String theory isn’t the golden child it used to be, but you can still learn about existing in ten dimensions.
Category: dailytidbits
Two more additions to the first three links in my Scalar Series:
A clock depicting the last 4.6 billion years of history in one hour and a project in visualizing enormous numbers with pennies, from one to one quintillion. [via svn]
One-minute vacations are short sound recordings of various places on the planet. Some 240+ recordings in the back catalog.
If you miss the original Zelda, you can get help. Zelda Classic reconstructs the old NES version. “Beyond that, Zelda Classic allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enhanced graphics, as well as new enemies, items, and challenges…If you can imagine it, you can create it (provided it’s in 8-bit color).”
This is awesome. It’s been so long since I sought the Triforce, but it’s hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years since its release on the NES.
A brief article on Librivox, which provides free, user-recorded audiobooks for works in the public domain. “If you think a recording is done badly, then please do one, and we’ll post it as well.”
Free (as in speech) beer: “Anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work.” They even have garish branding materials to share.
Slate is hosting an online edition of The 9-11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation, excerpting a chapter each day. [via badlanguage]
Hugh MacLeod has 10 questions for Seth Godin. Seth on wealth: “Look, there are 8 million millionaires in the USA. Why do these people go to work every day? Why not downsize appropriately and just sit on the beach? Because they’re too smart. They realize that the purpose of living isn’t to bake in the sun until you die.”
Here’s an oldie, but a goodie. An article from Outside magazine about America’s most dangerous wilderness, Angeles National Forest:
The man in charge at headquarters, Michael J. Rogers, insists that the Angeles is the ultimate proving ground for the theory that nature can be saved from humanity’s onslaught. Rogers, who has been forest supervisor since 1990, is an environmental evangelist for whom the glass is always half full Äî even when it’s nearly empty. This forest is not merely a slow-motion apocalypse, he argues (often to members of his own staff), but a laboratory where those who hold the public trust can test themselves against the host of troubles that will eventually confront every park and wilderness area in the country. In the Angeles, however, the future is now.
Maybe this is why, as I linked a while back, L.A. is the best place for writing about nature.
The Mises blog points to another “victory” in patent warfare. Creative has successfully gotten a $100 million settlement from Apple to end a suite of lawsuits, including one patent dispute about “automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata”.
The Nonist introduces us to Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. “Full-frontal objectification of the library itself,” featuring some pretty incredible photos. Books, shelving, tables all laid bare. Wish I were there…
Lately, I’ve stumbled across a couple articles on Freeganism, which is a new word for me. Freegan.info describes freegans–“people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources,”–and their common tenets:
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Waste Reclamation
Waste Minimization
Eco-Friendly Transportation
Rent-Free Housing
Going Green
Working Less/ Voluntary Joblessness
Here’s a piece in the BBC from a while back, and in the New York Press, and a recent feature in the Washington Post.
DejaVu.org offers a brief history of the internet, as well as a tool to emulate old-school web browsers like Lynx, Mosaic, and former versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. You can see what the internet looked like before it was in color. We really have come a long way.
Orwell’s 11 essentials for A Nice Cup of Tea. I love this bit:
“Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup Äî that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.”
Absolutely. I hate it when restaurants serve in these giant dishes that are more closely related to pans than cups. Thank you, George.
Nick Hornby writes about How to Read.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong.
As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems to me to be the highest-risk category – or the highest risk for me, at any rate, given my tastes.
I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what language can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possibly be.
But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes, and I certainly don’t have the patience to read it.
I’m trying to think of writers who hit a certain balance: sharp, luminous writing that also catches you off-guard with its everyday readability. Literary MacGyvers, if you will. The ones that come to mind right now are Tim O’Brien and William Gibson.
No longer allowed to romp around in refreshing Edenic bliss, the Kool-Aid Man wears pants now. [via ptdr]
Some great news in my inbox this morning: “Farecast is happy to announce that airfare predictions for flights out of Atlanta (ATL) are now available at Farecast.com.” Farecast predicts ticket prices and indicates fare history for the routes you’re interested in. They claim 75% accuracy in their predictions, and they also have some cool visual tools that will make the ticket shopping less complicated. Hopefully this will add some little transparency to a fairly shrouded market.
I feel like the Wikipedia thing has been beaten to death (almost as badly as the blogging v. journalism discussion), but I persist… Jaron Lanier writes about the rise of wiki, meta, and the Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:”it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.” [via iftfotb]
In 2004 Scott Williamson became the first person to “yo-yo” the Pacific Crest Trail in one year. That is, 2650 miles hiking from the the southern tip of California through Oregon and Washington to Canada, and 2650 miles back. Last spring, Steve Friedman wrote “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Scott Williamson”. It’s not so much about the nuts and bolts of hiking, but the emptiness and obsession. Good stuff. From what I hear, Williamson is one of the most humble people out in the hiking world. I believe he’s also attempting a repeat this year.
Mark Larson 
