The personal website of Alex Weber
I’ve eaten a lot of Dominos pizza, and I’ll admit I didn’t look too closely at their typographically-involved box design until now. Lots of details to enjoy here.
Source: Rag Right | Terrance Weinzierl Works On Pizza | TypeEd: Training on the Fundamentals of Typography
Another awesomely audacious aspiration aims to truly decentralize the web once and for all: IPFS
Remaking The Internet With IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.
Source: Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch
A fascinating look at what it was like for the author to completely lose their vision, and re-learn everything—even how to use their computer or smartphone!
I do remember being surprised to learn that only 3% of blind people are completely blind. Most have some degree of light perception or even a little usable vision, but I’m one of the few who can see nothing at all, and nothing is the best way to describe it. People assume it must be like closing your eyes or being in a dark room, but it’s not like that at all. It’s a complete absence of light, so it isn’t black or any other colour I can describe.
Source: Losing sight – Tink
TL;DR: mealworms’ microbiome can digest plastic!
The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.
Good news from an unlikely source!
The judge also invited the defendants to submit a joint brief as to why they should get attorneys’ fees. Just the invite is a sign of changing times: in his four years on the bench, Gilstrap has never granted attorneys’ fees to a defendant in a patent case, according to Texas Lawyer.
Source: East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases in one fell swoop | Ars Technica
Woah… Let’s get those automated space cleanup satellites and lasers going before this becomes a real problem! TL;DR: space debris might compound and prevent launching new satellites.
For the first time since the 1960s it’s beginning to look as if human activity beyond low earth orbit is a distinct possibility within the next decade.
But there’s a fly in the ointment.
Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.
This isn’t just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it’s traveling at orbital velocity
TL;DR: Using Subresource Integrity hashing/checking can prevent your site from participating in a Great Cannon-style attack.
Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition 43 and other modern browsers help websites to control third-party JavaScript loads and prevent unexpected or malicious modifications. Using a new specification called Subresource Integrity, a website can include JavaScript that will stop working if it has been modified. With this technology, developers can benefit from the performance gains of using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) without having to fear that a third-party compromise can harm their website.
Source: Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
Brace yourself… It’s about to get really nerdy in here.
Sex, in this case, is used to breed the characteristics of the badge’s light pattern as defined through a virtual genome. Things like the color range, blinking rate, and saturation of the light pattern are mapped into a set of diploid (two copies of each gene) chromosomes
TL;DR: tsundokuis a Japanese portmanteau of sorts meaning “pile of unread books”
It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.
The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読.
Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく.
Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.
The Prison Yoga Project seems like a great idea. Think about the following quote for a second:
“…93 percent of them are returning to society. They’re coming back. How would you like them to be when they return? We haven’t done a good job of rehabilitating people…”
The Prison Yoga Project is bringing mindfulness, meditation, and physical release to hundreds of prisoners.
Source: Prison Yoga Is Helping Inmates Transcend Their Cells | VICE | United States