Shared posts

18 Jun 12:06

Inner Peace (Through Superior Firepower) – Episode 067

by balder

When the defendant was at last allowed to speak, she bowed her head to King Banhammer and turned around to address the Court. The Overlady met the eyes of each juror, holding their gaze for a small but significant moment.

“This trial,” she said, her voice slow and focused, “is an extraordinary Kindness. I hope that you understand how grateful I am for it.”

She took two dainty, barefoot steps toward the jury, keeping her eyes moving among them. She ignored Chief Jillian completely.

From the saddle of her gwiffon, Jillian measured those two steps, and flexed her sword grip ever so slightly. But the prisoner did not come any closer than that. She only tilted her head to the side, then reached up with her manacled hands and brushed blonde curls away from her green eyes.

“I must tell you what it really means,” said Olive, “how special it makes the Court of Faq that you would offer me this chance to explain and defend myself. For you have not seen the broader world. You do not know how rare it is to find a shred of enlightenment anywhere in the darkness. On this important point, I would ask my first question of a witness. Princess Jillian.”

Now she did turn and look Jillian’s way. The Chief raised her eyebrows. “Hm?”

“You are Faq’s point of contact with the outside world. You’ve been in the field most of your life,” said the Overlady, taking one small step toward her. “You’ve dealt with many different sides as clients. That’s true, isn’t it?”

Jillian made a face, skeptical but amused. “Yeah, of course.”

“In all of your travels, have you ever,” said Olive, “encountered a side that would have done this? Stopped you from decapitating their enemy’s ruler, in order to let her speak freely to defend herself?”

Jillian made a soft little snorting noise. She looked to her left, where the last remaining units of Faq, casters all, stared back at her. Their faces were so earnest, some of them holding their chins up in judgment and appraisal, others raising their eyebrows inquiringly. However stupid it was, every single one of them was taking this trial seriously.

She tried not to smirk at the question. “No. I’ll admit that. Probably no other people in the world would be having a trial right now.” She shook her head at the bunch of them, closing her eyelids to cover up an involuntary eye roll.

Olive smiled, sweet and pretty. “Exactly,” she said, turning to the jury, “so you think no-one in the world wants to know the truth. That no-one thinks it’s important. That’s what I thought as well, before we discovered Faq. Please remember that; I thought it as well.”

She paused, then turned and approached King Banhammer. Standing to one side of the judicial bench, the Lady Firebaugh gave her former Chief Florist a narrow-eyed glare.

“This trial is about who I am,” said Olive, “what I am. And what I am is very simple.” At this moment, she planted her feet and addressed the King to his face, turning up her palms. “I am a disciple of King Loj Banhammer! One who until recently never knew he existed.” She pivoted back to the jurors, and pointed at them, her chains rattling. “I am a kindred spirit to each of you, only...lost. No-one ever shared Wisdom with me. I did not have any guidance. I was in the wild. I was in the darkness. I did the best that I could, without the benefit of your enlightenment.”

Jillian saw Wanda twitch and move her feet, as if she really wanted to say something. But the Croakamancer glanced at King Banhammer on the bench, and apparently thought better of it. Just as the opening statements of the prosecutor were not to be interrupted, so it was with the defendant.

“And so I made terrible mistakes,” said Olive, her face suddenly contorting in pain. “Lives were lost. No kind of caster is more sensitive to the value of Life than a Florist!” Her lower eyelashes glistened with welling tears, and a tremble crept into her voice. “But in every case, I did what I thought would bring peace. I made the smallest sacrifices I could, for the greatest possible benefit. I was often a fool. But never evil. Never a monster.”

Olive snapped a sharp look at the Lady Firebaugh, and raised her hands to point. “Haffaton only had one monster. And now she stands among you, unbidden, unwelcome. You must cast her out, if you want to survive! She’ll be the end of all of you!”

The jurors shifted in their chairs, either glancing at one another or staring at Wanda. Sister Betsy leaned and whispered something to Brother Labeler, who shook his head. Marie stared straight at Wanda, her lips pressed together tensely.

“Let her make her accusations! Because of your kindness, I will be able to tell you the truth of it, and because of your wisdom, you will listen. You’ll see that she lies. The root of evil is among you now. Do not make the terrible mistake of trimming a healthy branch.”

