The Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, is thought to predate civilization.
The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.
Our world may be a giant hologram.
Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.
Mind blown, check back later (via justin).
Behind the redesign of the New York Times Magazine. Great visual and typographic treatment
Why some countries drive on the right and others on the left. The countries that drive on the left are largely made up of former British colonies, but they do account for 34% of the world’s population.
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a piece of artwork by Caleb Larson that perpetually tries to sells itself.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
For his new book, Al Gore wanted some tweaks to the typeface.
“You see, Al is really involved with the project and we spend a lot of time working together in the publisher’s office. When he was reviewing the proofs, he had a comment about the typeface. Basically, he wants you to change the numeral one.”
As a result, there is an updated version of Brioni now available.
Oskar Karlin reworked the infamous London Underground map using the time it takes to travel between stations rather than the distance.
Wired has posted a gallery of beautiful electricity photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
For his latest project, called Lightning Fields, the award-winning photographer traded optics for electricity. He wields a Van de Graaff generator to send up to 400,000 volts through film to a metal table. The resulting fractal branching, subtle feathering, and furry whorls call to mind vascular systems, geologic features, and trees.
Last one out, please turn on the light is a survey of London’s remaining professional darkrooms, by Richard Nicholson. The photographs are well lit to reveal the beautiful machinery of an often gloomy place.
The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Apparently, they are reproductions from a book titled The 300 Meter Tower, written by Eiffel himself, and published by Lemercier in 1900. I wasn’t able to find an electronic copy of the book (it’s likely out of copyright), but I did come across another book about the tower published in 1889.
Rithmomachy is a complex, Early European, mathematical board game. The literal translation is “Battle of Numbers”. It’s similar to chess, but the capture of pieces depends on the numbers on each piece. Rhythmomachy Basics provides a few more details than the Wikipedia entry.
Some highlights of Na’vi gives us a brief look at the language spoken by the inhabitants of Pandora, in James Cameron’s Avatar. It was created by Paul Frommer from USC’s Marshall School of Business. He gives the Language Log an overview of the phonetics and phonology behind the language.
The Physics of Space Battles. It won’t really be like the dogfights or naval style battles in our scifi books, movies and television shows.
In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, [they] are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics — not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.
The Big Picture has a good collection representing the decade in news photography.
Making Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”. Pretty cool to see how the song is constructed, makes me believe I can sit down and bang out the next great club hit.
5 Dutch Type Designers was the first FontFont specimen, published in 1990. There’s a PDF of the original Dutch version available for download, as well as some commentary and recollections.
The absurdity in Alice in Wonderland is often attributed to drugs or a dark trip into the subconscious. For her PhD work, Melanie Bayley examined some of the most popular scenes from a mathematical perspective, which is summed up in Alice’s adventures in algebra. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Caroll) was a rather conservative mathematician, who disagreed with many of the new mathematical theories emerging during the 19th century.
The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson’s views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically.
I don’t imagine that Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland will delve too deeply into mathematical theory.
Plotter drawings from the 1960s. These are probably some of the earliest examples of digital artwork. The Wikipedia entry has some more information about plotters.
Pen plotters print by moving a pen across the surface of a piece of paper. When computer memory was very expensive, and processor power was very limited, this was often the fastest way to efficiently produce very large drawings or color high-resolution vector-based artwork.
That would’ve been some fun programming.
A Typeface for the Underground takes an in-depth look at the history of the Johnston typeface used by Transport for London. You might also be interested in Ken Garland’s book, Mr Beck’s Underground map, detailing the history of a design icon.
Gaming the System is an article from Rands describing the relationship between geeks and their games.
It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing us.
In a nutshell, geeks love to figure out how things work, improve anything they can and be the best at what they’re doing.
The Mandelbulb is an attempt to create a three dimensional equivalent to the famed Mandelbrot fractal. There’s information about the math behind the Mandelbulb, many images, links to videos and more. If you want the quick version, Wired posted a brief overview and a gallery of images.
A discussion with Cormac McCarthy and John Hillcoat. There’s some information about the film adaptation of The Road, his next novel, and insight into McCarthy’s process.
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
McCarthy also decided to part with his typewriter, it sold at auction for more than a quarter million dollars. He’s not going digital though, a friend bought him the same Olivetti model to replace the old one.
British police consulted a warlock in regards to mysterious horse mane braiding. Honestly, I don’t know what’s weirder: seemingly random horse braiding, or the fact that the police consulted a warlock.
How China won and Russia lost. An interesting read on the driving factors behind China’s apparent economic success and Russia’s failure, while implementing seemingly similar policies. The gist of it is that many of China’s reforms came bottom-up, gradually making their evolving from rural agrarian practices, while Russia’s reforms used a top-down government mandated approach.
Stupid Quotes from BookMine. You can only wonder what goes on in the heads of some people.
Hipsters repaint bike lanes. This made me laugh, it had to have been fun to write.
Scantily clad hipster cyclists attracted to the Brooklyn neighborhood made it difficult, the Hasids said, to obey religious laws forbidding them from staring at members of the opposite sex in various states of undress.
Satoru Iwata discusses the Mario brothers with Shigeru Miyamoto. The interview is quite revealing — many of Mario’s trademark characteristics were due to design and programming restraints at the time, including the moustache, the hat and the overalls.
Ministry of Type takes a look at the typography and layouts of Playboy, particularly those from the 50s and 60s. The magazine has put about fifty years of archives online, although the interface is a bit kludgey.
