Notes on a web journey

One week of the Guardian takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper and visually represents it as a series of static images.

One week of the Guardian

'skine art:

moleskine art

“ To an observer in space, humanity's footprints on the surface of the Earth are large and varied. They include the regular patterns of irrigated cropland, straight lines of roads and railways running across continents, reservoirs on river systems, and the cement rectangles of ports and seawalls along coastlines. But what about humanity's signature footprint - cities? By day, cities viewed from space can blend into the countryside, or appear as gray smudges, depending on the style of development and size of the urban area.”

Cities at night: the view from space

“ Welcome to CarType. A comprehensive study and collection of reviews and typographical applications of emblems, car company logos and car logos with images, comments, links, car company information and general interest.”

cartype

“ Compared with Stonehenge, they [the stone circles of Gobekli Tepe] are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.”

7,000 years older than Stonehenge

Via Veerle's blog:

“ The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book”, is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and”. The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and”.”

The ampersand

“ Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built. The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones - smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site's original structure. The researchers believe that the bluestones could reveal that Stonehenge was once a place of healing. The dig is the first to take place at Stonehenge for more than 40 years.”

Breakthrough at Stonehenge dig

“ The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father's rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today's society - teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage. Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only - or even a particularly common - form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today's Christians. ”

The End of Marriage

Found through this more recent post.

I like to read articles written using common sense and perspective instead of just taking a moral stance and then finding justifications for it.

“ In this article I will attempt to illustrate my design process - from typeface concept to a marketable font. Not many folks are willing to write about this. Perhaps they find it boring, irrelevant or just a little bit personal. I suspect it is a mix of all the above.”

Newzald: From Moleskine to Market

Very interesting article. Thanks Kris.

Via AceJet170:

“ Numerals (or figures) can take various forms. The figure style you choose ought to be appropriate to the project you are working on. Readability is key. But which style is best for which purpose?”

Oldstyle/Lining/Tabular figures explained

“ Like most punctuation, the paragraph mark (or pilcrow) has an exotic history. It's tempting to recognize the symbol as a “P for paragraph” though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for chapter.”

Pilcrow & Capitulum

..just found out about it..

This is the post that started it:

It became a competition:

The entries on Flickr:

And the winners are:

Winners of the What is Graphic design poster competition

Very nice initiative

Fragile Earth, views of a changing world:

Fragile Earth

City blog guide on the Guardian:

Blog by blog guide to ...

“ Welcome to the Earth as Art Gallery! Here you can view our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). This gallery of images uses the visceral avenue of art to convey the thrilling perspective of the Earth that satellites provide to the viewer.”

Our Earth as Art

Two posts on The Nonist:

• On the Scales
• Histoire Naturelle des Indes

“..People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification...”

“..Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things...”

The Moral Instinct

“ Fishing, climate change and pollution have left an indelible mark on virtually all of the world's oceans, according to a huge study that has mapped the total human impact on the seas for the first time. Scientists found that almost no areas have been left pristine and that more than 40% of the world's oceans have been heavily affected.”

Total human impact on oceans mapped for the first time

“ 150 years ago, Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of natural selection. To mark this anniversary we bring you the definitive guide to the naturalist's great book, with extracts from key chapters and essays from leading scientists and thinkers.”

On the Origin of Species

“ This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: the translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication”

The History of Visual Communication

Blank printable world maps :

Maps

“ Complexity in living things is a product of the lack of direction in evolutionary processes, of the accumulation of fortuitous accidents, rather than the product of design.”

Algorithmic Inelegance

Via City of Sound:

The windy city

I have seen these pictures before somewhere, maybe on the BBC:

Pieter Hugo Photography

“ I'm always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth”, as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavour. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.”

NOAM CHOMSKY - THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS

Via The Nonist:

“ This site is dedicated to presenting and and preserving Plains Indian “Ledger” art, drawings on paper, from the late 19th century for research and enjoyment.”

Plains Indian Ledger Art

“ Hundreds of letters and photographs found stuffed inside in a long-forgotten suitcase have thrown a tragic new light on the secret life of the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini - and may also reveal a lost operatic composition. The personal life of the creator of Madama Butterfly and La Boheme was dogged by scandal and tragedy which deeply affected his output as a musician. In 1909, Italian society was gripped by the shocking revelation that Puccini's wife, Elvira, had accused him publicly of having had an affair with the family's servant.”

