qqilihq

It seems that Conan O’Brien has a problem with the fact that Superman has a beard in the latest Man of Steel trailer. Here is his hilarious video response (above,) to which I reply:

[Team Coco | Via The Mary Sue]

The Galapagos Islands are some of the most biologically unique ecosystems in the world. Explorers and scientists alike have long studied and marveled at these islands—made famous by Charles Darwin. The Ecuadorean Government, local conservation groups and scientists are working to protect the Galapagos from threats posed by invasive species, climate change and other human impacts.

It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity. Today we’re honored to announce, in partnership with Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate (GNPD), that we’ve collected panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker. These stunning images will be available on Google Maps later this year so people around the world can experience this remote archipelago.


Images, like the one you see above, are also an important visual record that the CDF and GNPD will use to study and protect the islands by showing the world how these delicate environments have changed over time.


Our 10-day adventure in the Galapagos was full of hiking, boating and diving around the islands (in hot and humid conditions) to capture 360-degree images of the unique wildlife and geological features of the islands with the Trekker. We captured imagery from 10 locations that were hand-selected by CDF and GNPD. We walked past giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, navigated through steep trails and lava fields, and picked our way down the crater of an active volcano called Sierra Negra.


Life underwater in the Galapagos is just as diverse as life on land. We knew our map of the islands wouldn’t be comprehensive without exploring the ocean that surrounds them. So for the second time we teamed up with the folks at the Catlin Seaview Survey to collect underwater panoramic imagery of areas being studied by CDF and GNPD. This imagery will be used by Catlin Seaview Survey to create a visual and scientific baseline record of the marine environment surrounding the islands, allowing for any future changes to be measured and evaluated by scientists around the world.

We truly believe that in order to protect these Galapagos Islands, we must understand them. As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” We hope this Street View imagery not only advances the important scientific research, but also inspires you to learn more about this special place. Stay tuned for updates on this collection—the first time we’ve captured imagery from both land and sea! We can’t wait to share this amazing imagery with you later this year.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Project Lead, Google Maps

A team from the University of Sichuan won the Red Dot Design award for a concept design called "Lumigrid" -- a bike-light that projects a grid on the ground ahead of the rider, making terrain irregularities easy to spot:

Lumigrids can project a grid onto the ground. On a flat road surface, the grid will consist of standard squares. On a rough road surface, the grids will deform accordingly. By observing the motion and deformation of the grids, the rider can intuitively understand the landforms ahead. In addition, the luminous grids can make it easier for nearby pedestrians and vehicles to notice the bicycle, reducing the likelihood of collision.

Lumigrids can be fixed onto the bicycle’s handlebars. Its power is supplied by either an internal battery or by the rotation of the bicycle’s wheels. It has only one button so that the rider can easily use it while riding. The first press will turn on the power, the second press will change the mode of projection, and holding the button down for two seconds will turn the power off. Lumigrids has three modes with different grid sizes that can be used to adapt to different situations: normal mode (140x180mm), high-speed mode (140x260mm), and team mode (300x200mm)."

Lumigrids (via OhGizmo)

Since 2010, Google Fonts been collaborating with the Adobe Typekit team to create better web font technology. And now that many fonts first published by Google Fonts are also available in Adobe Edge Web Fonts, we’re extending that collaboration beyond just software to fonts themselves.

Together with Adobe, we want to improve the quality of open source fonts available to everyone publishing on the web. As a first step, the Typekit team has optimized Rosario, a humanist sans serif based on the classic proportions of Garamond’s type.

To start the process, Typekit reached out to the foundry, Omnibus Type, to request up to date copies of the font source files. Here are some examples of the possible optimizations that the Adobe team might make to a web font:

• Convert and/or clean up outlines, for design fidelity and file size efficiency
• Re-componentize source fonts, for file size efficiency
• Remove/reassign glyphs with incorrect Unicode code points, for semantic value
• Add common missing glyphs (non-breaking space, soft hyphen)
• Set vertical metrics values according to best practices
• Set underline and strike-through values, for design consistency
• Contribute PostScript hints and (if a typeface was designed for small sizes like paragraph text) TrueType instructions (also called hinting), which consist of instructions to the rasterizer embedded in the font file itself

After making some of these improvements, Typekit sent their version back to the foundry to review and release on the Omnibus Type homepage. The updated Rosario family is now available in Typekit, Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Google Fonts.

Together with the Typekit team, we’re looking forward to more quality improvements in the future!

Posted by Dave Crossland, Font Consultant

thegrugq: The cloud is a slum. You rent a room for your stuff, but you have to share it with 4 other families. And the hallways are full of criminals.

"ComputerBild" kooperiert künftig mit Viacom: Die Gaming-Show "Game One" ist ab sofort auch auf dem Online-Portal von "ComputerBild" zu sehen. Darüber hinaus wird die Kooperation auch weitere News und Videos umfassen.

