“ Phylotaxis (Phyllos - leaf, Taxis - order) is an exploration of the space where science meets culture. Its structure, derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio, is one of nature's most elegant. The Fibonacci Sequence is the set of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. This simple sequence governs phenomena as diverse as the petal arrangement of roses, the breeding patterns of rabbits, and the shape of our galaxy.”

Phylotaxis

“ The voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771) was the first devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. The Botany Library at the Natural History Museum holds all of the surviving botanical artwork from Captain James Cook's first Pacific voyage. Represented are works of the artists Sydney Parkinson (1745-1771), John Frederick Miller and Frederick Polydore Nodder, among others. These artists' works feature in the finished watercolours made during and after the voyage, between 1773 and 1784. Of the three, only Parkinson sailed on the ship and it was he who made the first sketches of the plants which were encountered and collected.”

The Endeavour Botanical Illustrations

Rembrandt was born in 1606, four hundred years ago

Powering Up, One Step at a Time

“ British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city. “We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground” says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. “And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.” Like solar and wind proponents, vibration harvesters argue that abundant, clean energy is all around us and goes to waste. The challenge is how to store the power efficiently so it provides a continual output even if the vibrations from footsteps or passing trains temporarily taper off.”

I don't really know how feasible vibration harvesting is but I agree with any research for alternative forms of energy.

“ This article explains closures so that a programmer can understand them - using working JavaScript code.”

Closures Are Not Magic

My contribution to eEmadges:

Welcome to an editable collection of beautiful descriptions

Darwin Correspondence Project

“ Nothing in recent history of science quite tops the achievement of the volumes of Darwin correspondence. It is our own Human Genome Project.”

The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution

The goal of this undertaking is to make the full literature of evolution available online within a historically and topically coherent structure. The work of Charles Robert Darwin is our pivot, but our framework includes the 17th century to the present and encompasses the history of evolution as a scientific theory with deep roots and broad cultural consequences.

Places & Spaces

Cartography of the physical and the abstract. An exhibition created to demonstrate the power of maps to understand, navigate and manage not only physical places but also abstract information spaces.

Israel/Lebanon situation maps

Kept up with events on both sides of the border..There are also very recent overlays of Getty Images showing Beirut airport and Jiyeh after the air attacks.

Osher Map Library

Smith center for cartographic education - University of Southern Maine

Also on maps:

Cartography

Five simple steps to better typography
five good articles by Mark Boulton

Photoshop type tips
a good tip on how to choose fonts

Singing dunes

“ Ever since Marco Polo, explorers have told stories about strange sounds they have heard in the desert. It is known that these sounds are produced by sand dunes when they avalanche, but the exact mechanism behind the phenomenon has remained a mystery.”

Stéphane Douady 's web site and his article:
the song of the dunes as a self-synchronized instrument

Object Oriented Javascript:

Private, public and privileged members

One core thing about JavaScript that tends to confuse people is how to get private, public and privileged members.

Namespacing your JavaScript

Perhaps a very uncommon approach to developing web applications that require JavaScript (but should be more common) is namespacing your scripts.

Private Members in JavaScript

JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language. Some believe that it lacks the property of information hiding because objects cannot have private instance variables and methods. But this is a misunderstanding. JavaScript objects can have private members.

“ My heart feels heavy as I present these portraits of the poorest of the poor of India. My father documented these portraits, not for the Internet, not for the money or artistic effort, but with a sense of history in his mind. “In a few years, it will be hard for us to believe that we lived amongst people like these” he once wrote to me. The subjects in this series are mostly uneducated, poor, and never been in front of a camera.”

Never been photographed

This is the way a bullfight should be:

Valencia(Spain) Feria de Julio 2006

Crete(Greece) about 1650 BC

On Noisy Decent Graphics:
always do it for real

Nice advice on including some reality into the virtual world of web design.

“ East Art Map Online is a tool that will lead you through the last 50 years of the history of visual arts in Eastern Europe. You will get to know 250 artists/events/projects that are considered of major importance by the 24 art critics, curators and artists from the different ex-socialist Central, Eastern and South-Eastern countries invited to make an initial selection for the EAM.”

East Art Map

Albert Einstein and meandering rivers

“ I begin with a little experiment which anybody can easily repeat. Imagine a flat-bottomed cup full of tea. At the bottom there are some tea leaves, which stay there because they are rather heavier than the liquid they have replaced. If the liquid is made to rotate by a spoon, the leaves will soon collect in the center of the bottom of the cup. The explanation of this phenomenon is as follows: the rotation of the liquid causes a centrifugal force to act on it.”

