Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Jamie Oliver Ted Talk
From Jamie Oliver’s TED talk urging us to teach our children about food, for the sake of ending our chronically poor (and ultimately fatal) eating habits:
For the last 7 years I’ve worked fairly tireless to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef. I don’t have expensive equipment, or medicine. I use information and education.
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iPad Classic
iPad Classic. Now we’re talkin’!
(Via El Reg)
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Iphone Resolution
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy lucidly explains display resolution, clearing up arguments about the iPhone 4’s retinal display technology:
Imagine you see a vehicle coming toward you on the highway from miles away. Is it a motorcycle with one headlight, or a car with two? As the vehicle approaches, the light splits into two, and you see it’s the headlights from a car. But when it was miles away, your eye couldn’t tell if it was one light or two. That’s because at that distance your eye couldn’t resolve the two headlights into two distinct sources of light.
The ability to see two sources very close together is called resolution.
DPI issues aside, the name “retinal display” is awfully confusing given that there’s similar terminology already in use for virtual retinal displays…
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Digital Quantification of Human Eye Color
For those of you with eyes that aren’t easily categorized as simply “brown”, “blue”, or “hazel”: researchers have written up a new genetic model for human eye color phenotyping, published in PLoS Genetics.
We measured human eye color to hue and saturation values from high-resolution, digital, full-eye photographs of several thousand Dutch Europeans. This quantitative approach, which is extremely cost-effective, portable, and time efficient, revealed that human eye color varies along more dimensions than the one represented by the blue-green-brown categories studied previously. Our work represents the first genome-wide study of quantitative human eye color. We clearly identified 3 new loci, LYST, 17q25.3, TTC3/DSCR9, in contributing to the natural and subtle eye color variation along multiple dimensions, providing new leads towards a more detailed understanding of the genetic basis of human eye color.
(Via Nature)
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A Macabre Fixation: Is Plastination Copyrightable?
I’ve actually wondered about this, as von Hagen’s popular (and assumed lucrative) Body Worlds exhibits have spawned many imitators of possibly questionable origins (one competing show is currently on view in a gallery inside our football stadium at the University of Texas). I guess that beyond the ethical and moral issues of consent and propriety, there’s also the business aspect: how enforceable is copyright when the primary medium is the deceased human body?
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Adam West on Videogames
In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be.
Prescient words from Adam West (yes, that Adam West), in Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, July, 1983.
(Via 1Up’s Retro Gaming)
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H2G2 Remake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjUCzY16pE0&feature=player_embedded
Might not be the prettiest thing I’ve seen lately, but it’s a point-and-click remake of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! It was released on May 25th, just in time for towel day. More about the new version here and here.
(Via GameSetWatch)
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Nasa Spacewalk Snapshot
Astronauts Michael Good and Garrett Reisman peeking in through the aft windows of the shuttle Atlantis during last week’s spacewalk. Hopefully HAL will let them back in.
(Full size version over at NASA. Via The Register)
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NES Music Tracker NTRQ
Old school NES musician Neil Baldwin of Duty Cycle Generator has released a native NES music tracker called NTRQ as a downloadable ROM. Even better, you can now get it in real NES cartridge form (songs you create are saved to the battery backup), with proceeds going to charity!
(Via GameSetWatch)
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Help Save a Piece of Usenet History at Duke University
Duke’s OIT is taking down the Usenet service pioneered by its grad students in 1979, a supremely long-lived Internet resource that helped define modern communication (BBS’s, forums, and P2P software owe much to Usenet and the A news client). Another nail in the venerable medium’s slow, eventual decline.
