More details are coming out about the Los Angeles Police Department's clash with demonstrators and reporters this Tuesday at an immigration reform rally.

I keep a directory of about 30 of my favorite paintings and anytime I need to do color correction, I just scan through them to find the one that gives the photo I'm working on the best look. This technique can be used in other ways. For example, use the color from a scanned-in 1970's Kodachrome snapshot to give a recent photo a vintage look. Need to make a picture more menacing? Use the color from a picture of a storm.

Reader comment:

Philippe Van Lieu says:

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Hey Mark, I saw this post and felt I should chime in on my own similar coloring technique. This is a technique I kinda stumbled upon when trying to limit the colors in a picture by borrowing the colors used in a source picture. What generally has worked for me was:

1. I would find a picture which has colors I like, and then convert it to Indexed Color mode. By doing so I can get the 3 to 256 colors Photoshop picks and save them as a .ACT palette file (via Palette > Custom > Save...)

2. Next, I take the image I want to convert and resize it to something huge, if it isn't already huge. Generally one side would be say 6000 pixels or so if that side was originally 1800.

3. I would then convert the new picture to Indexed Color mode as well. But instead of letting Photoshop choose my colors, I'll load in the .ACT palette file I created earlier.

4. Afterwards, I'll switch the converted image to RGB mode and shrink the image back down to whatever size I want.

It's a bit more of a lengthy process and probably uses up more time and memory to process, but I feel it does create some interesting, if not superior, end effects. For example, if you really want to mute out red out of your picture, then find a source picture with little to no reds in it, and then use this technique. I've provided a link below to an example which shows that it works. Now in the right hands, this technique can really help transfer the coloring effects of one picture to your own. I use it a lot and people love it!

My student Cameron Parkins (I've just finished a year of teaching at USC on a Fulbright Chair) has written an excellent essay for my class critiquing the film school's policy and proposing an alternative: students should be free to choose to license their works for redistribution under Creative Commons.

Cameron makes an excellent argument for this case, and has followed it up with an online petition to the film-school to overturn this bad policy.

USC SCA stands at an impasse. Conflicting approaches to copyright present various options for SCA as it reevaluates is IP policy, and it would do well to adopt (and encourage) CC-licensed IP option for its students. SCA’s most glaring fault is in its discordance with the IP policies of other, similar, film programs through out the U.S., especially those in Los Angeles who face the same industrial constraints (LMU, UCLA, CalArts).

SCA’s goals should be to foster creativity and openness. Its IP policy should reflect this by being inline with the sprit of artistic creation and the spirit of academic inquiry. Its current policy represents neither of these, but rather a corporate, non-academic approach to content ownership. This must be remedied if SCA wishes to remain a leader in its field and continue to offer its students a cutting-edge education – both technologically and ideologically.

Update: Janna sez, "I've been programming manager at USC's Trojan Vision Student TV Station for 2 years, and the post about the Creative Commons petition at the USC Cinema School made me think of our horrible, archaic Intellectual Property Agreement. Many students come to the programming department to pitch new shows, and lately more and more student producers have come through needing barely any equipment, personnel or money (most get next to no funding, if any) from Trojan Vision, only the opportunity to air on our closed-circuit cable and web stream, as well as using the Trojan Vision name to get insurance and shooting permits on campus they would otherwise have to pay for outside of class assignments. But even a show that doesn't require any of those things is required to sign over the intellectual property rights for their show to Trojan Vision, and as more and more older reruns are shown on air, the ownership basically become permanent (They supposedly expire if the show hasn't been played in over a year). So these student producers must get Trojan Vision permission (which they don't) to put clips up on YouTube, and can't shop their pilot around to networks or studios. And these agreements even pre-date Trojan Vision becoming a part of the Cinema school's wondrous bureaucracy (this version still hasn't been updated to include the SCA name)."

The last time around, a Doom9 poster named Muslix64 broke the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray crippleware by capturing a 16-byte key. The AACS Licensing Authority has captured headlines this week by sending legal threats to the sites that reproduced this short number, resulting in nearly 700,000 pages reproducing the number.

In addition to being irrevocable, the hack has the potential to make future decryption even easier. "This hack/technique enables us to figure out how the Volume ID is stored on the disc," arnezami explained. "It's very possible we would figure out [...] how the KCD is stored on the disc. Knowing that and being able to teach a PC drive how to read a KCD will open the door for what I called third-generation decryption."

I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.

