My screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic is coming along nicely.
Missing the bit about the poster of a single rounded rectangle that hangs over his bed, but A++ will read again.
history
Tractors and User Interfaces
The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up
Free-fall record holder who jumped from space and blew past the sound barrier to hit the supersonic 988 km/h top speed: “We really don’t appreciate what a beautiful planet we have.”
As a boy, Joe like many kids of his age wanted to be a fighter pilot and at age 22 Joe was doing just that, storming through the skies of Germany with the 86th Fighter Bomber Squadron. It wasn’t long though before Joe was called upon to bigger things. Even before there was a space program he was planning for it, volunteering himself for experiments which would make even Bruce Banner wince with fear, most notably the human decelerator where he went from over 600 mph to zero in just a few feet, blistering his body and making his eyes bleed from the 41g he pulled in breaking.
Thankfully not all the experiments were as life threatening as the human decelerator. One of Joe’s early tests for example was investigating zero gravity which involved him swooping and diving in his plane with a golf ball attached to a piece of string “When the golf ball floated, that was zero gravity”. Some of course were far more grand in scale and with ‘Project Man High’ Joe took a balloon up to the dizzying heights of 96,000ft paving the way for the NASA’s human space flight program ‘Project Mercury’. Not bad for a 29 year old but his real challenge was still to come.
On Aug. 16, 1960, Joe, now Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger, rode a helium balloon to the edge of space, 102,800 feet (32 km) above the earth.
Wearing just a thin pressure suit and breathing supplemental oxygen, Joe jumped from his gondola into the 110-degree-below-zero, near-vacuum of space. Within seconds his body accelerated to 714 mph in the thin air, breaking the sound barrier. After free-falling for more than four and a half minutes, his descent finally began to slow due to the friction of the heavier air below. He felt his parachute open at 14,000 feet, and he floated gently down to the New Mexico desert floor.
Joe’s feat proved to scientists that astronauts would be able to survive the harshness of space with just a pressure suit and that man could eject from aircraft at extreme altitudes and survive if properly equipped.
More than four decades later, Joe’s two world records, the highest parachute jump, and the only man to break the sound barrier without a craft and live, still stand, and the retired colonel and Aviation Hall of Famer, now 75, still rides the sky above Altamonte Springs in Florida as often as he can.
Paintings that appear out of nowhere — the magical Fore-edge painting.
Comic Sans is like Nickelback: great when used sparingly, total fail when used in excess.
Yesterday there was a huge consternation on Twitter when it came to light that the Physicist who presented the ground-breaking Higgs-Boson discovery used Comic Sans throughout her presentation.
While it was definitely awful looking, Comic Sans is quite the beautiful babe when used tastefully and in moderation. The talented folks at The Comic Sans Project bring you proof.
The Power of Charisma
It is said that when the ancient Roman orator Cicero spoke, people said to one another: “Great speech.” When the ancient Greek Demosthenes spoke, people said: “Let us march.”
Charisma is not just impressing people, it’s about getting them to act.
Designer of the Bullet train also designed a sauce dispenser, a really good sauce dispenser.
Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. “Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,” he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. “I needed something to touch, to look at,” he added. “Right then I decided to be a maker of things.”
One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser. Introduced in 1961, it has been in continuous production ever since. Traditional in its grace yet modern in its materials, the bottle’s design drew on Ekuan’s experiences at war’s end.
Beautiful.
The Burroughs B5000 — a 1960s machine based on an architecture more advanced than anything else known to man even today.
The Burroughs ALGOL compiler was very fast — this impressed the Dutch scientist Edsger Dijkstra when he submitted a program to be compiled at the B5000 Pasadena plant. His deck of cards was compiled almost immediately and he immediately wanted several machines for his university, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The compiler was fast for several reasons, but the primary reason was that it was a one-pass compiler. Early computers did not have enough memory to store the source code, so compilers (and even assemblers) usually needed to read the source code more than once. The Burroughs ALGOL syntax, unlike the official language, requires that each variable (or other object) be declared before it is used, so it is feasible to write an ALGOL compiler that reads the data only once. This concept has profound theoretical implications, but it also permits very fast compiling. Burroughs large systems could compile as fast as they could read the source code from the punched cards, and they had the fastest card readers in the industry.
The powerful Burroughs COBOL compiler was also a one-pass compiler and equally fast. A 4000-card COBOL program compiled as fast as the 1000-card/minute readers could read the code. The program was ready to use as soon as the cards went through the reader.
Thus the B5000 was based on a very powerful language. Most other vendors could only dream of implementing an ALGOL compiler and most in the industry dismissed ALGOL as being unimplementable. However, a bright young student named Donald Knuth had previously implemented ALGOL-58 on an earlier Burroughs machine during the three months of his summer break. Many wrote ALGOL off, mistakenly believing that high-level languages could not have the same power as assembler, and thus not realizing ALGOL’s potential as a systems programming language.
Developed in the 1960s, this crazy beast of a machine is more advanced than the latest Ivy Bridge architecture from Intel and anything Intel or AMD or anyone else has on their roadmap in the next 10 years. If there are aliens out there, you can be sure they’re using the modern day equivalent of the B5000 for their computing needs.
What’s the purpose of a necktie?
To hide the buttons.
I never understood neckties until now. I still won’t wear them though, even if I knew that the modern necktie is Croatia’s gift to the world and that the Chinese and Romans were wearing the precursor to the modern necktie more than 2000 years ago.
What I do wanna wear is a “Cape”. At my waist. The image in my head is so cool, but pulling it off will take some work.
