For the 2010 World Cup, Nike has created a recycled kit with recycled packaging. The shirts are made from nylon, produced from more than thirteen million melted-down plastic bottles, creating a kit 15% lighter than previous versions.
Category: links
Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner
Philip K. Dick never got to see Blade Runner, but thought highly of the preview that he saw before his death. The film by Ridley Scott was an adaptation of his short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
PopSci archives
Popular Science has made their entire archive available for browsing. That’s more than a hundred years of the magazine, visible in its original format, advertising and all.
Using GPU’s for general computation
How the
If a program can be broken up into many threads all doing the same thing on different data (ideally executing arithmetic operations), a GPU will probably be able to do this an order of magnitude faster than a CPU.
Oh no, words!
Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text. The Onion, spot on as usual.
Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.
Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.
Civilization at its oldest
The Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, is thought to predate civilization.
The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.
Living in a hologram
Our world may be a giant hologram.
Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.
Mind blown, check back later (via justin).
NYT Magazine redesign
Behind the redesign of the New York Times Magazine. Great visual and typographic treatment
Driving right
Why some countries drive on the right and others on the left. The countries that drive on the left are largely made up of former British colonies, but they do account for 34% of the world’s population.
Art that sells itself
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a piece of artwork by Caleb Larson that perpetually tries to sells itself.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
Gore’s choice
For his new book, Al Gore wanted some tweaks to the typeface.
“You see, Al is really involved with the project and we spend a lot of time working together in the publisher’s office. When he was reviewing the proofs, he had a comment about the typeface.”
As a result, there is an updated version of Brioni now available.
Time Tube
Oskar Karlin reworked the infamous London Underground map using the time it takes to travel between stations rather than the distance.