At this, the jurors broke into at least three separate mumbled conversations. Banhammer rapped his knuckles upon the bench until there was silence again.

“There is one person on trial here,” he said, “and I’ll take that as the conclusion of the defendant’s remarks. The prosecutor will now present testimony, and I would like to begin with the most serious charges: those of attempted heracide and patricide.”

Wanda stepped stiffly before the bench, shooting the barest glance at Olive. She cleared her throat. “Yes, Your Wisdom. But...in light of the defendant’s claim to be your disciple at heart, I first move that you ask her to turn to Faq.”

Jillian’s mouth opened, then widened to a huge grin as she realized the implications of that. Oh, wow. Yeah. Turning the Overlady would be essentially the same as croaking her, since there was no heir now. Haffaton would fall. Wanda was smart. If Olive turned, it was another way to win the war. Not that they’d want to be stuck with her on the Court of Faq, but what a way to call the Overlady’s bluff! She had to keep herself from letting go of Three-Edged to applaud.

Banhammer tilted his head in a listening pose. “Explain the motion?”

“If the defendant turns, it would of course remove any danger of enemy attack,” she said, “and likely begin our turn. This trial may continue after that, of course, with far less urgency. And I would be prepared to offer myself to stand against any charges the defendant might make, once we are both casters of Faq. For I agree with the aims of this Court. It is quite important to get to the truth, isn’t it?” She looked dispassionately at the defendant. “Let’s begin with testing the truth of her claim that she only wants to follow you.

Jillian wished she could see Olive’s face from here. But whatever Banhammer was seeing in it seemed to startle him for a moment.

Then he narrowed his eyes and folded his arms on the bench. “Motion granted,” he said. “Overlady Olive Branch, I invite you to honor your words and pledge yourself to the Kingdom of Faq. What say you?”


Rob's Other Comic Project: Duel In The Somme--Read it from the beginning!

18 Jun 11:48

Comic for June 9, 2013

17 Jun 14:02

June 05, 2013

imma

Secret Robot Internet!!! Awesome i've got to tell everybaaAaarrrgh!!


Broke Eats is launching another series with Paul Prado called Eat Broke Love. Check it out!

17 Jun 13:54

Schlock Mercenary: June 4, 2013

by Howard Tayler
Schlock MercenaryFirstPreviousArchiveShop

17 Jun 13:31

Hipsters

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?
17 Jun 13:26

Schlock Mercenary: June 2, 2013

by Howard Tayler
Schlock MercenaryFirstPreviousArchiveShop



17 Jun 13:25

June 02, 2013


Have I mentioned recently that we have a facebook group? Only badasses are allowed in. Good luck.
17 Jun 13:23

Schlock Mercenary: June 1, 2013

by Howard Tayler
Schlock MercenaryFirstPreviousArchiveShop

28 May 16:14

CC BY and the Truth-Printing Business

by Eric
Why are dollars worth anything? Why are digits on a bank statement worth anything? When my server tells our payments provider to move bits from your credit card, why does it matter to you?

In practical terms, dollars are valuable because other people will give you stuff or do things for you in exchange. Or at least they will if you can convince their bank to change the digits in their bank account. Their bank has to trust your bank which has to trust you. It all works because we all trust it will work. And why do we trust that it will work?

There are governments and laws to back them up. Why do we trust the government and laws? In practical terms we trust the government and laws because... well... they have ballot boxes. And judges and police forces. But mostly we trust the government and legal system because it sort of works and is often not abusive. At the bottom, it's because there's this web of trust which collectively holds everything together. Until of course, it doesn't. Because there isn't a bottom, it's turtles all the way down.

If you haven't heard of Bitcoin, let me give you this non-technical summary. Bitcoin is a recent implementation of the idea that money based on a web of cryptographically secured assertions is sounder than money based on a web of governmentally secured assertions. If as many people believed in cryptography as believe in astrology, we'd be using Bitcoin today.

The magic result is that an entity that gets society to trust its currency can then print money.

