Tag Archives: nanohistory

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Kinet­icJS — HTML5 Can­vas JavaScript Library Framework

    “Greet­ings fel­low webo­nauts! Kinet­icJS is an HTML5 Can­vas JavaScript library that extends the 2d con­text by enabling high per­for­mance path detec­tion and pixel detec­tion for desk­top and mobile appli­ca­tions. You can draw things on the stage and then add event lis­ten­ers to them, move them, scale them, and rotate them inde­pen­dently from other shapes to sup­port high per­for­mance ani­ma­tions and tran­si­tions.  Served hot with a side of awesomeness. ”

    javascript ani­ma­tion graphic-​​design html5

  • Tim Brown — More Per­fect Typog­ra­phy on Vimeo

    At long last, design­ers can use real fonts on the web. But what now? Where do we go from here? Tim Brown has been study­ing type on the web for seven years, and has lots of ideas to share. In this talk, Tim will guide you through using typo­graphic tools and per­spec­tives that will change the way you design web­sites. Typog­ra­phy is an ancient art and craft; we are merely its lat­est prac­ti­tion­ers. By look­ing to our tra­di­tion for guid­ance, we might once more attain our finest typo­graphic achieve­ments in this new medium.

    via:trek typog­ra­phy graphic-​​design type­face video

  • Twit­ter /​ tsuomela: My response to http://t.co …


    cultural-​​assumptions academic-​​culture wry-​​smile

  • BOOKTRYST: Amer­i­can Rare Book Trade Ads From 1902, Part III

    Part III of an absolutely fas­ci­nat­ing nanohis­tory series at Book­Tryst, exam­in­ing each of the ads in a 1900s bookman’s mag­a­zine. “On August 10, 1915  Ralph Ran­dolph Adams filed for, and on July 10, 1923 was granted a U.S. Patent for “Radioac­tive Spray Mate­r­ial.“ “The object of this inven­tion is to pro­vide a radio-​​active sub­stance for the pur­pose of stim­u­lat­ing plant growth. A fur­ther object is to pro­vide a radio-​​active sub­stance for the pre­ven­tion and destruc­tion of insects, lar­vae, eggs, bac­te­ria and fungi which are inju­ri­ous to plants or ani­mals. A fur­ther object is to pro­vide a mate­r­ial hav­ing these prop­er­ties which can be effi­ciently applied by spray­ing, and which will adhere to the parts of plants above ground…or to the fur, feath­ers or skin of ani­mals [our empha­sis] which are both­ered by pests…(U.S. Patent No. 1461340). In short, Adams invented a radioac­tive insect-​​killer to spray on the leather he used for bind­ing as a preser­v­a­tive to pre­vent pests from harm­ing his work. Adams “Vien­nese” bind­ings prior to 1910 do not, pre­sum­ably, require use of a Geiger counter, and, hav­ing one from 1902 recently pass through my hands, I am relieved. It is unknown to this writer whether Adams’ post-​​patent bind­ings glow in the dark.”

    books nanohis­tory dig­i­ti­za­tion cul­ture

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • BOOKTRYST: Amer­i­can Rare Book Trade Ads From 1902

    ‘Where to begin with Charles Car­ring­ton (b. 1867 — d. 1921 of syphilis), who deserves an entire book devoted to his col­or­ful char­ac­ter and career? Of Por­tuguese descent, Car­ring­ton,  born Paul Harry Fer­nandino, was, arguably, the most noto­ri­ous pub­lisher of his gen­er­a­tion. He began in Lon­don. Circa 1893–96 he skipped to Paris; deported from France in 1907, he fled to Brus­sels. In 1912, he returned to Paris, at times Ams­ter­dam. In short, he oper­ated one step ahead of the law. “His­tor­i­cal, Artis­tic, Med­ical, and Anthro­po­log­i­cal Works,” is cer­tainly one way to char­ac­ter­ize the books he pub­lished. Erot­ica, pornog­ra­phy, curiosa, and sex­ol­ogy are other appro­pri­ate descrip­tions. Often, the stated pub­li­ca­tion locale, pub­lisher, and date on his books were false. Many if not most of his books were “for pri­vate sub­scribers only.” He was active as a pub­lisher for twenty-​​six years and pub­lished approx­i­mately 300 books.’

    book­seller bib­lio­ma­nia nanohis­tory characters-​​we-​​have-​​been-​​like

  • The Ongo­ing Vigil of Soft­ware Security

    “Some of the rea­sons that we keep see­ing these types of exploits are that the “bad guys” are much smarter and more deter­mined than we give them credit for, we’re much lazier and more igno­rant than we take respon­si­bil­ity for, and secu­rity is dif­fi­cult to man­age prop­erly. As we become more and more reliant upon soft­ware, it is imper­a­tive that secu­rity be taken more seriously.”