Your presidential campaign used the Internet to break new ground in citizen political participation. I would urge you to take the lead again by continuing to support this important medium of political speech. And I offer whatever help I can to secure the support of others as well.

See also: Ask DNC and RNC for freedom to remix presidential debates

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) are sending threats to 20 universities if they don't provide "acceptable answers" to what measures they are taking to prevent illegal file sharing.

Smith received $11,500 during his previous campaign from groups associated with the RIAA and MPAA.

Berman received $9800 from related groups as well as an additional $22,700 from residents of NY (Berman is a CA rep) who have ties to the RIAA and MPAA

Alternate captions:

ell oh ell one one one. Cory is among the latest to be lampooned at LOLgeeks.com, and I'm there too. (Original photo: Scott Beale)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Last October, Congress and the President brought them under attack by passing the Military Commissions Act (MCA).

If the government puts you in jail, you have a right to know why. And you have a right to challenge your imprisonment in court. The principle is called habeas corpus, and the Framers thought the concept so important they wrote into the body of the Constitution.

The MCA eliminates habeas corpus for certain people detained by the federal government, and it gives the President the power to decide -- without review by Congress or the Courts -- who is branded an “enemy combatant.”

The ACLU is fighting to repair the damage done by the MCA and stop this and other unacceptable erosions of our freedoms and our Constitution, but they need your help.

To the Army's 1st Information Operations Command, the "media" is just another threat -- along with "al Qaeda," "hackers," and "drug cartels."   Military bloggers are even lower than that: just poor saps looking for a "therapeutic" way to get out their feelings.  No wonder the Army has put out new rules that could very well kill the sites off.

I've pasted a couple of screenshots below.  But it's really worth checking out the Information Operation Command's whole presentation on "OPSEC in the Blogosphere," obtained by Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News.

Link to post.

See also these related posts on Danger Room:

A high school senior in Texas has been transferred to an "Alternative Education Center" and will not be allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies later this year because he created a Counter Strike map of his school.

A day after the Virginia Tech shootings, a parent called the high school and told of a "killing game" which took place "inside the school". That's all that was needed to get the cops involved the the kid kicked out. Though it's important to note that *at every step along the way* it was found that the kid did NOTHING wrong or illegal.

Here's more on Wired News' game blog: link. My own blog post also includes a few other links to local coverage: link.

My friend Scott Shulman, a veteran cameraman with ABC News, just pointed me to a story he shot for the network in a small village very close to the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

This village, Shishmaref, is populated mostly by indigenous people -- about 140 houses with about 600 residents. The whole community is literally slipping into the sea, because the climate there has been gradually warming over a period of years. Some residents have already been forced to move. Here's a link to a photo slideshow, and here's the video link to the segment as it aired on ABC TV.

Update: I just spotted another interesting climate-related piece Scott shot (damn, say that 10 times fast!) -- Video Link to "Water War: How will Las Vegas' building boom stay hydrated?"

Reader comment: Lou says,

I live in Alaska and our Governor's official response to a recent proposal to list polar bears as threatened is, "global warming science is inconclusive." This is despite that Shishmaref is vanishing. Link (Username and password to access article is "juneauempire".)

The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out.

In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.

The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.

R. Stevens of Dieselsweeties fame writes,

I’ve been meaning to post about Three Panel Soul, the new comic by Ian and Matt of MacHall fame- unfortunately I’ve got to do so under less-than-wonderful circumstances. I love this new strip because I’m finding it a lot more minimalist and relatable… also ridiculously funny.

Matt was working as a contractor for a branch of the government. He made the mistake of being interested in the hobby of paper target shooting at about the same time as the VA Tech shootings and talking to someone about this hobby at work. Keep in mind he wasn’t even talking about those shootings, in fact he was discussing how he wanted a gun which would make it difficult to kill someone.

He was promptly fired and not allowed back to work because people were scared of him.

To top it all off, he was later visited by police detectives for making a comic about his experience, because it was a “borderline terroristic threat.” (Is “terroristic” even a word? Did they get that from the Colbert report?)

World Without Oil is a month-long collaborative alternate reality project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and ITVS. It’s the first alternate reality game to tackle a real-world problem: oil dependency.

World Without Oil imagines we are already living on the other side of the “peak oil” moment. The alternate reality game presents a “reality dashboard” that updates daily with gas prices, fuel shortages, and measures of chaos, suffering and economic impact for different parts of the country. Players are invited to document their own lives in this new reality, through blog posts, videos, photos, web comics, geocaches, audio messages, and any other means necessary!

