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

“ Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it, and assume it has always been so. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues otherwise in Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 a show that, with classic Met largesse, recreates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love of beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.”

The Republic of Beauty, Melding West and East

The article begins with..Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it...and I'm very surprised. Who is saying so? Natural enemies? What's that? And what they mean with West? I'm Italian, from the south, what do I belong to, West or Middle East? The Mediterranean sea has seen all the populations living on its shores coming in contact sooner or later, the culture that developed is a result of a mixing of everything, with peaks of greatness and dips into nothingness for each of the populations involved. The Mediterranean culture is one of the most ancient and rich of the so called West and it's the result of exchange not of enmity. There have been many wars, sure, but that's just the usual human stupidity and greed not natural hostility.

“ 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

Third post of the Uncommon knowledge series by AceJet170 :
003
and a comment post on it:
uncommon knowlege

On the BBC:

Sea floor records ancient Earth

More on grid layout:

Five simple steps to designing grid systems

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

Khoi Vinh has put online his presentation at SXSW on techniques to create a grid-based layout:

Oh Yeeaahh!

On Digital Web Magazine :

Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site

“ 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

On Coding Horror :

Primary Keys: IDs versus GUIDs

The GUID stays unique globally while the ID is unique only within a single table.

“ ..every know and then I get the urge to impart knowledge that I've accumulated on others, usually younger designers. OK, sometimes it's reminisciences about PMT cameras and Rotring pens, but sometimes, very occasionally, it's something that might actually prove useful. Usually, it's stuff that I wish I'd known when I was at their stage of life/career.”

Uncommon knowledge

I, for one, find the first two ( 001 , 002 ) “tips” interesting and hope to read many more..

On icon design:

• Icon Design: Bitmap vs Vector
• Icon Design: Sizing

A collection of Web 2.0 logos:

The complete Web 2.0 directory

A collection of tips about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other Web development and design issues:

Web Building Tips

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?

“ Homes across Britain are wasting a total of 3.3m tonnes of food a year, a report is expected to reveal.”

Homes waste 3.3m tonnes of food

Apparently is now, finally, trendy to say vaguely reasonable things. Even such a low level of awareness is welcome...better then the usual abyss of irresponsibility. As long as it doesn't just stop there, the issue of wasted food is extremely important as are its distribution and availability.

On Array Studio Workshop:

MySQL insert a new row or update old one

A post by Mark Boulton about design and art:

One Principle to Design By

On Digital Web Magazine :

Better Font Management

On nefariousdesigns:

Semantics and Structure

On Bokardo:

Five Principles to Design By

On Sitepoint:

The Joy of Regular Expressions [4]

links to part [3], part [2] and part [1]

8 of MARCH - INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

It's always necessary to remember the struggle of women for their rights. The International Women's Day is not a commercial recurrence but a reminder of the necessity to be together , men and women, to build a better life for everybody.

“ As Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, we know there is a direct relationship between peace, justice and respect for human rights. As long as women are denied human rights, anywhere in the world, there can be no justice and no peace. Recognizing women's equal rights, therefore, is an essential requirement for the creation of strong, sustainable and stable societies and ensuring that women enjoy equality with men in all areas of life is a key step to making human rights a universal reality.”

• Stop Violence Against Women
• IWD

“ 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

“ The flaw with the simplicity/complexity controversy is that it gives the impression that designers are making a binary choice - but simplicity and complexity are not polar opposites. In fact, making something simpler is often a case of relocating complexity, rather than eliminating it from the user-technology relationship.”

Simplicity: The Distribution of Complexity

“ 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 . . .