I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday and didn’t go too nuts on Black Friday (I’m sad to say that I did go a little off the deep end). Anyway, to keep you sane before the weekend officially arrives at 5 o’clock, here are four interesting links I stumbled across this week.

• Tilt-shift photography: For real vs. faking it
  I always loved this particular photographic effect but I didn’t know that the technique had a name. You can achieve a similar effect very easily in Photoshop, but for the real deal, you have to have a tilt-shift lens (such as the PC Micro-NIKKOR 85mm f/2.8D lens if you’re a Nikon user like me) or a Lensbaby, which looks to be a fair compromise.
• Tech toys for the preschool set
  I think it’s not unreasonable for me to be alarmed at the trend towards putting children in front of screens at a younger and younger age; a number of organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommends that children under two years old not watch television at all, and that older children be restricted to one to two hours of screen time per day. (In fact I wish I could reduce my screen time to one to two hours a day, but that’s difficult to do in almost any job nowadays.) But the trend this year seems to be towards “tech toys” that actually work. What does this mean? It’s hard to say right now, but in fifteen to twenty years perhaps we’ll be able to tell how the introduction of technology at such a young age has affected the new generation of kids. I genuinely hope that my fears are unfounded.
• Bad product design
  This link is a little jokey, but it points out something valid–products can be so badly designed as to be utterly ridiculous, bordering on useless. It may be true that all of the items presented in this collection (taken, by the way, from the SkyMall catalog that you’ll find on virtually any airplane in the United States) may be able to do what they were designed to do, but at a certain point you run into the problem of the law of diminishing returns.  To paraphrase in this instance, cramming multiple features into one device reduces the overall usability of the device to the point where it’s so unwieldy to use that it becomes practically useless.
• Hijacking a television signal
  On November 22, 1987, someone wearing a Max Headroom mask managed to twice interrupt the signals of Chicago-area television station, and no one has ever figured out who it was or what the motive was. A fascinating look back at television history, especially when you consider how difficult it would be to hijack a digital signal these days.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving from Gaussian Blur!

• Is virtual rape a crime?
  It was merely a matter of time before “virtual rape” (i.e., a rape in Second Life) became something that people had to deal with. But is a “rape” in a simulated environment truly a crime? This piece from Wired.com declares it a “shitty thing to do” but the author ultimately decides that it isn’t a crime. I find that I generally agree, given the horrific nature of actual real-life rape.
• Newsweek: Review of the Amazon Kindle
  I’ve tried to remain fairly oblivious to the entire e-book phenomenon, but that ended today when my friend and I happened to see the Sony eBook in a New Jersey Borders store. We both thought that the display model was a non-functional fake–the text was just too good on the screen to be real–until he pressed a button and it suddenly changed. Truly, it was a stunning thing to behold, and in that instant I became a believer. So is the Amazon Kindle a groundbreaking piece of technology? Maybe, but probably not. It doesn’t, however, mean that it isn’t interesting… and I still want one. (Warning–annoying auto-playing video with sound on the linked page.)
• The (non-)death of email
  Once again the naysayers are out in full force, saying that email is a dying medium merely because teenagers don’t use it all that much. I think it’s important to point out that teenagers also don’t use corporate intranets that much, nor do they use Blackberrys that much, but neither of those are close to dying. This is a piece from Slate that I find fairly ignorant; American teenagers do not make a representative sample of the Internet, they cannot be relied on as predictors of absorption, and they aren’t even the majority. A bit myopic but important to be aware of nonetheless.
• Zeldman on web design
  What sets web design apart from other forms of design? Internet guru Jeffrey Zeldman likens web design to typography in this compelling piece from A List Apart.

There were a lot of very good links floating around out in the blogosphere this week–so many that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just four, but that’s what I do for you each week. So, without any further ado, here are my four favorites.