The goal of the project is to harness the collective intelligence of bloggers and gamers to create a bottom-up map of what it would mean to live through a massive oil shortage in the U.S. The project’s mantra: Play it, before you live it.

The game launched on Monday, and already there are hundreds of player created documents to browse—-not to mention the official “backstory” created by the game’s puppet masters..

The latest game updates include video footage of an underground car vandalism effort, instructions for how to throw fuel-free parties, and an eyebrow-raising transcript of the new secretary of state’s address to the nation.

Sign up to play now; the game runs though the first week of June.

[Here's a] photo excerpt from a beautiful book by Taryn Simon, [called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar]. She manages to get herself into restricted areas around America -- JFK airport's contraband room, a nuclear waste facility, a federal marijuana grow room and mutant tiger cage.

UPDATE: The MySpace sexual preference bug has been zapped. Conspiracy theorists, take heart: plenty of other MySpace bugs remain.

BoingBoing pal Vann Hall says,

Perhaps along the same lines as the T-shirt reading "I'm for gay marriage only if both of the chicks are hot," MySpace recently made it impossible to select "Gay" as a sexual preference. "Lesbian" and "bi" remain viable choices. [Ed. note: screenshot shown above in this post.]

While I suspect nothing more nefarious than simple bad programming, others (see referenced URL) see this as an expression of Murdochian homophobia.

Video Link to "Think before you Post." (thanks, Erwin) See also an alleged in-game WoW protest: Link. And an anonymous BB reader points to yet another YouTube video, "Die DMCA, Die!": video link. CafePress has like 50 designs and counting: Link. ORLY owl weighs in: Link. (thx pseudolobster)

Previously on BoingBoing:

The article questions why Digg censors spam and porn, but not the HD-DVD key. I think mainstream media is now going to use this as an excuse to turn on web 2.0. They've been waiting for the opening, and now they have it. Not that I'm the biggest web 2.0 fan myself, but you can argue the point either way so if it goes south it's a preconceived notion that's the next point in the media hype cycle, turning on the beloved.

Media follows stories that mirror the plot of every "Behind the Music" out there.

"And then, it all went wrong for Digg.com...'

dun dun dun...

As for Diggers, like self-obsessed post-adolescents everywhere, they are justifying their deed as an act of liberation, arguing that copy protection is evil, and -- applying the same defense corporate crooks used 20 years ago with gullible juries -- that they really weren't stealing anything more than a bunch of numbers.

The great Web satirist Iowahawk has already punctured that argument by posting Kevin Rose's home address (after all, it's only numbers) and suggesting that every Digg user head over to his house for a giant party. So I'll make the more sober argument.

It is this: all information is not equal in value. Some of it was created with considerable investment in time and money that needs to be paid back. Other information is the product of creative minds that deserve to be rewarded for their contributions to humanity. And still more is vitally important to the ongoing employment of thousands of people and the families they support.

How appropriate that this scandal occurred on May Day, because only a utopian fantasist would argue that all information should be free. It was Abraham Lincoln who said that America's two greatest contributions to mankind were the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Patent (i.e., intellectual property) law. And while I empathize with the frustration of folks who find themselves impeded from the full use of the latest technologies, those morons who want to destroy private property (and that includes trade secrets) put at risk the very future of innovation itself -- not to mention that great creator of human freedom, entrepreneurship.

BoingBoing readers, I'll gladly post thoughtful your thoughtful rebuttals here: Submission Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Other members of the media who were injured included four employees of KVEA-TV Channel 52, a KTTV-TV Channel 11 news reporter who suffered a minor shoulder injury, a camerawoman who has a broken wrist and a reporter for KPCC-FM (89.3) who was bruised by a police baton.

"I was dumbfounded," said the KPCC reporter, Patricia Nazario. "I've covered riots. I've covered chaos. I was never hit or struck or humiliated the way the LAPD violated me yesterday."

Nazario said she was walking away from riot police when she was hit in the back.

Gamejew's 10 minute video
CNN video
Fox News video of police officers using force to make journalists vacate
Keith Olbermann commentary on MSNBC

Here's a Slate Explainer article that answers the question, "What are rubber bullets?" Link

While it’s obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it’s hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special. It’s just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?

As if that’s not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don’t know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.

When the great mathematician Leopold Kronecker wrote his famous dictum, “God created the integers; all else is the work of man”, he meant that the basic structure of mathematics is part of the design of the universe. What God created, AACS LA now wants to take away.