Last Suppers

I was browsing hulu yesterday, when I saw this promotional ad for the upcoming restart of Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica Last Supper (2008) via hulu

The full image is very impressive and instantly recognizable:

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 (2008)

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 (2008)

The image is normally a center figure with flanked by four sets of trinities. Therefore, there is someone missing in the photo. I guess the missing cylon? A possibly interesting thing is the missing spot is occupied by Judas in the Da Vinci original.

(The series recap is hilarious.)

It is, of course, a homage to Leonard Da Vinci’s The Last Supper fresco:

The Last Supper (1495-1498) by Leonardo Da Vinci

The Last Supper (1495-1498) by Leonardo Da Vinci

The symmetry, the center triangle, the grouping of threes, the expressions, the lack of halos around the holy figures. While this is the restored version, even the barely-visible unrestored fresco is a powerful piece. It deserves all the copies it inspires and more.

[More Last Suppers after the jump]Continue reading

Advocates of Single-Payer

This shocking article, especially in light of their tactical PR moves, makes a number of people theorize that WalMart would be advocates of a Single-payer health care system.

No. Just the opposite.

In 2004, WalMart spent $650k to defeat Proposition 72. Now a careful reading may have some wondering how a bill requiring heath coverage is not the antithesis of “single payer.”

But that’s because most people’s understanding of economics is naïve.

[The business of single-payer after the jump]Continue reading

YUI cookies

Every time I talked about web cookies, my ex-girlfriend would say, “Mmmm, cookies.”

Besides messing with my train of thought, it also gave me an unhealthy obsession with cookie implementations in web development. Today, I was taking apart how YUI implements subcookies, and the source had this comment in the subcookie parser…

/**
 * Parses a cookie hash string into an object.
 * @param {String} text The cookie hash string to parse. The string should already be URL-decoded.
 *…
*/

O RLY? Because it’s “already” URL-decoded, I don’t have to worry about double-encoding/decoding? That’s news to me.

Time to test the front-end coding wizardry:

// Include YUI utilities, logger, and cookie-beta (2.5.0)
// logger
var myLogReader = new YAHOO.widget.LogReader(document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("div"));

var Cookie = YAHOO.util.Cookie;
//Cookie.set("example", '');
var ex_cookie = Cookie.get("example");
var foo = Cookie.getSub("example", "foo");
var bar = Cookie.getSub("example", "bar");
var bogus = Cookie.getSub("example", "and");

YAHOO.log("The value of cookie 'example' is: " + ex_cookie);
YAHOO.log("The subcookie 'foo' is: " + foo);
YAHOO.log("The subcookie 'bar' is: " + bar);
YAHOO.log("The subcookie 'and' is: " + bogus);

//set subcookie values
Cookie.setSub("example", "foo", "Can YUI handle &and='s or not?");
Cookie.setSub("example", "bar", "more data");

The output after the second reload is:

The value of cookie 'example' is: foo=Can YUI handle &and='s or not?&bar=more data
The subcookie 'foo' is: Can YUI handle
The subcookie 'bar' is: more data
The subcookie 'and' is: 's or not?

Subcookie “and”? Doh! I guess that’s why this code is listed as “beta.”

Cookie Monster

Cookie Monster doesn’t like broken subcookies!

Here is a hint: If you nest serializations, you need to nest your escaping/unescaping.

(On the other hand, you only need to escape “=” and “&” instead of using this strategy.)

Bailout

I was pointed to this Paul Krugman article, which is a sequel to this piece. The Bear Stearns buyout is what touched it off. To which, someone wrote:

“Ahh, GOP capitalism—where profits are privatized and losses are socialized.

Conservative blogs start quoting Paul Krugman and the Times… You hear that? That’s the sound of the pendulum swinging back to reality.

I started writing after the 2004 election—the disaster we have wrought. But sometimes, we have to have a little faith. So, even in the face of futility, we send our words into the ether, the internet, this community we are a each a citizen of.

Nobody loves a recession, but four years was not a long time to realize our mistakes… and our social obligation to right them.

Reading George Orwell

In my seventh grade English class, I got an opportunity to read Animal Farm by George Orwell.

My mom had read it once as a little girl during the brief occupation of Seoul in the Korean War.

“One day Ohma brought home fish for dinner, wrapped in paper. But it was too much paper—everything was scarce. I noticed that the paper was numbered and I put them together and that was the first time I read Animal Farm.”

“Did you know what it was about?”

“Of course! I really liked the part where they said, ‘All animals are equal.” and then it got changed to ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ 😀 I loved it so much that when the war ended I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it didn’t make any sense. 🙁 I didn’t know what a ‘television’ was.”

[Politics after the jump.]Continue reading

Bebo for $850 million

I guess the news in my world today is that Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million.

Trust AOL to make the Microsoft-generated $15 billion “valuation” look like a steal. I’m curious how much Hi5 must be worth now:

Bebo’s phenomenal growth

Just trying to add some perspective. Not sure how Falco thinks “dominating in the United Kingdom” is going to save AOL…but I didn’t understand how they planned to win a war in Iraq either. I guess people are just really, really smart and I should trust them. At least now I know what they did with all the money they saved from the layoffs. In any case, congratulations, Bebo!

Earlier a bunch of us were discussing the internet porn industry. A friend mentioned that when you see companies like AdultFriendFinder selling out to traditional media outlets like Penthouse, it means that the players in the industry don’t see much growth potential and are cashing out.

Right before the internet bubble burst, Palm spun off from 3COM for higher than the parent company’s market cap.

Enjoy the crash.

nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 (and panoramic landscapes)

I finally upgraded my copy of nik Color Efex Pro.1 It has this new feature called “u-point” which allows you to do zone system tone masking a lot like LightZone. This means I can finally edit without masks. The other advantage is it finally works again on the Mac version of Photoshop. 😉

So I re-stitched an old panoramic of mine and then imported it into Photoshop to try out updated versions of my old nik filters as well as a new one.

Rock cave remnants

Greyhound rock
Santa Cruz beaches, Santa Cruz, California
Olympus C-2500L
(8 images, 1/250-1/1300 sec) @ f/5.6, iso 100, 9.2mm (36mm)

Please view large on black.

[nik professional filters and panoramic photography after the jump]Continue reading

Obama's 2002 speech

“Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

“The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly.”
—Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator speaking at Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, 2002

Brent Budowsky reminds us of Barack Obama’s 2002 speech opposing the war.

The speech is classic. The constant use of word pairs (“Auschwitz and Treblinka,” “Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz,” “Pakistan and India,” “the Saudis and the Egyptians,” “Exxon and Mobil.” “ignorance and intolerance” “corruption and greed,” “poverty and despair”), the sentence repetition an and counterpoint (“I don’t oppose all wars.” and then “I oppose dumb wars” followed by, “You want a fight, President Bush?”), the use of quick powerful sentences (“A dumb war. A rash war.” and then “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man”); it even ends, in the final sentence with three references to another Illinois politician’s reference to the greatest American speech of all time.

Truly impressive word play and well worth a read.

Read the full text here.

Home alone (or not)

I’ve been writing lately about the three P’s: programming, photography, and politics. Many of you must be bored out of your mind and are thinking, Damn! Terry.TMI.

Time to break it up a bit.

A friend is in the process of moving to a new place. She mentioned that she had never lived on her own before. She’s always been with boyfriends or her parents.

[At home with the parents after the jump]Continue reading