been in
Lightroom 5 Preset: Silhouette
Here’s my fourth free Lightroom 5 preset, Silhouette. It’s a fairly straightforward black and white preset that works especially well for partial or whole silhouettes. Depending on the starting brightness of the photo, you might want to adjust the strength of the silhouette effect by adjusting the ‘blacks’ control in the develop panel. Here’s the first example, a shot of a former Fidelity colleague’s son jumping into a pool: And here’s a second, a buffalo in a field I snapped while driving through Custer State park in South Dakota: Here’s the download: Lightroom 5 Preset: Silhouette To install it in Lightroom, simply right click any preset, select import, and then select the downloaded preset file.
1933 Beer Brewing Diagram and Subway Maps
Completely unrelated, other than that they’re both interesting, and both from 1933. A 1933 beer brewing diagram from popular science: And a some maps of the London Underground. In 1932 the map still attempted to show turns along the subway lines. By 1933, the design that dominates most subway maps today was born. 1932 with turns: 1933 without turns: And a 2012 London Underground map for comparison: And Boston, why not:
Lightroom 5 Preset: Vintage Rajasthan
Here’s my third free Lightroom 5 Preset, Vintage Rajasthan. My first two are here and here. I developed this one when editing a photo I took outside a temple in Udaipur, India. I was there working on an MIT research project, and got the shot on my way to a market in the early afternoon. The preset adjusts the color balance to add a vintage photo effect, and works well on shots that are vibrant with lots of colors. The original photo was bright and overwhelming, which to me was distracting, taking attention away from the the facial expressions. Here’s the photo with the preset: Here’s a second example: And one final: Here’s the download: Lightroom 5 Preset: Vintage Rajasthan To
When are MIT Students Asleep?
Via Joost Bonsen, my former MIT Media Lab instructor, here’s an interesting tool that charts a histogram of MIT student sleep patterns. You can filter by course and degree level. Undergrad engineering majors stay up late. Oddly, architecture and planning students seem to get the least sleep. Management students stay up late, but also sleep in — fitting. Click to picture to play with the tool:
Super PAC App: Comment on Non-Profits
In response to my previous posts here and here, Dan, co-founder of the Super PAC App, provided some context in the comments on the “non-profit” organizations that sponsored political ads: Definitions are important here. “Non profit organizations” is a catch-call designation for anything that is not a PAC, Super PAC, official campaign, or the national party (RNC or DNC). The disclosure rules for these groups (501c’s) are different and lighter than other organizations (don’t ask me why). The most famous is probably Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (often called Crossroads GPS). So when you think “non profit”, don’t think Make-a-Wish Foundation or Red Cross. Think of people who are choosing to register as non-profits from the menu of organization types–and they’re
Super PAC App: More on Who Lies Most
As I previously wrote about here, the Super PAC App has published all of their data so that anybody interested can take a look. Last week I looked into which types of organizations had the highest proportion of ‘Fail’ ratings for the ads they sponsored. It turns out that the clear ‘winner’ — and by ‘winner’ in mean the organization type that was found to ‘Fail’ most often — was non-profit organizations. I provided a few reasons as to why this could be the case. To sum them up, it seems likely that these organizations either (1) were more crude in their argument construction and execution, leaving them open to easy criticism, or (2) they may have simply had less
Lightroom 5 Preset: Bright Eyes
I had an encouraging response to my first lightroom preset posting last week, Burlington Northern. So I’ve decided to keep it up, and try to post new presets a couple times a month. Here’s my second posting, Bright Eyes. It’s a landscape effect that works particularly well around sunrise or sunset. It brings out the sky a bit, adds some highlight color, and enhances the sunlight’s reflection on grass and trees. I originally came up with it when editing the below photo of a tree in a field outside a Fidelity Investments office in Smithfield, Rhode Island. I used to work there on occasion, and the tree reminded me of the tree in the Shawshank Redemption, up in Maine where
Naukabout Beer
I spent the weekend on the Cape and discovered a new pale ale, Naukabout, from the Naukabout Beer Company. I found it to be a light, refreshing pale ale, with strong, but not overwhelming hop character. It definitely hit the spot. From the website, Naukabout means: (verb) — doing what you love to do when you’re finished doing what you have to do, and (noun) — the places, events, & things that reflect this lifestyle. I’ll drink to that. The brewery’s founders are from the Cape, but production is currently contracted out to Paper City in Holyoke. It’s great to see more and more small regional breweries popping up all over the place. It seems like quite a few are