When the currency is truth rather than coin, judges and guns don't work so well. Traditional hierarchical authority systems are breaking down. What's replacing them is open authority systems. Systems such as wikipedia which allow everyone to participate in the construction of truth, not by being correct, but by being fixable. And to the frustration of many, Wikipedia delegates all its authority to things that are "citeable".

So how do you get to be an authority that Wikipedia believes? The two criteria that seem to matter most are
  1. Openness. If wikipedians can't read you, you don't exist. 
  2. Authority. People need to believe you. 
If you notice the circularity here, you'll see that printing truth and printing money are not so different.

As usual, I take a long time getting around to my point. Which is this: If you want to be in the business of printing truth, the best license to choose for your business is the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). For now. And if you're printing science, medicine, technology or even philosophy, I really hope you want to print truth.

The Creative Commons part speaks to the need to be open. In the age of the internet, you can't print truth and keep it secret. No one will believe you.

The Attribution part builds your most valuable asset, your reputation. No one believes anonymous assertions.

You might ask about other options, for example, Non-Commercial (NC), No Derivatives(ND), Share-Alike (SA).

I've written about reasons to use NC and ND. Those reasons don't apply to the truth-printing business.

Can you imagine if your dollar bill said "This note is legal tender for all non-commercial debts public or private". That would be silly. The whole point of money is that it doesn't change depending on its use. And its the same with truth. There ain't no such thing as non-commercial truth. You can't control the uses of the truth you print. You can't even demand that people who consume your truth share that truth the same as you do..

A lot of people get confused about using no-derivative licenses. They think that if you print that the sky is blue, your credibility will be hurt if someone reprints a derivative of your truth and says the sky is black. But that's exactly what the attribution requirements prevent. But more than that, if you print your truth as chiseled in stone, then no one will believe it in a few years or so, because we all know that the truth hasn't been chiseled in stone for at least two thousand years. Nowadays we can make cryptographically strong proofs that assertions aren't being fiddled with and were made by the entities they're attributed. We can track the trail of assertions through history. And the provider of that chain of provenance is you, the truth printing proprietor. The longer the trail of conflicting assertions, the more crucial your authority as a truth printer becomes.

The problem of turning the currency of truth into harder currency is left as an exercise for the reader.
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28 May 15:31

Appropriate cheating in the nine-dot problem

by Seth Godin
imma

*gets a pen out of a pocket* ...

All geeks, nerds and puzzle folks are aware of the nine-dot problem, along with the lesson it is frequently used to present.

NinedotHere's a pencil. Here's a piece of copy paper with nine dots on it. Without lifting the pencil or folding the paper, connect the nine dots using four straight lines.

The narrator smiles as you try as hard as you can, unable to do it. Then he ends your frustration and points out you've been tricked by your own limits, because, of course, there's nothing in the rules that says you can't have the lines go beyond the edges of the nine dots.

The thing is, this isn't the end. This is the beginning of the cheating, and anyone who stops here, satisfied at his breakthrough, is missing the point.

Some innovators point out that because the dots and the pencil have width, it can actually be done with three lines. (Here's how). At this point, some people get uncomfortable because a lot of what we assumed (the edges of the nine dots, their magical zero width) is being challenged.

I think we can go far beyond this.

What revolutions do is change more than a few common conceptions. If you roll the paper into a tube, with the dots on the outside, you can go round and round and round (like an Edison music cylinder) and do the entire thing with just one line. Without folding the paper.

That's cheating! (You could also burn the paper and just call it a day at zero)...

Wikipedia is that sort of solution. So, in fact, are just about all of the innovative successes of the last decade. They took an assumed rule and threw it out. People who have been online for awhile have seen this happen over and over, and yet hesitate to do it with their own problem. Not because it can't be done, but because it's not in the instructions. And the things we fear to initiate are always not in the instructions.

28 May 14:27

3D Inset Parallax Effect

by Chris Coyier

The following is a guest post by Joshua Bader. Joshua noticed that certain 3D effects on the web could benefit from adjusting perspective as the web page is scrolled. I'll let him explain.

People love to make flat things appear as if they're three-dimensional. There are two ways to pull off this effect in a 2D environment, shape and movement.

