ANIMATIE - PRISM, we raken er niet over uitgepraat. Maar welke informatie is er nou precies opgevraagd, en door welke overheden? Google maakte al die informatie openbaar en ene Felix Gonda, parttime student aan Harvard, maakte er een gave visualisatie van. Zo kun je per land kijken van welke van Google’s databases informatie is opgevraagd, en hoe vaak. Of andersom: per database kijken welke landen daar uit verzochten.
Water recirculates through 273 independently controlled solenoid valves at the top of the structure to create a wall of water. This water starts from a collection pool on the ground and is pumped up to a large pipe that feeds the solenoids. Sensors mounted on the swingset gather information about the angle and speed of each swing.
That information is sent to a computer that predicts the action of the rider. The computer then creates a hole in the wall of water, allowing the rider to swing through without getting wet.
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A strange creature races against time to make the most important and beautiful creation of his life.
More at Presurfers own blog.
What Should We Call Poets is a tumblr blog with animated gifs about the life of writers. Here’s an example.
When I find a typo in a piece of writing that I’ve already sent out for submission.
(thanks Pearl, Humanyms)
France in the Year 2000 is a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the year 2000.
There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris.
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Since college kids are moving back this week, the Movoto blog thought it was appropriate to invent a way for them to figure out how much they should tip their friends for helping them lug their junk around.
Hence, the Moving Tip Calculator. Worth messing with and it’s definitely something to take away someone’s productivity for a bit.
Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.
Today information graphics surround us in the media, in published works both pedestrian and scientific, in road signs and manuals. The Infographic Directory is a blog by David Eaves featuring awesome quality infographics from around the internet in a wide range of categories.
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Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment has caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan, a study suggests. Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident. The link between the mutations and the radioactive material was shown by laboratory experiments, they report.
By comparing mutations found on the butterflies collected from the different sites, the team found that areas with greater amounts of radiation in the environment were home to butterflies with much smaller wings and irregularly developed eyes.
(via TISOTIT)
Beeld: cc Nature, Scientific Reports
A series of hacks to popular sites like LinkedIn, Yahoo!, eHarmony and Last.fm has revealed the startlingly easy passwords we all use. How often have you created a password with words like ‘password’ or ‘123456’? The numbers say you’re not the only one. Of the 442,773 total passwords hacked from Yahoo!, close to a quarter were used by more than one person.
Although this shows that the majority of us aren’t very original when we create passwords, there are clear patterns we can avoid to make our passwords a little more secure. Don’t end your password with a year, don’t use common base words, substitute numbers or characters for letters when you can, and try to make it something unique to you.
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While some predictions of science fiction have come to pass, if we were to compile a calendar of future events based on speculative fiction, we would run some hazards – not least the natural reluctance of authors to affix specific dates to their imaginings.
By leaving their dates murky, writers allow their predictions the possibility of eventually coming true. Looking forward to science fiction dates that have yet to come, here are some dates to put on your future calendar.
(via Look At This…)
DATA - Can your job be done by a robot? If you think not, you’re in for a rude awakening; turns out robots might do your job way better than you do.
According to this infographic, robots are not only slowly becoming able to do simple jobs like ‘retail cashier’ but also complex, high paying jobs that require massive amounts of education and practice for humans, like surgery or pharmacy.
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Typewriters are intricate machines – complex little boxes that require an abundance of ingenuity to produce. They are often beautiful, and they occasionally find wildly imaginative ways to conduct the delicate dance between the hammers and the keys.
So much of the way we interact with machines today directly links to the innovations pushed forth by typewriters in the late 19th century. In fact, it’s hard to chart the progression of technology without considering the typewriter. So here’s a look at 10 of the most beautiful typewriter designs of all time.
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