Back-to-back short reviews over at Marginal Revolution, from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

The gist of this and other reviews is that it’s exactly what the trailers promised: gorgeous graphics demos strung together by a weak, derivative story that hits you over the head with a whopping big moral sledgehammer.

Found a picture online and want to figure out where it really came from, so you can see it full-sized, without captions and site banners and censorship and loltext? TinEye to the rescue. It hasn’t been able to track down every picture I’ve fed it, but it also hasn’t had a false positive yet.

After some of my earlier searches, I’m not surprised that Amazon Japan occasionally recommends porn novels to me. Today’s top dirty book has an interesting title, 一発やりがい.

一発 means “one shot”, either literally, like one (1) bullet, or more generally, like a knockout punch; やりがい means “(s.t.) is worth doing”. In context, the phrase would seem to map cleanly to:

"I'd hit that"

The intro is a bit slow, but the actual poem is worth the investment.

(updated with a link that still works, and omits the intro)

Yesterday, a massive, peaceful protest of 100,000 people – the largest demonstration for climate justice in world history – was met with a heavy-handed response by the Danish police.

Emphasis mine. 100,000 concerned activists can’t be wrong, say the folks at itsgettinghotinhere.org.

If the reporting is more honest than the science, it does sound like these assclowns were badly mistreated, but perhaps a few of them will reevaluate their religious beliefs after being “forced to sit in rows for hours, as the temperatures dipped below freezing”.

Risako: “I made it quite clear that we were wearing black tonight. Your disobedience is most disappointing.”

Momoko: “Please allow me to punish her next, Mistress.”

Saki: “That cow would never have caught me if this drapery wasn’t so heavy.”

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I’m quite fond of the work of South Korean singer Younha. My interest started when someone brought one of her songs in for our Japanese reading class, but I eventually went on to pick up her Korean albums as well (which were much cheaper than their Japanese equivalents). This morning, I was listening to some tracks from Peace Love & Ice Cream, and found myself thinking:

"I can't wait until she releases these in Japanese, so I can understand the lyrics."

(amusingly, the title track is a cover of a song recorded in English by Dutch artist Sandy Dane; I think they even used the same backing track (Sandy Dane, Younha), although the lyrics are apparently quite different)

As I said earlier, the Faces feature isn’t terribly well-integrated into iPhoto. It’s a standalone piece of metadata that has no collection to the app’s events, places, folders, or keywords. It’s even stored separately, in a pair of SQLite databases that have no real connection to anything else; they can even be deleted without affecting the rest of your database.

At a user level, the key issue is that Faces aren’t people. You can’t use it to tag “Bob’s wipeout on the slopes”, “Mary dressed up as Darth Maul”, “Jean hiding from the camera”, or dozens of other scenarios in which the relevant person isn’t clearly showing their normal face. You could select a random portion of the picture and claim it’s a Face, but it will lower the recognition accuracy, and may not work anyway.

I’m sure a future version of the app will integrate it better, perhaps allowing you to mark out areas of a picture that contain a specific person but shouldn’t be used for face recognition, but for now, you end up with two sets of pictures, faced and faceless, only one of which is easy to browse.

The other set does have its charms, though…

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