The identity of Puccini's secret lover

“The Guardian and Observer's unique series of the best interviews of the last century. For two weeks, each day's paper came with a free booklet containing some of the most famous encounters in journalism history, from David Frost's conversations about Watergate with Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe's last interview, Princess Diana's confessions to Martin Bashir and Bill Grundy's disastrous grilling of the Sex Pistols on live television.”

Great interviews of the 20th century

“ Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution. At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?”

Is “Do Unto Others” Written Into Our Genes?

“ Power generation is not a one way street: the more power it produced the more it cost the environment. This realisation has changed our view of almost everything that consumes power, but not so much computers. Only recently have they become numerous enough to make an energy difference to our world, and more recently still, their power consumption has rocketed. ”

The push for greener PCs

“ A revolutionary new environmental biotechnology - the Microbial Fuel Cell - turns the treatment of organic wastes into a source of electricity. Fuel cell technology, despite its recent popularity as a possible solution for a fossil-fuel free future, is actually quite old. The principle of the fuel cell was discovered by German scientist Christian Friedrich Schónbein in 1838 and published in 1839. Based on this work, the first fuel cell was developed by Welsh scientist Sir William Robert Grove in 1843.”

From waste to power in one step

“ Most of us would love to run our homes on solar power - if only it wasn't so unreliable, cumbersome and expensive. But thanks to a pioneering factory in Wales, those objections may not apply for much longer.”

Solar power

“ Ask someone to name a website and it's a virtual certainly they will say something ending with dot com: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn't matter what, it's the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people. But that may all change next year when the top level of the net - the part after the dot - is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won't be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won't be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net's infrastructure) - but it could mean a change in the way the online world works.”

After the dot: the latest net revolution

“ Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values. Because at their core, those values are sound. That is why, even in places where you'll find virulent anti-Americanism, you'll also find enormous affection for things American.”

Why Do They Hate Us?

“ I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq. She wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn't really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor. The thing that stood out about her, though, wasn't her strange uniform but the fact that nearly half her face was severely scarred. Or, rather, it had more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head. She was always alone, and I never saw her talk to anyone. Members of my platoon had seen her before but had never really acknowledged her. Then, on one especially crowded day in the chow hall, she sat down next to us.”

Shock Troops

Design Online is electronic library containing a digitised record of Design journal for the years 1965 to 1974:

DESIGN online

A selection of the best images from the first four years of the Travel Photographer of the Year competition:

Travel photographer of the year

Two works by Jonathan Harris:

“ Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”

UNIVERSE

“ 10x10 (“ten by ten”) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.”

10 x 10

more works here

“ Symptoms of mental retardation and autism have been reversed for the first time in laboratory mice.US scientists created mice that showed symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome - a leading cause of mental retardation and autism in humans. They then reversed symptoms of the condition by inhibiting the action of an enzyme in the brain.”

Autism symptoms reversed in lab

“ Drifting icebergs are ecological hotspots that enable the surrounding waters to absorb an increased volume of carbon dioxide, a study suggests. US scientists found that minerals released from the melting ice triggered blooms of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton. ”

Icebergs are ecological hotspot

“ Scientists believe they have discovered the biggest migration of wild animals on Earth, with an aerial survey revealing vast herds of gazelle and antelope on the move in southern Sudan in a region which had been assumed to have been denuded of its wildlife by years of civil war.”

Sudan's breathtaking migration

“ Krulwich is a journalist working across numerous arenas...much of his talk concerned framing, and the way the media handles inclusion and exclusion, and how it creates spaces of framing. Also political campaigns uses and abuse spatially, in order to portray a different sense of space. For example, Krulwich showed some great footage from the early 90s, of Bush the Elder's campaign of the time, and the various tactics involved in building a crowd i.e. hire a 354-person band; hand out tickets to locals, imploring them to come by calling them VIPs. And then, most interestingly, creating a smaller space downtown by fencing off areas - as the rally organiser says it makes the crowd bigger.”

