I've been interested for a few years, on and off, in the work of Paul Ekman. He did a lot of research into how our faces react to our emotions. He discovered that the meaning of emotional facial expressions is universal across cultures. He contends that there are facial expressions we are not conscious of and that most of us never notice in others--very subtle ones, and also very quick ones that flash across the face in a fraction of a second as a first emotional response to a situation--and that we can learn to see these and use them to tell when someone is hiding their true feelings.

There was a great New Yorker profile by Malcom Gladwell in 2002 that's available at his site. Jordan initially showed it to me that year, and I could not resist trying to learn to see microexpressions and read faces. This entails learning the muscles of the face and the combinations of their exercise that produce familiar facial expressions, of which Ekman has produced an encyclopaedia called FACS (Facial Action Coding System). It also requires learning about how the expressions and muscle movements correspond to emotions. This knowledge is not included in FACS because it is still under research, and FACS is in fact a kit for carrying out that research by laying out a system for quantifying the expressions observed by researchers. Finally it requires learning to see the microexpressions that supposedly come and go from a face within a fifth of a second or so.

So the question for me became what can I buy or do to learn this, preferably without spending a lot of money, but spending as much time as necessary. The complete FACS sells for $260, which I might be able to justify to myself at some point, but I really wanted to see if I could achieve my goals for less. A couple of years ago I bought two CD-ROMs that Ekman sells, called the "Micro-Expression Training Tool" and the "Subtle Expression Training Tool" for $30 each. The titles are self-explanatory, but I found them lacking. In the "METT", you're shown pictures of people with neutral faces, and then a photo of them making an expression is flashed on for some short interval, then the original picture is back, and you're tested on what emotion they were showing in the quick photo. After that initial quiz you get to look at the expression photos for a longer time, and then you take the test again. You do better, so you must be able to see micro-expressions! Not quite. One sample per emotion is really not enough to help you learn the essence of the expression. More importantly, seeing a quick photo flashed in this way is very different from how it must look when someone really makes a microexpression. Even one quick video would have been so helpful, and would be the most convincing evidence I've seen yet that the phenomenon really exists. This was like trying to learn a foreign language with a list of 10 words translated.

Since then I found this site (warning: silly music) which has a wealth of information related to FACS, including material about the facial muscles and videos of people moving those specific muscles. You can also download some sample chapters from the full FACS. With that and Ekman's book "Emotions Revealed", which I've finally started reading, I feel like I'm starting to get a better foundation for observing faces in the wild.

In the New Yorker profile, Silvan Tomkins is described as perhaps the best face reader the world has ever known. He learned the skill by watching television with the sound turned down. I don't have cable TV right now, but I do have access to DVDs through Netflix, and that's where I finally come to my point. To practice observing faces, I'd like to be able to watch DVDs with the sound off and watch the faces of people, and then if necessary go back and watch it with the sound on to see if I can correctly predict the emotions they were experiencing at that time. I can also slow the action down to try to get a better look at fleeting microexpressions. To be precise, this is what I'm looking for:

• Lots of close-up shots of people's faces that don't cut away a lot.
• The people could be expected to be experiencing some kind of emotion, and preferably a range of emotions.
• Non-fiction is preferred--since microexpressions are supposed to be subconscious, I don't know if even a good actor's expressions would correspond more to their character's situation or to how filming was going that day.

I think that about covers it. The first requirement might be the hardest to fulfill, because it goes against a very common style of documentary. But I know there must be some good stuff out there, it's just hard to get a feel for how well a DVD will meet my requirements without actually seeing it. Anyone have any ideas?

Can anyone tell me what's going on in the solid-colored areas in these photographs? I took the aerial from a plane close to landing at San Francisco airport, and the satellite image shows the same area highlighted in the upper left corner. Though you can't really see it in the images, the surface of these areas was clearly water--I could see waves on it. I'm assuming they must be farms of some kind, but the only thing I know of that's commonly grown this way in the US is cranberries, and I doubt that's what's being grown in all of these areas. I'm also confused by the fact that they're adjacent to the bay, but bounded off from it by some sort of wall. So it's not bay water inside there, yet they're connected to the bay, and the walls didn't seem that high. And what's grown in salt water? Fish I guess, but would fish or their feed turn the water such colors?

By the way, has anyone else noticed deteriorating performance from Google Maps? Lately I see a lot of tiles failing to update after a change in the query or the zoom level, sometimes leaving me with a confusing if not unusable mishmash of tiles from different locations or zooms.

Update: Turns out they're salt evaporation ponds, and the colors are caused by different forms of algae that grow in different salinity conditions--the red ponds are the saltiest.

Recently I puzzled over these posters that appeared in the vicinity of my workplace (these two were taped to one another around a lamppost, and there were at least a few more). Why would someone go to such an effort to reclaim their pet two years after it went missing? I don't have an answer I can back up with facts, but being halfway through the complete Sherlock Holmes, I endeavoured to reason it out. First, some observations:

• The posters went up, I believe, in mid to late April. They're now in pretty bad shape and no attempt has been made to replace or fix them.
• Judging by the handwriting in the vital stats area, not to mention all the other differences, it seems safe to say that these two posters were made by more than one person.
• The text that has been blacked out on both posters said essentially that the dog could also be brought to a specified police precinct, which I believe was the closest one for our neighborhood of Mott Haven.
• A peculiar feature is the perfect white background and poses in the pictures of the dog. These would have to be either lucky shots or the result of Photoshopping, both unlikely to appear on posters like this. This leads me to think they were either taken off the web or copied from a book. I'm inclined toward a book because I don't see any of the pixelation that would be likely when printing web images at this size. Cursory Googling didn't turn them up.
• Googling did turn up this listing at PetLocator. The presence of the pictures points away from my book hypothesis, as its unlikely someone would go the trouble of scanning them in as opposed to just taking them off the web. It doesn't show when it was posted, but the Internet Archive has the page showing up on Feb. 18, 2005. Also, seeing the pictures on there makes me rethink the likelihood that the owner might have used Photoshop to erase the background in them.

And some possible explanations:

• The impending Mother's Day anniversary of the loss inspired a renewed sadness in one of the pet's owners, and either that person, or others close to them, made the posters more in an attempt to feel less sad and guilty than out of any sincere hope of finding the pet.
• The owners got a tip that the pet might have been seen recently, renewing their hope.
• This is part of a larger, consistent campaign to recover the pet that I haven't been otherwise aware of. This supported by the PetLocator page, but contraindicated by the poster stating that the dog was lost on Lincoln Ave., that being where the posters were put up. It's unlikely they've been fanning out their poster distributions from where it was lost for 2 years.

That's about as far as I can take it. Anyone?

A while ago I saw a movie on IFC a couple times called "Kicking and Screaming" (not the Will Ferrell one from last year). It was directed by Noah Baumbach, and was really really good. I was dismayed to find that it wasn't available on DVD. When I saw "The Squid and the Whale" I was buoyed by its excellence, thinking it portended well for his other films being noticed more. Sure enough, not only has the day come, but it's being released by the Criterion Collection! Evidently their unconditional love of Wes Anderson extends to his recent collaborator.

The only downside is that Criterion has a new logo that, so far, I don't much care for. It's a tilted 'C', and though I can see the motivation behind it--it's more of a symbol, and certainly more recognizable in small images than the previous skinny capital letters with the horizontal line. But those letters and that line had come to symbolize so much to me. This is just a letter 'C' that could be anything. On the other hand, they are also releasing all of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.