I finally finished blink last week and can’t help but look at the Skype emoticons with awe. A long section of blink deals with research in facial expressions lead by Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Turns out there are 43 different facial muscle movements, if you combine up to five you come up with a lot of expressions, many of which don’t mean anything, but still you end up with about three thousand. And this explains how Skype’s emoticons can say so much within just, what, 64 pixels.
Apart from that blink is a good read but I thought didn’t deliver as much as promised in the introduction. The “everybody can learn how to thin slice” claim was maybe a bit too much I thought.