I guess this is appropriate here, I can’t seem to leave these pictures alone.

Most of these are from the old Red Cross First Aid manual (4th edition, 1957), but the anti-aging device is from Doors, Windows, and Skylights by Dan Ramsey.

This gallery thing is confusing, I hope that it works.

Hey everyone! Thanks to Unicornosaur, I have a coin code to give out to you! This is my favorite kind of contest! It is called a caption contest. This is what you do. You have to write in a comment what each thing says. Example (DO NOT USE)

Hornstrkier: Hey golf ball!

Huge Golf Ball: Hornstrkier you rule!!

I made the example kind of lame so you can come up with cooler things! Good luck! (Remember: All you have to do is comment! No need to e-mail me)

~Hornstrkier

Use This Picture To Help You: (You don’t need to edit the picture. It just gives you an idea of what it would look like. Don’t make a picture just comment.)

NEWS
An engineer’s quest to caption the Web
By John D. Sutter, CNN
February 9, 2010 9:14 a.m. EST

Mountain View, California (CNN) — The Internet used to be a place where Ken Harrenstien could do anything.

The Google engineer, who has been deaf since childhood, loved the Web because he could e-mail and chat without the aid of a sign language translator.

But as the Web evolved and got faster, online video started to flood in. And all of a sudden, this place that once allowed for limitless communication started to feel walled off to Harrenstien.

“It was only when they started adding videos that the Net was not my means of access, but it became a barrier,” he said in a recent interview, speaking through signing interpreter. “And that was very frustrating.”

The reason for Harrenstien’s trouble is simple: Almost no video on the Internet comes paired with text captioning for the deaf.

While the U.S. Federal Communications Commission requires closed captioning for nearly all television programming, the same isn’t true for online video.

But Harrenstien isn’t sitting back and complaining. He’s dedicated his career at Google to developing technology to bring closed captioning to the Internet.

It’s a quest informed by personal experience. Harrenstien says his work is a reminder that being deaf isn’t a limitation. It’s empowering.

I’m creating something I want and need for myself.
–Ken Harrenstien, Google

“It is extremely important [to my work] because I’m creating something I want and need for myself,” Harrenstien said in a second interview, conducted through an Internet chat program.

“So, I can identify very well with all of the other people who similarly need and want this. … This sometimes helps me keep going in the face of frustrations.”

Personal quest

When Harrenstien was 5 years old, he had a nightmare that changed his life.

He’d become sick with a high fever and the mumps. He went to sleep one night with the ability to hear. When he woke up from a terrifying dream, he was deaf.

“As I recall, the dream was scarier” than waking up deaf, he said.

Throughout his career and personal life, Harrenstien has found ways that being deaf is an advantage.

He met his wife, for instance, because she saw him using sign language. At the time, she was training to be a sign language interpreter. They bonded over their mutual love for ice skating, and the couple now has three children.

Being deaf also has guided Harrenstien’s work.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harrenstien worked on a projected called the ARPANET, which was one of the first versions of e-mail and online communications.

“I was motivated because I wanted that system to exist so I could communicate with people,” he said.

He went on to help develop a project called Deafnet, an early online community and messaging tool for deaf people.

Machine captions

Harrenstien is now at Google, and he and a team of other engineers have created automatic captioning for a handful of educational channels on YouTube.

That technology debuted in November 2009. It works by interpreting the sound on a video clip, translating that data into text, then adding the text on top of the video at the appropriate times.

It’s a tricky feat, and Harrenstien is the first to admit that the technology botches some voice-to-text translations.

But he still sees these “machine-generated” text captions as a major step toward making the Web equally accessible to all people.

He also works on awareness.

There are more deaf Internet users than Italian speakers, and nearly as many deaf people are online as those who speak French and Korean, according to Google. But many people who aren’t deaf don’t realize that online video isn’t already captioned, or that so many people rely on captions to watch video, he said.

Google is also working to make it easier for people to upload captions of their own, and the company is encouraging people who upload video to the Internet to use its software to easily input captioning for deaf people.

When people who own videos on YouTube upload text transcripts, Google’s auto-captioning technology will put the text on the video without time codes.

Harrenstien said the Web would become more accessible if everyone pitched in to help bring closed captions to online video clips. Some YouTube channels already have captions, including presidential addresses from the White House.

“What I would like to see happen is that people would see what we are doing here, and realize, ‘Oh, this is really useful,’ and all start doing the same thing,’ ” he said.

Meanwhile, new video — most of which is not captioned — continues to flood the Internet at an incredible pace.

In a presentation at Google headquarters, Harrenstien showed a video clip of a roaring waterfall as he said that more than 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

That’s more than three years of video uploaded in a day.

Computers will have to help humans to caption all of that backlogged video, Harrenstien said.

Caption regulation

It wasn’t all that long ago that television programming was inaccessible to deaf people.

Harrenstien remembers occasionally watching TV before it had captioning, just to get a sense of what the medium was like.

But overall, he found TV to be a waste of his time until Congress in 1996 forced broadcast companies to caption the majority of their programming.

He says captions wouldn’t be on TV today if the FCC hadn’t required it, but he stopped short of saying the federal government should require captions on all online video.

Dianne Stark, an administrator with the Described and Captioned Media Program, a nonprofit that works on media accessibility issues, said the federal government should require captions for online video.

She praised Google for its work on auto-captions but said people who post videos online should upload accurate captions so their work is accessible to deaf people.

“We are delighted that Google has tried to perfect this speech-to-text because it’s a start,” she said. “However, if you have 10 percent errors, and that’s just an estimate, it can change the content entirely.”

She added: “I think the difficulty with Google is sound recognition. [Caption accuracy] depends on who the narrator is. It depends on if the narrator has a Southern accent of a Northeastern accent or whatever. It’s more difficult for the speech recognition to be precise.”