On CITY OF SOUND:

Postopolis!: Robert Krulwich

Flags by Colours

“ Experts are lost for words to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment. Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.”

Text reveals more ancient secrets

“ The Web, in particular in its version 2.0, is an implementation of the strategies of control in the field of writing. The image, at the opposite, is interpretable with more difficulty by the machine and remains a not very accessible territory. Pattern recognition is a field in full expansion. It constitutes a key technology in the domains of safety, of the management of the rights, of marketing.. Logo.Hallucination proposes to use technologies of recognition of images in order to detect subliminal forms of logos or emblems, hidden (generally involuntarily) in the visual environment or in the whole of the images of the Internet. The found images will be accessible in a weblog, proposing a comparison between the original on the one hand and, on the other hand, the brand and its logo.”

Logo.Hallucination

“ Today, if you wanted eco-friendly illumination, you would have solar panels generate power during the day to run your T8 fluorescent bulbs at night. But what if you could just store daylight itself and save it 'till later?”

Things That Should Exist: Light Storage

“ If the canard that Adolf Hitler was a superb art director is meant to glorify the art directorial profession, think again. Although historians say he was the art dictator of Germany because he spent an inordinate amount of time overseeing the art and design of the Third Reich, he nonetheless had thousands of willing executioners, like Hugo Boss, designer and manufacturer of Wehrmacht and SS uniforms, doing the everyday work. Yet like art directors today, as Führer (leader) he received credit for everything under his domain, even those things he knew nothing about and had no hand in creating.”

The Nazi Triangle

“ Humans are generally believed to be more highly “evolved” than our chimpanzee cousins. But in at least one sense that isn't true, say geneticists who have hunted for the hallmarks of natural selection in our respective genomes - and found more of them in chimps.”

Chimps lead evolutionary race

Via The Guardian's Internet Guide :

“ Yann Arthus-Bertrand is not a man for small ideas. After circumnavigating the globe taking aerial pictures for Earth From Above, his next ambitious project was to create a time capsule of the world today by interviewing people in every corner of the planet. Started in 2003, the results so far are put together on this slick site. Testimonials picks out snippets from the 6,000 video interviews with incredible people and incredibly normal people, all answering a similar set of questions about their lives and dreams. Dig deeper and you'll find full-length films and road diaries of the team's travels.”

6 billion Others

“ Sheets of plastic that fold into tiny pyramids, boxes and spheres when water is added have been created by French researchers. They think the technique could one day be used to mass-produce the microscopic 3D components used in found inside many different devices from printers to medical sensors.”

Plastic sheets perform auto-origami

“ Scientists have at last uncovered the closest living relative of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, the most feared and famous of all the dinosaurs. For the first time, researchers have managed to sequence proteins from the long-extinct creature, leading them to the discovery that many of the molecules show a remarkable similarity to those of the humble chicken.”

Who are you calling chicken?

I have had young roosters and they hunt as a pack, more similar to Velociraptors as shown on Jurassic Park then T. Rexes, chasing my dog away to get at his food.

A photoblog by Ryan Keberly:

The Snowsuit Effort

Faces of Metropolitan Detroit.

On Coudal Partners :

Whose Fish?, a brainteaser by Einstein (maybe).

The Guardian brand advertising campaign (via AceJet170):

• New-look marketing for Guardian
• new Guardian campaign

“ Moore's Law states that the number of components that can be packed onto a given silicon chip doubles every eighteen months, but the end is in sight for this steady progress. In contrast, biological systems manage to store and manipulate information more compactly than any silicon-based device can achieve. In particular, DNA holds information in digital form, just like a computer, and uses fewer than fifty atoms to store one bit.”

How to make biology on your computer

“ The mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago apparently did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today's mammals.”

Mammals Took Sweet Time to Flourish

Via mmm,pretty...:

Jen Stark

Beautiful..

“ The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar...”

from A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe

Force of nature

On the BBC:

Sea floor records ancient Earth

On the New York Times :

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Read also an interview to De Waal by Der Spiegel:
Hippy Sex Fiends and Brutal Machiavellians

“ Mystery over knowledge, I love that. The process of creation depends on flashes of inspiration, moments where you manage to leap out of your usual groove and see things from a new perspective. Whatever knowledge and expertise you may bring to your craft, it's these moments of fleeting mystery that actually manage to kiss your work with an instant of virtuosity.”

