Last Supper, super-sized
Remember in The Da Vinci Code where Dr. Langdon talks about the hand holding a knife in Leonardo's Last Supper? I wanted to see for myself, and even the picture in the illustrated edition didn't help much. That's all changed now.
The Hal 9000 website lets you pan and zoom a 16 trillion-pixel image of the painting on your computer screen, a composite of nearly 1700 individual shots.
The actual painting in Milan, Italy is 29 feet wide, 15 feet high. The digital version is way bigger. If you had a typical computer monitor (96 ppi resolution) it would have to be 150 feet wide and 81 feet high to display the entire image without scrolling.
Fortunately you don't need to buy a new monitor—the scrolling and zooming of the website is reasonably fast and smooth with a DSL connection to the internet.
And see the little "Music" icon at the right? Click that right away or the syrupy tune will drive you crazy. What were they thinking?
Top |
|
When bad guys do good
I'm not a big fan of Wal-Mart. I have serious concerns about how they treat their workers, how they destroy small retailers—sometimes entire downtowns—and enough other negatives to spawn an anti-WalMart movie and websites like Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart.
So I have mixed feelings about the commercial Wal-Mart made to sell compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Click to watch it at right.
It's great: light-hearted, to the point, and uses similar statistics to the ones that made me start switching to CFLs throughout the house. I'm sure it will convince millions of ordinary folks to buy and use CFLs who otherwise would pass them by in favor of cheaper incandescents. It makes going green seems like fun and smart at the same time. I just wish it wasn't increasing Wal-Mart's bottom line at the same time.
Top |
|