    software-​​development secu­rity advice overview

  • Economist’s View: “The Soci­ol­ogy of Organizations”

    “It often sounds as though Per­row is fault­ing these orga­ni­za­tions for defects that are inher­ent in all large orga­ni­za­tions. But it seems more fair to say that his analy­sis does not iden­tify a gen­eral fea­ture of orga­ni­za­tions that leads to fail­ure in these cases, but rather a sit­u­a­tional fact hav­ing to do with the power of busi­ness to resist reg­u­la­tion and the sus­cep­ti­bil­ity of Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent to polit­i­cal pres­sures that ham­string effec­tive reg­u­la­tory orga­ni­za­tions. Per­row does refer to spe­cific orga­ni­za­tional haz­ards — bad exec­u­tive lead­er­ship, fal­ter­ing morale, inabil­ity to col­lab­o­rate across agen­cies, exces­sively hier­ar­chi­cal archi­tec­ture — but the heart of his argu­ment lies else­where. The key set of prob­lems spi­ral back to the inor­di­nate power that cor­po­ra­tions have in the United States, and the dis­tor­tions they cre­ate in Con­gress and the exec­u­tive branch. … It is specifics of the US polit­i­cal sys­tem rather than gen­eral defects of large orga­ni­za­tions per se that lead to the bad out­comes that Per­row iden­ti­fies. There are strong democ­ra­cies that do a much bet­ter job of reg­u­lat­ing risky indus­tries and plan­ning for dis­as­ters than we do — for exam­ple, France and Ger­many. …
    There isn’t much pub­lic con­cern about these risks, and leg­is­la­tors are there­fore free to ignore them as well. … So where will the polit­i­cal demand for strong reg­u­la­tion come from? Will we need to wait for the bad news we’ve man­aged by good for­tune to have avoided up to this point?”

    public-​​policy infra­struc­ture antebellum-​​America con­ser­vatism

  • Bach­mann, Gaffney, and the GOP’s Anti-​​Muslim Cul­ture of Con­spir­acy — The Daily Beast

    “Ear­lier this month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-​​TX) appeared on the FOX Busi­ness show Money Rocks to make the case for depriv­ing the chil­dren of immi­grants of their 14th Amend­ment rights. Gohmert claimed that on a recent air­plane trip to the Mid­dle East, one of his trav­el­ing com­pan­ions had struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with a grand­mother who described her family’s involve­ment in a Hamas plot to send preg­nant women to the United States. Gohmert sum­ma­rized the les­son for view­ers this way: “We’re bring­ing them over here on tourist visas, some ille­gally, let­ting them be born here and say­ing, ‘This is an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. So come back in 20, 25 years when you’re ready to blow us up.’””

    para­noia Repub­li­cans con­ser­vatism conspiracy-​​theories political-​​discourse antebellum-​​America

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Altaeros Ener­gies Releases Demo Video of Their Fly­ing Wind Tur­bine — Core77

    “What you saw there was a scaled pro­to­type, 35 feet in diam­e­ter. Dur­ing the test run it arrived on-​​site in a dock attached to a trailer, then deployed, acti­vated the tur­bine, and returned to the ground—all auto­mat­i­cally. At its high­est alti­tude of 350 feet, it suc­cess­fully got the tur­bine to gen­er­ate twice as much juice than it gets at tower height. We’d say Altaeros is one to watch.”

    wind-​​power pro­to­type engineering-​​design sus­tain­abil­ity energy

  • More on DRM and ebooks — Charlie’s Diary

    “There is a per­va­sive assump­tion that ebooks are dis­pos­able lit­er­a­ture. But to the vora­cious read­ers, this is not the case. Cur­rently it’s hard for many peo­ple to build up col­lec­tions of books due to space con­straints — nev­er­the­less I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50–150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an ice­berg once ebooks become main­stream; why dis­card an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years’ time and it takes up no space? For such peo­ple, fil­ing and tag­ging their col­lec­tions is a major issue. And so is porta­bil­ity. It’s true that if they own an iPad they can have an iBooks app full of books pur­chased from Apple, and a Kin­dle app full of books from Ama­zon, and a Nook app full of books from B&N. But those apps are, thanks to DRM, data silos — you can’t cross-​​check to see if you bought book 3 in a series from Apple and book 5 from Ama­zon with­out a lot of fid­dling around.”

