January 2012
55 posts
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Spun by a million spiders, stronger than kevlar →
By DENNA JONES l The Observer Jan.15, 2012
It looks like liquid gold and feels as light as a cobweb in the wind. This golden cape is the stuff of fairytales: the largest garment ever made entirely of spider silk. As it goes on show at the V&A, Denna Jones meets the duo behind the gossamer revival
“The geeks love this,” says Nicholas Godley, smiling broadly. Before us lies...
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The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry →
The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line.
Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers’ suggestions. We started with a long list of over 400 lines taken from dictionaries of quotations,...
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Max Zorn’s Tape art
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Check out those videos by Stephen Malinowski.
A composer and software egineer, Malinowski is the creator of the Music Animation Machine, a music visualisation tool inspired by a hallucination he had in 1974. The project took its definitive form in the mid-eighties after friends suggested he animate by computer the visual method he had developed. The Music Animation Machine has been repeatedly...
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Personal Style: Henrik Vibskov
keepsdiary:
Henrik Vibskov is a personal favorite in terms of coolest personal designer style out there.
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The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold →
By BOB PARKS l Businessweek Jan.12, 2012
Late one night in August 1997, 54-year-old inventor Lenn Rockford Hann placed two bottles of Gatorade near Concourse F of Chicago O’Hare International Airport, unlaced his sneakers, removed his socks, then dodged curious maintenance workers for two hours while running 13.1 miles on the walkways. His pace surprised him. He was convinced the springy,...
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Tinker Hatfield on the creation of the Air Max I
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Selling a 300-Year-Old Cello →
By DANIEL J. WAKIN l The New York Times Jan.13, 2012
On a cold day last winter, an ailing Bernard Greenhouse, wearing an elegant bathrobe and attached to oxygen, was wheeled into the living room of his Cape Cod home, which was festooned with paper cutouts of musical notes. Relatives and students, locals and caregivers had gathered to celebrate the 95th birthday of one of classical music’s...
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William Gibson’s Future Is Now →
By PAGAN KENNEDY l New York Times Jan.13, 2012
On one of his trips to New York, William Gibson stopped before an antiques shop that would end up haunting him. He tried the door. It was locked. Over the years, he searched for the shop window many times — it seemed to wander around SoHo and materialize on unpredictable streets. Whenever he peered through it at the treasures within, he felt...
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“You multiply NASA’s budget a factor of two or three and you give it a grand...”
– King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson)
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The unbearable loss of words →
Everyone has a private terror—often abetted by a checkered family medical history or having witnessed the torment of a loved one—of being struck with some particular affliction. For some, it’s the ravages of a slow and painful cancer. For others, it’s being caught in a freak accident that renders them quadriplegic in their prime. For me, it’s the fear of surviving a stroke...
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“There’s one light event that’s every important to me: the rise of the earth’s...”
– James Turrell
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Salad-bar strategy: The battle of the buffet →
By JAMIE CONDLIFFE l New Scientist Dec.27, 2011
A mathematician, an engineer and a psychologist go up to a buffet… No, it’s not the start of a bad joke.
While most of us would dive into the sandwiches without thinking twice, these diners see a groaning table as a welcome opportunity to advance their research.
Look behind the salads, sausage rolls and bite-size pizzas and it turns out...
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Demonstration of temporal cloaking - How to use... →
By KATIE DRUMMOND l Wired Jan.4, 2012
Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light.
A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re...
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