By give a flat shape the appearance of edges or sides, we can make buttons or other objects appear as if they are raised or sunken into the screen. This is seen even here on CSS-Tricks:

The movement effect is a bit trickier. In a three-dimensional world, objects closer to you move fast, while the ones further away move slow. The further away an object is, the slower it moves. This is called the parallax effect. The parallax effect has been used in all sorts of places for the past few years.

The first method, shape, works because it makes things appear to be popping out, or pushed away from you. The second method, movement, works because it makes things seem as if they are positioned in context with each other. But, what if we combined them. An object that looks sunken into the screen, like a shelf, and its edges shrink and grow, using the parallax effect, making the object appear as if it really is in 3D space.

First we need to add some markup on our page and give the items we want to affect the class of inset. Any block level elements will do. Here is a simple form with inputs that will have the effect applied.

<form>

  <label>
    First Name:
    <input class="inset" type="text" placeholder="Enter First Name" />
  </label>

  <label>
    Last Name:
    <input class="inset" type="text" placeholder="Enter Last Name" />
  </label>

  <label>
    Email Address:
    <input class="inset" type="text" placeholder="Enter Email Address" />
  </label>

  <label>
    Address:
    <input class="inset" type="text" placeholder="Enter Address" />
  </label>

  <label>
    Phone Number:
    <input class="inset" type="text" placeholder="Enter Phone Number" />
  </label>

</form>

Next we will need to style our inset elements. By giving the item slightly different color borders we can give the element the illusion of depth. This is because the joint between borders is an angle and with the different colors, it appears as if light is hitting different "sides" of a 3D area. This is the 'shape' method we mentioned earlier.

.inset {
  width: 100%;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  background: #f9f9f9;
  border-style: solid;
  border-width: 30px;
  border-top-color: #e5e5e5;
  border-right-color: #eee;
  border-bottom-color: #e5e5e5;
  border-left-color: #eee;
}

Now that the shape we want to manipulate is styled, we can use some simple jQuery to get the element's original border-width, window height, scroll position, target element's position on screen and convert that position to a percentage for the top edge and bottom edge.

var origBorderWidth = parseInt($('.inset').css('border-top-width')),
win = $(window),
windowHeight = win.height();

$('.inset').each(function() {
  var self = $(this),
    scrollHeight = win.scrollTop(),
    elementPosition = self.position(),
    positionPercentTop = Math.round((elementPosition.top - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);
    positionPercentBottom = Math.round((elementPosition.top + self.outerHeight() - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);
});

Once we have all of these numbers as variables, we can resize the top and bottom border-widths of each element based on its position on the screen.

var origBorderWidth = parseInt($('.inset').css('border-top-width')),
win = $(window),
windowHeight = win.height();

$('.inset').each(function() {
  var self = $(this),
    scrollHeight = win.scrollTop(),
    elementPosition = self.position(),
    positionPercentTop = Math.round((elementPosition.top - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);
    positionPercentBottom = Math.round((elementPosition.top + self.outerHeight() - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);

  self.css({
    'border-top-width' : origBorderWidth - (origBorderWidth * (positionPercentTop / 100)) + 'px',
    'border-bottom-width' : origBorderWidth * (positionPercentBottom / 100) + 'px'
  });
});

Now comes the fun part – recalculating each element's top and bottom border-widths while the page is scrolled. This will give us the desired parallax, 'movement' effect.

var origBorderWidth = parseInt($('.inset').css('border-top-width')),
  win = $(window);

function set3D() {
  var windowHeight = win.height();

  $('.inset').each(function() {
    var self = $(this),
      scrollHeight = win.scrollTop(),
      elementPosition = self.position(),
      positionPercentTop = Math.round((elementPosition.top - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);
      positionPercentBottom = Math.round((elementPosition.top + self.outerHeight() - scrollHeight) / windowHeight * 100);

    self.css({
      'border-top-width' : origBorderWidth - (origBorderWidth * (positionPercentTop / 100)) + 'px',
      'border-bottom-width' : origBorderWidth * (positionPercentBottom / 100) + 'px'
    });
  });
};

win.on('load scroll resize', function() {
  set3D();
});

There you have it. To see the effect, keep you eye on a single element as it moves up and down the page when scrolled. You will see its top and bottom border-width change depending on its position on the page. Its subtle, but effective.

