The best design speaks not only so it can be understood, but also in a way it can be admired by those that use it. What if you were inspired by the things that you used, simply because they were impressive in a way that was evident to you?
Frank Chimero × Blog × The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible *knotesy
Oh come on, clearly “Hectic Danger Day” is the better title.
From orbit they’d deploy the perfect bomb into the atmosphere. The enthusiasm for delivering advanced decrepitude and causing melted databanks on a planetary scale was evident in even the most trivial blackboard scrawl at the institute. Yes the robot killing robots had failed, evidently, but this time they’d nail it. Everyone assumed delivery was the easy part. So, early one morning, rocket technicians perched behind blast resistant concrete, visors down, a gallery of eyes readily anticipating a quickly accelerating interplanetary missile, trajectory meticulously calculated. Eagerly awaiting regular pings of sound to and from the target, the moment of destruction, in fact the rocket exploded a few hundred meters up and the robot killing bomb went off above Ebyx itself.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 dealt only with bank and defense-related intrusions. But over the years, thanks to constant pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, the scope of the law slowly crept outward. So by the time Swartz was arrested in 2011, the tough federal statute meant to protect our national defense secrets covered everything from Bradley Manning’s offenses to violating a Web site’s terms of use
From ‘WarGames’ to Aaron Swartz: How U.S. anti-hacking law went astray | Politics and Law - CNET News *knotesy
He fell, he got up. Each time longer. He had the advantage of snowfoot boots, made of skin, hand stitched. They would take years to break in properly, but they were warm. Now he was driven by self-hatred, believing he may die out in the storm, from being lost, which is absurd, given the scope of things. He shook the snow from his cap.
The amount of data, two terabytes, is so great that it poses problems for the Internet; you can download it for free if you like, but the organizers of the project would rather mail it to you on a hard drive.
Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Needs Theorists : The New Yorker *knotesy
I saw another body of gendarmes, likewise lighted by torches, just emerging from a street’s end, some distance in front of me. I saw nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we came to Smyrna, and had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the inn) about landing at all. I saw, through all his forward promises, Excuses, prayers, and pledges that were oaths (What he, poor boaster, thought I could not see), That he was shorn of will, and that his heart Was as defenseless as a little child’s.
You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.” The researchers also found that they could use commercially available “spray-on bandage” products to add a thin protective layer and bond the system to the skin in a “very robust way,” he says.
Wearable Electronic Sensors Can Now Be Printed Directly on the Skin | MIT Technology Review *knotesy
Priceless Blaschka glass models now on display | Natural History Museum
The delicate glass artworks of sea creatures crafted by father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were made between 1866 to 1889. Find out how Museum staff prepared them to go on display in the new Treasure gallery.
See the models and the rest of our 22 Treasures in person at the Museum:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/galleries/green-zone/treasures/
To test the idea, the researchers conducted experiments with rats containing brain microelectrode implants capable both of recording electrical activity from neural networks and stimulating neurons. Simply put, patterns of cortical signals were recorded in one rat—the encoder—and transmitted directly into the brains of another rat—the decoder.
A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Rats | The Scientist Magazine® *knotesy
Dr Ropars thinks sunstones were real, and were actually crystals of Iceland spar, a form of calcite that polarises light (and therefore reacts to polarised light). Light from the sky is polarised and, as he discovered in 2011, looking through a piece of Iceland spar reveals the direction of polarisation, and thus the direction of the sun
After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database,” said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics.
BBC News - Antarctic Lake Vostok yields ‘new bacterial life’ *knotesy
A yam. This is what SXSW has come to. The digital portion of what started as a music festival has metastasized into a spectacle of peacocking internet startups and the people who surround them. Last year, Interactive had 24,569 attendees while the music portion of SXSW had 18,988 and the film portion just 16,490.
At SXSW, the stunts get wilder every year — and more disappointing | The Verge *knotesy
Imagine Johnny Rotten as a fat, pissed-off Jew and you might get a feel for Plotnik’s schtick. I could never tell if Bob was genuinely nuts or just playing nuts.
Dangerous Minds | Bleecker Bob’s is closing: Legendary record store to be replaced by frozen yogurt chainstore *knotesy
Horizontal Cells in the Zebrafish Retina
In the image above, cell nuclei (cyan) were stained with BODIPY while the outer plexiform layer is pseudo-colored in red. In yellow are the Cx55.5:M-YFP-labeled horizontal cell precurors.
Symmetric cell divisions have been proposed to rapidly increase neuronal number late in neurogenesis, but how critical this mode of division is to establishing a specific neuronal layer is unknown. Through in vivo time-lapse imaging methods, Leanne Godinho et al. discovered that in the laminated zebrafish retina, the horizontal cell layer forms quickly during embryonic development upon division of a precursor cell population. These precursors undergo nonapical symmetric division at the laminar location where mature horizontal cells contact photoreceptors. Strikingly, the observed precursor cell type (yellow) exclusively generates horizontal cells.
Imaged by Leanne Godinho and Philip Williams, courtesy of Rachel Wong, University of Washington.
Beautiful patent drawing for R. J. Spalding’s Flying Machine, 1889. Complement with the illustrated history of human flight.
The slight misalignment seemed unimportant at the time, but it produced some strange and unpleasant results. And those troubling effects persisted long after I took the gear off. That’s because my brain had adjusted to an unnatural view, so it took a while to readjust to normal vision.
When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently.
Monkeys Stay Away from Mean People: Scientific American *knotesy
The secondary engines kicked in, pushing X back with acceleration, his suit creaked with pressure changes. In a few moments he was out of the atmosphere. Not the first, not the last time. He’d trained for years, made sacrifices (personal, familial), shunning laziness like a sickness. Quite probably long term professional suicide. Ex-astronauts, after their very brief very dangerous career either became fixtures of retirement homes, retelling the same stories, or adjunct professors somewhere out of mercy, gray hair slicked back, natty suit, camouflaged decay. And yet. And yet he could not imagine it any other way, for this moment.
The 4th century geometer Pappus was one of several ancient Greek mathematicians who suspected that the elegant shape of the honeycomb was a result not of an innate bee-sense of geometric beauty but of nature's efficiency. The repeating pattern of six-sided figures you see in a cross-section of a honeycomb, Pappus guessed, used the least amount of wax to build the walls. ... more »
The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them.
The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good *knotesy