    business-​​opportunity col­lect­ing nerds-​​as-​​camel-​​nose my-​​people vague-​​press

  • Avería – The Aver­age Font

    “I am not a type designer. This is the story of the cre­ation of a new font, Avería: the aver­age of all the fonts on my com­puter. The field of typog­ra­phy has long fas­ci­nated me, and I love play­ing with cre­ative pro­gram­ming ideas, so it was per­haps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “gen­er­a­tive typog­ra­phy”. A Google on the sub­ject brought up lit­tle, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that per­haps the process of aver­ag­ing, or inter­po­lat­ing, exist­ing fonts might bring up inter­est­ing results. Luck­ily at this point I didn’t do any more web search­ing – instead I grabbed my lap­top and came up with an ini­tial idea for find­ing what the aver­age of all my fonts might look like – by over­lay­ing each let­ter at low opac­ity. The results can be seen in the below image.”

    typog­ra­phy type-​​design type­face generative-​​art design graphic-​​design

  • Phillip Rhodes’ Weblog

    “In short, it’s time for a res­ur­rec­tion of the crypto-​​anarchist /​ techno-​​libertarian /​ cypher­punk move­ment and it’s asso­ci­ated val­ues, activ­i­ties and aes­thetic. Those of us who care about these issues can’t just lurk in the shad­ows and act like noth­ing is hap­pen­ing. It’s time to start telling peo­ple about public-​​key encryp­tion, host­ing key-​​signing par­ties, devel­op­ing new tech­nolo­gies for bypass­ing Inter­net cen­sor­ship, devel­op­ing tools for bypass­ing State and Cor­po­ra­tion con­trolled mes­sag­ing chan­nels, and tak­ing a stand for freedom.”

    cryp­tog­ra­phy nrrrrds cultural-​​assumptions cultural-​​dynamics diver­sity

  • No, physi­cians don’t under­stand screen­ing sta­tis­tics | The Inci­den­tal Economist

    “So basically,when it comes to sav­ing lives, docs are three times more likely to rec­om­mend a screen­ing test based on irrel­e­vant data than they are to rec­om­mend it based on rel­e­vant data. I’m brac­ing myself for the hate mail, but this is part of the rea­son why I’m skep­ti­cal that just pro­vid­ing docs with more evi­dence will change the way they prac­tice. Most docs just aren’t trained to under­stand this stuff.”

    medical-​​culture health­care sta­tis­tics probability-​​theory plan­ning

  • reveal.js


    slides pre­sen­ta­tion library javascript sim­ple

  • Fancy HTML5 Slides with knitr and pan­doc | Yihui Xie

    “Karthik Ram gave an Intro­duc­tion to R a cou­ple of weeks ago, and I strongly rec­om­mend you to take a look at his cool HTML5 slides. I started try­ing HTML5 slides last year, and now it is dif­fi­cult for me to go back to beamer, which I have used for a few years for my pre­se­n­a­tions. It is hor­ri­ble to see beamer slides every­where at aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ences (espe­cially the clas­sic blue themes).”

    slides pre­sen­ta­tion library javascript mark­down

  • An algo­rithm is just an algo­rithm | Gene Expres­sion | Dis­cover Magazine

    “Another illus­tra­tion that knowl­edge comes not through blind adher­ence to meth­ods, but human reflection.”

    algo­rithms sta­tis­tics sto­ry­telling i-​​need-​​the-​​name-​​for-​​this

  • Cap­tur­ing dealer descrip­tions in our online cat­a­log — Yale Law Library — Rare Books Blog

    “Attrac­tive and rare set of decrees con­cern­ing the func­tion­ing of the judi­ciary in the papal city of Bologna. These city statutes were pro­mul­gated by the Pope’s legate, Car­di­nal Benedetto Gius­tini­ani (1554−1621). Despite the issu­ing author­ity, the con­sti­tu­tions (a word indi­cat­ing leg­is­la­tion of the high­est level) are entirely non-​​religious in con­tent, relat­ing to civil law jus­tice in the city. They shed con­sid­er­able light into how courts worked in Bologna. Included are instruc­tions on cases involv­ing poor peo­ple; rules for notaries; the keep­ing of reg­is­ters; seizures of prop­erty; tak­ing of sus­pects; pay­ment of offi­cers; expert wit­nesses; and the gov­ern­ing of appeals. Pages 192–198 com­prise papal edicts on the salaries of Bolog­nese judges and notaries.” — Leo Cado­gan Rare Books (Dec. 2011)

    books cat­a­log nanohis­tory librar­i­ans meta­data

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • A List Apart: Arti­cles: Artis­tic Distance

