Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com
Everyone is quite rightly linking to this great interactive explainer on colour. It does a great job of describing complex concepts in a clear accessible way.
Link tags: spaces
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6, 97: Why scorpions?
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
NASA Collection
Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.
᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ - YouTube
When is a space not a space?
Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.
Your Public Library Is Where It’s At + Subtraction.com
Fuck yeah, libraries!
Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.
This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.
And when we look at it this way, as a startlingly, almost defiantly civilized institution, it seems even more urgent that we make sure it not only continues to survive, but that it should also thrive, too.
The Good Room – Frank Chimero
Another brilliant talk from Frank, this time on the (im)balance between the commercial and the cultural web.
Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it.
This really resonates with me:
If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance.
Seedship
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.
Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars: The True Story of a Real Rocket Man with G.A. “Jim” Ogle
I listen to a lot of podcast episodes. The latest episode of the User Defenders podcast (which is very different from the usual fare) is one of my favourites—the life and times of a NASA engineer working on everything from Apollo to the space shuttle.
You know how they say it doesn’t take a rocket scientist? Well, my Dad is one. On a recent vacation to Florida to celebrate his 80th birthday, he spent nearly three hours telling me his compelling story.
The ‘Credit Card Number’ Field Must Allow and Auto-Format Spaces (80% Don’t) - Articles - Baymard Institute
A deep dive into formatting credit card numbers with spaces in online forms.
Culture Ship Randomizer · A gravitas free zone.
For when you just have to name something after a Culture General Systems Vehicle …or maybe a General Contact Unit.
How We Could Actually Build a Space Colony - Popular Mechanics
This is basically porn for me.
Bernal spheres, Stanford tori, and O’Neill cylinders, oh my!
SKYLON Users’ Manual (PDF)
Tech specs for a spacecraft that doesn’t exist (yet).
Sci-Fi Airshow :: Home
I want to go to there!
This is what Photoshop is for. Be sure to watch the slideshow.
Project Icarus
A joint effort by the Tau Zero Foundation and the British Interplanetary Society to research the design of an interstellar spacecraft.
Space craft - a set on Flickr
There's some lovely Buran porn here.
Twitter / MarsPhoenix
The Mars Phoenix probe is twittering its journey to the red planet.