14 March 2003

Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition See also: Brian McConnell's Beyond Contact (am.co.uk) [via boingboing] 6:18:48 PM     comments

ITC reprimands C4 over image of dead baby being eaten ITC: "lack of respect for human dignity". C4: unrepentant, insists its remit is to "take on challenging subjects and explore cultural boundaries". Zhu Yu's performances have been spun into babies-commonly-eaten-in-China stories (Do They Eat Babies in China?; Eating Babies In Taiwan) and, perhaps due to this, is Zhu Yu fake?. 6:18:20 PM     comments

Michael Light: Apollo photography and the color of the moon I worked in my exhibition printing towards a neutral gray, isolating what I felt to be filmic issues and eliminating them. There is still color in my prints, but filmic casts and filmic crossover has been largely eliminated; I worked to eliminate mission-specific filmic artifacts. Transparency film from AS16, for example, is consistently, relentlessly blue -- no one ever reported the moon being blue -- as well as brutally overexposed in most instances. Photoshop allows one to work on contrast and saturation in to compensate for overexposure in ways that amaze, but increase contrast and saturation and everything only goes even more blue -- so one must selectively go in and desaturate that overheightened blue that never should have been there in the first place . . . . Picture number 67 (in Full Moon) still has some blue, but much has been cut. Images looking directly into the sun, however, all go blue and should do so: that's what happened across all missions. 6:17:48 PM     comments

Pictures from the space shuttle Columbia reconstruction project [via jwz] 6:17:28 PM     comments