Issue 10 - Late
A truncated issue this week, because I started getting sick on Sunday and spent yesterday in bed.
I still struggle mightily with just not doing anything, particularly for a period of more than an hour or so.
It was good to force myself to just rest for once.
A Thing of Beauty
I love how these photos by Navid Baraty use reflection to turn New York cityscapes into disorienting intersections of lines and reflections.
Ephemera
I’m here for the idea of replacing handshakes with the Vulcan “Live Long And Prosper” salute as one of the less-distressing side-effects of the new Coronavirus era.
You may have seen these elsewhere, but in case not, a dose of macabre silliness which fits well in these apocalyptic times: Czech artist Filip Hodas’s Cartoon Fossils series, featuring the imagined skulls of popular cartoon characters…
And this “Minimum Wage Machine” is an effective way to make an important point…
Mazeletter is a series of fonts which can be combined to produce infinitely-tiled, differently-styled labyrinths.
In less earth-bound news, I didn’t realize this was coming, but after nearly 21 years, the SETI@Home project is coming to an end. It makes sense – back when it started, a custom-designed system really was the best way to help ordinary folks devote compute-time to a task as vast as finding alien signals. But the resources available to us are different now. Still, as one of the first major “citizen science” projects out there, SETI@Home will be missed.
Meanwhile, some of the same advances in computing which have rendered SETI@Home obsolete also mean that we can now, thanks to a rendering based on flight data, see exactly what the Apollo 13 astronauts saw as they approached the moon:
Finally, since we’re still in its aftermath, here’s a yearly dose of arguments as to why Daylight Savings Time sucks (in this case, several reasons why it’s actively dangerous).
Endnote
Planning on being back to our regular Sunday-afternoon schedule this week. Sorry about the delay!
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