Magic Boxes, Canned Chaos and Creative Totems

Two articles on Nature:

“ Most people tend to think of the tropics as the hottest scene on the planet when it comes to spawning new life. But Canadian zoologists have found that it is actually the world's temperate zones where new species evolve and become extinct the fastest.”

Life is faster in the temperate zone

“ A three-dimensional model of our planet's plate tectonics could help to explain why the Andes mountain range is taller than geologists would predict: it could all be down to the long length of the South American continent.”

Why are the Andes so tall?

“ The long-term mental anguish caused by psychological torture and humiliating treatment is comparable to that caused by physical torture, a new study indicates. The results, say the study's authors, support the prohibition of psychological torture by international law.”

Psychological attacks

“ The idea of gaining light from pedal power is not exactly new - kids have been riding bikes with dynamo-powered lights for years, and you can buy watches that never stop working as long as you remember to move your arm. But the Hong Kong scheme is one of a new wave of energy recapture ideas aimed at harnessing the surplus power of casual activities.”

Turning sweat into light

“ Carbon dioxide emissions from shipping are double those of aviation and increasing at an alarming rate which will have a serious impact on global warming, according to research by the industry and European academics.”

And you thought air travel was bad for the climate . . .

“ The seas around the Antarctic peninsula are among the most mysterious places on Earth - what life there is has remained largely a mystery, thanks to a thick cover of ice for the past few millennia. But the collapse of some of these ice sheets has given scientists a rare opportunity for access, and yesterday they revealed that they had found a thriving underwater world that is being transformed by climate change.”

The Antarctic's secrets revealed by melting ice

“ The complex geometrical designs used centuries ago in Islamic art and architecture were planned with a tiling system that was not discovered in the West until five centuries later, two physicists have claimed.”

Islamic tiles reveal sophisticated maths

“ If you saw Bernie Krause, a sotto voce man with heavy, nearsighted eyes, seated amid the baffling array of high-tech sound-engineering gear in his Glen Ellen, Calif., studio, you might never guess that he was once flung down a Rwandan mountainside by a mountain gorilla. Or that he forced himself to sit coolly still in the stultifying blackness of an Amazon jungle night while a prowling jaguar mouthed a microphone he had set up only 30 feet down the trail. As Krause tells these tales of peril, his voice resonates with a certain fearlessness developed during his worldwide, nearly 40-year quest to record the earth's rapidly disappearing biophony - a term he coined to describe that portion of the soundscape contributed by nonhuman creatures. Biophony, Krause has theorized, is unique to each place; nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else. ”

The Noises of Nature

“ The viability of harnessing waves as a lucrative renewable energy source received a boost last week following the announcement that the world's first commercial wave energy project will begin delivering wave-generated energy to the north of Portugal later this month.”

New Wave Energy Project

This piece of news dates October 2006, I just found out about it via 3 Quarks Daily. I think that it should have had a much bigger news coverage.

“ Giant blisters containing water that rapidly expand and contract have been mapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Fed by a complex network of rivers, the subglacial reservoirs force the overlying ice to rise and fall. ”

Antarctic water world uncovered

“ Human-generated carbon dioxide has sunk down to a great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean, a new study has shown. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the oceans store CO2 for longer than expected - good news for reducing the risk of climate change, but bad news for marine life in the deep sea.”

Carbon goes deep

“ In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.”

Oldest chimp tools

“ An annual contest for the best microphotographs of living (or once living) things.”

Microphotographs of Living Things

“ The new Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City opened to the public on February 10. Visitors to its elaborate displays can explore the fossil and genomic findings that f orm the basis for the current thinking on how we became human.”

The Hominids Take Manhattan

Via Ace Jet 170:

NY City Transit Authority Graphics Standards

A post on NoisyDecentGraphics has become this:

The Design Disease

Simple and nice.

“ Macro shots of various insects or bugs. All the shots are taken in my garden. ”

Insects macros

Two great posts on 3quarksdaily:

• The Future of Science is Open, Part 3
• Lunar Refractions a post about Piranesi

“ Psychologists are learning more about how colour builds language and language builds colour.”

