2026-04-26 23:43:32
Paul Ford: This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies. (Tl;dr: regulation.) “The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale.”
2026-04-26 22:19:49
Wow, Sabastian Sawe set a world record with a 1:59:30 marathon. “They call Sabastian Sawe the silent assassin. But it was impossible to ignore the beautiful destruction on the streets of London as the 30-year-old Kenyan…”
2026-04-25 04:55:00
A collection of weekly bus passes from Milwaukee, WI. Years covered are 1930-1979. Was there a new design every single week? (via @slowernet)
[This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2015.]
Tags: design · timeless posts
2026-04-25 04:02:42
A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…”
2026-04-25 03:05:40
“We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knives and [started carving]. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”
2026-04-25 02:19:12
While reading this article about the structure of complex knots, I ran across this diagram drawn by scientist Peter Guthrie Tait in 1885 for a paper called On Knots Part III. It’s one of two figures that together show all of the possible variations of knots with 10 crossings. I think the color plus the small multiples activated the Tufte array in my brain; anyway, I love this diagram. (via damn interesting)
(I tried for the better part of an hour to track down a high-resolution copy of Tait’s paper to no avail. There are various contenders, but nothing that includes high-res scans of both knottiness diagrams. I’m curious about this archive of the original paper but not $41 curious. If anyone has access through their institution and wants to send me a PDF, I’d love that. Update: I have a copy of the paper and will be posting updated images soon! Thank you, Michael!)
Tags: mathematics · Peter Guthrie Tait · science