A histogram is a graph that shows how colour or brightness is represented in an image. It should be familiar with anyone who has opened up Photoshop’s “levels” window.

Histoface is a typeface of sorts, which creates an image with a hidden message in the histogram.

Here is an image created with HistoFace. As an image it looks just like a white to black gradient:

But open up the histogram in photoshop, and you get:

Taking this a little further, I created three separate images, and put them into the red, green, and blue channels of an image. This created this image, which has “red”, “green”, and “blue” as hidden messages in each respective colour channel. You’ll have to check for yourself though.

You can make your own on the HistoFace page.

(Thanks Jay!)

Photo from Gum Election via Wooster

The debate over the American Election has been fierce over the last few months. Obama has been running some negative ads, especially hammering home links between John McCain and the Bush/Cheney camp. For the most part though, his campaign has been more issues based. His 30 minute prime-time did not mention McCain or Palin at all.

McCain’s campaign, on the other hand, has seemingly consisted almost entirely of ads which attack or demean Obama in some way, linking him to William Ayers, claiming he’s a socialist, or what have you. I’m sure many of these ads are effective, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all about Obama. They don’t mention what McCain will do, only what he won’t.

The situation has thus pretty-much become a referendum on Obama. The two choices being Obama and not-Obama, instead of Obama vs. McCain.

Regardless of the outcome tomorrow, I think this has been a tragic flaw in the Republican campaign. From the outset they have been behind on the issues that matter. McCain has been catching-up in trying to embody change, encouraging economic regulation, reforming health care, and speaking to the middle and lower classes. Obama has been hammering these points from day one, and in too many cases that has allowed him to shape the debate that followed.

If McCain loses tomorrow, as I hope he does, I think this will be a big reason — He has purposely kept the eyes of the public on his opponent, not on himself.

My friend Alice just posted an extremely bizarre set of photos she took in Japan of The Crying Sumo Festival, in which sumo wrestlers hold babies aloft and compete to make them cry the loudest. The traditional ceremony is conducted to ward off evil spirits.

If holding the babies aloft in front of the crowd and yelling the word “cry” in Japanese over the loudspeaker doesn’t make the babies cry, the overgrown wrestlers grimace, yell, or don scary masks to get the infants crying.

Here is a great link showing how many countries have yet to move to the Metric System.

I’m currently working my way through The Toyota Way. While I don’t normally read management or manufacturing books, I’ve found this one particularly enlightening. Toyota has just recently surpassed GM and Ford to become the largest automaker in the world, and this book goes a long way to explain their remarkable success. Much of their success is due to their relatively long term view. Toyota often sacrifices short term success for long term gains, a refreshing outlook for such a big company.I’m not done the book, but one really good piece of advice has stuck with me. When you encounter a problem, be sure to ask why at least 5 times. What that basically means is – always look at least 5 levels below the surface when trying to find the root of the problem.

When relatively advanced western societies first arrived in certain areas of New Guinea and Melanesia many years ago, the more primitive societies living there had to deal with an influx of technologies and goods they were not familiar with. Many of the items the westerners brought were not made of wood or stone, but metal and synthetic goods the natives did not understand. Since it did not make sense to them that man could have made these things, they began to believe that they were created by the gods.

What arose from these beliefs were the incredibly interesting “Cargo Cults” – groups of people whose religious practices involved mimicking the behavior of Westerners by building mock airstrips, offices, and radios out of available local materials, in an attempt to get goods (or cargo) from the gods.

Here is a decent write-up on the phenomena. Wikipedia also has some good information. It’s fascinating stuff.