Discoveries

"What would happen if a state was to physically disappear but people want to keep their..."

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:09:13 -0700

““What would happen if a state was to physically disappear but people want to keep their nationalities? It could continue as a virtual state even though it is a rock under the ocean and its people no longer live on that piece of land…. As independent nations they receive certain rights and privileges that they will not want to lose. Instead they could become like ghost states. This is a pressing issue for small island states, but in the case of physical disappearance there is a void in international law.””

- Increase in sea levels due to global warming could lead to ‘ghost states’

Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris

Sat, 30 May 2009 19:00:53 -0700

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.”

BART swings

Tue, 19 May 2009 10:04:30 -0700

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.”

Scotch Modern

Fri, 01 May 2009 02:24:23 -0700

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.”

Where's the remotest place on Earth?

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:29:35 -0700

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.”

The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:57:23 -0700

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.”

High Power Job

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:55:24 -0700

High Power Job:

A beautiful, mesmerizing video about the Faraday-encaged linemen of the sky. Please do watch it.

"Perhaps the answer lies in greening the cities — not in a vertical direction — but on the..."

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:10:38 -0700

“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?’

"No one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a website."

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:35:52 -0700

“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)

"The
element now represents a paragraph-level thematic break."

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:43:19 -0700

“The
element now represents a paragraph-level thematic break.”

- The web evolves by rewriting its own history: HTML 5’s differences from HTML 4

code_swarm – Python

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:16:11 -0700

code_swarm – Python:

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

Fake Marshall McLuhan

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:37:05 -0700

Fake Marshall McLuhan:

Marshall McLuhan Twitter bot (?).

(Automatic) Oblique Strategies

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:32:53 -0700

(Automatic) Oblique Strategies:

Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, vended hourly & freely via Twitter.

"The Gulhane was for the lost, the doomed, for people too low-caste to sleep under bridges. You went..."

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:21:06 -0700

“The Gulhane was for the lost, the doomed, for people too low-caste to sleep under bridges. You went up narrow dark stairs and came out on the roof where sheet plastic covered a two-by-four framework to form a skeletal barn in the January cold. You could stay there for twenty-five cents a night. It was a good price for kids who had sold their passports to buy drugs and had nowhere to go.”

- Istanbul: Days That Were

"[There are] approximately 30 engineers and programmers at NASA who are tasked with writing and..."

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:30:00 -0700

“[There are] approximately 30 engineers and programmers at NASA who are tasked with writing and testing 1,000 to 1,500 lines of software code and then beaming it about 170 million miles away — every day.”

- NASA: ‘Extreme programming’ controls Mars Lander robot

Tricked-out transportation from Pakistan

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:25:48 -0700

Tricked-out transportation from Pakistan:

These trucks and buses are simply beautiful.

"People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running..."

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:47:29 -0700

“People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.”

- New York Times: Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average

"The enthusiasm for seeing a city from the outside is the exotic or the picturesque. For natives of a..."

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:57:24 -0700

“The enthusiasm for seeing a city from the outside is the exotic or the picturesque. For natives of a city, the connection is always mediated by memories.”

- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, describing Walter Benjamin

"Istanbul is a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home."

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:56:00 -0700

“Istanbul is a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home.”

- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:06:43 -0700

Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services:

Very cool: a self-healing, self-modifying, distributed database:

Once the [geo-location] database has been boot-strapped with initial data and launched to developers via an API, users of the service will further refine and improve the service by having devices submit information on towers and signal strength (along with location) back to Google. This means that over time, the service improves itself and will be able to work almost anywhere in the world, regardless of local regulations, network providers or restrictions.