Cosmo Catalano

ilovecharts:

Huffington Post front page.

Wow. ALL CAPS Arial and a chart saved as a lossy-ass JPG instead of a PNG. This might just be my least favorite thing on the Internet right now.

(source image - from here, blame HuffPo for the Arial and at least some of the generation decay)

rickish:

These boobies broke your website.

choire:

lol.

Probably not the boobies themselves, but the fact that the boobie pictures were poorly prepared for web use.

Note to The Awl: I can help with that.

dealbreaker:

Hey Everyone,

We are going to be writing a book! Here’s the official announcement, from the most recent issue of Publishers Weekly. We are so excited to be starting this project and will be sure to keep you guys updated on any developments. Thank you so much for reading our blog for the last year. This would not even be remotely possible without you all. The blog will live on as well, so keep submitting guest entries, and keep reading. We love you.

-Dave and Marisa

Ok. Several things:

• Awesome picture quality bro.
• terrible idea—every time you make book from blog, god kills a kitten.
• there’s a “yo dawg yo” to be made out of Publishers’ Weekly.

(via juliasegal)

Internet Charts: You’re Doing Them Wrong

Venn diagrams really don’t lend themselves to this sort of data set—clearly art represented here exists at varying degrees along two axes: stoner and douche. An XY plot makes a whole lot more sense, especially considering how many individual points are presented—I can’t even tell if LOLCats or Stained Glass is more stoner!

While this style of chart is very much in vogue—a meme, you might say—it really only works for discrete, “and/or” comparisons. I realize it’s a joke, but most of the humor therein stems from the logical and valid presentation of an absurd set of data. And this setup just doesn’t deliver.

Also, lossy compression? For a line drawing? PNG or GTFO. I bet they didn’t even make this in Illustrator/Inkscape.

ohryankelley:

The Evolution Of Storage

(via: geekologie)

This infographic series is garbage.

Small Scope: The large-scale jump to digital music storage began with a 5GB iPod, which has a capacity of roughly 89 CDs—that is, if you idiotically define “CD” as a compact disc full of uncompressed music. MPEG Layer-3 compression (.mp3) will get you, on average, 10:1 reduction in size. A CD contains 700mb, so the jump to the iPod was just over a seven-fold increase in storage, and priced at $300 at launch, it cost as much as 20 CDs—or 14GB.

Small Scope 2: The photo comparison is similarly flawed. Detail from a 35mm print isn’t really comparable to an 8.5 megapixel image. The unit “photo” overlooks all sorts of crap: file compression, size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc.

Large Scope: Data is effing data, people. Breaking it down like this simply because there weren’t processors fast enough to play mp3s or digital eyes sharp enough to pixelate images serves purely nostalgic instincts.

Conversely, bad comparisons like this fuel marketing claims and public ignorance—it’s sort of thing that makes people view $5/month for unlimited texting as a “deal” when, in terms of cost-to-provider, it’s the biggest public fleecing since Credit Mobilier.

How do you get a .jpg that lossy? How many generations of re-compression does it take to get that kind of noise in a simple, two-color line drawing?

Is it ironic that one of the world’s most delicious coffee companies is apparently one of the least Internet-savvy? I think it is.

lifeaquatic:

I often get asked things like “What do you actually do?”

The answer: Make line drawings in Word that illustrate what I’m trying to say in writing.

The Star is very academic. Well done, Malone. Bonus points for png.

Oh, Velonews. Even when you do something cool, you manage to screw it up with broken images and JPGs that should be PNGs.

Chris Pine should always be a JPG, Step. 60K for this, 400k for the PNG.