- Visualizing the iPad 3′s (likely) retina-display screen
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A lovely and powerful illustration. I really can’t put in to words how excited I am for this 2048×1536 screen; I think my anticipation is on par with what I was feeling right before the iPhone debuted in 2007.
I’ve a strong sense that most peopleâ€â€even those who consider themselves gadget geeksâ€â€are not prepared for the sea change that this sort of pixel density (in a consumer screen this large) will bring about. The applications are limitless, and most of them haven’t even been imagined yet.
If you aren’t already using your iPad in lieu of your Mac (where possible), I suspect this screen probably will put you over the edge (even if that means always having to carry around a Bluetooth keyboard)… at least until Macs get similar displays.
- The “Pillars of Creation†haven’t existed for thousands of years
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Surely you’re familiar with this photo taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995, right? Check it:
The Pillars of Creation no longer exist. In 2007, astronomers announced that they were destroyed about 6,000 years ago by the shock wave from a supernova. Because of the limited speed of light, the shock wave’s approach to the pillars can currently be seen from Earth, but their actual destruction will not be visible for another millennium.
- The late great Lucy Grealy on her face, tragedy, beauty and identity
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This story likely will make you cry, but you’ll be better for reading it.
Halloween, that night of frights, became my favorite holiday because I could put on a mask and walk among the blessed for a few brief, sweet hours. Such freedom I felt, walking down the street, my face hidden! Through the imperfect oval holes I could peer out at other faces, masked or painted or not, and see on those faces nothing but the normal faces of childhood looking back at me, faces I mistakenly thought were the faces everyone else but me saw all the time, faces that were simply curious and ready for fun, not the faces I usually braced myself for, the cruel, lonely, vicious ones I spent every day other than Halloween waiting to see around each corner. […]
I had long, blonde hair, and I also had a thin figure. Sometimes, from a distance, men would see a thin blonde and whistle, something I dreaded more than anything else because I knew that as they got closer, their tune, so to speak, would inevitably change; they would stare openly or, worse, turn away quickly in shame or repulsion. l decided to cut my hair to avoid any misconception that anyone, however briefly, might have about my being attractive.
- Biology doesn’t support gay marriage bans
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Sex is not the binary system we think it is, and we can’t go around making rules about what people can and can’t do based on what anatomy happens to be between their legs. So on top of the fact that gay marriage bans are unconstitutional, unnecessary, and downright petty, they are also terribly unscientific.
I’m sorry, but you have to be a special kind of ignorant asshole to be against gay marriage.
Science > your blind hate.
- Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head, and extreme beer
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If you’re a beer enthusiast or snob, you’re definitely going to want to read this great piece by Burkhard Bilger.
Relatedly, Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA probably is my favorite IPA of all time, but these days I seem to try at least one new IPA a week, and right now I’m completely smitten with 21st Amendment’s Brew Free or Die IPA.
- David Sparks’ OmniFocus screencasts
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Probably the best collection of OmniFocus screencasts on the planet.
- Black SMS iPhone app
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BlackSMS lets you send hidden password-protected text messages. The name “BlackSMS†is due to the texts showing up as black chat bubbles in the iMessage app.
A clever idea, but the implementation sure is kludgy. Also, I’m not sure I can fully trust an app whose only screenshot in the App Store is of an SMS conversation that begins with, “So… did u do it with Stacy last night give details.â€
- YOURLS
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YOURLS is a small set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run your own URL shortening service. You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API.
- DP Review previews the Fujifilm X-Pro1
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This new piece of kit was made available for pre-order just a few days ago, and I signed up right away. I also pre-ordered the 35mm f/1.4 to go along with it.
If interested, check out the official site, a video walkthrough of the menuing system and the three official videos from Fujifilm (40 minutes total). Also, Hugo Poon has put up some shots he’s taken with the X-Pro1, including some incredible high-ISO snaps, like this ISO3200 shot.
- To My Old Master
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In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon  who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family  responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below.
A beautiful, honest letter that’s equal parts tragic and joyful. (Kottke did some follow-up research into Jourdon Anderson and family.)
- The machine-tooled happyland
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In a 1965 article for Holiday magazine, Ray Bradbury described his first visit to Disneyland, and went on to explain how Walt Disney’s “audio-animatronics†changed his perception of both humanity’s future and the role machine’s will play in helping us understandâ€â€and believe inâ€â€our pasts.
[W]e live in an age of one billion robot devices that surround, bully, change and sometimes destroy us. The metal-and-plastic machines are all amoral. But by their design and function they lure us to be better or worse than we might otherwise be.
In such an age it would be foolhardy to ignore the one man who is building human qualities into robotsâ€â€robots whose influence will be ricocheting off social and political institutions ten thousand afternoons from today. […]
Disney is the first to make a robot that is convincingly real, that looks, speaks and acts like a man. Disney has set the history of humanized robots on its way toward wider, more fantastic excurÂÂsions into the needs of civilization.
- How to get a nuclear bomb
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If this interests you at all, be sure to check out Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines, which deep-dives into this topic and a host of others. (You’ll learn a lot, I promise.)