Check out this Pen!
Editors note: pretty neat eh? Perhaps with even more tech we could create a demo that did eye-tracking and adjusted the perspectives depending on where your eyes are in relation to the screen. Here's another example that adjusts perspective based on the mouse.

3D Inset Parallax Effect is a post from CSS-Tricks

28 May 14:25

Karen McGrane on Content: WYSIWTF

Arguing for “separation of content from presentation” implies a neat division between the two. The reality, of course, is that content and form, structure and style, can never be fully separated. Anyone who’s ever written a document and played around to see the impact of different fonts, heading weights, and whitespace on the way the writing flows knows this is true. Anyone who’s ever squinted at HTML code, trying to parse text from tags, knows it too.

On one hand, the division of labor between writing and presentation can be seen at every point in our history. Ancient scribes chiseling stone tablets, medieval monks copying illuminated manuscripts, printers placing movable type—we’ve never assumed that the person who produces the document and the person who comes up with the ideas must be one and the same.

And yet, we know that medium and message are intertwined so tightly, they can’t be easily split apart. Graphic designers rail against the notion that “look and feel” can be painted on at the end of the process, because design influences meaning. The more skilled we are as communicators, the more we realize that the separation of content from presentation is an industrial-age feint, an attempt to standardize and segment tasks that are deeply connected.

Today, we try to enforce the separation of content and form because it’s good for the web. It’s what makes web standards possible. It enables social sharing and flexible reuse of content. It supports accessibility. It’s what will keep us sane as we try to get content onto hundreds of new devices and form factors.

When talking about how best to separate content from presentation, designers and developers tend to focus on front-end code—which makes sense, because that’s what we have the most control over. But, as with so many challenges we have with content on the web, the real issue lies in the tools we give content creators to help them structure, manage, and publish their content. The form that content takes depends as much on CMS as it does on CSS.

How should content management tools guide content creators to focus on meaning and structure? What’s the right amount of control over presentation and styling in the CMS? And how should these tools evolve as we break out of the web page metaphor and publish content flexibly to multiple platforms? Let’s look at three tools that sit at the intersection of content and form.

Preview button

Even the most die-hard structured content editors still like seeing what their work is going to look like. Writers print out documents for editing to give them a different view from what they see on the screen. Bloggers instinctively hit the preview button to look at their work the way a user will see it.

Whoops. Decades of work refining the emulators between desktop publishing programs and laser printers means that writers can feel confident that their document will look virtually identical, regardless of where it’s printed. We’ve carried that assumption over to the web, where it’s categorically untrue. Different browsers render content in their own vexingly special way. Users can change the font size—even add their own custom style sheet. Today, the same document will render differently on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. The preview button is a lie.

Yet we can’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, seeing content in context becomes even more important as our content now lives across devices and platforms. Instead of throwing up our hands and saying “preview is broken,” it’s time to invent a better preview button.

One publishing company I know of has built its own custom preview rendering interface, which shows content producers an example of how each story will appear on the desktop web, the mobile web, and an app. Is it perfect? Far from it. Content will appear in many more contexts than just those three. Is it better than nothing? Absolutely.

WYSIWYG

The desktop publishing revolution ushered in by the Macintosh allowed the user to see a document on screen in a form that closely mirrored the printed version. The toolbar at the top of the screen enabled the user to add formatting—change the font, insert an image, add typographic effects like headings and bullets, and much more.

In an effort to carry over this ease of use to the web, we allow content creators to embed layout and styling information directly into their content. Unfortunately, the code added by content creators can be at odds with the style sheet, and it’s difficult for developers to parse what’s style and what’s substance. When it comes time to put that content on other platforms, we wind up with a muddled mess.

What is the right amount of formatting control to give content creators? That’s a difficult question to answer, because it pierces right to the heart of what’s stylistic and what’s semantic. Even something as simple as adding bold and italic text forces us to ask if we’re really just styling the text, or adding semantic meaning (say, a book title or a warning message.)

Better content modeling can solve some of these problems, encouraging content creators to appropriately “chunk” their text. By banishing blobs of text with formatting embedded and replacing them with chunks of clean, presentation-independent content, we’re building in the distinction between content and form right from the start.

