Essays

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A Comment on the iPhone 4’s “Retina Display” Debate

Sev­eral blogs and mail­ing lists I fre­quent linked to an arti­cle inves­ti­gat­ing the valid­ity of Apple’s claims that the iPhone 4′s dis­play has a ‘ter­mi­nal’ res­o­lu­tion for the appli­ca­tion at hand: namely a human read­ing its dis­play at an ‘aver­age’ dis­tance (which, being unspec­i­fied in Apple’s press release, offers quite a bit of lat­i­tude for interpretation).

The arti­cle ignores sev­eral impor­tant facts.

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On Plagiarism & Creativity in the Digital Age

A while ago there was a thread on the 3D-Pro mail­ing list that diverged from its orig­i­nal sub­ject and took a turn towards a debate about copyright.

The debate resulted when some­one dis­cov­ered that part of an image was being used as a back­drop for another image with­out giv­ing proper credit. It is note­wor­thy that the lat­ter work was not of com­mer­cial nature. The poster got very upset about this nev­er­the­less. I think what upset them most was the fact that the cre­ator of the derived work claimed copy­right. The poster called that per­son an “artist” (they used quotes to express their dis­agree­ment with the use of that term) who had “the filthy guts to rip of another (real) artist’s hard work”.

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Planet Japan

I arrived in Tokyo last week but due to the sen­sory over­load this city imposes on the brain, par­tic­u­larly on a geek’s brain, I needed some time to con­tem­plate (read: process) my impres­sions before writ­ing any­thing about it.

Let me start by say­ing that I feel utterly stu­pid, by now, for not hav­ing vis­ited Japan ear­lier. My aunt is Japan­ese; through her I got to watch “Naus­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind” (in Japan­ese, w/o sub­ti­tles), when I was 11 years old, in 1985, the year after the movie came out. The images never left my head and I believe they were part of the rea­son I ended up pur­su­ing a career in film.

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