Tags: story

Escape from Spiderhead | The New Yorker

Madeline sent me a link to this short story from 2010, saying:

It’s like if Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon wrote an episode of Black Mirror. I think you’ll like it!

Yes, and yes.

Two-Bit History

An ongoing timeline of computer technology in the form of blog posts by Sinclair Target (that’s a person, not a timeslipping transatlantic company merger).

Peter Gasston | People don’t change - YouTube

This talk from Peter—looking at the long zoom of history—is right up my alley.

Letterform Archive – From the Collection: Blissymbolics

The fascinating story of Charles K. Bliss and his symbolic language:

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.

How To Kill Your Tech Industry

I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.

Color Leap - History’s Palettes

Colour palettes throughout the ages that you can copy and use.

Internet Archive: Connections season 1, episodes 1-10

Videos for the whole first season of James Burke’s brilliant Connections TV series.

Internet Archive and chill.

The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity | CSS-Tricks

This is a terrific spot-on piece by Rachel. I firmly believe that healthy competition and diversity in the browser market is vital for the health of the web (which is why I’m always saddened and frustrated to hear web developers wish for a single monocultural rendering engine).

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

CSS exclusions with Queen Bey

This great post by Hui Jing is ostensibly about CSS shapes and exclusions, but there’s a much broader message too:

Build demos, and play around with anything that seems remotely interesting. Even if that feature is in early stages, or only supported by 1 browser. And then talk about it, or write and tweet about your experience, your use cases, what you liked or disliked about it.

We can shape the web to what we want it to be, but only if we get involved.

Refresh – A fresh approach to the browser

Some interesting ideas for evolving the web browser. I’m very interested in the ideas about navigating our browser history—that feels like a very underappreciated goldmine with a direct lineage to the “associative trails” imagined for the memex.

Neodymium – Popula

Magnets: How Do They Work?

Magnetism might be the most romantic of all the topics in science to be metaphorically butchered by poets.

General Magic

A forthcoming documentary about the company spun out of Apple to create a handheld communication device …in 1990.

From mobile computing, social media, downloadable apps and e-commerce to touchscreens, emoji and USB, the products and services that now dominate the tech industry and our day-to-day lives were born at General Magic.

Brighton Guide

Fascinating snippets of information about some of the most interesting buildings in Brighton.

(The website was made by Lydia and Tash as a project for Code First: Girls)

A Talk with the Pioneering Internet Art Collective JODI -ARTnews

“It’s almost too easy now, and too unsatisfying that you only can put your work in a community full of advertisements and full of tracking,” she said. “I think there will be this urge, on the one hand, to have a local internet of small communities, and, on the other hand, a decentralized internet again.”

“You can still make websites nowadays,” Heemskerk said. “People think it’s complex, but it isn’t —you just register your domain and make your website and that’s about it.”

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain - MIT Technology Review

A near-future sci-fi short by Hannu Rajaniemi that’s right on the zeitgest money.

The app in her AR glasses showed the car icon crawling along the winding forest road. In a few minutes, it would reach the sharp right turn where the road met the lake. The turn was marked by a road sign she had carefully defaced the previous day, with tiny dabs of white paint. Nearly invisible to a human, they nevertheless fooled image recognition nets into classifying the sign as a tree.

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button - Bloomberg

Paul Ford explains version control in a way that is clear and straightforward, while also being wistful and poetic.

I had idle fantasies about what the world of technology would look like if, instead of files, we were all sharing repositories and managing our lives in git: book projects, code projects, side projects, article drafts, everything. It’s just so damned … safe. I come home, work on something, push the changes back to the master repository, and download it when I get to work. If I needed to collaborate with other people, nothing would need to change. I’d just give them access to my repositories (repos, for short). I imagined myself handing git repos to my kids. “These are yours now. Iteratively add features to them, as I taught you.”

Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web

The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.

Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?

BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive

Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:

In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.

The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.