But imagining that each “chunk” of content is a field in the database (with its own input field) rapidly devolves into the absurd. That way lies madness. The real solution isn’t necessarily to “banish blobs,” but to replace the WYSIWYG toolbar with semantic markup. Rather than entering all text into discrete fields, content authors wrap text that describes what it is. Our book title doesn’t need to be a separate field if we can wrap it in the proper tags.

Defining what goes in a field and what goes in a tag requires a tighter collaboration between content authors, CMS architects, and front-end developers. It’s time we started having these conversations.

Inline editing

We’re evolving. Not satisfied to rely just on tools that are vestiges of the desktop publishing era, we’re developing new and innovative ways to mix up content and formatting that are unique to the way the web works. There’s no better example of this than inline editing.

Inline editing allows content creators to directly manipulate content in the interface, with no separation between the editing screen and the display. Medium offers an editing interface that’s identical to the desktop display and in-place editing is being added to Drupal 8 core.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is “how can I get my content creators to understand why it’s so important to add structure and metadata to their content?” This, I believe, is one of the fundamental challenges we’re facing on the web, particularly as we adapt to a multi-channel future. Inline editing encourages content creators to focus on the visual presentation of the desktop interface. Just at the moment when we need content creators to think about the underlying structure, we’re investing in tools that obscure the “connective tissue.”

Jeff Eaton sums up this problem nicely in a post called Inline Editing and the Cost of Leaky Abstractions:

The editing interfaces we offer to users send them important messages, whether we intend it or not. They are affordances, like knobs on doors and buttons on telephones. If the primary editing interface we present is also the visual design seen by site visitors, we are saying: “This page is what you manage! The things you see on it are the true form of your content.”

The best solution isn’t to build tools that hide that complexity from the user, that make them think that the styling they’re adding to the desktop site is the “real” version of the content. Instead, our goal should be to communicate the appropriate complexity of the interface, and help guide users to add the right structure and styling.

The era of “desktop publishing” is over. Same goes for the era where we privilege the desktop web interface above all others. The tools we create to manage our content are vestiges of the desktop publishing revolution, where we tried to enable as much direct manipulation of content as possible. In a world where we have infinite possible outputs for our content, it’s time to move beyond tools that rely on visual styling to convey semantic meaning. If we want true separation of content from form, it has to start in the CMS.

28 May 09:09

Poses (art)

imma

Liveliness :-)

28 May 08:38

Cells

Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer.
28 May 08:35

Schlock Mercenary: May 26, 2013

by Howard Tayler
Schlock MercenaryFirstPreviousArchiveShop



28 May 08:33

Comic for May 26, 2013

28 May 08:26

In My Kingdom Cold

imma

And this is the song about how Agmar the Brave heroically discovered a more comfortable shape for milking stools after cutting down a particularly knotty tree for kindling




Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

We have two delightful new prints available in the QC Store!

VanCaf is this weekend! I will be there! You should also be there!

28 May 08:19

May 24, 2013


Really been enjoying Junior Scientist Power Hour comics.
23 May 16:03

Sony Just Launched a Ludicrously Fast Internet in Japan

by Stan Schroeder
Fiber Feed-twFeed-fb

So-net Entertainment, a Sony-backed Japan ISP, has launched a fiber-based Internet service that reaches download speeds of 2 Gbps, making it the fastest home internet in the world

The Nuro, as the service is called, is available to homes and small businesses in Tokyo and six surrounding prefectures, Computerworld reports. The upload speed is a little slower than download — 1 Gbps — but it's still faster than most of us get, even at work

For comparison, the ultra-fast Google Fiber broadband Internet service offers a "mere" 1 Gbps download speed — and that's still some 100 times faster than today's average home internet connection Read more...