Nur 42 Stunden nach der Ausstrahlung im amerikanischen Fernsehen wird AXN ab Mitte August die fünfte und zugleich letzte Staffel von "Breaking Bad" zeigen. Zunächst gibt es aber nur die englischsprachige Originalversion zu sehen.

An international team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology have identified the strain of Phytophthora infestans that caused the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852. In the thick of blight, botanists classified it as a mildew-causing fungus of the Botryotinia genus. In the 20th century it was reclassified as Phytophthora but was thought to be a strain called US-1 which is still widespread today. By analyzing dried specimens collected between 1845 and 1896 that have been kept in herbaria at Kew Royal Botanical Gardens in England and the Botanische Staatssammlung Munchen in Germany, researchers were able to find trace amounts of Phytophthora infestans DNA, map its genome and identify a previously unknown strain they’ve named HERB-1. (Full pdf study here.)

“Both herbaria placed a great deal of confidence in our abilities and were very generous in providing the dried plants,” said Marco Thines from the Senckenberg Museum and Goethe University in Frankfurt, one of the co-authors of this study. “The degree of DNA preservation in the herbarium samples really surprised us,” adds Johannes Krause from the University of Tübingen, another co-author. Because of the remarkable DNA quality and quantity in the herbarium samples, the research team could evaluate the entire genome of Phytophthora infestans and its host, the potato, within just a few weeks.

They found that HERB-1 is related to US-1 more than it is to any other modern strain, but it is unique. Phytophthora infestans originated in Toluca Valley, Mexico, among the potatoes that grow wild there. It was already endemic when Europeans arrived in America and brought the potato back, and yet, hundreds of years would pass before any Phytophthora strain made its way across the ocean. Scientists believe the US-1 and HERB-1 strains diverged in the Americas in the early 1800s. The newly individual HERB-1 hitched a ride on a trading ship and landed in Europe in Antwerp, Belgium, in the summer of 1845 before rapidly spreading to the Low Countries and other countries in Western Europe. Then it made the sea voyage to England and, most disastrously, Ireland.

Ireland was hit the hardest because more than a third of its population was dependent on potatoes as the sole source of nourishment. Irish Catholics were prohibited by law from owning land. Instead, the became tenant farmers who paid rent and worked the property of absentee English or Anglo-Irish landlords producing crops and cattle for export. This was a hand to mouth existence. Potatoes had the most bang for your caloric buck and could grow in the marginal land which was all the tenant farmers had left once the export crops and cattle pastures got the choicest bits.

By the early 1800s, the potato was the sole staple of the Irish farmer. Not only was it their only food, but almost all of the potatoes grown in Ireland were one breed: the Irish Lumper. The profound dependence on the potato coupled with a lack of genetic variety geometrically expanded the impact of the late blight when it arrived. HERB-1, used to the challenges of tough wild varieties, just slaughtered the cultivated potato crop. Author and scientist E.C. Large wrote in his seminal work The Advance of the Fungi that the blight “spread faster than the cholera amongst men.” Over the seven years of the Famine, HERB-1 destroyed crops so thoroughly that the Irish Lumper breed was almost driven to extinction. (It’s back now as an heirloom potato.)

The population of Ireland was more than decimated. In 1845 the population was more than eight million. By 1852, there were only five million people left in Ireland. One million of them died from starvation and the diseases that ravage the hungry. Two million emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. Ireland’s population today at just 4.5 million has yet to recover from the devastation of The Great Hunger.

HERB-1 may have been defeated by human-directed evolution, namely the breeding of new blight-resistant potato strains in the early 20th century. US-1 is probably the strain that replaced HERB-1. Now that the genome of HERB-1 has been decoded, researchers can see if it really was driven to extinction or if it still exists in secluded pockets somewhere around the world that the genetically resistant potato varieties haven’t reached yet.

This is the first time the genome of a plant pathogen has been decoded from dried samples. It brings new life to musty old specimen collections that aren’t exactly exciting to most museum visitors and have been relegated to storage. Scientists studying the evolution of pathogens, how they develop in concert with human breeding of crops will find a rich new vein to mine in the back rooms of Victorian museums.

Das beste Beispiel für journalistische Distanz.

Mein alter Sandkasten-Kumpel Tim (jetzt Webdesigner, da war sicher etwas im Sand bei uns) hat mich auf dieses Video hingewiesen: The User is Drunk. Ein genialer Ansatz!

Wir hatten es hier und hier angekündigt, und jetzt steht das Roman-Manuskript mit dem Arbeitstitel »Der Sandfloh«.

Schon wieder ein Buch also, fragen Sie sich? Muss das immer sein mit diesen Büchern? Wer soll denn das alles lesen? Na ja, ich zum Beispiel, am 16. Mai bei Read on, my dear in der Z-Bar. Jan-Uwe Fitz und Frederic Valin laden ein und lassen freundlicherweise auch mich mal kurz auf die Bühne.

