Colossus MK. 2, Bletchley Park (James Pegrum, peggyjdb)
2 weeks ago
May 5, 2013
concrete arrows between L.A. and Salt Lake City to mark an air route (AeronauticsBranch of the Department of Commerce, 1920s and 30s)
via TYWKIWDBI
2 weeks ago
May 2, 2013
The History of San Francisco Place Names
An interactive map showing the history of street and landmark names in San Francisco.
3 weeks ago
May 1, 2013
Manfred Mohr, Cube Transformation Study, 1972 (by Manfred Mohr)
1 month ago
April 14, 2013
Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon by Tom McCormack
Tom McCormack does a deep dive on the early days of the emoticon:
The conjuring of a voice where there is only actually just a bunch of static text is a huge part of the Magick of good writing. But much of the written word is not trying to be good, in this sense.
The CMU CS bboard could have dictated that all jokes be written with the skill for compression, mimicry, and understatement of James Thurber or S.J. Perelman, but this would have likely betrayed this bboard’s social function, which was to facilitate amusing or pragmatic and low-investment communication among people who seem, for the most part, not to have been humanities majors.
The question of what symbol or symbols can or should substitute for tone of voice was considerably worked over by the CMU CS BBS. What distinguishes Falhman’s from the previous suggestions is that it simultaneously accented the lyrical expressiveness of the word-substitute and added an element of modular variability, two of the most important qualities of the more involved longer-form writing the smiley was intended to obviate.
Def worth a full read.
i’m being eaten by a cyclops you moron
2 months ago
March 14, 2013
reblogged via 
To track how languages evolve, words mutate, sounds shift, and new tongues arise from old, an algorithm has been developed to reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors.
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues have developed a machine-learning algorithm that uses rules about how the sounds of words can vary to infer the most likely phonetic changes behind a language’s divergence. The system was also able to suggest how ancestor languages might have sounded and also identify which sounds were most likely to change. src
3 months ago
February 15, 2013
reblogged via
The spread of printing across Europe in the 1400s (metaLAB)
via The Atlantic
5 months ago
December 6, 2012
BASIC
10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10, a new book collaboratively written by 10 authors, takes a single line of code—inscribed in the book’s mouthful of a title—and explodes it.
That one line, a seemingly clumsy scrap of BASIC, generates a fascinatingly complicated maze on a Commodore 64. Run the little program on an emulator—or on an actual Commodore 64, if you happen to have one collecting dust in your basement—and a work of art unfolds before your very eyes, as the screen slowly fills up in a mesmerizing fashion. (Run it on another old-school computer, like an Apple II, and you won’t get the same transfixing result, for details that have to do with the Commodore 64’s character set, called PETSCII.)
The line of code seems basic, even for BASIC. There aren’t any variables. It uses a GOTO instead of a more elegant loop. How could something so short and simple generate such a complex result? What can this one line—“10 PRINT,” to use the authors’ shorthand—teach us about software, and culture at large?
via Slate
5 months ago
December 1, 2012
using the wormholes in woodcuts (from the prints in published books) to map the historic distribution of beetles (Blair Hedges)
6 months ago
November 22, 2012
Rivers of blood in Moscow: The Great Purge personified
The Memorial Society’s database of purges in Moscow 1930-50s mapped
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