Jeff Thompson | Blog

From George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, relaying meteorologist/mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson’s description of a compound dedicated to the prediction of weather:

“After the war, Richardson published a detailed report, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process… At the end of his account, he envisioned partitioning the earth’s surface into 3,200 meteorological cells, relaying current observations by telegraph to the arched galleries and sunken amphitheater of a great hall, where some 64,000 human computers [people making calculations by hand] would continuously evaluate the equations governing each cell’s relations with its immediate neighbors, maintaining a numerical model of the atmosphere in real time.”

For some reason I imagine a giant geodesic dome with mountains in the background (the Banyan Bowl above is the closest approximation I could find).

Videos of people opening boxes.

According to Wikipedia: “The oldest video on YouTube using the name “unboxing” is the opening of a boxed Nokia E61 smartphone, uploaded on June 12, 2006…  According to Google Trends, searches for the term “unboxing” began to surface in the final quarter of 2006.”

Interior of a brick bagel oven, via The Brick Bake Oven Page

While it appears this may be about a year late to have caught, below is a selection of very long, very repetitive videos found on YouTube (all 10 hours long – the new maximum for YouTube).  A few thoughts and extras:

• I’m trying to think this through: it seems like these videos are a combination of meme and “fuck you” masquerading as extreme minimalism
• The Huffington Post has their own favorites list
• Slacktory had a challenge that anyone documenting themselves watching an entire 10-hour video would receive $100 – two people did; their video evidence is the ultimate meta-level bore
• If you’re craving more, try TehN1ppe’s huge selection of 10-hour videos

A fluted pot that stirs its contents automatically.

Via: Core77

After a long time playing with ideas for an easy Processing to Illustrator tool that would allow fancy coding to be piped directly into Illustrator for further layout (and was vector-based the whole way through – no terrible rasterization allowed), I now have a really easy solution that doesn’t involve any fancy code, external libraries, or command-line nonsense.  The process:

1. Write your code as usual, but add PDF export

2. Run once and use File > Place… to insert the PDF into your AI document (do not simply open the document, as changes will not be reflected) — NOTE: be sure “Link” is clicked when placing

3. The resulting PDF, placed into the document as a single unit

4. Make changes in Processing and re-save the pdf – here we reduce the number of lines from 1,000 to 10

5. Back in AI, you will be prompted to update the pdf – easy!  No need to ask it, simply moving between programs updates your work

6. Awesome, done.

A dead end for this process was SVG export from Processing, which is not super easy (surprisingly).  Here’s my hack that uses Inkscape’s command line tools:

import processing.pdf.*;

String filename = "test.pdf";
boolean deletePDF = false;

void setup() {
  size(11*72, 17*72);

  // pretend we're creating a normal pdf
  beginRecord(PDF, filename);

  // do some stuff here!
  for (int i=0; i<1000; i++) {
    line(random(0,width), random(0,height), random(0,width), random(0,height));
  }

  endRecord();

  // convert to svg
  // via: http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5391
  String[] outputFile = split(filename, '.');
  runUnixCommand("/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/script --without-gui " + sketchPath + "/" + filename + " --export-plain-svg=" + sketchPath + "/" + outputFile[0] + ".svg", sketchPath);

  // if specified, delete the original pdf
  if (deletePDF) {
    runUnixCommand("rm " + filename + " -f", sketchPath);
  }

  // X11 will still be running, so you'll have to quit it by hand...
}

void runUnixCommand(String commandToRun, String dir) {
  File workingDir = new File(dir);          // where to do it - should be full path
  String returnedValues;                    // value to return any results

  // run the command!
  try {
    Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(commandToRun, null, workingDir);
    int i = p.waitFor();
    if (i == 0) {
      BufferedReader stdInput = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
      while ( (returnedValues = stdInput.readLine ()) != null) {
        println(returnedValues);
      }
    }
    else {
      BufferedReader stdErr = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getErrorStream()));
      while ( (returnedValues = stdErr.readLine ()) != null) {
        println(returnedValues);
      }
    }
  }
  catch (Exception e) {
    println("Error running command!");  
    println(e);
  }
}

Via: Wired

Highly-magnified soggy breakfast cereal, from a scientific paper discussing why cereal tastes better with milk than water.

Via: Popular Science

The site of the deepest hole on Earth (well sort of, see Wikipedia article for clarification), the Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola Penninsula in Russia.  Fascinating how completely empty and without fanfare the architecture is.

The location of the hole, as seen on Google Maps.  Above photo via Wikipedia user Before My Ken.