Dutch company Parastone makes some amazing figures based on characters from famous paintings by artists including Bosch, Pieter Breughel the Elder, Aubrey Beardsley, Degas and Dali, among others. See the index for the whole list.
The video has been making the rounds since Slashdot posted it yesterday. What’s really amazing is that it looks almost exactly like a demo of OS X. Many features and some of the apps are virtually the same, even though this is from over a decade ago.
Here’s a good torrent of the video
Some […]
Searchday has an article listing some of the more useful non-commercial web directories.
Ah. This is a story that will undoubtedly get its own solid place in the legend of Wikipedia. Recently there has been increasing debate over the accuracy of Wikipedia, with heavy criticism coming from project co-founder Larry Sanger.
Now we have a story about a Simpsons-watching 12 year old finding errors in the Encyclopaedia […]
Check out this fantastic technical overview of OS X by Amit Singh.
Tech Review reports on a coming service called Rojo that aims to combine RSS with social networks by having users flag stories and share their feeds with linked accounts. It seems like this might bridge the gap between privately reading feeds and sharing info through a blog. Right now the service is in […]
The Council on Library and Information Resources will be publishing a series of essays exploring the value of library space in a time when so many resources are moving online. Written by four librarians, an architect and a humanities professor, the essays apparently underline a growing need for the physical library, albeit with an […]
MIT’s Technology Review has a short piece with 13 suggestions for how to use the Apple Mac mini. Some ideas include using it as a satellite interface with a HAM radio or to drive a home security system, as well as the more popular ideas like using it as a home server or to […]
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a page from the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious manuscript currently held in Yale’s Bienecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As Wikipedia’s extensive entry explains,
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet […]
Via BB, Cory Doctorow has an interesting response to a recent announcement by Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung that they are developing a common DRM system. He makes a concise argument explaining how DRM systems punish normal consumers rather than actual pirates.
Not one of these systems has ever prevented piracy or illegal copying. […]
Perhaps more for the programmers…
wordlist.sourceforge.net
Interesting discussion at slashdot.
Ren Bucholz thinks we might see a year where file sharing becomes mature and profitable, as he outlines in this San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial.
From Boing Boing
Next time you have a book that you want others to read but aren’t sure what to do with it, you might try BookCrossing. Register a book, release it into the wild and track its travels.
According to Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy, the FBI’s retired Carnivore electronic surveillance tool was actually a privacy-protective alternative to less precise commercially available options. It was dubbed “Carnivore” because it only got the meat sought by the court order and not the extra, irrelevant data. Once commercial options caught up, about […]
Three University of Wisconsin-Madison professors are saying that they believe video games may be better at teaching than textbooks.
I can’t say I argue with them at all. Certainly those of us that grew up along with video game technology recognize that video games are far more detailed and useful than the Pong stereotype and […]
Stanford has put up an FAQ page on the the library project.
From Mad Librarian
California legislator Kevin Murray has introduced a bill that would essentially ban the internet.
As EFF explains:
The bill, introduced in the Senate last week, would make a criminal of anyone who sells or distributes software that allows users to transmit files over a network, if the seller/distributor fails to exercise “reasonable care in preventing use of […]
Like Battelle, I have mixed feelings on Google providing a tag to block links in comments or forums. In the article, it says Typepad will automatically have the tags in place. Does this mean no option for them? It will certainly help with comment spam, but at a price. Since comments […]
From the Washington Post:
An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific enterprise they support.
The […]