May 2010
Massive Maya City Revealed by Lasers →
These are the days of lasers in the jungle, Lasers in the jungle somewhere.
Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble
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Images of Oberlin Illuminations Past →
For those of a nostalgic turn.
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Nigerian oil spills dwarf the BP debacle →
More oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
You need to read this. And then we all need to start talking about...
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Oh man
clapifyoulikeme:
Now that xxxx happened, and xxxx didn’t xxxx, I really think that xxxx shouldn’t xxxx and that Amy Pond should marry me.
Get. In. Line.
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“The greatest defense of liberty is simply to define certain things as beyond...”
– Total Drek: Bit Me
Seems like an important quote to me.
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Facebook's New Privacy Controls: The Good and the... →
Facebook is in it for the money, wants to make a lot of money, is in fact fiduciarily obligated to its investors to be “doing this for the money.” Facebook is not a hippie collective of open-source do-gooders paid in massages, pot brownies and gratitude. Mark Zuckerberg did not put “I’m CEO, bitch” on his business cards because he cares about you, J. Random User, and...
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Wolfram|Alpha » What is the airspeed velocity of... →
This one’s for roflcoffee.
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“Observation: when demonstrating my images to a client, something amazing...”
– Aaron Mahnke writing for A Better Freelancer
That’s the trick. When I watch videos on my iPad, I forget anything except that I’m watching videos. When I read books on my iPad, I’m just reading books. Part of this effect is created by the constant tactile interaction with the...
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“As the acquisition of every object pre-supposes at all events some exertion on...”
– The Kama Sutra
Vatsyayana’s response to the notion that since destiny controls all things,we should not strive to attain those things we desire.
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“Hamilton Base Ball Club.
Jersey City, Sept. 13th, 1860
To the President &...”
– Letters of Note: Fancy a game of baseball?
They don’t write ‘em like that any more.
Frederic Tudor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
Frederic Tudor (September 4, 1783 - February 6, 1864) was known as Boston’s “Ice King”, and was the founder of the Tudor Ice Company. During the early 19th Century, he made a fortune shipping ice to the Caribbean, Europe, and even as far away as India from sources of fresh water ice in New England.
A truly fascinating life.
“In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley, professor of chemistry at Cambridge...”
– Air conditioner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In other words, I am back among the ranks of the artificially cooled.
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BP brands →
If you’re considering boycotting BP as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill, here’s a handy list of their brands.
(via John Gruber and Colin Kenney)
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Facebook Still Doesn't Get It
Facebook press conference:
Ben Parr from Mashable: This isn’t the first and last time that people are upset. What have you learned?
Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe we should have gone slower and communicated the changes clearer. “Now we feel that we have the privacy model that allows us to scale the service.” “Big takeaway from this [is] don’t mess with the privacy settings...
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“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely...”
– Gandalf, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (via eonomine) (via sunshadowpoet)
jacquelynn:
I really couldn’t care less about The Lord of the Rings and I have no idea who Gandalf even is, but this is quite a good summation of how I try to live.
It seems I’ve failed as a friend....
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Forced Facebook 'likes' and dishonest ads →
Paul Adams:
Yesterday a friend emailed me a link to watch the new Nike World Cup 2010 ad. It was recommended from a friend, so I was pretty motivated to watch it - even when they forced me to “Like” it before I had watched it.
…
Today, this [an ad] shows up in my newsfeed.
This campaign is completely dishonest. It should be clear to people what they are signing up to when they hit the “Like”...
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“Yes, you can carry thousands of them in your pocket, but what will you have to...”
– The iPad Revolution | The New York Review of Books (via lee)
sleepanddream:
Plus you can’t write in the margins or underline or dog-ear on your e-reader.
I take it you haven’t used Kindle for iPhone or iPad. But let’s be serious here: if you’re not buying physical copies of the...
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The Mix Type: Game Concept
What? As the name suggests, it’s like a mix tape, only with fonts. Each designer has a certain amount of time (a day? a week?) to create some type-heavy item that uses fonts in unexpected and aesthetically pleasing ways. At the end of that time, each player posts their gamepiece and the gamepieces are scored (whether by other players or by an audience). See here for the sort of thing I have...
