A now little-known manuscript prepared by nine young physicists as a statement about the futility of scientific secrecy quickly became a test of the limits of free discourse in the nuclear age.

RT @TheAtlantic: Why aren't cities littered with dead pigeons? The answer is fascinating -- and gross: http://t.co/bC91NORx

it is a critique of the Gill Sans typeface and the idiosyncrasies of its creation from a contemporary perspective. The central argument is that an earlier typeface by Eric Gill’s mentor, Edward Johnston, is a superior piece of type design.

i think london should permanently install Wenlock as a gargoyle on the ring of steel http://t.co/eQaXl2Ik

Pronouns and power dynamics. Read this and never look at your emails the same again. http://t.co/JDDOkkrc

"There is an assumption that disagreements can be resolved by dialogue and voting." http://t.co/UiFdnNTP

"The anthropological literature offers no evidence of barter as a central economic practice prior to money" http://t.co/bFXilqdS (via @LRB)

Anish Kapoor's Orbit tower: the mother of all helter-skelters http://t.co/P998aoEa

It's easy to forget now, but the humble blimp was once the Flying Machine of the Future.

I've only had bad reviews in San Francisco, but my movies have always done really well here

This tech/startup piece in the Atlantic http://t.co/WJRKXvwS dovetails with what I was wondering about in this post: http://t.co/chVxwRZ9.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of adult prisoners in the United States; thanks to the state’s unforgiving sentencing laws, at least 90 percent of Angola’s prisoners will die there.

great article on new york versus san francisco (via @kvanscha) http://t.co/A1PpFM8G

'whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation... is, as the title promises, algorithmic. The film has no beginning, middle, or end. At each screening, a computer program live-edits a movie out of more than three thousand film clips, eighty voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music. Each of these movable parts is marked with loosely content-related tags (“horizon,” “anxiety,” “white”), and the computer fits the pieces together according to an algorithm that matches tags.'

Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are routinely being imprisoned.

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.

“an attempt to use our summer workers effectively in the construction of a significant part of a visual system”

The FCC has issued an interim report on Google's wifi data capture as part of the Street View project. There's some good stuff in here about the different reactions of the US regulators and various European bodies (including, inevitably, a German prosecutor).

"…so that somebody on the network can *do something* with it." – http://t.co/snWsEcb7

It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor

"The Labour MP for Walthamstow has made a name by campaigning against payday loans – an example of her traditional approach to fighting for the dispossessed, she says."

Consider how difficult it is to get a computer to do anything.

"Air conditioning is not an aspect of urbanism whose implications we often consider. What follows is Alison Carafa’s fresh and cheerful journey through some of the unintended uses for, hacks to and consequences of this unloved but, for many, indispensable addition to urban windows."

Andy Baio: "If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)" "But if you look at the payout per employee, Instagram is completely off the charts."

Russell M Davies: "In the world of Twitter and Instagram, it looks even more quixotically patient and focused. And that's why the completion of Pepysdiary.com should be celebrated -- it teaches us that the internet has power over other dimensions than the Social Graph and the Real-Time Web, that web success can be built with things other than venture cash, spammy PR and rapid scaling."

"Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live this way, by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal, and it’s the premise on which a lot of single people base their lives. If you’re ambitious and you’ve had to navigate a tough job market, alone can seem the best way to approach adulthood."

"I don’t think it is coincidence that women make up most of the userbase of Pinterest. We seem to excel at escapist fantasies and the constant reach towards unattainable perfection."

Klint Finley: "I like Bridle’s stuff, but it’s hard for me to feel like it’s a truly new aesthetic. The fashion bits look like electro revival scene style from the 00s that continue to be popular today, which is itself a revival of 80s electro, hip-hop and synthpop. And 8-bit already got a revival in the 90s and 00s, and of course that was all 80s nostalgia. Glitch still felt vital in the early 00s, but it’s by now passe."

Annie Dell’Aria: "The architecture and design of the new Battlestar Galactica’s (SciFi, 2004-2009) narrative world mirrors the complex political, ethical, and moral questions posed by the narrative arc of the entire series."

Love this: On (Design) Bullshit http://t.co/F3GkX93H

Navneet Alang: "for all the legitimately utopian hope of Project Glass, it is also a reminder of why the centralization of technology among a few key, large players is reason for pause. The glasses take those tired, pedantic debates over "open versus closed" operating systems and interfaces and puts them into sharper focus. This is about what kind of world we want to see."

'Urban development near the harbor has created a kaleidoscope of lights competing with the visual aids that mariners use. Traffic lights onshore can mimic the critical red and green buoys that mark safe channels.
''“You've got all of these lights going off everywhere and sometimes it can be a little bit tricky.” He argues that it's made the audible signals even more important. “They're critical pieces of information,” he says. “There will never not be a need.”'

"Reaching from a Florida computer into the most private documents of Hollywood celebrities took no organized blackmail ring, no special tools, and no special software. It required merely a search engine, an Internet connection, and the willingness to be deeply creepy."

"Images are made in Photoshop and Illustrator. Video is edited in Final Cut Pro. Buildings are rendered in Autodesk. Books are written in Scrivener. And so on. To paraphrase McLuhan “the hardware / software is the message” because while you can imitate as many different styles as you like in your digital arena of choice, ultimately they all end up interrelated by the architecture of the technology itself."

upon "expound"
  thrice.dost_thou do
    speaketh("Hark!")
  verily
  ponder(1..3)
verily

"Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing."

Matt Webb: "the Airblade, in order to achieve its own efficiency forces all of its users to adopt identical movements, removing autonomy from millions to save money for the owners of the establishments in which it is installed. I have been roboticised."