On Information Aesthetics:

hydrogen atom pixel model

simple information graphic depicting the distance between an electron and a proton of a hydrogen atom

world population one

simple information graphic depicting the world population as pixels

Javascript includes
calling a script from within another script

Link thumbnail
displays a small image of the destination page when hovering on a link

On Nature:

You're only as old as your genes

genetic fingerprint could pinpoint fittest organ donors

Neanderthal genome in two years

we have the modern human genome. Now researchers are set to sequence the DNA of our extinct cousins: Neanderthal man

On Xefteri:

improving an XML feed display through CSS and XSLT

Not a bad idea, even if I think most people gets the RSS feeds through aggregators or Live Bookmarks on Firefox.

Irrepressible.info:

“ The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments - with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world - are cracking down on freedom of expression. Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.”

On the BBC: are cities the new countries?

“ Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too. These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”

Fourteen years ago, in 1992, Paolo Borsellino was killed by a car bomb.

In a Country where all kind of political prevarication goes unpunished but the World Football Cup gets thousands of people on the street there is a strong need to remember and regain some sort of dignity and understanding of what is important in life.

Stunned Net Art Open 2006

“ The Net Art Open takes a different approach to the curation of Net Art online. Rather then present a single event based exhibition selected by a curator or panel of selectors the Net Art Open is an ongoing blog based process delivered by RSS feed. Curatorial bias has been removed by accepting all work which meets the criteria The result is a true reflection of the state of Net Art now.”

On UXmatters: label placement in forms

“ Excessive distances between some labels and their input fields forced users unnecessarily to take more time to interact visually with the form.”

based on Luke Wroblewski's article

On Friendly Bit:

• static and dynamic CSS
• finer details of floats

Designing the new layout of my site, I also decided to soften the colors a bit. I'm still using just Blue, Red and a touch of Grey, plus the White background and the Black of text. This were the colors used in the previous version:

And this are the new ones:

Basically, I softened the blue (from #0000ff to #3366ff) and substituted the black(#000) with a grey-black(#333).

On Particletree: JSON, Ajax, and UTF8

“ How do you go about sending any type of character to the server via JSON? The solution turns out to be quite simple, but arriving at the solution involved many attempts in the wrong direction.”

Regular expressions:

• Regulazy
  a visual Regex creation tool for beginners
• Regulator
  an advanced, free regular expressions testing and learning tool

Food for thought:

The Missing Peace

“ Peace starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities.”
His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, 1989 Nobel Laureate for Peace

Plato as Software Designer
Plato's Ideal Types helps explain not only how our minds work, but perhaps also how computer software should work.

The Big Here and Long Now
an essay by Brian Eno

Underwater Image Competition 2006
link to a shortlist of ten entries per each of the five categories

SERPENT's permanent gallery of images split into regions: image gallery

On Nature: Sun helps clean the sky

“ The cleaning agent responsible is the hydroxyl radical (denoted OH), which is created when ultraviolet radiation splits apart a molecule of ozone to produce oxygen atoms that subsequently react with water. The resulting hydroxyl radicals are highly active and quickly react with trace atmospheric gases, such as the pollutant carbon monoxide, which is rapidly turned into carbon dioxide.”

What do they have in common? Not much, apparently..

On the BBC: detainees to get Geneva rights

“ All US military detainees, including those at Guantanamo Bay, are to be treated in line with the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions.”

“ Daniel Dell'Orto, a defence department lawyer who was the first to testify, said there were about 1,000 detainees in US military custody around the world. Guantanamo Bay holds an estimated 450. Mr Dell'Orto did not say where the others were being held.”

“ The new Pentagon policy applies only to detainees being held by the military, and not to those in CIA custody.”

It is the year 2006, isn't it?..sometimes I believe we are living in a time warp..

Second post about the new layout.

The sidebar used to contain links to news and most visited (by me) web design sites, links to the categories of my posts, monthly and year archives, a search posts form and the “metadata” (rss, xhtml and css validation, email contact, web hosting).

Since I have a whole page dedicated to external links, I decided to keep in the sidebar only those internal to my web site. I moved the “metadata” into the footer and the fragments links into the sidebar together with the Delicious and Technorati search forms. I think the navigation is clearer now and the sidebar more efficiently organized.

On Digital Web Magazine: accessible widgets for the web

When building web applications, we're working with a fairly restricted set of widgets, compared to those available for native desktop apps. The recent surge of interest in JavaScript points to a solution: we can replicate the functionality of sophisticated native widgets through some clever DOM scripting, and provide our users with exciting interfaces that bridge the gap between native apps and web apps.

On A List Apart: automatic magazine layout

Auto-resized images are a common feature on the web now. Automating the process of resizing images saves a lot of time - it's certainly quicker than manually resizing images in Photoshop - and is a good way to manage images on a site.