The FCC did not return phone calls or e-mails requesting comment.

Harrenstien is trying to combine caption technology with awareness to make online video more accessible — with or without regulation.

After closed captioning came to TV, Harrenstien said he took to science fiction programming because he “wanted to see what the future would look like.”

Maybe he will be able to watch some of those programs online soon.

© 2010 Cable News Network,Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Tell us a story, please?

Photo by Andrew Davoll

11) Given the fact that many TV viewers are hearing-impaired, “superfluous” information, such as names, interjections from the off, etc., should also be subtitled.

12) Songs must be subtitled where relevant.

13) Obvious repetition of names and common comprehensible phrases need not always be subtitled.

14) The in- and out-times of subtitles must follow the speech rhythm of the film dialogue, taking cuts and sound bridges into consideration.

15) Language distribution within and over subtitles must consider cuts and sound bridges; the subtitles must underline surprise or suspense and in no way undermine it.

16) The duration of all subtitles within a production must adhere to a regular viewer reading rhythm.

17) Spotting must reflect the rhythm of the film.

18) No subtitle should appear for less than one second or, with the exception of songs, stay on the screen for longer than seven seconds.

19) The number of lines in any subtitle must be limited to two.

20) Wherever two lines of unequal length are used, the upper line should preferably be shorter to keep as much of the image free as possible and in left-justified subtitles in order to reduce unnecessary eye movement.

PART 1

Please tell us a story?

Photo by Kim Shillington

Romance, science, and zodiac quackery in Une femme est une femme/A Woman Is A Woman (Godard, 1961).

Virgo is a hard worker, a neglected mother, a quotidian task master, and a selfless martyr. Virgo is also a reality TV train wreck, a drunken psychopath, and a self-abusing anorexic. Virgo is analytical on a good day. Virgo is self-critical, self-loathing, self-deprecating, self-flagellating, and self-defeating on a bad day.

The Virgin, contrary to what her title may suggest, is the resident cock gobbler of the zodiac — never a topper, always a bottom. If you’re looking for a woman who will abuse herself, party like it’s Greek harvest time and she’s drunk on mead, please you sexually without so much as a nod to her own hungry genitalia, and perform all the humiliating duties you’ve assigned to her as wife and mother, look no further than the drunken Virgin of the zodiac.

And yes, more often than not, this naughty little maiden is getting crunked at the club or downing daiquiris at the Mommy and Me block party, an attempt to drown to death the echoes of self-loathing that usually prevent her from embodying the female charm and charisma she labors to possess.

The Virgo vibratory pattern is restrictive, effective, judgmental, exact, helpful, and neurotic. Virgos are a lot of things, socially charismatic not being one of them.

Usually, when I meet a Virgo, my natural reaction is, ‘this person must have Aspergers.’ They fixate on minutiae like Rainman [and] have more clicks and ticks than a malfunctioning android attempting to process human emotion.

Virgos rule the house of diet, perfectionism, and nourishment. Just glance at a list of famous Virgos and you’ll find more self-flagellating, adulthood suppressing skeletors than you can shake a stick at: Amy Winehouse, Rachel Zoe, Nicole Ritchie, Karl Lagerfeld, Twiggy, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Peggy Guggenheim, etc.

Yes, that is pretty much the way of it.

Virgo is the embodiment of human turmoil.

Insightful and amusing zodiac sign analysis by Carly, whose blog “Do you think I’m smart? Astrology and other Ass Munchery” is right here on the wordpress. Usually I say that I don’t believe in all that large astrological nonsense, but I have to admit that’s the first one I’ve ever read that was right on. Maybe I just needed to read all the horrible things I already know about myself confirmed, instead of the butt-licking backhanded compliments in most horoscopes, in order to start giving it some credence.

Final thought.

How to Spot a Virgo Woman:

They have an eating disorder.

They give rigorous handies.

They have acid reflux.

They’ll do “anything for my man.”

They want your love, but don’t deserve it.

(more, if you’re into that — she is very clever and scathingly funny)

Tell us a story... please?

Photo by Hsien-ku

Can you tell us a story?

Photo by Jane Brack

Definitely the winning caption!

Terry : ‘What a shite couple of years. Mum’s a thief. Dad’s a druggy. Been pulled up in the tabloids several times for my arrogant behavior and now just missed the decisive penalty in a Champions League final’

Bridge : ‘ Hey, you dont know what a lucky bastard you are mate…..I’ve just found out my missus has herpes, aids and syphillus’

Tell us a story?

Photo by Docophoto

Tell us a story, please....

Photo by Robert Rollend

last night jack kept putting bits of canned fruit down his shirt during dinner.  after taking off his soaking shirt and wiping him down, he proceeded to go to the living room, strip down the rest of the way, and transfer his socks from his feet to his hands.  he then said “look at me!” and was very eager for his picture to be snapped before he had to go to the tubby.  i don’t have one, but can you think of a funny caption?

More from Lane.

Tell us a story?

Photo by Lars vanderGoor

On this post, I will be giving 10 tips on good subtitling practice. Everyone is free to share their ideas and comment.

1) Subtitlers must always work with a (video, DVD, etc.) copy of the production and if possible, should have a copy of the dialogue list and a glossary of unusual words, names and special references. Read more…

… the Beatles attempt to write on his back and feed cake to his neck …

Roy Orbison good-naturedly plays along …

resolutely stood firm and ready to meet his arch nemesis, the dreaded Captain Needle …

“Fuck you, people. This is what I think of your Lolcats … ZZRRRBBBTTT”

… should use these restrooms …

Todd was killed by an ill-timed Google Mapquest Balloon ….