George Packer:

Have the Republicans run out of ideas?

The Political Scene: The Fall of Conservatism

The United States is currently involved in a wide spectrum of complex national security challenges around the world. Challenges posed by rising regional powers, global terrorism, and failed states will be long and enduring. These can only be effectively met with the help of our allies and coalition partners.

Toward a U.S. Export Control and Technology Transfer System for the 21st Century

ImageMagick gets seam carving.

Just as Sampling an image resizes by directly removing or duplicating whole columns and rows from an image, the special IM operator "-liquid-rescale" also removes or duplicates columns and rows of pixels from an image to reduce/enlarge an image. The difference is that it tries to do so in a more intelegent manner.

First the instead of removing a simple line of pixels, it removes a 'seam' of pixels. That is the column (or row) that could zig-zag through the image, at angles up to 45 degrees.

Secondly it trys to remove seams that have the 'least importance' in terms of the images contents. How it selects this is in terms of the images energy, or more simply, the amount of color changes a particular 'seam' involves. The 'seam' with the least amount of changes will be removed first, followed by higher 'energy' seams, until the image is the size desired.

Resize or Scaling -- IM v6 Examples

Against the odds, film noir just does not get old.

Darkness visible

Ever wanted to create your own isometric pixel picture, but didn't know what the word isometric meant? Well, now you can fulfill your wildest dreams with Cubescape!

Cubescape - Your own digital landscape

Vertext is an OpenGL-enabled Processing vector font library. This enables you to draw giant, detailed typography at high frame-rates.

Vertext

A memoir of life in a nuclear research town.

This review is being written by a white-trash guy who grew up in village a lot like author Kelly McMasters' blue-collar hometown, Shirley, on Long Island's south shore. It's one of those places beaten up by the weather and changing economic conditions, one that rich people speed by on their way to the fashionable Hamptons. Places such as Patchogue, where I grew up, Shirley and its neighbor, Mastic, have not been the subject of much literature.

McMasters is correcting that with a disturbing, ambitious book twining her life in Shirley in the 1980s with the relationship the town and its residents have to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nearby high-energy physics and nuclear research complex, and the potentially disastrous environmental consequences of that geographical fact.

Home is a very heavy nucleus.

'Welcome to Shirley' by Kelly McMasters

In the end, red tape proved mightier than the sword.

It is about the possibilities of escape — slim at the best of times — from those prisons we make for ourselves.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

What Lives On

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of "Design and the Elastic Mind," the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The "victimless leather" was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat.

Museum kills live exhibit

Max Boot on a new memoir from Ricardo Sanchez:

Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. As if to validate that old adage, the first few years of the Iraq war have produced a spate of memoirs that amount to denials of paternity.

The tragedy of Ric Sanchez is that his fast ascent culminated in an assignment for which he was not prepared and not suited. He went overnight from commanding fewer than 20,000 soldiers in one division to commanding 180,000 U.S. and allied soldiers trying to gain control of 25 million Iraqis. Reflecting a generally held view, Tom Ricks's "Fiasco" quotes one officer as saying, "He was in over his head." The general's denunciations of others would be more convincing if he were prepared to admit the painful truth about himself.

The General's Chain of Blame in Iraq