How grue is your valley?

“ Gerontologists consider the maximum lifespan for humans to be about 120 years. But with rising evidence for a genetic “death programme” which in principle could be amended, some researchers are starting to believe the limit could be extended.”

Can ageing be stopped?

“ From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.”

Savage Wars of Peace

“ Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies”

The Universe's Invisible Hand

Airlines set to net billions

“ Scientists have discovered the key to the ability of spicy foods to kill cancer cells. They found capsaicin, an ingredient of jalapeño peppers, triggers cancer cell death by attacking mitochondria - the cells' energy-generating boiler rooms. ”

How spicy foods can kill cancers

Two articles on online communities and their de-humanization:

• Digital Maoism
• The “Dumbness of Crowds”

Via Kottke.org:

“ The remarkable thing is that the 7 lanes of freeway in each direction have zero extra capacity at that bandwidth, while the single track of rail rapid transit has, theoretically, at least another 66% to spare.”

15 thousand per hour

On Collision Detection:

“ The Five-Year Forecast
Unseasonably warm, with freakish snowfalls and chance of cyclone. This winter will be weird, and the weather will keep getting weirder.”
by Clive Thompson

A feature on the future of New York's weather:

The five-year weather forecast

Science's 2006 Breakthrough of the year and runners up:

Special Online Collection: Breakthrough of the Year 2006

Via Kottke.org:

The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006

“ The largest lizards in the world are capable of virgin births. Scientists report of two cases where female Komodo dragons have produced offspring without male contact. ”

Virgin births for giant lizards

“ Coached by breast milk and good bacteria, the immune system strives to learn the difference between food and pathogens before the first morsel crosses our lips.”

Why We Develop Food Allergies

“ In 1891, Sylvain Dornon walked 1830 miles between Paris and Moscow on stilts at an average of about 30 miles a day (58 days total).”

Stilt Walkers

“ Has any book been recast into English more times than this tale of Aeneas' wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire? Probably not, given both the poem's venerability and the relative accessibility of Latin. When you further consider all the partial or complete versions in private manuscript - often the work of old classics teachers, shared with their students - we indeed confront something that looms over us like a cloudburst.”

Wars and a Man

On Laputan Logic:

• the evolution of numbers
• the cult of the Golden Ratio

Historical notes for every decade since 1650:

history by decades

The Smithsonian's online exhibition of satellite imagery:

Earth from space

Via India,Ink.:

“ Penguin's just announced a new series of My Penguin classics with naked front covers - white art-quality paper, blank save for the Penguin logo. It's up to you to clothe them, in illustration or collage or whatever, and if you e-mail it to Penguin they'll post it to their online gallery.”

Draw your own

A nice idea.

The National Sleep Research Project:

forty facts about sleep

On Nature:

Human genome more variable

Two links found via Kottke.org:

• Human motivation
• Malthusian catastrophe

“ Scientists have identified the oldest known bee, a 100 million-year-old specimen preserved in amber. The discovery coincides with the publication of the genetic blueprint of the honeybee, which reveals surprising links with mammals and humans. The ancient insect, trapped in tree sap, is at least 35-45 million years older than any other known bee fossil.”

Bee fossil DNA generate a buzz

“ That Diego de Velazquez is the greatest of painters has never been in doubt. Anyone who has seen Las Meninas, that stupendous vision of the artist at his easel among the children, dogs and courtiers of the Spanish palace, glimmering like a mirror, the size of life and fully as profound, knows it at once. What Velazquez could achieve with the tip of his brush, all the way from literal to philosophical truth, remains astonishing to the mind and eye, even though every one of his marks is laid in plain sight.”

A feast for both mind and eye

“ This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context.”

The complete work of Charles Darwin online

Another beautiful post on the Nonist:

Typewriter Museum

The link to the actual Typewriter Museum web site:

The Virtual Typewriter Museum

A post On Decent Noisy Graphics asking readers to leave design questions in the comments that will be answered as single posts:

Design Questions

“ Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out. ”

Global Rich List

I'm the 814.456.058 richest person in the world, in the top 13.57%. Find out that what you make a year is a lot more then you thought when compared to most of the world's inc