startled

6:15 p.m. Men set down chess board in crosswalk to promote peace

Oakland residents Yafeu K. Tyhimba, 41, and Keba Konte, 43, put down a chess board in the crosswalk at 14th Street and Broadway and began playing a game against each other. “It’s a thinking man’s game,” Konte said. “And that’s what we need to be doing tonight.”

It’s a shame how South Africa will never be invited to host anything ever again. This was widely predicted before the World Cup due to the high crime rates, abject poverty, and incompetent governance, but in the end the South Africans brought it upon themselves with the goddamn vuvuzela. People of South Africa: when you are ignored by every international event planning committee for the next fifty years, that plastic horn will be the reason why.

Between this and Smokescreen, I’m pretty sure all of the culturally important Flash content has been ported to JavaScript. I rest easy knowing that, even if Flash disappears, the unknowable will continue to be unknown for future generations.

Found via HTML5 vs Flash.

I live in a mixed milk-viscosity household. If you typically stock multiple grades of milk in your refrigerator, you may already be familiar with the situation seen in this photograph:

On the left, fat-free milk. On the right, reduced-fat. Both labels are a nearly identical shade of light blue. This situation represents a ticking time bomb: a hastily poured glass of milk will, sooner or later, bring tragedy to the lips of the recipient. So long as dairies are allowed to pick their own colors willy-nilly, the milk-drinking public will not be safe.

To illustrate the scale of the problem, I have compiled this table of label colors from a sampling of dairies:

(Most colors are based on dairy websites, and some may be out of date or inaccurate. Corrections and additions welcomed.)

You can stare at the data all day, but no pattern will emerge. Apart from whole milk, nearly every color is used to represent nearly every type of milk. I’d like to bring special attention to Mayfield and Dari Gold, who both spread only three colors across four products, and to Trader Joe’s, for using barely different color schemes for their regular and organic lines.

Industry-wide labeling standards are the clear solution to this danger. Standards can be difficult to establish, and generally require industry buy-in and an independent consortium or two. Rather than let the dairies squabble in committee for the next several years, I am willing to save them the trouble and declare a new standard on their behalf. I hereby present the new standardized colors for milk labels, with justifications.

To narrow the possibilities, first I eliminated colors that have a clear association with a common milk product:

I then applied the design principle of the poison dart frog: the brighter the color, the more dangerous (fattening) the milk product:

Turning to the four grades of regular milk, I started with the easy decisions:

The intermediate grades were a little more arbitrary, but with so many colors from the basic Crayola palette already in use, there aren’t as many possibilities to consider:

Problem solved. All that’s left is to notify every dairy that they don’t meet the labeling standards.

(For the record, I drink large quantities of 2% milk.)

Check out http://www.inbflat.net/, which could only be more awesome if it were hooked up to a mixer board.