Once you have ten or so images, you are better off using an AJAX based image gallery, but this script will fill the gap nicely up until that point.

Syd Barret passed away:

• Pink Floyd's Barrett dies aged 60
• Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, dies

“ Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond ”

The sudoku of the 17th century: Sangaku

“ Perhaps it's not surprising that sudoku - the number puzzles that everyone seems to be working on these days - first became popular in Japan before spreading across the ocean. The fad is reminiscent of a math craze that swept the islands centuries ago, when ardent enthusiasts went so far as to turn the most beautiful geometrical solutions into finely illustrated wooden tablets, called sangaku, that adorned the walls of local temples and shrines.”

first read on Collision Detection

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side and you can populate it with data by pointing it to an XML file.

Today is Nikola Tesla's 150th birthday.

On Peterned weblog: table of contents
..table of content styles with different types of counting, right aligned page numbers and dotted lines filling the gap..

On Stuffandnonsense: CSS: a tribute to selectors
more links to articles on CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 selectors by 456 Berea St.

Andy Rutledge: logo misapplication

“ I believe that the logo is the most abused, misapplied, misconceived, wrongfully distracting element of design and business today. I encounter too many people in business who believe that their logo should define them. The reality is that they should define their logo. For some reason it seems that this business fundamental is lost on most business owners.”

This is the first post about the new layout.

At the beginning I wanted to have the latest post bigger and the previous four in a column below, with two more columns beside it, one for the categories and fragments, the other for the archives:

I like it, it's compact and easy to grasp. No fancy positioning and not too much clutter but..the problem, for me, is that there is only an excerpt of the previous posts, to read them it's necessary to click and go to the respective permanent link. I think it's better to read at least the first five posts without having to go to another page. So, I decided against it and went for the layout as it is now. The size of the text is bigger on the latest post and for posts seen singularly (permanent link), a bit smaller on the previous ones when seen on the home page. The column on the right holds all the site navigation, except for the four main pages, which I left in the masthead.

An Interactive Text Messaging Enabled Public Performance: TXTual healing

“ TXTual healing uses a cell phone a computer and a projector to create a mobile public performance by posting a person's text messages into speech bubbles that are strategically placed on the facades of buildings ”

Via typographic trivia on India,Ink. :

Lost Things in the Garden of Type

A list of the top 50 science blogs written by scientists:

• top 50 written by scientists

A list of the top 5 science blogs written by non-scientists:

• top 5 written by non-scientists

According to the Technorati rankings blogs written by scientists and non-scientists have the same range. As Kottke says “it's clear that the blog reading public doesn't care that much for science”.

Country overview: women quotas

“ Obstacles to women's political participation exist throughout the world in prevailing social and economic regimes, as well as in existing political structures. In 2005, the representation of women reached nearly 16 percent globally. Although this total has increased in recent years, the minimal progress globally means that the ideal of parity remains a long way off.”

“ Today women constitute 16 per cent of the members of parliaments around the world. Recently, Rwanda superseded Sweden at the number one in the world in terms of women's parliamentary representation - 48.8% women against Sweden's 45.3%. Rwanda is an example of the new trend to use electoral gender quotas as a fast track to gender balance in politics.”

Italy is the 48th Country, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. France is even worse.

On the New York Times: when Venice shook the world

On the Guardian: race to the world's energy hotspots

Like vultures flying all around a dying animal. Except, when the animal dies, we are likely to follow..

Sevencolors new layout:

1. first post bigger
2. icons thanks to Mark James of famfamfam
3. new sidebar
4. softer color palette
5. bigger text

These are some of the most important changes in sevencolors layout. I will post about each change after I'm finished checking that everything is all right..

Using proper quotation marks:

• On a Mac, use Option+] and Shift+Option+] for the left (open) and right (closed) single quotes. For Windows, use ALT 0145 and ALT 0146 for the left and right single quotes (hold down the ALT key and type the numbers on the numeric keypad)
• On a Mac, use Option+[ and Shift+Option+[ for the left and right double quotes. For Windows, use ALT 0147 and ALT 0148 for the left and right double quotation marks (curly quotes)
• In HTML code the characters as ‘ for ‘ and ’ for ’ and “ for “ and ” for ” (ampersand, pound sign, number, semi-colon)
• The Unicode numeric entities of ‘ for ‘ and ’ for ’ and “ for “ and ” for ” (ampersand, pound sign, number, semi-colon)

When using the ALT keystrokes in Windows, use the numeric keypad not the row of numbers above the alphabet and be sure Num Lock is turned ON.

There are some important differences between Windows and non-Windows display of characters:
on the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML

On Friendly Bit: current issues with Microformats