• MSNBC: Alpha Channel
  MSNBC.com just relaunched with a spiffy new design. They’re still working out some of the quirks and I’m still adjusting to the new layout (kind of like how it took me a while to adjust to the redesigned New York Times layout a while back), but I think it works. More interesting to me than the redesign itself, though, is the fact that MSNBC has decided to make the entire process transparent; they’re pretty blog-savvy over there anyway, so it was hardly a surprise that they launched another blog to talk specifically about the design process. For this, I applaud them–and have added them to the blogroll over there.
• When is it time to quit?
  I can’t remember exactly when it happened–it may have been due to a psychology course in college, or it might’ve been because of a book I read–but at some point I decided that if I started reading a book and realized maybe twenty pages in that I hated it, I wasn’t going to finish it (previously I felt like I was almost obligated to slog through the entire thing “on principle”). That said, it isn’t always as easy for me to quit every project I embark on even when I have a sense that it may not be worth the trouble. This is a growing discussion over at 43 Folders on how to tell when it’s time to hang it up. No solid answers or “how-tos,” but the discussion is interesting nonetheless.
• New Jean Nouvel skyscraper to adjoin MoMA
  Some sketches of architect Jean Nouvel’s breathtaking angular spire that has been proposed for the vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art have been released. Ordinarily architectural sketches are nothing more to me than pretty drawings, but I am interested in how a good design (like this one) can inspire such excited communication amongst followers of this kind of thing. (via Curbed)
• Tokyu Hands: Things for “making”
  The MAKE: Blog featured several photos of a store called Tokyu Hands in Shinjuku, Japan, which is apparently filled top-to-bottom with everything “from an isle full of tweezers to the largest selection of paper cut-out models I’ve ever seen.” I’d really like to go and see it for myself now. (via MAKE: Blog)

• Surviving with less paper
  43 Folders has an excellent article on the love/hate relationship with paper that many of us seem to have, while making this key observation:

  …the key is to recognize that paper is all about process, whereas digital media are all about information and retrieval. One mustn’t be afraid to whip out a scrap of paper when it’s time to scribble impromptu notes, mark a manuscript for edits, or do some visual thinking. Equally, one must not hesitate to scan or transcribe and then throw away a piece of paper that has value only in the potential future usefulness of the information it represents, once the drafting and scribbling are done. Embracing paperless reference filing is not the same thing as rejecting paper’s important role in your work.

• Trademarking a color
  This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard–T-Mobile claims to “own” the color magenta. Never mind the fact that that’s like Boeing saying it “owns” the sky or Coca-Cola saying it “owns” carbonated water–it’s so oddly non-specific as to be a pointless claim. Colors vary so widely even from one computer screen to the next that unless they were to try and claim a specific Pantone shade and/or hexadecimal color setting (which they haven’t, apparently), there’d be no way to enforce it. Utterly inane.
• Mission patches reveal glimpses of the military’s strange inner workings
  A new book entitled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World shows images of some of the military’s strangest mission patches that only hint at what, exactly, these research groups might be up to. Some feature aliens, others have dragons… and so forth. From a design perspective these are fascinating–there’s a stark dichotomy at work here (the need to identify groups while also keeping their missions secret).
• Choosing a typeface: Considerations
  Should there be more to selecting a typeface for a project than just simply “liking” it? At what point should design history come into play? Jessica Helfand takes a look at that question and concludes that “at a certain point in the evolution of a visual idea, a certain amount of judgment intervenes, and appropriateness is questioned—even though appropriateness can be boring.”

• Designing a “hotel for gays”
  Axel Hotels has just opened its second location in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The company operates what it calls “hetero-friendly” (as opposed, I suppose, to “gay-friendly”) hotels that are carefully designed to appeal to the upscale gay market.
• Cory Doctorow: Automated copyright scanning will never work
  Boing Boing blogger Doctorow wrote a dead-on piece in the Guardian about why various companies’ efforts to develop automated “copyright sentries” are futile.
• Stupid Apple predictions
  There have been a lot of misinformed, ignorant and just downright pessimistic predictions about Apple. Here are some of the best.
• Why your blog is going nowhere fast
  A list of some of the best and most common-sensical reasons why new blogs tend to flounder and fail.