I wrote this.
OHHLA! Sandbox! Nostalgia for Usenet-era music discussion and discography trading.
(via notational)
Create and edit ANSI and ASCII art in your browser!
If ansi.drastic.net isn’t doing it for you, here’s another in-browser ANSI art generator, with source available on Github. Go make some BBS graffiti!
From Physical Review A, a new method for keeping precise (like nearly atomic clock precise) time using a diamond and a laser:
Frequency standards based on atomic states, such as Rb or Cs vapors, or single-trapped ions, are the most precise measures of time. Here we propose and analyze a precision oscillator approach based upon spins in a solid-state system, in particular, the nitrogen-vacancy defect in single-crystal diamond.
Oh good, now if Jay-Z is still worried about his Rolleys that don’t tick-tock, or his Audamars that’s losing time hidden behind all those big rocks, he can just shoot a laser at them.
(yep, I just attempted a Watch the Throne / Nature magazine crossover joke. goodnight, everybody!)
One thing of note is that none of them express the golden ratio, that so-called best of proportions. 5:8 comes quite close but, as far as I’m aware, no web device matches the golden section in its screen aspect ratio. I’m not sure why that is, but I like to think that it’s because the golden ratio is for the weak.
…
The musical interval ratios also provide an opportunity, not only to create connectedness between the parts of a layout, but to bind the content to a device. Just as a textblock and page resonate together, so too can web content and the screen on which it is displayed.
Owen Gregory (@fullcreammilk) on musical intervals, device aspect ratios, and how we should be seeking these harmonies when designing for the web as a responsive medium. A good read. And I like the jab at the golden ratio.
See also: Cennydd Bowles’s The Music of Interaction Design talk.
Dr. OctoTron (Kool Keith and Del)!
And KutMasta Kurt! Hope this collaboration gets spun up into a new album, but this 7” will do for now (and should also help pass the time until Deltron 3030’s Event II appears in June).
Zork: Your greatest challenge lies ahead - and downwards
Inspired by the text adventure of the same name.
Go score this designhere at the Threadless website.
Wow! I wouldn’t mind having a poster print of this beautiful typographic map of the Great Underground Empire.
"When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be."
— RIP Roger Ebert (via austinkleon)
(via austinkleon)
`The Ethiopians — Hong Kong Flu. Heard on today’s Jamaican Gold radio show, I think this might be the catchiest song about infectious disease I’ve heard in a long time. Part of the “beautiful melodies telling me terrible things” category of music, to paraphrase Tom Waits.
(PS to the folks of the 1960s: in the future, we use our magic-like portable computer video screens to watch recordings of other people’s records.)
Tonight another episode in mystery about a monster trying to guess a town’s secret. A town called, Twin Beaks. A darn fine town.
Holy smokes, how’d this escape my attention? Agent Cookie! “Darn fine pie!” Log Lady with anthropomorphic log! Knock-off Angelo Badalamenti score towards the end! Sesame Street at its David Lynch-iest.
"I don’t get the deluge of manuscripts that I would be getting in Nigeria. But some do manage to find me. This is something I understand, because a budding writer wants to be encouraged. But I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can. Once you have really done all you can, then you can show it to people."
— Chinua Achebe, on being solicited for advice from aspiring novelists. Quoted from an 1994 interview with the Paris Review.
"That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions."
— Chinua Achebe, RIP. Quote from a 1994 interview with him in the Paris Review. Things Fall Apart was one of the novels we read in middle school that really changed my understanding of the workings of the world, and remains one of the books that I hope to always have on my bookshelf. (hat tip to @hawkt)
"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."
—
Maurice Sendak
I can’t be the only person who nearly cried at work when they read The New York Times’ review of Sendak’s last book today, right? …right?
(via hepatosaurus)
"You may or may not find this all a bit overdetermined. But we are in no small part what we consume. Our media texts become signifiers of self, status, character. There was a reason why the obsession demanded, at one point, to be written in second-person and another reason why I can write about it, to an audience of thousands today. Why I can put my name beside it and own it in a Google Search. “Star Trek” meant something to me at age 13 that I could not speak. It means just as much, if not more, today, even if I cannot even bring myself to watch even one episode, lest it ruin my perfect memory of it."
— It is possible that you may cry some tears by the end of this (via joshreads)
(via joshreads)
Pretty much everything you need to know about taking criticism can be summed up in this article:
- Relax (You’ll be surprised how fast you will recover.)
- Strengthen your neck.
- Practice (Get hit a lot.)
- Breathe.
- Try to absorb the blow, roll with the punch
- Remember to keep your mouth shut
- Protect your vulnerable areas
- Keep your balance
(Thx to Mike Monteiro for the idea: “the skill I picked up in [art] school that turned out to be the most valuable was learning how to take a punch.”)
Ditto that about art school. The biggest takeaway from my formal education that applies to the real world has been the ability to handle public (or at least “in front of your peers”) critiques: constructive criticism you take in, roll into your work if it has merit; you also learn to recognize destructive criticism, which can be safely put aside as not-useful. The rolling with punches metaphor is apt.
"
When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity. First I got interested in computers, which led me to get interested in the Internet, which led me to get interested in building online news sites, which led me to get interested in standards (like RSS), which led me to get interested in copyright reform (since Creative Commons wanted to use similar standards). And on and on.
Curiosity builds on itself — each new thing you learn about has all sorts of different parts and connections, which you then want to learn more about. Pretty soon you’re interested in more and more and more, until almost everything seems interesting. And when that’s the case, learning becomes really easy — you want to learn about almost everything, since it all seems really interesting. I’m convinced that the people we call smart are just people who somehow got a head start on this process. I feel like the only thing I’ve really done is followed my curiosity wherever it led, even if that meant crazy things like leaving school or not taking a “real” job. This isn’t easy — my parents are still upset with me that I dropped out of school — but it’s always worked for me.
"— Aaron Swartz, in a previously unpublished email exchange with Ronaldo Lemos. (via fastcompany)
(via notational)
