I don’t understand very much about image compression but this animation makes for a pretty cool demo. Not sure about the name, but it’s harder to argue about the pronunciation than gif
The Coffee Cups of NYC
A visual survey of New York City coffee cups, from GP’s favorite cafes across the city.
This weekend I was in Madison Wisconsin and found some great coffee at a shop/roaster called Colectivo Coffee. They have some great illustrations and designs on their packaging and to go cups as well.
Source: The Coffee Cups of NYC : Gear Patrol via Kottke
On Dormant Cyber Pathogens and Unicorns
When trying to get at the technical core of what the FBI is asking of Apple, this researcher/hacker/forensic scientist/? seems to have the explanations.
Might I suggest you start here and here and a Summary
Really you should just go read the last 15 or so posts.
This is a controversial topic, but at the core of the debate is a tremendous amount of misinformation and purposeful ambiguity. Fight the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
Source: Zdziarski’s Blog of Things
Hubble Breaks Cosmic Distance Record
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the Universe was only three percent of its current age,” says Pascal Oesch of Yale University and lead author of the paper.To determine large distances, like the one to GN-z11, astronomers measure the redshift of the observed object. This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the Universe; every distant object in the Universe appears to be receding from us and as a result its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths.Before astronomers determined the distance to GN-z11, the most distant measured galaxy, EGSY8p7, had a redshift of 8.68. Now, the team has confirmed GN-z11’s distance to be at a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang.“The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas,” explains co-author Rychard Bouwens from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. “This transitional period is known as the reionisation era. GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe.”
This makes me think about the difference between a video camera and a still frame camera. A video camera, or video itself, is about capturing images over time, while a still camera, or a picture, is about capturing an image at this specific time. But what if the concept of a picture gets more complex, a photo taken today, right now, of a time in the past (realizing that this is always true of photography just on a incredibly tiny scale), then do we need to change the name of what is happening when the Hubble Space Telescope “documents” the past?
A new space telescope is so exciting but this is an ugly website
Source: Hubble breaks cosmic distance record | ESA/Hubble via Engadget
Bowie’s Top 100 Books
Described as a “voracious reader” by curator Geoffrey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 memoir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analysis of U.S. anti-intellectualism in The Age of American Unreason.
Teapot of Significance
Fascinating (but short) article about early computer graphics.Ken Block’s GYMKHANA EIGHT
These are just silly. But boy oh boy do I enjoy them.
It seems all to fitting that track that starts to play at the end of Ken Block’s video would be M.I.A.’s Bad Girls. This feels like how music videos should be, epic, beautiful, ridiculous.
The Road Not Taken
As you slide away from the curb, the sound of the electric drive motor hardly rises above a whisper. A few blocks from home, you steer the car into a special lane, and pull a lever under the dash. The front wheels lock in straight-ahead position. Simultaneously, the side-hatch door slides back and an electric third-rail shoe folds out. It makes contact with a power rail, the flanged wheels roll onto rails of a track, and your car accelerates at a controlled rate of 0.3g. You twirl a dial until you see ‘Fifth Street’ appear in a small window. Seconds later, as your car enters a main guideway at exactly 60 mph, you open the paper and begin scanning the news.
Fascinating long form article. This is near to my ideal vision for public transit.
The delightfully opposite of efficient public transit and another
Source: The road not taken : The Verge
The Lost Tombs of Oman
In the remote and spectacular mountain ranges of Oman rise dozens of conical towers whose function and origin remain unknown. Only discovered by a British aviator in the nineties, these 5,000-year-old tombs are an enigmatic mystery for the archeologists of the 21st century.
Source: The Lost Tombs of Oman : Maptia via HackerNews
