When you write a story down, it only happens one way.
When you adapt a book to film, the characters have specific appearances.
When you draw shapes on a map, a smeared spectrum becomes four crisp colors.

I want to expound more on these ideas in a blog post, but starting the year with an intellectual all-nighter wouldn't be very auspicious.

apod Astronomy Picture of the Day has a new image from the Mars polar orbiter:

It's BACON!!!

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
Kim chee photo by rockdoggydog http://flickr.com/photos/rockdoggydog/455046265/
Caption by Trevor Stone http://trevorstone.org/lol/kimcheeomnomnomnom.jpg
Text is Hangul (Korean) for "om nom nom nom"

Google advanced image search has an option to search just for faces. This means they have a program to inspect an image file and guess if it contains a face. This is something that humans are really good at, but computers take a lot of teaching to get right and Google seems to do a pretty good job.

Straightforward uses of this include searching for a country name to see natives and visitors, checking out the hair styles of "software engineers," searching for "bush" and seeing what portion are satirical versus serious, and turning "safe search" off and finding people sucking on your search terms (like "big"). But amusement can also be found by searching for terms which (without the "faces" option) are less likely to contain faces. Sometimes the results include nonhuman images which nevertheless have a similar structure to a face. Sometimes they include a statue or drawing. And sometimes the results have really awesome human faces. Try it yourself!

orange	oops	wtf
Orange Butterfly 897 x 987 - 172k - jpg www.hillsentertainments.co.uk	Oops! by JAM 500 x 619 - 52k - jpg www.worth1000.com	December 01, 2007 in WTF? 479 x 400 - 26k - jpg moldychum.typepad.com
map	pie	trevor
... Click map for Marysville 700 x 600 - 39k - jpg www.brunosart.com	Pie vs. Cake - oneforthetable.com 516 x 511 - 41k - jpg www.oneforthetable.com	Trevor is a lively young Spaniel mix ... 1632 x 1224 - 848k - jpg www.petlvr.com

Edit: A search for "geek" brings up several copies of this one:

At the Denver Women's Chorus concert all the singers wore awareness ribbons of varying colors. Looking through the program, my thoughts immediately explored the question "What ribbon would I wear if I were in the women's chorus?" My favorite colors are iridescent blue, transparent, and reflective. (I may not be sexually queer, but I've got some pretty queer preferences.) What might a transparent ribbon stand for? Government accountability!

In an energetic mood tonight, I sat down with MacGIMP and a GNU FDL SVG black ribbon graphic. After a few hours of tinkering, I came up with a few versions I like, shown below. I'm soliciting reader feedback. Is the text clear? Are there effects I should consider? Do you like the overlay or side text better? Is the icon (above) readable? You can view this in your journal style instead of mine if you have a color scheme without a white background. (I tested the text over black, white, and several garish 16-bit colors.)

After I've incorporated feedback, I'll post the .xcf files, write a few paragraphs about why government transparency is important, and encourage its copyleft spread. Until I've had a chance to give it a first go around, though, I request that you link to this post rather than the images directly. I'll update this post and make a new one when I feel the ribbon is ready to take flight.

( The images (~160KB) )

At work we use iText, a free library for manipulating PDFs. The library's author makes his money by giving away cool software that's complicated enough that developers are motivated to buy the book so they can use it well. We just bought said book, and I want royalties: