Tag: books

Link dump 2016/8: Open science, books on a ship, waves in the Alps, maker projects

Writing power tools

As I’m in the early stages of my final research project for my studies in Library Science, I’m looking at different ways to organise my thoughts and materials, and taking it as an opportunity to try some of the tools that are defining the current trend towards open and reproducible research. Things like version control can however quickly become complex and might scare away the bravest. It is certainly one of the most challenging topics I’ve had to teach during Software Carpentry workshops. And I’m far from understanding all of it. That’s why this Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science looks to be a fantastic resource, laying out a complete workflow using open formats. As far as writing the actual paper, there is still no tool that will replace me. Although it might soon change, as a novel written by a computer almost won a literary price in Japan. The wind-up bird got creative.

Words in transit

I like it when a subway station is being refurbished and traces of the past are briefly brought to light again while walls are being resurfaced. This happened recently on the Paris Métro Trinité station. Together with a glimpse of swanky typefaces and yellowing memories, one learns in passing that this operation in French is called décarrossage.

The Royal Geographical Society recently digitized a series of photographs documenting Shackleton’s voyage on the Endurance, including this view of his travelling library:

Black and white view of Shackleton's library on board the ship Endurance.
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s library on the Endurance. Source: bbc.com

Of course they couldn’t resist trying to identify the contents of the library. And it is only a matter of time before Shackleton’s collection is dutifully catalogued on LibraryThing.

Earlier this month, the same Royal Geographical Society was also hosting my friend and land-art artist Sylvain Meyer for the annual conference of the Society of Garden Designers. I’m very happy that Sylvain is getting recognized for his fantastic work! I also miss my print of his early piece Ondulation, which I loaned to another friend when I left Switzerland.

Photo of a land-art installation in the Swiss Alps. The earth has been manipulated to represent a set of concentric circles.
Ondulation by Sylvain Meyer

Making extravaganza

I’m currently clearing some backlog on my feed readers. Last week I went through the map folder, today it’s the one on making. A bunch of posts were about the insane Wintergatan musical marble machine that took the Internet by storm a couple of weeks ago. Here are some other projects that jumped at me:

The other night I lost an hour of my life making an origami Darth Vader by following this instructional video by Tadashi Mori. Here’s an origami X-Wing fighter to go with it.

IMG_7247

Finally, I like a good project timelapse as much as the next guy, but this one is particularly entertaining.

Link dump 2016/6: planes over the Atlantic, hidden metadata, name wars and materials

Next time I cross the Atlantic, I shall stop a moment to reflect on everything that’s happening in the background to make this possible. AeroSavvy has a great post explaining how the North Atlantic Tracks system works.

This experimental visualization tool from the Internet Archive is a fun way to explore the popularity of a given concept:

Graph displaying instances over time of the word "Colonialism" in 82,000 books indexed by the Internet Archive.
Dated instances of the word “Colonialism” in 82,000 books indexed by the Internet Archive.

The Anatomy of a Tweet. Unsurprisingly, a tweet is composed of much more than 140 characters. There’s a scary amount of metadata coming along with it.

Serialization formats are not toys. Things to watch out for if you are building a web application that takes YAML, XML or JSON input. Watch it even if you don’t: being aware of how easy it is to break software is sobering.

Game of Thrones — the French Baby Boys’ Names Edition. An hilarious take on the evolution of the most popular boy’s names in France. Also from the same excellent Strange Maps blog, I can’t help but love the straightforward honesty of cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin who admitted to the following on his 1753 map of Australia:

Excerpt from a 1753 map, showing the words "Ceci est Conjecturale".
Excerpt from Bellin’s Carte Réduite des Terres Australes, 1753.

I’m currently reading Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters and discovering little snippets information about materials I wasn’t aware of. For example, that the reason reinforced concrete works so well is because “as luck would have it, steel and concrete have almost identical coefficients of expansion” (p. 75). In passing, he also warns against the simplistic equation concrete = ugly:

But the truth is that cheap design is cheap design whatever the material. Steel can be used in good or bad design, as can wood or bricks, but it is only with concrete that the epithet of ‘ugly’ has stuck. There is nothing intrinsically poor about the aesthetics of concrete.

I agree.

Link dump 2016/1: Modernist libraries, fiction publishing, podcasts and Noah Webster

While I keep working on the draft of my first actual blog posts, let’s see if I can also use this space to keep track of what I recently enjoyed reading:

This week, I also learned that most of American English spelling can be traced to Noah Webster. He axed the extra u’s in colour and neighbour, changed offence to offense and cheque to businesslike check. He’s the one who insisted the letter “z” be pronounced “zee” instead of “zed” (he also wanted “y” to be called “yi” and “w” to become “we”). All this, and much more, from the first chapter of Mary Norris‘ Between You & Me, which is a true delight to read1.

  1. Nonrestrictive clause ↩