The Swedish flatpack furniture company Ikea says it "regrets" that images of women went missing from the Saudi version of its mail-order catalog. Women are visible in the version of these same images in the English-language Ikea catalog. "Excluding women from the Saudi Arabian version of the catalogue is in conflict with the Ikea Group values," said a spokesbot this week. And, check it out: they're also PUTTING SOCKS ON PEOPLE! (HT: Antinous + Maciej Ostaszewski)
The image went viral after inclusion in this New York Daily News article on how CNN and Fox totally blew it, by incorrectly reporting that the health care mandate championed by Obama was voted unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, when the opposite was in fact the case. More on Poynter. (thanks, Miles O'Brien!)
At Poynter, Craig Silverman writes about FourAndSix, a new photo forensics tool now in beta. The idea is to create tools that "sniff out digitally altered images." Two of the people behind it: Kevin Connor, former VP of product management for Adobe Photoshop, and digital image forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid. (via Erin Siegal)
The Hubble Space Telescope doesn't just produce glossy, full-color posters on its own. It takes a little work to get from raw images to the photos we gawk over on the Internet. This video takes you through the process of turning three different black and white images into one complete, beautiful photo of a spiral galaxy.
David Kaplan, assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, sent me this gif, showing the differences between an image of the Andromeda Galaxy produced by astrophotographer Robert Gendler, and the image of the Andromeda Galaxy that serves as the default desktop wallpaper in Apple's OS 10.7 (Lion).
Apple has once again altered the Universe according to their whim. They moved/removed many stars, and got rid of a whole galaxy. This is M110, which is one of M31's [Andromeda's] satellites. The other big satellite, M32, is still there.
Kaplan says he hasn't looked lately, so he can't guarantee that galaxy M110 hasn't actually vanished from the sky. But he's pretty sure it's only really been lost to Photoshop.
A blast from the distant meme past: Worf, the Cover Bands. An internet time capsule from 2005. It was a contest to photoshop the best Worf cover band. The best. Not the Worfst.
(via Shane Nickerson)