FF Chartwell — a font that lets you make all kinds of charts inside design programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.
Coolest. Font. Ever.
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.
Source: Wikipedia
DNAs, RNAs, and now XNAs
When it comes to messing with the backbone—the sugars and phosphates—it gets quite a bit harder to integrate things with actual biological systems. The enzymes that prepare and copy DNA, for example, are structured to work with sugars and phosphates. Having something that’s both chemically and structurally distinct doesn’t always work that well.
Rather than messing with the chemistry, the team behind the new paper decided to fix the enzymes. They started with a DNA copying enzyme, and introduced lots of random mutations, then checked for versions that would latch on to a chemical that was somewhat structurally related to the normal sugar used in DNA. After a couple rounds of this, they had an enzyme that could copy stretches of DNA into pieces of a nucleic acid that contained nothing but this sugar substitute, converting the DNA into an artificial chemical relative.
Using similar procedures, the same enzyme could be adapted to a wide variety of chemicals related to sugars. The authors picked five in total, all with features that were distinct from the normal sugars, like a double bond between carbon atoms, a fluorine replacing an oxygen, and a double-ring structure. Collectively, they termed these DNA/RNA substitutes XNAs.
Animals came from DNAs, plants from RNAs, and now with XNAs, the question of when we’ll meet aliens is finally answered… we don’t have to look to skies, we are making them right here on Earth in our labs. Exciting.
Source: Ars Technica
Digital Fishing
Go fishing a unique and innovative physical-to-digital game for Yoobi, London’s first temakeria. A revolutionary use of QR codes has enabled people to ‘fish’ for free sushi in the weeks leading up to the restaurant launch.
Neatest use of QR codes yet. Great job by icoDesign.
Source: digitalgirlsclub
Alan Kay’s vision of the future from 30 years ago (1982)
He made this while working at Atari, envisioning smartphones connected to the internet enabling access to an intelligent encyclopedia like, our own Wikipedia, digital media consumption, apps, e-learning, weather warning systems and more.
Visionary.
But,
there’s something even Alan Kay didn’t forsee:
The most interesting thing for me today about these images is that although we foresaw that people would be accessing information wirelessly (notice the little antenna on the device in the “tide pool” image, we completely missed the most important aspect of the network — that it was going to connect people to other people.
Lust object.
Innovation never dies. Take this door knob for instance…
Take a few seconds right now to think how you can make, something as commonplace and established as a door knob, interesting…
… go on, take a couple more seconds…
… done?
Here’s Hideyuki Nakayama’s answer — a door knob that lets you see outside the door. Yep, the entire scene outside gets refracted inside the door knob so looking at the door knob can tell you what’s going on outside.
More importantly, this shows how you can run out of ideas only to find someone else add a fresh new batch of interesting ones.
Innovation never dies, even in something as established a concept as a door knob.
Manipulating human emotions at will is art… but these guys just might turn it into science. Incredible, Ghost in the shell seemed so far away until now. The future is going to be so much fun.
A talk that should be on TED.com: Bret Victor on the principles behind Ideation
Ideas thrive on immediate feedback and serendipitous discovery. I know that, pretty sure many others know that too. But what makes this video a must-watch (gets insane around the 10:40 mark) is how Bret makes the very compelling statement that it’s time to take this shit seriously.
update:
I just finished watching it and realized I had misunderstood the purpose of the video. Bret finished with insights that are more to do with how people should choose their life’s work instead of merely ideation as I had originally thought. Incredible insights really, Bret’s the closest to being the “Alan Kay” of our time in my opinion.
Disruptive
Yep, the biggest reason I wanted Apple to succeed back in 2007 was because I wanted someone to show the world that leapfrogging the competition with insanely great products is a much better and more profitable business strategy than the mindless cloning that the PC industry has been doing all along.
But… instead of Apple’s success spawning a 1000 Apples as I had so dearly hoped, it spawned the same 1000 leeches of the PC industry sucking on the efforts of the pioneer. I don’t care about these parasites and their “me too” products. They are impotent, they have no life and it’s stupid to expect them to do anything worth getting excited about.
But I do keep hoping that someday the leeches realize they are copying the wrong thing - that they’re copying Apple’s products when they should be copying Apple’s fundamentals, which is to make great products that redefine the landscape of the industry.
Samsung, Sony, LG, Motorola et al should pick up little known research projects that have the potential to change the way we do things today, polish them, build a cohesive business strategy around them, plan a great ecosystem supporting them and do a scalable product launch driving mass market adoption. I don’t want another iPad clone. What I do want is Augmented Reality (SixthSense), Thought Computing and Space elevators. Whoever does that gets to be next in line to suck money out of my wallet.
You should know by now that I normally do not get into much “news” around here. Especially when it’s not specifically Mac news. There are a ton of great Mac news sites out there and I leave that job up to them. That said, Chairman Gruber linked to a highly fascinating Wall Street Journal…
Source: minimalmac
Superb idea.
Chrome - Notification bar overlaps with the browser UI, that way it can be distinguished from fake bars.
/via stefanwehrmeyer
Source: littlebigdetails
