Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!
The New York Times is publishing science-fictional op-eds. The first one is from Ted Chiang on the Gene Equality Project forty years in our future:
White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.
A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.
This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …
Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.
This is the lovely little film about our WorldWideWeb hack project. It was shown yesterday at CERN during the Web@30 celebrations. That was quite a special moment.
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and sociopath incubator, Y Combinator.
There’s never been any reason to visit Hacker News, but now you really don’t need to ever go there. This site posts a weekly roundup, complete with commentary that’s even more snarky than Hacker News.
Here’s a fairly typical summary of a fairly typical thread:
A programmer at a spamhouse is transported to a world where people are not judged by the color scheme of their Atom window, but by the character assessment and culture fit reports they write about potential new hires. Hackernews spends a lot of time discussing how to bullshit people like the author into hiring them. A few Hackernews struggle with the knowledge that there are people who contribute to business without involving Git. Furious debates about “title inflation” break out amongst people who type javascript into computers and straight-facedly refer to themselves as “engineers”.
Oh, and I love the “about” page.
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.
This is a lovely write-up of the WorldWideWeb hack week at CERN:
The Web is a success story in open standards, natural and by-design progressive enhancement, and the future-proof archivability of human-readable code.
The US Mission to the UN in Geneva came by to visit us during our hackweek at CERN.
“Our hope is that over the next few days we are going to recreate the experience of what it would be like using that browser, but doing it in a way that anyone using a modern web browser can experience,” explains team member Jeremy Keith. The aim is to “give people the feeling of what it would have been like, in terms of how it looked, how it felt, the fonts, the rendering, the windows, how you navigated from link to link.”
Here’s the CERN write-up of our week of hacking to produce the recreation of the WorldWideWeb browser.
Photos from earlier this week:
In a small room in CERN’s Data Center, an international group of nine developers is taking a plunge back in time to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. Their aim is to enable the whole world to experience what the web looked like viewed within the very first browser developed by Tim Berners-Lee.
A little teaser from U.S. MIssion at the U.N. in Geneva:
This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the birth of the #WorldWideWeb. A team of #webdevelopers are working to make it possible for the public to experience the #FirstWebBrowser as it looked on #TimBernersLees’s computer @CERN…
Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.
This looks like a really interesting two-day event here in Brighton in November. Like Indie Web Camp, it features one day of talks followed by one day of making.
After a day of tech talks from project teams using their skills for social good, you’ll have the chance to take part in workshops and hackathons to use your own talents for a worthy cause.
And you get to go up the i360.
Well now, this is a clever bit of hardware hacking.
Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.
A great write-up of Science Hack Day Dublin—the 6th iteration is coming up next month.
What struck me about this hackathon is that the only end goal is for people to have a bit of fun and make stuff. There’s no flashy big-ticket prize and no commercial agenda. They’re not looking for start-up pitches or scalable business plans, and there’s no Dragons’ Den interrogation. Just good old-fashioned, high-tech making and mingling.
A clever little hack to preserve an aspect ratio for any HTML element.
We use two important attributes:
- SVG knows how to maintain aspect ratio
- CSS grid knows how to make overlapping items affect each other’s size
A report on Science Hack Day Berlin (published on the excellent eLife website).
When I put together the first Science Hack Day back in 2010, I had no idea how amazingly far it would spread—all thanks to Ariel.
