Adactio: Links—Tagged with story

Morphosis: Goliath, David, Adam

A biblical short story from Adam Roberts.

The Layers Of The Web

Here are the slides from my opening keynote at Beyond Tellarrand on Thursday. They don’t make much sense out of context.

The Layers Of The Web - Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

Thanks to the quick work of Marc and his team, the talk I gave at Beyond Tellerrand on Thursday was online within hours!

I’m really pleased with how this turned out. I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to be interested in the deep dive into history that I took for the first 15 or 20 minutes, but lots of people told me that they really enjoyed that part, so that makes me happy.

Information mesh

Timelines of people, interfaces, technologies and more:

30 years of facts about the World Wide Web.

The lines of code that changed everything.

We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV—pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much.

This is a fascinating way to look at the history of computing, by focusing in on culturally significant pieces of code. The whole list is excellent, but if I had to pick a favourite …well, see if you can guess what it is.

Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo

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!

Southern Mosaic

A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:

On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.

do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

A Love Letter to Net.Art - The History of the Web

Click around the site a bit and you’ll find yourself tied to an endless string of hyperlinks, hopping from one page to the next, with no real rhyme or reason to tie them altogether. It is almost pure web id, unleashed structurally to engage your curiosity and make use of the web’s most primal feature: the link.

How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson

Six UX lessons from game design:

Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)

Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)

Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)

Affordances (Prompt for known loops)

Hintiness (Move to new loops)

Pacing (Be sure to start here)

Mark Zuckerberg Is a Slumlord

An interesting comparison between Facebook and tenements. Cram everybody together into one social network and the online equivalents of cholera and typhoid soon emerge.

The airless, lightless confines of these networks has a worrying tendency to amplify the most extreme content that takes root, namely that of racists, xenophobes, and conspiracists (which, ironically, includes anti-vaxxers.)

Bandstands: The industry built on Victorian social engineering - BBC News

As a resident of Brighton—home to the most beautiful of bandstands—this bit of background to their history is fascinating.

What Technology Is Most Likely to Become Obsolete During Your Lifetime?

Old technology seldom just goes away. Whiteboards and LED screens join chalk blackboards, but don’t eliminate them. Landline phones get scarce, but not phones. Film cameras become rarities, but not cameras. Typewriters disappear, but not typing. And the technologies that seem to be the most outclassed may come back as a the cult objects of aficionados—the vinyl record, for example. All this is to say that no one can tell us what will be obsolete in fifty years, but probably a lot less will be obsolete than we think.

Mapping the Moon

A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:

Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.

NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog Fall 1989

Brian found this scanned copy of a NeXT manual on the Internet Archive. I feel a great fondness for this machine after our CERN project.

Chaos Design: Before the robots take our jobs, can we please get them to help us do some good work?

This is a great piece! It starts with a look back at some of the great minds of the nineteenth century: Herschel, Darwin, Babbage and Lovelace. Then it brings us, via JCR Licklider, to the present state of the web before looking ahead to what the future might bring.

So what will the life of an interface designer be like in the year 2120? or 2121 even? A nice round 300 years after Babbage first had the idea of calculations being executed by steam.

I think there are some missteps along the way (I certainly don’t think that inline styles—AKA CSS in JS—are necessarily a move forwards) but I love the idea of applying chaos engineering to web design:

Think of every characteristic of an interface you depend on to not ‘fail’ for your design to ‘work.’ Now imagine if these services were randomly ‘failing’ constantly during your design process. How might we design differently? How would our workflows and priorities change?

The Decolonial Atlas

The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.

For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.

This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.

How cartography made early modern global trade possible.

Maps and legends. Beautiful!

Link tags: story

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