Discoveries

The sphere of information is full of inspiring or interesting bits, waiting to be discovered. Here are a few of my discoveries.

May 30, 2009 7:00pm

Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris

“Now of all the things presented for the inspection of that faithful servant of the public, the museum curator, the most romantic, and the least likely to be true, is ambergris. I say inspection, because identification is preconceived in the mind of the finder. His treasure, stumbled upon along the sea beach, recognized with the sudden surmise that dawns like knowledge from a previous incarnation, is encountered where ambergris belongs; it looks, and feels, and smells as ambergris should and, since it bears no resemblance to anything familiar, it follows that riches are already within his grasp.”
May 19, 2009 10:04am

BART swings

“Somebody decided to make the world just a little bit more interesting, and three red swings appeared on the BART Public Transit System in San Francisco for the public to enjoy.”
May 1, 2009 2:24am

Scotch Modern

“Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1870, Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, thus presenting an ironic critique of the way in which mechanical imagery beguiles us with the trite veracity of simulacra.”
Apr 30, 2009 11:29am

Where's the remotest place on Earth?

“Very little of the world’s land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. […] Less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.”
Apr 21, 2009 5:57pm

The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown

“The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy’s Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM” … “Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.”
Jul 25, 2008 5:55pm

High Power Job

A beautiful, mesmerizing video about the Faraday-encaged linemen of the sky. Please do watch it.
Jun 30, 2008 4:10am
“ Perhaps the answer lies in greening the cities — not in a vertical direction — but on the horizontal? This is pretty much what Cuba did when the flow of Soviet oil dried up and large-scale mechanised agriculture became impossible. Under the US trade embargo the people faced starvation. The result was a proliferation of small-scale organic farms that basically kept the nation fed. ” - The Guardian: ‘Farming: vertically challenged?’
Jun 25, 2008 6:35am
“ No one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a website. ” - Amen: A Night With Bill Gates’ New Big Hairy Vision (Brian Lam)
Jun 24, 2008 7:43am
“ The <hr> element now represents a paragraph-level thematic break. ” - The web evolves by rewriting its own history: HTML 5’s differences from HTML 4
Jun 23, 2008 1:16am

code_swarm – Python

A beautiful graphic visualization of the progress and evolution of the open-source Python programming language.
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