"It’s hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism." A look at what he got right, what he got wrong, and how the world ended up. Good stuff.

"Is the problem as straightforward as just doing some orbital garbage disposal? What about the historic spacecraft in orbit that represent our incredible technological and social journey into space?"

"This demo currently uses two different error-diffusion dithering algorithms: Atkinson's and the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm. Error-diffusion means that the algorithm goes pixel by pixel, rounds the individual R, G, and B channels to either 0x00 or 0xff, and then distributes those differences (which the algorithm calls the "quantization error") in differing amounts to pixels further down the line. It being a 3-bit dithering means that your red, blue, and green channels are represented by a single bit (off or on), giving you a total of 8 colors."

"As part of a bigger project I wanted to generate an abstract background image/texture." "Recently the pxl app for iPhone has filtered through my friends. It allows you to apply a variety of abstract compositions to your photos, a popular one turns an image into a collection of triangles, a general effect that should work well, and allow us to create a large background image out of a relatively small source image." Nice work there.

"My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred."

"The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time." An interesting addition to Robin Sloan's essay Fish.

"According to Transport for London (TfL) figures, the number of journeys taken on the Tube in the year to April is expected to reach 1.1 billion—a bit over one seventh of the world’s population. So 164 accidents means that—if my sums are right —0.0000164 per cent of those journeys end in an embarkation/debouchment-related owie." On TfL's Tube poster campaign.

On the Missouri river's engineering. "I’ve said elsewhere that I think the Army Corps is an exceptionally peculiar organization, probably the country’s most radically avant-garde landscape practice, but rarely recognized for that, as it is the scale, agency, and organizational intricacy of the Corps’ work, not its formal properties, which render it so radical."

"A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking." Good stuff.

A summary from Eric Klinenberg of his new book: "the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011". It's let down a little by the lazy choices of who to interview at the end, but it's a phenomenon worth watching (and one I'm happily part of).

Subtitled "On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives", this is a great essay on the process of building things digitally, documenting it, and what's left behind of art.

'@stamen's Geraldine writes about "a mix of the hand and the computer" behind creating textures for the watercolor maps'. There's been a whole week of posts about the various maps that's fascinating.

"Christian Marclay’s installation Tape Fall (1989) is a grower." A review from October 2002 about the artist's installation at SFMOMA. See also: "Video Quartet (2002), a new piece commissioned by San Francisco MOMA and the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, is a much more ambitious approach to the intertwining of sound and vision. The 14-minute piece consists of four parallel audio-video channels, each one a montage of hundreds of musical scenes from classic Hollywood films, fused together into a dense and bewildering mix."

"If the internet makes a sound (and it does), are you listening? Our correspondent uses software to transform the digital ephemera of web browsing—from network traffic to JavaScript, browser histories to JPGs—into music." A lovely piece by Giles Turnbull.

Usula K. Le Guin: "As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook." "It looks to me as if people are in fact reading and writing more than they ever did. People who used to work and talk together now work each alone in a cubicle, writing and reading all day long on screen."

"In extracting these buried fields and denormalising them into my post files I was able to think—as a purist—about how posts should be represented online. Especially for my circumstances. I have opinions, y'see." Timezones, pagination, and flow. Good stuff.

"The behind-the-scenes story of the readers and booksellers who launched the Hunger Games franchise." An interesting look at how the book was a hit at the publishers and with influential readers and librarians long before it was on sale, let alone a popular adult book.

"SPUR asked Stokle to draw two transit maps for them (full disclosure—I edit SPUR’s monthly magazine, The Urbanist), with the intent of demonstrating how a single, unified transit map might provide greater accessibility and ease of use and to stimulate conversation about how transit decisions are made." The maps are interesting but I think flawed. More later, perhaps.

"The image above is a photo of part of a large map of London, created just after the Second World War and showing buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the Blitz. The map is the centrepiece of a small free exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive in Finsbury." Nice, but a scan online would be nicer (please?)

On the art world's most recent hit, The Clock, and its creator. Lots of interesting tidbits here, such as his willingness to turn a blind eye to other's copyright to create his art while insisting that its display be under his control. I still want to see it, mind you.

"Having a pagination scheme that closely models how a stream is sorted can give you both the casual browsing experience that the numbered pagination provides, as well as powerful navigation abilities that the numbered pagination can't provide." Yes, this.

"Pinterest has 10 million users. Let's say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That's $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That's $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.
"If the site had 800 million users like Facebook? That revenue would go to $3.6 billion, just $100 million less than Facebook's 2011 haul."

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names."

I don't really know how to describe this free-wheeling post about systems, games, and so on, so perhaps you should just go and read it.

Karel Williams: "this was a budget against the north and west, with a vicious and undisclosed regional agenda which has attracted almost no attention – even though output per head in the disadvantaged regions is less than half that in London. And doesn't the failure of coalition backbenches, and Labour, to raise this economic issue, tell us a lot about present-day politics? After the decline of mass parties with strong regional bases, Westminster politics is today all about metropolitan cliques pitching to southern swing voters."

"Using a special PNG as a mask for an img element with a background-image property, you can turn flat-looking static maps into nifty skeuomorph-ized paper objects."

On the new US air traffic control infrastructure, imaginatively named NextGen. "Leighton Quon, project manager of NextGen Systems Analysis, Integration, and Evaluation at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., answers eight questions about what NASA is doing to help improve air transportation for all of us in the future."

Greg J. Smith / @serialconsign reviews a book that puts some media theory behind the glitch aesthetic.