All Posts, page 16

Katia Moskvitch:

Astronauts returning to Earth after a long stint in space are so badly disorientated that they usually can’t walk properly for 24 hours or longer. Turns out human brains function differently in space and when an astronaut gets back, it takes his or her brain some time to re-train itself. Now Marissa Rosenberg, a neuroscientist at Nasa, plans to use virtual reality headsets as a tool to short-cut the training.

Kristen Yoonsoo Kim investigates why Korean films keep getting snubbed at the Oscars:

At the time, the submission of Age of Shadows made no sense to me. But in early 2017, a government blacklist created by Korea’s former, impeached president Park Geun-hye was uncovered. Thousands of Korean artists and cultural figures were banned from receiving government support, and one of the most prominent figures on that blacklist was The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook, thought to be too leftist and thus a threat to the government’s agenda.

The Handmaiden, Okja, and Burning are among my favorite films of the last few years. It’s a shame they’re not getting wider recognition.

Mike Orcutt:

A miner who somehow gains control of a majority of the network’s mining power can defraud other users by sending them payments and then creating an alternative version of the blockchain in which the payments never happened. This new version is called a fork. The attacker, who controls most of the mining power, can make the fork the authoritative version of the chain and proceed to spend the same cryptocurrency again.

This sounds less like a hack and more like a consequence of “it’ll never happen” dismissal of possible abuses of the system as it’s designed.

A great little documentary about the birth of the web, featuring Tim Berners-Lee front and center.

FOREVERYONE.NET connects the future of the web with the little-known story of its birth. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet creating the world wide web.

Digital archeology — a working simulation of the first ever web browser:

In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as “the web” today.

In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the origins of this transformative technology.

It’s amazing just how resilient and backwards-compatible HTML is. My site is already quite usable in WorldWideWeb, but now I’ll have to resist the urge to add some optimizations for 1990 web users.

I don’t quite share Craig Mod’s love of email newsletters, but I do strongly agree on this point:

I try to be deliberate, and social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do. Which, to someone who, you know, gives a shit, is pretty dang insulting.

David Ehrlich writes about the upcoming Apollo 11 documentary, made using recently discovered 65mm footage:

It’s rare that picture quality can inspire a physical reaction, but the opening moments of “Apollo 11,” in which a NASA camera crew roams around the base of the rocket and spies on some of the people who’ve come to gawk at it from a beach across the water, are vivid enough to melt away the screen that stands between them. The clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.

This looks absolutely incredible.

A remarkable visualization of emergence at work. The close-up shots of the circulatory system look straight out of a trippy sci-fi horror film.

apenwarr:

The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn’t do in the last 6 hours.

A deep dive into figure accessibility from Scott O’Hara:

A figcaption is meant to provide a caption or summary to a figure, relating it back to the document the figure is contained within, or conveying additional information that may not be directly apparent from reviewing the figure itself.

If an image is given an empty alt, then the figcaption is in effect describing nothing. And that doesn’t make much sense, does it?