An animated history of glasses – or, why you owe your enhanced vision to Isaac Newton.
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The last four years of patent wars in cell phones, visualized – shown by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of Everything Is A Remix fame at TEDGlobal 2012.
A 1790 map showing the viewing path of the 1761 Transit of Venus, which sparked the world’s first coordinated global scientific collaboration – a fine addition to history’s most magnificent maps.
Captain Cook’s drawing of his observation of the 1769 Transit of Venus, an essential part of the first worldwide scientific collaboration of its kind.
The Star Trek cast, minus William Shatner, meets the Space Shuttle Enterprise in 1976. NASA’s prototype space shuttle was to have been named Constitution, butStar Trek fans show mounted a write-in campaign that led to it being named Enterprise.
From the excellent new app The Space Shuttle Era: Stories from 30 Years of Exploration by The Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum. Some images are also available online.
Poster for the 1939 New York World’s Fair by Joseph Binder, from PANTONE’s color history of the 20th century.
Reading is a bootcamp for developing and exercising critical thinking. Without that — intellectual apocalypse! And critical thinking is about developing a point of view, and all writing is — or, should be — about arguing a point of view, implicitly or explicitly. When you bring the crowd into the equation, this concept completely disappears — because a crowd cannot have a point of view, at least not one that is simultaneously focused and authentic to each individual in the crowd.
I don’t need a focus group of strangers to tell me what I should be reading or, more dangerously, how to read what I’m reading. Decision by committee doesn’t work in creative labor, and it certainly doesn’t work in intellectual labor.
I shared some thoughts on the future of reading, and why “social reading” isn’t necessarily a great idea, over at Findings.
This is the time for forward-looking research universities to invest scarce resources in computer science/computing—even at the expense of other engineering disciplines, if necessary—in order to ensure a vibrant, cohesive, and prominent computer science/computing presence and identity. This most certainly is not the time to scale back on computer science research and education.
Zvi Galil, Dean of College of Computing at Georgia Tech, sends the president of University of Florida a letter addressing UF’s decision to eliminate its computer science department in order to save money.
The landing site map for Apollo 11, 1969, from NASA’s records at the National Archives at Riverside.
Count on the 1960s to at once break and reinforce gender stereotypes: Female astronaut turns damsel in distress in the arms of male astronaut.
Should you check your email? A flowchart by the brilliant Wendy MacNaughton (previously: I II III) for a Forbes article on how and why to ignore your inbox.
In the oldest surviving recording of Thomas Edison’s voice, circa 1888, he describes an imagined trip “around the world on the phonograph.”
TED curator Chris Anderson on how web video powers global innovation through “crowd-accelerated learning.”