More about Japan, Tech, World, Sony Isp, and Home Internet
23 May 15:56

Google Fiber: Why Traditional ISPs Are Officially On Notice

by timothy
MojoKid writes "A few years ago, when Google was determining which city to launch its pilot Google Fiber program, cities all over the country went all-out trying to persuade the search giant to bring all that fantastical bandwidth to their neck of the woods. And with good reason: Google Fiber offers gigabit Internet speeds and even TV service, all at prices that meet or beat the competition. In fact, the lowest tier of Google Fiber service (5Mbps down, 1Mbps up) is free, once users pay a $300 construction fee. If ISPs were concerned before, they should really start sweating it now. Although Google Fiber looked like it would whip traditional ISPs in every regard, with Time Warner Cable cutting prices and boosting speeds for users in Kansas City in a desperate attempt to keep them, surely other ISPs were hoping the pilot program would flame out. Now that Austin is happening, it's clear that it's only a matter of time before Google rolls out its service in many more cities. Further, this jump from legacy Internet speeds to gigabit-class service is not just about people wanting to download movies faster; it's a sea change in what the Internet is really capable of."

Share on Google+

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



22 May 15:10

It’s not a web app. It’s an app you install from the web

» It’s not a web app. It’s an app you install from the web

The makers of Forecast.io struggle to explain the concept of "installing" web apps. (Spoiler: They succeed.)

@paul_irish
22 May 08:59

(Rerun) How to Construct an Informative Presentation

by Scott Meyer

There is a brand new Asking the Wrong Guy column available. His font-search has yeilded surprising results ... if you're surprised by the names of fonts. Please, if you have a problem, and you don't particularly need practical advice, by all means,shoot him an e-mail!

Thank you for checking out my novel Off to Be the Wizard, (Available for Kindle (USUK),Nook, old-school, dead tree form, DRM-free on Smashwords, and as a free sample), and for using my Amazon Affiliate links (USUKCanada).

20 May 16:33

102-Year-Old Abandoned Ship is a Floating Forest

by Pinar
rachel shared this story from Everyone's Blog Posts - My Modern Metropolis:
Neat!


The SS Ayrfield is one of many decommissioned ships in the Homebush Bay, just west of Sydney, but what separates it from the other stranded vessels is the incredible foliage that adorns the rusted hull. The beautiful spectacle, also referred to as The Floating Forest, adds a bit of life to the area, which happens to be a sort of ship graveyard.

Originally launched as the SS Corrimal, the massive 1,140-tonne steel beast was built in 1911 in the UK and registered in Sydney in 1912 as a steam collier which was later used to transport supplies to American troops stationed in the Pacific region during World War II. The ship went on to serve as a collier between Newcastle and Miller's terminal in Blackwattle Bay.

Eventually, in 1972, the SS Ayrfield was retired and sent to Homebush Bay which served as a ship-breaking yard. While many ships were taken apart, about four metallic bodies of vessels that are over 75 years old currently float in the bay, though none are enveloped by nature quite like the Ayrfield. The ship continues to attract visitors to its majestic presence, rich with mangrove trees.

Top image by Andy Brill


Image by Neerav Bhatt


Image by Steve Dorman


Image by Rodney Campbell


Image by Louise Evangelique


Image by Louise Evangelique

via [Bhakta's Weblog, Oddity Central]

20 May 11:15

Comic for May 19, 2013

17 May 13:46

This is the Look of Total Heartbreak

imma

argh! :-(

This is the Look of Total Heartbreak

Submitted by: Unknown

17 May 09:51

20 Free Lined Paper Textures for Designers

by cini

3.lined paper texture 20 Free Lined Paper Textures for Designers
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16 May 16:13

ARIADNE AND THE SCIENCE by Molly Crabapple & Warren Ellis: The Complete Illustrated Story

by Warren Ellis

This is a very short story by me, broken into five parts and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.  Limited-edition prints of all five of Molly’s pieces are still available at this link.

No-one knows how old Ariadne is any more.  She’s said by many to live in seclusion within a cloaked and baroque lunar atelier, which is a strange thing for a woman known to have wanted to see everything there is to see.  Some say that, by some hypercosmic string magic, she watches herself as a child, studying the day that curious young Ariadne had her idea.  No-one had told little Ariadne not to ask questions, and when she worked out that plants were the best machines of all, she asked why they couldn’t be made to do things that her computer machines could do.  And when no-one had a good enough response, Ariadne came up with the best answer of all: I will find out by learning how to make them do that.  And that is why Ariadne lives on the moon, and why we are all here today.

