From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.
Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.
This is a great free service for generating small subsetted icon fonts. Launch the app and have a play around — you can choose from the icons provided or you can import your own SVG shapes.
Nice touch: you can get the resulting font (mapped to your choice of unicode characters) base-64 encoded for your stylesheet.
Some good database character-encoding advice from Mathias.
A beautiful short film about The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.
Wilto does an excellent job of summarising the current state of responsive images, highlighting Florian Rivoal’s compromise proposal that combines the best of the picture element with the best of srcset.
This is not only the single most important human endeavour that you can participate in, it is also ridiculously gorgeous.
Science!
Thanks to Jason Scott, every episode of The Sound Of Young America ever recorded is now stored on the Internet Archive. Get huffduffing!
A one-stop-shop with links to the authentication settings of various online services. Take the time to do a little Spring cleaning.
Re-examining Von Neumann probes, reconciling their apparent scarcity with the Fermi paradox.
What a great way to sell a book with “explorations” in the title—play around with the font size, leading, alignment (and browser window size).
A classic (very) short science fiction story that posits an interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
Would you like SETI to resume sweeping the skies in search of extraterrestrial life? Now you can put your money behind re-kickstarting that noble mission.
This URL displays a picture of a sunset (from Flickr) taken wherever the sun is setting right now.
Barebones templates for HTML5 documents. It needs a bit of work but it's a nifty idea.
A nine-point document that constitutes a "Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence."
The search for Dyson spheres.
A shedload of data from The World Bank. Get parsing.
Vintage advertising of science and technology.
"I love this graph because in one small space, it shows the time of Sunrise and Sunset across the entire world throughout all Latitudes throughout the entire year of this tilted planet."
A comprehensive set of sketches, diagrams and screenshots from Soxiam showing the evolution and iteration of interfaces on Vimeo and other sites.
Revenge is a dish best served pink.
The title of "most bizarre IE quirk" is hotly contested, given just how many of them there are. But John has found a real humdinger here.
Normally LOL is a throwaway little phatic interjection but I really did laugh out loud at some of the pictures in this photoset.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you spam, make pretty pictures.
Put a sheet over someone and then photograph them jumping into the air. The result is startling.
There's something very Gibsonesque about this real world mashup of Google Maps and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Pulling together a bunch of CSS tricks from a range of sources: reseting, baseline typography and grids (fixed width, unfortunately).
Having left web accessibility behind him, Joe camps out at the Clearleft office where he immediately turns into a wanker designer.
Ridley Scott's seminal superbowl ad for Apple... in Lego.