- Familiar yet alien ancient views of Earth – photorealistic simulations of the world as seen from space, millions of years ago.
- Flash Gordon Does Not Have Super-Speed (a friendly reminder)
- Back in 2006, Qualcomm effectively discontinued Eudora, though they sponsored a project to extend Mozilla Thunderbird with the look, feel, and some features of Eudora. I lost track of it over the years, but it turns out they finally released Eudora OSE last September…four years later.
- Revealed: How Area 51 Hid Secret Craft. Advanced designs by humans, of course, not alien ships.
Tag: history
Links: Science as a Subway, App Pricing, Terraforming IRL & the Importance of Scott Pilgrim
Crispian Jago presents the history of science as a subway map (cool visualization).
The comic strip The Oatmeal tackles the irony of mobile app pricing. Or, in the worlds of “Weird Al” Yankovic: “I hate to waste a buck ninety-nine.”
A 19th-century terraforming experiment: Ascension Island’s artificial ecosystem, instigated by Charles Darwin.
Author Seanan McGuire explains why movies’ financial success matters to fans: Since Scott Pilgrim failed at the box office, similar movies aren’t going to be funded for quite a while. I’ve actually been meaning to write up something similar, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Links! Alarms, Ghosts of History, Firefly Trek, WW2 Star Wars & More
Serious stuff (news, usability, history, etc.):
- Too many alarms can be as bad as none, if people learn to ignore them. Aesop knew it, but modern society keeps forgetting. (NY Times via NN Group)
- Then and now: Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov blends World War II photos with images of the same locations today. I’m a member of a Flickr group that does this with more general timeframes, Looking Into the Past, though I’ve only contributed one myself. It blends the 1997 and 2007 views of the UCI Student Center.
- The Internet Storm Center offers tips on protecting computers from lightning.
- CNN asks: Why are food allergies on the rise? Short answer: we still don’t know. (To preserve your sanity, don’t read the comments.)
And not so serious:
- Fantastic image: Firefly crew as the Enterprise crew. Classic Star Trek, of course. One thing that really struck me was the reminder that there’s really only one woman among the regular classic Trek cast: Uhura. Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand are there, but neither of them would really have had the kind of focus that Kaylee, Zoe, Inara and River have here.
- Incredible custom action figure maker Sillof collaborated with Glorbes on a Star Wars in World War II series.
- The webcomic SMBC presents: The Logogeneplex! I’m pretty sure I’ve read stuff that this was used on. (Warning: archives are NSFW.)
Links: Identity, Kindle, Language, and the Moon
Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Great Quotes With “Dear”
Here are some of my contributions to today’s Twitter meme, #greatquoteswithdear. You can probably figure out how the game works…
- “Damn it, dear, I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!”
- “Damn the torpedoes, dear. Full speed ahead!”
- “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes, dears.”
- “Hello, dear. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
- “I aim to misbehave, dear.”
- “I came, I saw, I conquered, dear.”
- “Kneel before Zod, dear.”
- “Madness? This is Sparta, dear!” ← (this one’s my favorite)
- “More weight, dear.”
- “Something wicked this way comes, dear.”
- “The same thing we do every night, dear: Try to take over the world!”
- “Why so serious, dear?”
- “Yippee-ki-yay, dear.”
- “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, dear?”