- Can religion survive without all the hocus-pocus?
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Of course not.
It is the supernatural elements of those [religious] texts that give them any authority… [Without those elements] all the religions would be reduced to some banal version of the golden rule that could just as easily be found in any basic ethical system.
- A sampling of advancements associated with past world’s fairs
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explode.Though world’s fair have long been outmoded, I’ve always romanticized them. Can you imagine being a Parisian teenager in the late 1800sâ€â€wholly interested in technology and scienceâ€â€and stepping onto the grounds of a world’s fair? Your head would
We’re spoiled these daysâ€â€what with infinite access to infinite knowledge and allâ€â€but back then your mind would have exhausted itself racing with the possibilities of what was taking place before your eyes. Not only had you never seen most of this stuff before, you likely had never even imagined it. The feeling must have been overwhelming.
(Relatedly, check out Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which chronicles both the production of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer who created a killing chamber in a hotel near the fairgrounds.)
- Low-profile magnetic iPad stand from Ten One Design
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This thing is absolutely beautiful, but I’m skeptical of its ability to keep the iPad still when you’re interacting with it.
- Burger King tries home delivery
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Burger King has quietly begun testing home delivery of its burgers, fries and other sandwiches. […]
There’s a $2 delivery fee. And depending on the store, minimum orders vary from $8 to $10. The stores try to deliver within 30 minutes of the time a phone or online order is received. Delivery customers must live within a 10-minute drive of the store.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would be so proud.
I, of course, would do this in a heartbeat, but only if they somehow disguised themselves and the bag(s). There’s no way I’m walking down to the lobby of my (rather nice) apartment complex and acceptingâ€â€in plain sight of people I interact with on a daily basisâ€â€delivery of a BK Big Fish and fries.
- Video of a crow using a jar lid to sled down a snow-covered roof, over and over again
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If this doesn’t blow your mind, then, well, you might not be as smart as a crow.
- Announcing Arc: a new magazine about the future from the makers of New Scientist
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Arc will explore the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world’s most celebrated authors – backed up with columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.
Selectively enable Flash in Chrome without an extension
Last week I wrote about the extensions I use in Chrome, and the number one question I got in response was, “You don’t block Flash?!†Of course I block Flash. I’ve always blocked Flash. (In my 2009 discussion of the ClickToFlash Safari plugin I wrote briefly about the ways I’ve blocked it over the years.)
The thing is, with Chrome, you don’t need a plugin or extension to ensure that Flash (or any other type of content that requires a plugin) is blocked by default, but easily enabled when needed; this sort of functionality is built into the browser.
To set it up, simply punch about:flags into the address bar and enable “Click to play.†Then (and you may need to restart the browser before doing this) go to Preferences → Under the Hood → Content Settings → Plug-ins, and choose “Click to play.†That’s it. (I’m not entirely sure this is currently available in the regular and beta channel builds, but it’s been baked into the developer builds for a very long time, and so my hunch is that it has creeped into the other builds by now.)
(You might also want to check out my trick for restarting (Chrome or Safari’s) Flash, without having to cycle your browser.)
- Kaufmann’s posographe
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An ingenious six-variable exposure calculator from the 1920s. This kind of blew my mind.
The books I read in 2011
Just a quick list of the books I managed to plow through in 2011. After browsing this list, if there’s a book you think would interest me, please let me know, or just gift it to me. ;) Relatedly, you also may want to have a look at my book wish list.
★★★★★
★★★★☆
★★★☆☆
Currently, I’m reading the following books:
If you made it this far you might as well have a look at my reading list for 2010.
- Shawn Blanc reviews the Galaxy Nexus
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I usually mark-as-read product reviews if it’s something about which I already know a fair amount. That said, I ended up reading this piece because Shawn is a friend and I was curious what his opinion was of Android’s latest flagship device, especially given that this was his first real experience with Android.
It’s a thoughtful write-up that I encourage everyone to read, particularly the iPhone-for-life crowd.
The Chrome extensions I use
I’ve long been a huge fan of Chrome/Chromium and have been asked more than a few times for a list of the extensions I use, and so I thought I’d whip up a quick post to list and discuss them (where necessary). (The italicized text after the name of each extension is the copy provided by the respective developer.) Note that this list does not include the bookmarklets I use; I’ll discuss those in a separate post.
Though it probably is obvious, there likely is some overlap between certain of the “privacy†extensions, and I’m OK with that. Relatedly, I also whitelist cookies on Chrome (an awesome browser feature). Basically, this means that I have to give a site explicit permission before it can set cookies. It’s great, though not without its annoyances; for example, sometimes some snooping is required to get certain websites working. (It’d be nice if Chrome let us enable cookies for a particular site, and then automatically deleted those cookies as soon as the tab in which they were created was closed. If you’re aware of an extension that will do this, please let me know.)
- Engineers create virtual sky for office ceilings
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I so want this in the bitcave.
- How to dismiss iOS banner notifications
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News to me. (Via Shawn Blanc.)
- Video tribute to the defunct-as-of-yesterday “Jaws†ride at Universal Studios
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[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/T_t3Q6ahmyU ]
This brings back some memories.
