Waldo Jaquith

Wasn’t the Walmart name change only a few months ago? The copyright footer on the walmart.com site still has the hyphen.

Posted by KCinDC on 24 January 2011 @ 9pm

They changed it to “Walmart” in their logo in 2008, and then formalized it in 2009 in their quarterly earnings report. In the year or so between those two events there was a lot of debate among copyeditors as to whether they should include the hyphen or not, but that was settled with the formal name change.

There is one bit of weirdness, coming in the form of the footer at the end of their news releases:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is the legal trade name of the corporation. The name ‘Walmart,’ expressed as one word and without punctuation, is a trademark of the company and is used analogously to describe the company and its stores. Use the trade name when it is necessary to identify the legal entity, such as when reporting financial results, litigation or corporate governance.”

Which explains the website footer. I definitely understand the line that they’re trying to draw, but I can appreciate that it could be puzzling. But I’ll give the Times this: they’re consistent. After reading through a good 200 story titles that include the word “Walmart,” I only see them referring to it as “Wal-Mart,” and never as “Walmart.” So maybe they’re not inconsistent, but merely wrong. Or, viewed a certain way, hyper-correct. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 24 January 2011 @ 11pm

I’d be cautious about proclaiming that “3D will never work, period.” You sound like someone saying that color photography will never happen on the basis that light is composed of a full spectrum of wavelengths, and therefore we will never be able to fully replicate a given image.

Posted by Tim McCormack on 25 January 2011 @ 8am

Walmart is really messing with my principled objections. Last year they embraced energy saving lighting and now they are going to help people to be more healthy. If they can pay a living wage I might have to amend my negative view of them.

Posted by Duane Gran on 25 January 2011 @ 8am

Hooray for Wal(-M)mart! Good for Michelle Obama.

Posted by Michael on 25 January 2011 @ 10am

“I’d be cautious about proclaiming that “3D will never work, period.” You sound like someone saying that color photography will never happen on the basis that light is composed of a full spectrum of wavelengths, and therefore we will never be able to fully replicate a given image.”

The difference is that the human eye is biologically evolved with the rods and cones necessary to perceive color within the visible light spectrum. The point about our brains and eyes being evolutionarily conditioned to both focus and converge at the same distance is an apt one; it’s not like trying to introduce visible-spectrum color to photography, it’s like trying to photograph and print an image using only infrared.

I’m entirely unimpressed with 3D. It’s kitchy and distracting, as though the physical barrier of the glasses between my eyes and the screen is also a metaphorical barrier that prevents me from becoming engrossed in the narrative.

Posted by Sam on 25 January 2011 @ 12pm

That LA Times piece is rather…nuanced?

When it came to foreign affairs, he took the hardest of hard lines in a 1983 speech that dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

Reagan, however, didn’t demonize his enemies, snub allies or try to destroy the federal government.

Posted by Jon S. on 25 January 2011 @ 12pm

I’d be cautious about proclaiming that “3D will never work, period.” You sound like someone saying that color photography will never happen on the basis that light is composed of a full spectrum of wavelengths, and therefore we will never be able to fully replicate a given image.

Well, I don’t sound like that—I didn’t say it. :) I only said that it’s “fundamentally flawed,” and I think that’s true. But I don’t think it’s impossible, just that the current technology isn’t going to work.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 25 January 2011 @ 1pm

Waldo: I guess it was Ebert’s title, not yours.

Sam: I didn’t say my argument about spectrum was valid — the point was that it wasn’t. If you want to take the evolutionary tack, I could also make a similar argument about how we aren’t adapted to assign depth to flat images, but we manage just fine.

Posted by Tim McCormack on 25 January 2011 @ 2pm

…after more than 30,000 years of human artistic endeavors, I think we ought to be able to agree that we’re mentally adapted to interpret depth out of flat images, and there’s no contrary biological conditioning because it doesn’t require us to converge and focus at different differences. If converging and focusing at different depths was something that was going to come naturally to us, people would be studying those kitchy little magic eye posters from the 1990s in art conservatories.

Posted by Sam on 25 January 2011 @ 3pm

Sam: My point is not “stereo flat imagery doesn’t hurt your eyes”, but rather “technology will change”. We’ll have full 3D at some point, it just won’t look like today’s technology.

Posted by Tim McCormack on 25 January 2011 @ 8pm

3D just seems like a ploy by electronics companies to sell TVs at higher margins. And now they can sell accessories that cost $200 a pop that are customized to just their brand. It’s a sweet deal. By the time the fad wears off, they will have made a good deal of money. What will consumer electronics companies think of next?

Personally, I’d like a refrigerator that worked like an inventory control system and knew the right point at which to order supplies. It would be even better if the fridge could go to the grocery store and pick those items up before I got home. It be awesome if it could scan the pantry using RFIDs or something like that and restock that as well.

Posted by tx2vadem on 28 January 2011 @ 10am