Averaged Beauty

Attractiveness by Age Experiment
Attractiveness by Age
Originally uploaded by manitou2121.

Pierre Tourigny downloaded about 30 pictures of women from Hot or Not, a popular internet “photo rating” site, then used SqirlzMorph to create each of the virtual women in the composite images shown here.

“These women do not exist. They are a composite of about 30 faces that I created to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet.”

See also averages based on Hot or Not ratings and origin.

The Flickr/Yahoo! Situation

As anyone that cares to listen knows, I’m a big Flickr fan.
It’s bothered me that Flickr has decided that all the original members need to update the way they login by merging their accounts with Yahoo! accounts.
Here is a copy of the announcement:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.
95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It’s easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don’t.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:
http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here:
http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you’re reading this, you’ve been around for a while and that means a lot to us!
Warmest regards,

– The Flickreenos

Obviously in the end I’m going to stay a Flickr user, but I will admit, I did take this opportunity to shop around, just in case there was something else out there that compares. For a hard core flickr fan like myself, that’s a serious statement.

I know I shouldn’t admit that a change in the way I login to Flickr bothers me, but it does. I really don’t like Yahoo! and so I’ll try not to let my hatred of companies that play dirty get in the way of enjoying the world’s best photo sharing site.

Here is the Official Old Skool Merge Topic on Flickr. The backlash has been fierce. I’ve found reading the comments fuels my disappointment, but also the way the Flickr staff has handled it has me feeling good about the long term future of the site.

Spiders on Drugs

A couple of weeks ago I watched the video Spiders On Drugs.

It’s a parody of the old Hinterland Who’s Who show that you may remember if you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980’s here in Canada. Hinterland’s Who’s Who would come on between shows—I used to hate them, “enough with the stupid animals I want to see cartoons!”

This interesting read is the story of Andrew Struthers who made the video and his narration of what happened after he posted it on YouTube.

Art Puzzle

From https://rinpaeshidan.jp/about/

Since the group’s first breakthrough video went viral on YouTube in 2006, Tokyo-based Art collective Rinpa Eshidan has been creating “motion paintings” and commercial films that have earned the group fierce notoriety in the global art scene.

With over 60 million collective hits worldwide, Rinpa’s signature style is recognized and emulated the world over.

Charlie Brown Christmas Performed by the Cast of Scrubs

I’m a fan of scrubs, and if you are too, you might like this version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas performed by the Scrubs cast.

Here is some backstory.

Take everyone’s favorite Christmas special, mix in a little wackiness from everyone’s favorite medical sitcom, and what do you get? You get the video that’s after the jump: a ten-minute version of A Charlie Brown Christmas with the voices of the cast of Scrubs dubbed in.

And don’t think that this is just Zach Braff, John C. McGinley and company doing a literal reading of the Charlie Brown script; it’s more like a Scrubs episode, complete with flashbacks, girl names, and penis jokes. Even the characters are the same. Except here, JD looks like Chuck, Dr. Cox looks like Linus, Carla looks like Lucy, etc. (And there’s even a Cox Rant ™ or two in there, in places you wouldn’t expect). I’ll let you be surprised at where the other voices pop up.

The video was made during season three for a cast Christmas party. It’s very funny and definitely worth a look.

Water Polo Champions

Those of you that know me well, know that I love water sports. Last night my water polo team won the U of L intramurals finals in a victory so decisive, I didn’t actually find out the final score.
I’m not going to say it was easy. For one thing, we were missing a lot of players last night. One had bus trouble and wasn’t back from her swim meet in Vancouver, another had a concert to perform in — one that if he missed he would fail his music class. There were a couple other players that just sort of, stopped coming to the games, so that left us a person short and no subs.

It was 6 on 7 for the first half and we actually did really well, despite being short handed. However, near the beginning of the second half, our goalie swam up out of the water to make a save and then fell back under the water shaking with pain. Nobody could figure out what happened to him. I swam over as did a couple others and it turns out that he had one of the worst cramps in his calf that I’ve ever seen. It was pulsing up and down.
So that left us down to 5 players. I have to be honest — I was a little worried.

It turns out my fear was misplaced because it was at this point that we really started to pull ahead. It’s games like this one that remind me why I love water sports so much.

Update: Check out this great water polo flickr set by my friend John Lapins.

Mr. Citymen

Mr. Citymen is a series of five wonderful short animated pieces by Eric Lerner. It seamlessly combines computer rendered characters inside live action environments.

mr. citymen

Coupled with the avant garde soundtracks, these animations work on a variety of levels and evoke various responses from the viewer. Also the combination of live action and animation is incredibly effective.

Moo Cards

Last month a company called MOO Print Ltd gave out ten free “moo cards” to any Flickr Pro subscriber. Since I didn’t have anything to lose, I ordered up my ten free cards and was pleased that there really are no strings attached and the cards look great.

I was excited to jump on the “take pictures of my moo cards and post them on flickr” bandwagon, however, at the time I got mine in the mail, my camera happened to be inconveniently getting a free massage by the nice people at Nikon. (They replaced the shutter and aperture, not to mention gave it a nice software upgrade—it fixed the problem so despite the wait I’m happy again).

Anyway now that I have my camera back and without further ado, here are a few of my moo cards:

Moo Cards

The thing on the left is a roll of magnetic tape. I’m in the process of turning the cards into magnets moo-gnets.