Journal 2350 Links 6294 Articles 66 Notes 2796
A lovely piece of design fiction imagining a project where asteroids are shaped and polished into just the right configuration to form part of an enormous solar-system wide optical telescope.
Once they are deployed in space, a celestial spiderweb of crisscrossed laser beams can push around clouds of those microscopic optical sensors to desired locations.
Christmas dinner.
Sprouts, trimmed and peeled.
Shrimp, salmon, and crab salad with a pint of Murphy’s.
After Christmas Eve lunch with Irish relatives I can confirm that Father Ted is a documentary.
Behind the amusing banter there’s some really solid performance advice in here. Good stuff.
Client Side Rendering (CSR), or as I call it “setting money on fire and throwing it in a river” has its uses, but for this site would have been madness.
Ignore the clickbaity title—you don’t need to do anything this holiday; that’s why it’s a holiday. But there are some great talks here.
The list is marred only by the presence of my talk Resilience, the inclusion of which spoils an otherwise …ah, who am I kidding? I’m really proud of that talk and I’m very happy to see it on this list.
The on-screen interfaces for Rogue One have just the right retro feel next to those for The Force Awakens.
Thursday night tunes in the Rob Roy.
Cuskinny.
Jessica in Ireland.
Adding https://resilientwebdesign.com to the https://pwa.rocks collection.
Matt Griffin’s thoughtful documentary is now available for free on Vimeo. It’s a lovely look at the past, present, and future of the web, marred only by the brief appearance of yours truly.
This is my kind of T-shirt.
I love this project by Brendan—a kind of retroactive design fiction featuring boarding passes from airline travel referenced (but never seen) in films like Die Hard, The French Connection, and Pulp Fiction.
Compare and contrast Alien, Starship Troopers, and The Thing with 2001 and Roadside Picnic (and I would throw Solaris into the mix).
Plugging in a monster moves a plot right along, of course, but if that’s all it’s doing, the plot is neglecting to examine how a real biosphere would work. That would be a sensationally complex task, but given the amount of research now going on in astrobiology and exoplanetary science, the suspicion here is that experts could be summoned who could produce such a film. Even so, there is something to be said for not seeing aliens.
This article examines what I thought was the most interesting aspect of Rogue One—the ethical implications for technologists.
Don’t dismiss this essay just because it’s about a Hollywood blockbuster. Given the current political situation, this is deeply relevant.
Sleepy.
The most important rule to follow when giving a talk or writing is to be yourself. I can learn just about any topic out there from a million different posts or talks. The reason I’m listening to you is because I want to hear your take. I want to know what you think about it, what you’ve experienced. More than anything, I want your authenticity. I want you to be you.
Going to Ireland. brb