Das heißt: Sie müssen dort nicht lesen, aber zuhören. Um ein wenig Neugier zu wecken hier schon mal vorab ein paar packende Passagen aus dem Text:

»Es war an einem der ersten warmen Frühlingstage …«

»Vor ein paar Monaten erst, erinnerte er sich, hatte er sie auf einer Party …«

»Guten Tag.« – »Guten Tag.«

»… bestellte er an Ort und Stelle für jeden ein Bier.«

Sie sehen, da ist Zug drinne! Und wie man schon anhand der kurzen Auszüge merkt, geht »Der Sandfloh« auch stilistisch ganz eigene und bisher noch nie beschrittene Wege. Hören Sie selbst: am Donnerstag, 16. Mai um 20 Uhr 30 bei Read on, my dear in der Z-Bar.

Michael Bukowski

P.S.: Autoren, die diesen Beitrag geschrieben haben, haben auch diese Beiträge geschrieben.

by Matt

Yes, the United States Navy has teams of bottlenose dolphins trained to detect mines, other undersea objects and enemy divers. During training in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego, California, last month, a dolphin named Ten alerted his handlers to the presence of a suspicious object in an area where the trainers hadn’t planted anything. A week later a second dolphin, Spetz, alerted in the same area. He was sent back with a marker to pinpoint the precise location so the object could be retrieved. When the Navy divers recovered it, they found it was a Howell torpedo broken into two pieces.

To train the dolphins, Navy specialists sink objects of various shapes in rocky and sandy undersea areas where visibility is poor. The shapes mimic those of the mines used by U.S. adversaries. [...]

The dolphins have found unexpected things in the past, including a mine-shaped lobster trap during a mission off Canada with the Canadian navy. But a torpedo that was more than a century old and that the divers and trainers needed to consult explosives experts — and Google — to identify?

“We’ve never found anything like this,” said [head of the marine mammal program Mike] Rothe, his voice full of admiration for the marine mammals. “Never.”

The Howell torpedo was the first torpedo to be produced in any quantity by the US Navy. It was invented in 1870 by Navy Lieutenant Commander John A. Howell, head of the Department of Astronomy and Navigation at the U.S. Naval Academy, but development took almost two decades. In 1889, the Navy ordered 50 Howell torpedoes from the Hotchkiss Ordnance Co. of Providence, Rhode Island. Powered by a flywheel that was spun at high speed before launch, the 11-foot-long Howell required no fuel, left no visible wake for the enemy to detect and could be surface-launched from battleships or launched underwater by torpedo tubes. It had a range of 400 yards and could reach a speed of 25 knots. Its flywheel acted as a stabilizing gyroscope to keep it on target.

It had some marked disadvantages however. It was unwieldy, hard to load and hard to charge. The flywheel had to be spun by massive winches to get it going and once it was finally in the water, the flywheel was so loud it obviated the stealth advantage of wakelessness. In 1892, American manufacturer E. W. Bliss Company secured the rights to producing Whitehead torpedoes. Invented by English inventor Robert Whitehead in 1866, over the next few decades Whitehead torpedoes became established in the Navies of Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and China. They were more expensive, but they were self-propelled with three-cylinder engines.

For a while, the Navy tested both Howells and Whiteheads side by side (see this 1894 New York Times article about just such a test in Newport, Rhode Island), but by the late 1890s, the Whitehead was the undoubted victor. The Howells never made it past that initial 50 unit order.

Before the kickass trained dolphins did their thing, there was only one known surviving Howell torpedo on display at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Washington. The discovery of a second one, by dolphin no less, is thus nothing short of epic.

The newly recovered Howell is stamped “USN No. 24″ which puts it right in the middle of the production run. Explosive experts have examined it and found that its century plus in the Pacific has rendered it inert. It’s at a Navy base right now being cleaned and prepared for shipment to the Naval History and Heritage Command in the Washington Navy Yard.

The best fonts of 2012

Marian
Paul Barnes [Commercialtype]

FF Tisa Sans
Mitja Miklavčič [FontFont]

Euclid
Emmanuel Rey [Swiss Typefaces]

The Harriet Series
Jackson Cavanaugh [Okay Type]

OurType Stencils
Fred Smeijers, Maurice Göldner, Pierre Pané-Farré & Thomas Thiemich [OurType]

JAF Bernini Sans
Tim Ahrens [Just Another Foundry]

Thema
Nikola Djurek [Typonine]

Rollerscript
Nick Cooke [G-Type]

Trivia
František Štorm [Štormtype]

Fort
Jeremy Mickel [Village/MCKL]

Honorable Mentions

Andere Best-of-Listen

• FontShop
• Fontwerk
• MyFonts
• Peter Glaab
• Typecache
• Typographica

Ein großes Dankeschön

… wie immer allen Designern und Foundrys für die freundliche Unterstützung!

Many thanks to all designers and foundries for the support!