jokke.dk is the personal website of Joakim Nygård, a software architect, entrepeneur and Mac user living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more »
6th September, 2010
Lovely piece by Frank Chimero on not noticing the wonders around us
Can horses type? Probably not. But, you know, that clip-clop sound that their hooves make sounds an awful lot like the clip-clop sound my fingers make when I’m writing. I like that sound: it denotes progress. I wish we would still ride horses, because then we could have a sound we associate with progress and getting closer to somewhere we want to be. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.
3rd August, 2010 | 0 Comments
New Scientist reports that we might wrongly be classifying young and fully grown dinosaurs as separate species.
Paleontologists John Scanella and Horner propose that some dinosaurs underwent remarkable morphological changes during their growth and that we are confusing these differences between juvenile and adult with distinct species, specifically that
... Triceratops is merely the juvenile form of Torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic Torosaurus form
ScienceDaily has a similar story about the Pachycephalosaurus:
Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.
"Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth," Horner said, "which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care."
2nd August, 2010
Color cycling is an effect used widely in games of the 90s to create the illusion of animating backgrounds by changing only the colors used in a single image. The backgrounds for the classic LucasArts games are masterly done using color cycling.
Joe Huckaby has created an HTML5 implementation of color cycling using a few of Mark Ferrari's fabulous images. Ah, the memories...
1st July, 2010
Talking at RSA, Philip Zimbardo explains some absolutely amazing correlations between how we perceive time and how we interact with others and the world. Discoveries like this ought to have profound implications on how we structure our society.
There's a 10 minute animated extract for those with short attention spans :)
1st July, 2010
Vanity Fair:
When V.F. asked 52 experts to choose the five most important works of architecture created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. Here are the top 21, in order of popularity.
Many of these are remarkable from an engineering view as well.
30th June, 2010
iFixit has a teardown of the gyroscope inside the new iPhone 4. The images are stunning examples of the remarkable expertise and precision required to build the devices we have come to think of as everyday things. To think it started only 50 years ago with the invention of the transistor...
30th June, 2010
Interview with Gail Dines about her new book Pornland:
Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.
29th June, 2010
Paul Greenberg writes for The New York Times about the declining population of Tuna:
But appetites continued to outstrip supply. Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China.
Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.
We seriously need to reconsider what we eat or there will be none.
29th June, 2010
Astute analysis by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz of the psychology in Farmville (yet another social game I'll never play) and why we need time to think:
The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
28th June, 2010
Everyone should read this. There's a real risk of finding oneself in a sick relationship or employment at some point in life – or knowing someone who is:
Make sure there's never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there's never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.
23rd June, 2010
On May 2 the investment advisory firm Cumberland commented on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no "good" here.
One and a half month later, the oil is still spewing into the ocean and at a much higher rate than previously thought. Up from 600.000 liters to 7-10 million liters every day. That's 1/3 of Denmark's daily oil consumption! and Exxon-Valdez every four days
There's more on popularlogistics.
UPDATE: 60 Minutes recently did a report on a trial in Ecuador against Chevron, claiming they dumped 68 billion liters of toxic oil waste in the Ecuador rainforest. In Nigeria, it's not news either. I still shocks me to see the extent to which we have no respect for human life and the environment. Our way of life turns us all into horrible parasites.
23rd June, 2010
It's a two-year old article, but It's surely as relevant today. In 2008 Engadget linked to two videos by 60 Minutes and CurrentTV about how electronic waste is shipped to China to end up in massive dumps.
17th June, 2010
IBM has spent the last three years building a fantastic question-answering machine called Watson. Much like Deep Blue beat the grandmasters of chess, Watson will attempt at beating the best players of Jeopardy!, a much harder task as it involves complex language parsing and spans enormous knowledge areas. New York Times has a fascinating article on how they approached the challenge and just how far they've come:
Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample “Jeopardy!” clue: “He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.” In the first pass, the algorithms came up with “Nixon.” To evaluate whether “Nixon” was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase — “Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974” — and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported “Nixon” as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result “Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,” a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make “Nixon” the top-ranked solution.)
9th June, 2010
CommonDreams.org asks where the Haiti money is going:
Of the U.S. money, 40 cents on every dollar goes to the U.S. military, according to sources gathered from USAID and the U.N. and compiled by the Associated Press. Less than one cent goes to the Haitian government. U.S. government contracts, paid for by citizen's tax dollars, are being given out to private U.S. corporations for post-earthquake work including damage assessments, security guards, military "mission support," shipping of supplies, clean-up, construction, long-term planning, "monitoring food security," and much more.
That does not sound very humanitarian
15th May, 2010
The Guardian's Andrew Brown on Facebook and privacy:
This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren't customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook's users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren't customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.