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”

"…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."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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.

'@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."

"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.

"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."

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.

Joe Moran: "I think we've been here before, skirting the issue of road pricing and using the notion we are 'falling behind' to push privatisation." A longer view.

"Hatherley is ostensibly a critic in the mode of Reyner Banham: freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. Aesthetic but in Hatherley’s case also political: for it is the great strength of his writing – as well as its besetting weakness – that he aims for an explicitly politicised critique." Full of fancy words, and sympathetic yet still Self is scathing. It's worth a read, anyway.

"Few buildings have been submitted to as many masterplans and schemes as Battersea Power Station. Once again in limbo, the great red brick hulk on the south bank of the Thames has acted as a canvas for the shifting architectural visions of the decades, from fun palace to theme park to science centre to culture park to non-descript icon."

Owen Hatherley: "Architecture, at Battersea Power Station, was an afterthought." "Giles Gilbert Scott was brought in at the last minute to head off complaints. It is telling that what is London’s best-loved piece of 20th-century architecture is so un-modernist – applied decoration on a big shed."

Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

"It has something to do with what James says in his post - “[The New Aesthetic] has made me see and think about the world in a strange way“. I relate a lot to that, but in particular, I now find myself being drawn to the reactions of people to things that (may or may not be) The New Aesthetic, but are certainly the presence of non-human actors in the world."

Mark Vanhoenacker, on the experience of arriving in the US. "Tourism promotion is common sense. But we might reconsider the wisdom of requiring travelers to subsidize it in exchange for a grilling about their sexual health and genocidal activities." "Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime."

Andrew Hetherington at Focus on Imaging: "So the problem now is this: I have about 100 rolls of slide film in my freezer. By the time they are gone I need to have figured out how to afford a camera that costs more than most cars. If any of you can swing me a few jobs for Chanel or Prada I promise you now that I will lend you the camera when I get it."

"The opening will not mark the final completion of the Kings Cross project – that will not come until late 2013 when the green canopy that currently hides the impressive facade of one of London’s oldest stations will finally be removed. It will, however, arguably mark the biggest point of change for passengers – because from Monday the way-finding through Kings Cross will change significantly." The usual worthwhile look at a public transport project.

"If you’d like to know what goes on beyond the cockpit door so you can better understand go-arounds and take the maneuver in stride like a seasoned traveler rather than as one who doesn’t fly much– read on."

'“Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” And some of us are very good at that!' A bit long and it skitters all over the place, but it's probably worth a read.

Rob Horning: 'Pinterest, since it discourages self-promotion and relies entirely on the appropriation of someone else’s creative expression, turns curation into passive consumerism; it allows for the construction and circulation of a bland sanitized “Stepford” identity.' 'Pinterest invites us to view all the images the internet offers as advertisements, in effect.'

Craig Hodgetts: 'Joining the throngs of the faithful as they jostled for a better view of his paintings, and searching in vain for even one fellow architect, one could not help wondering why the place was not swarmed by young designers. And one was reminded once again of just how insular the architects of the “Me Generation” had become. On display were images depicting cityscapes and buildings that might have been snatched from the most recent international competitions. Lustrous metallic surfaces, twisting towers, parametric volumes, all hauntingly beautiful, and all bearing dates—wait for it—from the early 1970s and ’80s!'

Megan Garber: "Almost all of the advances taking place within our established social networks have emphasized images at the expense of text. There's the rise of Pinterest, most obviously, and its almost text-free explosion of pictures and pins. And the less-meteoric-but-still-pretty-remarkable rise of Flickr and Instagram and Hipstamatic and their fellow photographic networks. But there's also Facebook, doubling down on its photo-heavy Timeline. And Google+, selling itself on its video Hangouts. There's the small matter of YouTube. And the viral profusion of Tumblr. Even Twitter -- spare, text-y little Twitter -- has, in its latest web redesign, emphasized user avatars, not to mention video and image attachments, much more boldly than it ever did before." This is a good post, with more questions than answers.

"By taking the space suit as a topic, then, de Monchaux stakes a claim for architecture as a wider pursuit — one that does not presuppose buildings. In the same period as the Apollo space suit’s production, architecture was undergoing changes of its own. Technical professions like engineering came to develop more and more of what might be thought of as the real machines for living: standardized components, HVAC systems, tempered glass — the real architecture." A good review of my favourite book of last year.

"Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia." On demographics, politics, and a strategy that bets it all on 2012's elections.

4sq's Engineering Blog on how to match neighbourhoods using a 400-dimensional vector. OK then.