Antipodean

Locks, Actors, And STM In Pictures

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:57:00 +1000

Locks, Actors, And STM In Pictures:

Good article.

CoVim - Collaborative Editing for Vim

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:50:21 +1000

CoVim - Collaborative Editing for Vim:

Looks useful.

(via Everest Maxed Out)

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:10:50 +1000

(via Everest Maxed Out)

Everest Maxed Out

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:37:06 +1000

Everest Maxed Out:

“Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions. The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps.”

(via Audubon Beaks - Always With Honor)

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:59:54 +1000

(via Audubon Beaks - Always With Honor)

German for black: Rad links from around the web #1

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:01:32 +1000

German for black: Rad links from around the web #1:

germanforblack:

I spend every minute of the day looking at amazing things that other people are doing on the web. Studio buddy Glen helped convince me to compile a list.

Some fantastic links for a Friday arvo. Thanks for sharing Ben. :-)

Yahoo, Tumblr tie-up in the works?

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:52:23 +1000

Yahoo, Tumblr tie-up in the works?:

I’m not sure how I feel about this.. based on what Yahoo did with delicious and flickr (ie let them die). :-/

kororaa: scinerds: Barns Are Painted Red Because of the...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:51:26 +1000

kororaa:

scinerds:

Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars

Have you ever noticed that almost every barn you have ever seen is red? There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the chemistry of dying stars. Seriously.

Yonatan Zunger is a Google employee who decided to explain this phenomenon on Google+ recently. The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part.

Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars. Zunger explains :

The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.

As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart. It doesn’t make anything heavier than 56. What does this have to do with red paint? Because the star stops at 56, it winds up making a ton of things with 56 neucleons. It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse).

The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint.

And that, Zunger explains, is how the death of a star determines what color barns are painted.

i love this

99designs worldwide community

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:22:18 +1000

Here’s something I made.

It’s a visualisation of the 99designs worldwide community.

Pretty neat huh? You wouldn’t believe how much effort it took to make those little hexes look just right.. :-P

Also, if you’re into this kind of thing—did I mention that 99 is hiring? ;-)

Petman Tests Camo (by BostonDynamics) Boston Dynamics being...

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:57:22 +1000

Petman Tests Camo (by BostonDynamics)

Boston Dynamics being creepy again.

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:09:22 +1000

A Cloudless Atlas — How MapBox Aims to Make the World's 'Most Beautiful Map'

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:50:00 +1000

A Cloudless Atlas — How MapBox Aims to Make the World's 'Most Beautiful Map':

“To solve the problem, MapBox takes a much finer-grained approach. It takes all the images it has of an area and stacks them on top of each other. Then, it reorders each column of pixels in the stack based on how cloudy it thinks it is. “We do that for every pixel in the world,” says Loyd.”

Incredible results. The satellite imagery the MapBox team is producing is remarkably beautiful. It’s a really clever approach to produce perfectly seamless and cloud free imagery. I can’t get enough of this.

Edit: More on the MapBox blog.

Space Is Now a Reality TV Show

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:02:42 +1000

Space Is Now a Reality TV Show:

“Chris Hadfield’s return from the International Space Station marks a new era for the final frontier.”

The Atlantic on astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Cover Story: Daft Punk

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:52:00 +1000

Cover Story: Daft Punk:

loganabbott:

Great article on Pitchfork about Daft Punk and their new album.

After 20 years, the world has finally caught up with Daft Punk, so the helmet-clad retro-futurists are embarking on a new mission: to make music breathe again

Cool article. Presentation is superb.

psql: Working on some art for Elepath #00002. This one will be...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:17:41 +1000

psql:

Working on some art for Elepath #00002. This one will be a huge cutout.

dbreunig: No one launches like Daft Punk.

Tue, 14 May 2013 02:19:40 +1000

dbreunig:

No one launches like Daft Punk.

Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:19:39 +1000

Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets:

“MapBox has developed an open source vector format to power the future of our web maps. Vector tiles rethink web maps from the ground up, providing a single efficient format to power raster tiles, interactive features, geojson streams, mobile renderers, and much more.”

I can’t wait for MapBox’s new Vector maps. I’m especially excited for Tilemill 2, which they’re working on open source, in public, right from the start. I really like their style. :-)

Some Candid Thoughts on Node.js from Creator Ryan Dahl

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:27:00 +1000

Some Candid Thoughts on Node.js from Creator Ryan Dahl:

“Node is popular because it allows normal people to do high concurrency servers. It’s not the fastest or leanest or even very well put together - but it makes good trade offs in terms of cognitive overhead, simplicity of implementation, and performance.”

“Node’s problem is that some of its users want to use it for everything? So what? I have no interest in educating people to be well-rounded pragmatic server engineers, that’s Tim O’Reilly’s job (or maybe it’s your job?). I just want to make computers suck less. Node has a large number of newbie programmers. I’m proud of that; I want to make things that lots of people use.

This mirrors my thoughts on Node. It’s fantastic for writing network servers. I also get the feeling that people try to do too much with it, but that’s hardly Node’s fault.

colchrishadfield: With deference to the genius of David Bowie,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:42:34 +1000

colchrishadfield:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.

Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.

Incredible.

Frankenbyte: Faster Github using SSH multiplexing

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:55:11 +1000

Frankenbyte: Faster Github using SSH multiplexing:

frankenbyte:

I use both Github and Bitbucket daily for version control, for work and for a variety of projects. With this kind of active use of Git or Mercurial, you’re spinning up ssh connections to remote servers left right and centre. Ain’t nothing wrong with that — it works.

But, over the day the latency…

Great protip.