Category: bizarre

Disney Surpasses Microsoft’s Media Reputation

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Via MediaBistro’s Daily Media News Feed, Disney ousted Microsoft’s reputation in the media. These second-quarter results were derived by studying 60k news items:

Higher attendance at theme parks and stronger box office receipts from its newest films, “Finding Nemo” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” helped catapult The Walt Disney Company to the top of Delahaye’s most recent Media Reputation Index, a quarterly assessment of how news coverage affects corporate reputation. […]

The second quarter results, which are based on an analysis of more than 60,000 news items, also found that technology was the strongest of all sectors, with Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems and Dell claiming six of the top 20 spots. […]

I haven't been able to find the complete list online, but the article includes the top 10:

Second Quarter 2003 Media Reputation Index — Top Ten Companies:

  1. The Walt Disney Company
  2. Microsoft
  3. Intel
  4. Wal-Mart
  5. General Motors
  6. IBM
  7. Home Depot
  8. Coca-Cola
  9. Bank of America
  10. AOL Time Warner

Disturbingly enough, it resembles a list of Companies To Avoid. In particular, I wouldn’t touch Disney, Microsoft, nor GM with a ten-foot pole. And Disney, with its let’s-make-copyright-last-forever nonsense, is more evil than most.

In a HHOS?-esque moment, I’m wondering whether the other companies on the list should be avoided as well ;). Granted, I already avoid Intel and AOL, but that’s primarily because their competitors make superior products (not because they’re evil, per se). Likewise, I don’t drink Coke, but that’s just because they don’t have a Splenda-based soda yet (unlike Diet RC & Diet Rite).

Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot are large companies, to be sure, but they seem fairly normal to me. And, I’ve never been a Bank of America customer, so I can’t speak of them one way or another. And on the other hand, IBM actually appears to be one of the Good Guys(TM) these days, with its fight against SCO.

Man’s Signature Offends Delaware

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Charles Weinstein has an otherwise-normal signature that he’s been using for more than eight years — except that it’s upside-down. He's used it on checks, credit cards and other official documents, but the Delaware DMV isn’t accepting it:

He said he trained himself to write his name in this unusual way, working right-side up, as a way to make his mark unique. He said he has been signing his name this way for more than eight years on all official papers, checks, credit cards — even his old driver’s license. It was never a major problem until this week, he said, when he went to the DMV office on Airport Road to change his address.

Weinstein said a window clerk told him to “stop fooling around and sign it right.” When he insisted that what he wrote was his valid, legal signature, Weinstein said the clerk accused him of being a troublemaker and threw him out. […]

Writing one’s signature upside-down is an interesting trick, though I can’t imagine how long it took him to learn that technique or what methods he used to wrap his head around it.

Using an acting analogy, I’m curious whether he used “method writing” (where he actually learned to write the characters in his name upside-down and then wrote those in sequence to form his signature) or whether he merely learned how to mimic the look of his upside-down signature.

(Via the Crypto-Gram newsletter.)

The Uncanny Valley, Giant Robots, and Talking Animals

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I saw this one linked from a Slashdot story on a planned photorealistic CGI TV series. Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori discovered what he calls the Uncanny Valley.

In short, a human-like animal or machine becomes more likeable as it becomes more similar to humans (at first). Past a certain point, however, the likability takes a dive before going back up again (hence the “valley&rdquo).

This chasm &mdashj; the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis — represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment — affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that. […]

So, an industrial robot or even an android are generally perceived positively (they’re on the up-slope before the valley), but a moving corpse would garner a negative reaction (this would be deep in the valley, as it’s just-human-enough to be eerie). If this doesn’t make sense yet, check out the graphs on the site — those should clear things up.

And, that’s why talking animals aren’t threatening — they’re far enough from being human yet their slight-humanness raises their likability without falling into the valley.

These literary tricks have become mainstays, for they work exceedingly well. Public-service advertisements of the eighties and nineties featured an animated anthropomorphic hound in a trench-coat, encouraging cooperation with police agencies and the formation of neighborhood watch programs. With this character, the creators avoided using a human of any recognizable ethnic type, which might have impaired the effectiveness of the campaign in some areas. […]

SS American Star – Ghost Ship

Ashley Bischoff29 Comments

The SS American Star was grounded off the west coast of Fuerteventura in 1994, and has been rotting there since. I wasn’t sure what to expect at the site, but it’s a surreal view of a deteriorating corpse of a ship.

The pictures fascinate me, but I just don’t know why. Perhaps it’s the nature of destruction that wouldn’t normally be seen with a ship that size (somewhat like the curiosity in seeing the Enterprise crash-landed into a planet, I suppose).

(Link from MetaFilter)

How Much Inside?

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David Brake, also known as “the guy that owns blog.org” passes along How Much Inside?, the site that measures how much stuff is inside various things (go figure).

For instance, they answer the burning questions, “How much Oreo Goo is inside a pack of Oreos?” and “How many square inches of Magic Shell are in a bottle?”.

Simply put, magic shell is awesome. It is ACTION FOOD! It forms a hard shell when put on top of ice cream, which protects it from burrowing insects and mites. It is the perfect way to make ice cream more fun & your classmates jealous.

Developed in the 1960s through a collaborative effort between the U.S. Army and Industrial Light and Magic, magic shell was designed to be a bulletproof camouflage coating for armored vehicles. […]