There was lots of names for the thing Ariadne made: computational flora, iGrass, memory trees, That Damned Stuff. There were lots of names for Ariadne, too, because when she got tired of nobody being able or willing to answer her questions, she just released Ariadne’s Meadow into the world. Fields began thinking, and forests began processing, and the world discovered that Ariadne’s Meadow was actually quite a nice place that just wanted to help. So much so that seven years later, when everyone discovered that Meadow probes had begun to break up Mercury, Venus and Mars for power, living space and computing strata, nobody really minded very much.

Very soon, the solar system was a mass of warm and grassy island computers.  But Ariadne was far from finished.  The best machines ever should be able to answer all the questions, and she knew there was more to see.  And so there were soon trees that stood so high and strange that their silver tops crested up into the universe next door.  Ariadne grew bridges across the multiverse, the set of all possible universes, just to see what she could see, which is of course the best reason of all.  And, on the foot of every bridge she crossed, she gave Meadow to every Earth she found.  As did Meadow itself, when it explored on its own, as it was a friendly kind of Damned Stuff, and also because weeds get bloody everywhere.

But what Ariadne discovered on her walks with the Meadow was that there were bigger places to see.  The multiverse hangs in the metaverse, a room where all the universes hang like sheets on a great hypermagnetic wave.  And the Xenoverse is the weather outside that room that causes the wave.  And the Hyperverse is the weather system that causes those winds.  And the Omniverse is the impossibly giant ecology that contains all things.  Ariadne, of course, knew as well as you and I that weeds get bloody everywhere. So it was not an impossibly long time before she, in a boat of Meadow, could look down on all of creation and know that everything everywhere was really nothing more than things growing.  And she, no less than a clever woman who never learned not to ask questions, did look down, and smiled.

After that, of course, Ariadne could be said to have seen all the places there were to see. Which it’s why many say she retired to the old Moon that still hung above old Earth (because she never changed anything just for the sake of change, and the old Moon was still a perfectly good old Moon). A lonely, lovely little atelier on the Moon, just Ariadne and her science, as the new reality she’d grown for everyone crept and budded and bloomed all around the Omniverse. But Ariadne and the science is the reason we’re all here, and why no-one has died since the Meadow first grew. So, perhaps, listen to the people who knew her best, because they say she’s ageless because she trained the creepers of Meadow along Time itself, and now she dances along them, meeting all the people who ever were and teaching them always to ask questions. Because that, as I said, is why we’re all here.

Words by Warren Ellis, pictures by Molly Crabapple.

Limited-edition prints of all five of Molly’s pieces are still available at this link.

© Warren Ellis & Molly Crabapple 2012

16 May 16:02

05/14/2013

by Tarol

05/14/2013

16 May 14:23

Dictionary of Numbers

by xkcd

I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget? (That last question is  why I made my money chart.)

A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase “315 million people” into “315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]”.

As Glen explains, he once read an article about US wildfires which mentioned that the largest fire of the year had burned “300,000 acres.” This didn’t mean much to Glen:

I have no idea how much 300,000 acres is […] But we need to understand this number to answer the obvious question: how much of the United States was on fire? This is why I made Dictionary of Numbers.

Dictionary of Numbers helpfully informs me that 300,000 acres is about the area of LA or Hong Kong.

Wolfram|Alpha provides a lookup service like this, but you have to load the site and type in the quantity you’re curious about, which I never remember to do. (It’s also often short on good points of comparison.)

Dictionary of Numbers is a new project, so it’s got its share of glitches and rendering hiccups; it’s very much a work in progress. You can submit bug reports, feedback, and suggestions for data sources via a link on the project’s website.

I think these kinds of tools are a great idea, and I want to encourage them. Intelligence is all about context, and when computers get better at providing it, they make us smarter.

The extension can even be surprisingly funny, like when it seems to be making an oblique suggestion for how to solve a problem—e.g. “The telescope has been criticized for its budget of $200 million [≈ Mitt Romney net worth].” It can also come across as unexpectedly judgmental. Glen told me about complaint he got from a user: “I installed your extension and then forgot about it … until I logged into my bank account. Apparently my total balance is equal to the cost of a low-end bicycle. Thanks.”

You can get Dictionary of Numbers here.

16 May 13:43

Comic for May 13, 2013

imma

cooool