Beautiful time lapse video of traversing Half Dome at night. I discovered the link at The California Sun. Much of it is only for subscribers, but the writing and content are excellent.
Pixel: a Biography
So why do so many people think that pixels are little squares? The answer is simple: apps and displays have fooled us for decades with a cheap and dirty trick. To ‘zoom in’ by a factor of 20, say, they replace each pixel with a 20-by-20 square array of copies of that pixel, and display the result. It’s a picture of 400 (spread) pixels of the same colour arranged in a square. It looks like a little square – what a surprise. It’s definitely not a picture of the original pixel made 20 times larger.
Alvy Ray Smith
I’ve been using Photoshop and other graphic programs for decades, and I absolutely thought pixels were little squares. This is a fantastic and informative essay. Highly recommended.
Loot
“Loot is randomized adventurer gear generated and stored on chain.
https://www.lootproject.com/
Stats, images, and other functionality are intentionally omitted for others to interpret. Feel free to use Loot in any way you want.”
I haven’t been drawn into the NFT craze, but I really do like the idea of something that can be an unalterable creative asset.
Kyle Russell explains how a community has already formed around this set of adventurer gear
In less than a week, a community has gone from lists of text to infinitely many illustrations of those items to worlds for those items to reside in and characters to wield them. All from taking simple primitives and generating context around them that gives them value.
https://collisions.substack.com/p/gimme-the-loot
Video of Aurora From the ISS
Clouds compete for attention in this aurora time lapse over a blue ocean.
Thomas Pesquet
Hyper-Reality
A very dystopian (but somewhat believable) vision of what our augmented reality future may hold. I discovered the link in the always fascinating newsletter by Benedict Evans.
Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.
Hyper-Reality Description on Vimeo
Ode to a Flower
A wonderful video I ran across on brainpickings (I highly recommend that site, too) featuring the famous physicist Richard Feynman explaining why science only adds to the beauty of world.
The API-first world
Postman is a great tool for using/testing APIs. Added to that, they’ve created a fun comic book explaining their vision for “API-first” world. Yes, it’s biased toward their company, but it’s still great.
Now, there’s quite a bit of discussion across the industry these days about what exactly “API-first” means, so we decided to choose an unconventional medium to explain it. Folks here at Postman are big fans of reading, and of science fiction, and of graphic novels, so we decided to create a graphic novel to describe the API-first world.
Postman Blog
Shruthi Venkatesh, a visual designer here at Postman, brought this idea to life with her illustrations in a brand-new graphic novel that I am very excited about sharing with you, “The API-First World.” Please give it a read.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I stumbled across the book review by Rodrigo García in the Paris Review about his book: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, where he writes of “the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez.”
He would say, “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me,” and then he would repeat it in one form or another multiple times an hour for half an afternoon. It was grueling. That eventually passed. He regained some tranquility and would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it,” or “Everyone treats me like I’m a child. It’s good that I like it.”
the Paris Review
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was an amazing achievement of world literature and for me, personally, it was my first exposure to magical realism.
The World’s First Carbon Concrete Building Is Under Construction
Despite all the chaos in the world, amazing innovation continues.
From Interesting Engineering:
Specifically, the concrete used for The Cube will be strengthened with carbon fiber yarn, which is made by extracting almost pure carbon crystals via a process of thermal decomposition known as pyrolysis. The yarn is then woven into a mesh that the concrete is poured onto before setting. As the carbon fiber doesn’t rust, the carbon concrete is also more durable over a longer period than steel rod-strengthened concrete. As structures can be much thinner due to the lack of steel rods — which often require more thickness to prevent water penetration — Henn says that this will enable “a future architecture where environmentally conscious design is paired with formal freedom and radical rethinking of the most basic architectural elements.”
Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.
An evergreen comic/article by The Oatmeal. It’s both humorous, and educational about how truly amazing Tesla was, and, by contrast, how overrated Thomas Edison was/is.
Tesla was known for discovering amazing things and then forgetting to write them down. Edison was known for rushing to the patent office as soon as one of his employees had something.
The Oatmeal