Mind. Blown.

Marvellous use of scrolling and zooming. I’d like it very slightly more without the silhouette of the hand controlling where the focus moves to, but that’s not to discount the neatness of the concept and how nicely it’s executed.

[Via MetaFilter]

Eyes on the skies

From Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight:

Many of the somersaulting, spinning and plummeting maneuvers that birds have mastered aren’t ones that anyone would want to experience in a passenger aircraft. But uncrewed aerial vehicles, also known as UAVs or drones, are freer to make drastic maneuvers, and their increasing popularity for military, scientific, recreational and other uses is creating more opportunities for them to do so.

At the very least, drone-watching seems as if it’ll get more interesting1 as drones swoop in from an unexpected angle and bank hard at the last second to kill their speed and change their direction before landing with an attention-seeking flourish on the drone-pad next to your front door.

[Via Sentiers 230]


  1. Will Amazon’s drones play nice with other retailers’ drones when it comes to finding a perch, or will they get weirdly territorial about defending their (air)space? 

Excel eSports

If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as “ESPN8: The Ocho,” you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing.

Or you might have seen “,” a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. […]

Having read Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors I feel a little bit better that even these Excel experts can occasionally find themselves screwing up and botching a formula’s reference when under time pressure. Mind, they’re making these mistakes in competition mode; what’s my excuse, when I’m in just the office, doing this stuff between answering phone calls and emails?

Excel makes juggling with data so easy to do that it’s possible to forget that it’s not always the best tool for the job.

[Via MetaFilter]

Remember

A fair point:

The English invented a sport [cricket] that relies on five consecutive days of without rain. Then they compete with countries like Australia and India. It’s like on some level they want to be punished for colonialism.

posted by adept256 at 11:09 AM on August 2

Don’t forget the West Indies.1

[Via MetaFilter]


  1. As a teenager I spent time listening Test Match Special for news of how Tony Greig’s England side were repeatedly failing to make the West Indies grovel. Then a few years later Viv Richards took over the West Indies captaincy and spent a decade and a half making sure nobody in English cricket could forget the West Indies. 

Put away

Hell, yes! The future needs files

For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.

I’m not here to tell you exactly what should happen, but more what you should want. For me, it’s a travesty that people don’t understand why files are so powerful and more importantly, how they need to evolve for mobile. I want all OSs, including mobile ones, to properly support real files as they are amazing, inspiring, and possibly the future of how we build our digital future.

This is the biggest challenge Apple users are facing as Apple find themselves having to balance the needs of users of their various platforms as MacOS moves ever closer to the iOS way of doing things. Some future iteration of Siri might be clever enough to locate everything the user is looking for if it can talk to all the Apps and get them to query their own datastores for search results, but that’s a pretty dicey proposition and I’m not sure that’s the way to bet.1

Sidelining the creation of files to an option on the Share menu while your OS provides a lamentably weak Files app is definitely not the way to go. If creating iPadOS had been the genesis of a different approach to the needs of users that would be one thing, but using the Files app on iPadOS is just such weak sauce for anyone who used a halfway decent file manager on a Mac or Windows or Unix system.2

Also…

[The Mac…] created the “Desktop”, a temporary holding place for files. People needed folders for longer term storage but it was also powerful to have a temporary ‘working area’ for recent files. The original Mac even had a “Put away” command that would return a file from the Desktop back into its original folder location (sadly removed in OS X). This small bit of history shows how adding a tiny amount of metadata can have a significant positive impact on a user’s workflow.

I’d completely forgotten that “Put away” was ever a thing on the Mac desktop. Our computers are capable of this3 so why can’t they offer such useful and helpful features?

[Via adactio, via philgyford’s pinboard]


  1. Yes, I’m old. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this.  

  2. I refer the honourable member to my previous footnote.  

  3. Metadata is a wonderful thing!  

Target Acquired

I was curious about the TV adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife and had it on my list of shows I’d take a look at somewhere down the line. Then I came across Abigail Nussbaum’s review of the first season at Strange Horizons:

At this point, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that this review of The Time Traveler’s Wife is a rave. Let me hasten to correct that impression. The Time Traveler’s Wife is hilariously, deliriously bad. It’s everything that critics of the book have been complaining about for nearly twenty years, multiplied by every complaint that Moffat’s critics have leveled at him for roughly the same amount of time. And, like the show’s Henry and Clare themselves—a couple who have intimate conversations in a completely normal speaking voice while out in public, for example arguing over whether Henry has been ogling a woman on the subway while sitting right next to said woman—it’s the sort of pairing where you find yourself happy that these two toxic disaster zones have found each other, because at least they won’t impose their dysfunction on anyone else.

I realise that was meant as a warning, but how can I not move this programme up my list now?

Emulation

Thanks to Charlie Stross for pointing out Lena, an short story by qntm written in the format of excerpt from a version of Wikipedia hailing from a distinctly nightmarish timeline:

This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Miguel Acevedo.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. […]

If you find yourself thinking that sounds neat, be sure to follow the link and read the remainder of the entry.

I think probably enthusiasts for mind uploading are wildly underestimating the complexity of capturing a snapshot of a mind, let alone the resources required to do something useful1 with all that data afterwards. Then again, a few decades from now who can say how much bandwidth and processing power it’ll be feasible2 to throw at the task?

Chilling stuff…

[Via Charlie’s Diary]


  1. Useful to whom, exactly? Useful how?  

  2. Trivial, even.