- Matt Mullenweg on Apple, WordPress & tech release strategy. 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number
- Robert J. Sawyer on the relationship between science fiction and science fact: The job of sci-fi isn’t to predict “THE future,” but “to suggest a smorgasbord of possible futures, so that society may choose the one it wants.”
- Mystery California missile turns out to be a contrail lit by sunset, seen almost end-on so that it looked vertical. The photo actually reminds me of a contrail I once saw.
Tag: linkblogging
Recent Links: CMS Nirvana, $1M Comma, Voltron as a Band
- Dougal Campbell asks: are WordPress & Drupal converging on CMS Nirvana?
- A cautionary tale on the importance of punctuation: the million-dollar comma.
- 1980s cartoons as concert posters by Steven Thomas. Voltron, MASK, Silverhawks and more.
Links: Clouds, the Blue ‘e’, and Bobby Tables
- Incredible photo from APOD: Clouds, Birds, Moon, Venus. I’ve finally replaced my Woodbridge Snow photo as my desktop wallpaper at home.
- Microsoft provides an interesting look back at the evolution of the Internet Explorer logo over the past fifteen (yes, fifteen) years.
- 100-year data preservation. A 350-year-old copy of Shakespeare is still readable. But what about that 35-year-old floppy disk?
- Funny: Swedish voters submit SQL injection and JavaScript attacks on hand-written ballot. The article’s title refers back to the XKCD comic about “Bobby Tables.” (via Slashdot)
Links: Science as a Subway, App Pricing, Terraforming IRL
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.
Links: Cloud Caps, Kahlua Cupcakes, and the Anti-Vista
A couple of days ago I clicked on the StumbleUpon toolbar and landed on this incredible photo of lenticular clouds over Mt. Rainer at APOD. It was a bit unnerving, because that picture has been my desktop wallpaper for the past year or so! Good call, though.
The Straight Dope experiments with Kahlua cupcakes to determine two questions: How much alcohol is left in each cupcake? (Not much) Can you get drunk? (Not unless you eat so many cupcakes that you’ll be sick anyway.)
Windows 7 is doing what Vista couldn’t: convincing people to replace Windows XP. The best quote in this ZDNet article: “Windows 7 is the Anti-Vista.”
Goin’ On a Typo Hunt
NPR has an article on The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends cross the country with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. And there’s a book.
I may need this.
When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”
The appeal hasn’t stopped. You may have noticed I have two categories on this blog devoted to weird/funny signs and mistakes in signs.
Yeah, this sounds like a good bet. Update: I finally read 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.
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.)
