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The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art
Beavis and Butthead text art (Textfiles)ASCII art is as much a part of the Internet as emoticons, cats, or lol. We're talking about pictures made from text: letters, numbers, and special characters...
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5 Intriguing Things: Thursday, 1/30
1. Someone died in the sixth century. More than 1,400 years later, a scientist discovers the body and sequences the DNA of the organism that killed the person. "Scientists have reconstructed the...
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Forgotify: The Tool for Discovering Spotify's 4 Million Unheard Tracks
flattop341/FlickrThe idea first came to Lane Jordan when he heard an odd little fact: Around 20 percent of tracks on Spotify—some four million songs—had been played exactly zero times. Four million...
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The Facebook of Mormon
APThe woman that he was trying to reach almost never picked up her phone, and she lived more than 50 miles away. Plus, he had to watch his gas mileage. So Brandon Gonzales, a then-20-year-old...
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The Secrets of the Jumbo Squid
Jumbo squid (Reuters)Imagine you can see what I see. Doing so is no small feat, I know. But maybe if you look closely. There is something I want to show you that is often invisible or unnoticed when...
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SFW: When Big Data Meets Porn
In his 1987 book The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick explored the many ways that technology transforms pornography. Technological innovations—the advent of the printing press, the rise of the home...
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A Brief History of 'What Time is the Super Bowl?'
Reuters / The AtlanticPerusing the metaphorical tomes of modern civilization, we can already speak to some of the Great Questions—the ones that might define our era. “How do we balance security and...
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Felix Baumgartner's Disorienting and Amazing Fall From Space
On a Saturday in October 2012, the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stepped off a helium balloon and plummeted—with his parachute—to Earth. He simultaneously broke the world records for highest...
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5 Intriguing Things: Friday, 1/31
1. Five of Satya Nadella's 25 tweets. He's expected to be named Microsoft's new CEO any minute now. "HTML5 - what fun! Bing on Yahoo! Bing IT On! azuring away today! machine learning!" 2. The F.A.T....
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The Quiet Upheaval of Facebook's New iPhone App
FacebookThis week, Facebook will have two big causes for celebration. On Monday, the company will release a new iPhone app. On Tuesday, the website will turn 10. A new iPhone app? New software would...
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Soon, the Coldest Place in the Known Universe Will Be on ... the...
Space, on top of everything else, is cold. Really cold. The cosmic background temperature—the temperature of the cosmic background radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang—is 3 Kelvin, or...
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The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird
Games are grotesque. I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in...
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An Early Draft of Carl Sagan's Famous 'Pale Blue Dot' Quote
NASA/Rebecca J. RosenThere is something about Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" passage that is, to me at least, perfect. From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular...
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5 Intriguing Things: Monday, 2/3
1. The NSA was working the Copenhagen climate talks, says yet another Snowden document. "It remains unclear precisely when the NSA began to target the summit specifically. However, the NSA document...
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Paul's Powerpoint to the Corinthians
St. Paul Writing His Epistles, 17th century, oil on canvas probably by Valentin de Boulogne (Wikimedia)Few scholarly projects in English rival the writing of the “Authorized Version” of the Bible—or,...
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5 Intriguing Things: Hilary Mason Edition
Greetings from the capital of the United States, where I'll be for the rest of the week. Today's links are brought to you by data scientist and hacker Hilary Mason. You may know her previous work at...
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5 Intriguing Things: Hilary Mason Edition
Greetings from the capital of the United States, where I'll be for the rest of the week. Today's links are brought to you by data scientist and hacker Hilary Mason. You may know her previous work at...
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Perhaps the First Film Explaining Cellular Phone Service
AT&T's archives of the Bell Labs research and media provides a neverending stream of fascinating tidbits about the development of modern mobile communications. Recently, archivist Robin Edgerton...
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America's Shame: Our Ketchup Packets
If the Olympics had a competition dedicated to ketchup packaging, the United States would lose. Handily. Without medalling. We would be vanquished by, among others, Australia. Whose ketchup packet is,...
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Our Best Weapon Against Revenge Porn: Copyright Law?
Titian/Rebecca J. Rosen“Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” - Sir Francis Bacon * * * When federal agents arrested Hunter Moore...
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