    “While I’m sure that some­one will dis­agree, these sites have proven that very few “pro­fes­sion­als” have the abil­ity or courage to pro­vide a well-​​constructed analy­sis of some­one else’s work (whether or not the eval­u­a­tion was solicited). My opin­ion has noth­ing at all to do with either web­site, but rather with indus­try pro­fes­sion­als’ inabil­ity to chal­lenge, or fear of chal­leng­ing, the sta­tus quo. Far too often, hon­esty is met with ridicule, shame, or out­right rage from peo­ple hid­ing behind elec­tronic media. As a com­mu­nity, if our goal is to con­tinue rais­ing the bar for design, we need to get to a place where objec­tive dis­cus­sion is wel­comed, not scorned or drowned in obse­quious­ness. I would love to see dis­cus­sion of basic design move past the super­fi­cial trendi­ness of emerg­ing web technologies.”

    cri­tique col­lab­o­ra­tion advice graphic-​​design not-​​just

  • - How We Will Read: Laura Miller and Maud Newton

    “LM: Lit­er­ary peo­ple, when they talk about books, tend to think of fic­tion first. But most peo­ple, when they think about books, are think­ing about non­fic­tion, which lends itself amaz­ingly well to some kind of enhanced e-​​book expe­ri­ence. As a piece of that, I’m skep­ti­cal of enhanc­ing fic­tion e-​​books. The essence of nar­ra­tive is this sense of causal­ity and mean­ing, and when you intro­duce a lot of arbi­trary or ran­dom branch­ing things into it, it actu­ally loses it’s core plea­sure. It’s a tricky issue.”

    pub­lish­ing ebooks read­ing edi­tor

  • Per­sonal Tech for the 17th Cen­tury — Suzanne Fis­cher — Tech­nol­ogy — The Atlantic

    “The university’s John Carter Brown Library has long held the “Roger Williams Mys­tery Book,” a book that pur­port­edly belonged to Roger Williams, the rad­i­cal reli­gious thinker and founder of Rhode Island. The book is miss­ing its title page and thus has lit­tle iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion (besides a sub­ti­tle, “An Essay Con­cern­ing the Rec­on­cil­ing of Dif­fer­ences among Chris­tians”) — but it’s cov­ered with exten­sive short­hand mar­gin­a­lia sus­pected to have been writ­ten by Williams him­self some­time in the mid 1600s. The stu­dents, who include his­tory and math majors, are using this semes­ter to deci­pher the writ­ing and to deter­mine whether or not the short­hand hand­writ­ing was Williams’s hand.”

    nanohis­tory mar­gin­a­lia early-​​modern puz­zles

  • atomo

    “atomo is a small, sim­ple, insanely flex­i­ble and expres­sive pro­gram­ming lan­guage. its design is inspired by Scheme (small, sim­ple core), Slate (mul­ti­ple dis­patch, key­words), Ruby (very DSL-​​friendly), and Erlang (message-​​passing con­cur­rency). it is writ­ten in and pig­gy­backs on the Haskell run­time, per­mit­ting access to all of its power (and libraries!) through a thin layer.”

    pro­gram­ming lan­guage

  • Jour­nal of Dig­i­tal Humanities

    “The Jour­nal of Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties is a com­pre­hen­sive, peer-​​reviewed, open access jour­nal that fea­tures the best schol­ar­ship, tools, and con­ver­sa­tions pro­duced by the dig­i­tal human­i­ties com­mu­nity in the pre­vi­ous quarter.”

    digital-​​humanities jour­nal open-​​access pub­lish­ing

  • [1203.4881] Com­pu­ta­tional Com­plex­ity Analy­sis of Multi-​​Objective Genetic Programming

    Some days I just want to take genetic pro­gram­ming away from the com­puter sci­en­tists. Then I real­ize I ought to just let them keep the use­less, rit­u­al­ized thing they imag­ine it is.

    facepalm multiobjective-​​optimization software-​​development-​​is-​​not-​​programming

  • - How We Will Read: Clay Shirky

    “That is one of the poten­tial shifts in social read­ing: Can I cre­ate value for other peo­ple by say­ing that I found this pas­sage by Bruno LaTour strik­ing — even if I never look at it again? That’s an amaz­ing act of what I called “frozen shar­ing” in my last book. Being gen­er­ous about things when you are offer­ing it out to the pub­lic, with­out it being either in a spe­cific time frame or for a spe­cific target.”

    pub­lish­ing read­ing social-​​capital project be-​​useful-​​to-​​one-​​another