Human being, husband, friend, and partner at Priceless Misc, a digital production studio. I post here about stuff I like, which usually relates to design, art, science, technology, and music. But you don't have to take my word for it ...

I like how Yahoo/Tumblr provided this shareable object, a kind of totem, to commemorate the event, that at once nods to the animated GIF culture on Tumblr, the recent-ish Keep Calm meme, and the rumblings of backlash that had already begun in the day before the announcement.

2headedsnake:

Charles Morgan Smith

The series ‘Emissio’ explores the aesthetics of astrophotography through using conventions derived from Hubble images and highlights the way in which the astrophotograph itself is highly constructed.

Google’s Roboto font, now being used throughout their new webapp UI, renders pretty horribly at small sizes. Am I crazy?

Looks like a dot matrix printout on my screen. Maybe this is really only meant for retina screens?

Star Trek movies and TV series: Which are the best? Why? - Slate Magazine

This pretty much sums up my opinions on Star Trek, and why the new rebooted movies (and even the older movies to an extent), while still fun, aren’t really true to what makes me love the franchise in the first place.

In short: it takes the space of a television show to explore the issues of humanity that Star Trek is known for. Sci-fi movies (successful ones, anyway) demand action.

Scientists extrapolate from the rate of growth in life complexity to propose that life on Earth began before our planet even existed. Pretty fascinating line of thought.

cab1729:

Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review

Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say.

And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.

(via proofmathisbeautiful)

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old “ultraconserved words” that even our hunter-gatherer forbearers would understand.

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic “weathering” and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.

A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true.

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

(via explore-blog)