Mr. Entropy

A beautiful reflection on the heart, from biological fact to imagined emotional instrument. There’s a good narrated version of the essay, too.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

Brian Doyle

A great essay by benedict Evans.

The first generation of internet services tried to help with filters and settings, but most normal people ignore the settings and don’t want to write filters, and so we very quickly went to systems that tried to help automatically. Gmail has its priority inbox, and social networks build recommendation engines and algorithmic feeds. Given that the average Facebook user is apparently eligible to see over a thousand items a day, it seems (or seemed) to make sense to try to show the video of your niece before the special offer from a restaurant you ate at five years ago. So your feed becomes a sample – an informed guess of the posts you might like most. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product – half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out.

Benedict Evans

In Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’s “A Concerto Is a Conversation,” Bowers traces the process of breaking into new spaces through generations of sacrifice that came before him, focusing on the story of his grandfather Horace Bowers. As a young man, he left his home in the Jim Crow South, eventually ending up in Los Angeles. Encountering discrimination at every turn, he and his wife, Alice, nevertheless made a life as business owners.

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.

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 is randomized adventurer gear generated and stored on chain.
Stats, images, and other functionality are intentionally omitted for others to interpret. Feel free to use Loot in any way you want.”

https://www.lootproject.com/

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

Clouds compete for attention in this aurora time lapse over a blue ocean.

Thomas Pesquet

Une aurore australe sous la lumière de la lune 🤩
.
Clouds compete for attention in this aurora timelapse over a blue ocean.#MissionAlpha pic.twitter.com/r9y1t2MgPp

— Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) September 14, 2021

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

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.

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.

Postman Blog