Category: Daily Links

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment has some hi-res colour pictures of Mars for you.

via the Flickr blog, someone having fun with their computer’s built-in camera and some household stuff.

‘Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.’ My blog design is *so* not colour-blind friendly. Ho-hum.

‘Here is a social poster which relates to the United Nations Conference held in London in 1973. During the conference the New Directions in the Law of the Sea were introduced. They were to prevent the pollution of the seas by ships.’

‘Although there are a few astrological images, this anonymous manuscript is almost totally devoted to fluid dynamics and mechanics. I can’t find any background to the work and suppose it was produced somewhere between the 16th to 19th centuries.’

A fab picture at APOD. ‘What has happened to Saturn’s moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as ice.’

a tale of heartwarming geekiness: ‘There are a bunch of people in their basements playing Flight Simulator, and a bunch of people in their basements pretending to be air traffic controllers, running an application that simulates a radarscope.’

Such fun!

via Metafilter: ‘This blog is made up of transcripts of Harry Lamin’s letters from the first World War. The letters will be posted exactly 90 years after they were written.’

via fishea on delicious: ‘Starting in 2003 I committed to the idea of creating a luxury apartment in the mall.’

via swissmiss, a really cute idea.

A comparison between the Pirahã (a culture with no concept of numbers and little apparent wish to learn about them) and a parallel situation in the USA.

illustrations from ‘Arcana Entomologica; or, Illustrations of Rare, and Interesting Exotic Insects’ (1841-1845)by John Westwood

‘The inventor’s trial-and-error approach can be automated by software that mimics natural selection’

‘The clip below shows how, if you vibrate a surface violently enough, between around 30 to 200 times a second, and use a liquid that is a little thicker than water, droplets can be made to climb uphill.’

via bookofjoe; it is what it says it is.

interesting question & possible answer: ‘The hypothesis goes back to a 1967 paper … “Why are mountain passes higher in the tropics?” They aren’t, of course, but he suggested a pass at the same elevation may be more of a barrier in the tropics’