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Quit Facebook Day →
Not sure why people need a particular day for it, but if you’d rather be part of a mass exodus, here’s your chance; mark your calendar for 31 May.
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Facebook Absolutely Must Die →
The official name of Facebook in China, as it appears on the Chinese version of its Website, is simply “Facebook.” It is unofficially, but commonly, referred to as Liǎnshū 臉書 (lit., “face book”).
Lately, however, Fēisǐbùkě 非死不可 has become a popular way of transcribing the name “Facebook.”
And what does Fēisǐbùkě mean? “Absolutely must die.” Fēi...
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WatchThe initial trailer for Sintel, the soon-to-be-product of the Blender Institute’s latest Open Movie Project: Durian. Looks like a hell of a lot of work is going into it.
No idea what I’m talking about? You can get the basic concept of it by reading about the last such project, Peach, and by watching the product, Big Buck Bunny. If that’s still too much, here’s the short...
Torpedo Airship Controlled By Wireless Is The... →
Sunday Magazine:
“Of course,” [the inventor] said, “my invention is primarily a warlike one. I think it will do away altogether with existing methods of warfare.”
A fascinating look at the spiritual ancestor of the Predator drone—from 1910.
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Bits: On blasphemy: →
personally, my opinion of images of the Prophet (peace be upon him) veers towards respect for the tradition that he is not depicted and if he is that it is done so with a veiled face. that said, i really wouldn’t take issue with him being depicted otherwise so long as it was respectful.
what is being done is not respectful. and i would feel the same way if i saw people depicting Jesus (i should...
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Welcome Home →
A delightful Tumblr about homes and other beautiful things.
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“Men of letters are not necessarily great respecters of books. Shakespeare made...”
– From a review by John Buxton of A.N.L. Munby’s The Libraries of English Men of Letters in the December 1965 issue of The Library, the journal of the Bibliographical Society.
Wish
I want to go somewhere there are no clocks, no workplace, no concept of money; someplace where the only goals are to survive tomorrow and be happy with the people you love.
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Who Loves a Book More? →
The Subversive Copy Editor Blog:
Recently I heard publisher Stephen Roxburgh speak to a group of writers in a bookstore. He held up a 1710 edition of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, leather-bound with marbled papers, beautifully etched, letter-pressed on vellum. Three hundred years old and looking like new. He said “If you tell me you love this book, I’m right there with you.” He...
“Successfully restored an IPSW to my iPhone from Linux. My life just got a whole...”
– Joshua Hill
Joshua Hill has managed to restore an iPhone 3GS on Linux using a version of libimobiledevice, a library used to provide increasingly complete, no-jailbreak support for iPhoneOS devices in Linux distributions. From the libimobiledevice website:
It allows other software to easily access...
No President Left Behind →
GQ’s Editor-in-Chief pens an irreverent but distilled letter on the Texas state school board and the jamming of ideas down liberal throats. Required reading.
CSS3 solar system →
This is brilliant. It’s a shame about the perfectly circular orbits, but I’m pretty sure elliptical (and sometimes overlapping) orbits are either impossible or prohibitively difficult with the current state of the art.
“In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to...”
– Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns | The Guardian
Emphasis mine. Among other things, they want to remove Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum because he heavily favoured separation of church and state and doublespeak the slave trade into the “Atlantic...
Facebook Privacy Scanner →
…an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings. The source code and its development will always remain open and transparent.
Click a bookmarklet while you’re on Facebook, and the service “warns you about settings that might be unexpectedly public”. As the gentlemen at Diaspora point out, this really ought to be built into Facebook.
Hello, world… again.
There’s no real easy way to say this, so here it is: starting now, this Tumblr is going to be much less about silly quotes and whimsical whatnots, and much more serious commentary on technology and politics (these things being both inextricably linked and hugely important).
I’m in the process of rethinking and rebuilding my online presence, so there will be some serious shuffling going on...
freedesktop.org » desktopcouch →
Purpose: Integration of CouchDB storage into desktop applications, for automatic replication and synchronization of data between computers.
It doesn’t sound like much, but this specification opens up the possibility for preferences and data for arbitrary applications to be synced between different Linux machines, potentially including a server with browser access.
Ubuntu is already looking...
“It was a fun test, and we’re all impressed at how much you won.”
– GLaDOS