A very simple rule
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.
Link tags: night
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How Florence Nightingale Changed Data Visualization Forever - Scientific American
The design process in action in Victorian England:
Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.
The Cello and the Nightingales: How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Experience of Empathy for Nature – The Marginalian
Decades before fiber optic cable spanned the bottom of the ocean to link continents, the airborne voice of a spring songbird did.
Mario Popova writes of an interspecies broadcast:
Those were the early days of broadcasting and recorded music, when the technology was both too primitive and too expensive to make the joy of music as ambient as air; the days before we made our Faustian deal with the technocrats who made music cheap and musicians poor so that we could stream it anytime anywhere with no recompense or thought of the souls from which the stream pours.
The Lords of Midnight
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?
This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.
(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)
Google Night Walk
A nice stroll around Marseilles at night without any of the traditional danger.
The creation of Missile Command and the haunting of its creator, Dave Theurer
The story behind the classic arcade game Missile Command and the toll it took on its creator:
Theurer’s constant strides for perfection left him working his body to the point that Missile Command’s premise started to manifest itself in his subconscious, sneaking into his dreams and turning them to nightmares.
There was something about the sound of those explosions, the feeling of the trackball in your hand, and the realisation that no matter how well you played, you could only delay the inevitable.
THE END
Black Marble - City Lights 2012 - a set on Flickr
Gorgeous pictures from the Suomi satellite, just released by NASA
YouTube - Newsnight Goldacre Sigman BBC2 20090224
Behold the double awesomeness of Jeremy Paxman and Ben Goldacre! Susan Greenfield, alas, is simply embarrassing.
Delighting with Data » tomtaylor.co.uk
Notes and slides from Tom Taylor's talk at Oxford Geek Night 7. It's a great collection of things that talk (or at least Twitter): Tower Bridge, asteroids, plants...
SCHED: SXSW 2008 Schedule for Friday March 7 in Austin, TX
Look what Taylor made: a handy schedule of everything going on at South By Southwest. Smart kid.
The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » HMRC fiasco: Government “not interested” in expert warnings
The ORG turn a Newsnight interview into hypertext, thereby strengthening the message exponentially.