Scientific American recently ran An Earth Without People, an article about just how fragile and maintenance intensive our infrastructure is. Larger images from the article can be found at mondolithic, and other interesting visualizations are out there.

Some folks at Princeton's CS department have done a good analysis of a Diebold voting system, the kind used in many elections across the country. They've done a good job of presenting their findings in several different forms, for various audiences ("executive summary", a video, an in-depth technical whitepaper). There's ways for anyone with web access to really grasp the content of their research, which i find pretty admirable.

Folks who know me know my personal preference is for the technical whitepaper, which was actually a great read. It's very clearly explained, sober and direct, and points out the wide range of potential vulnerabilities that the machines share with most commercial PCs, in addition to a series of vulnerabilities specific to the Diebold-proprietary software. If you have any interest in computer security, do yourself a favor and read it. They're thinking about these things the right way.

I've seen a couple of references recently to the beautiful mathematical/scientific art of Bathsheba Grossman. Very impressive stuff that is almost entirely enabled by technology. She uses computers, laser etching, 3D printing, and maybe most interestingly, direct-metal printing, which is something I had not been familiar with. It's really nice how she gives detailed explanations of how she makes the pieces.

Also from Joey Hess comes moreutils, which looks to be an awesome package of glue utilities. As the README puts it:

This is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago.

I look forward to this propagating into etch.

I just stumbled across this interesting discussion among several typographers about the euro symbol. The discussion is from 10 years ago, when the symbol was just being introduced.

There are interesting points in there covering everything from the name of the symbol itself (some people think it should be the "ecu" instead of the "euro", others vehemently disagree), its placement into unicode and other character sets, complaints about the glyph's general form, political trouble with the guidelines set forth for its use by th

So i recently came across an article titled Unexpected Increased Mortality After Implementation of a Commercially Sold Computerized Physician Order Entry System. It makes me shudder to think about it. i'm glad i don't work in healthcare IT.

However, there are a number of flaws in the analysis (not the least of which is the sample size: n = 1). But it does raise the question: given the supposed culturally-ingrained scientific methodology in allopathic medicine, why are these IT systems implemented without wider study? Or are there wider studies that i just don't know about?

This is so weird. Some Japanese researchers came up with a way to remotely control human movement. Oh it's so weird. Anyone who still thinks that their mind is tucked securely away in their skull should wake up and smell the coffee, or WE'LL MAKE YOU DO IT FROM AFAR!!!!!!!

I've always been intrigued by the idea of living on a house boat. There is something both romantic and comforting about house boats. I love water and I'd like having a home that is truly a vessel-- self-contained and self-sufficient. So I was very interested in this article on amphibious houses in the Netherlands. A realistic, responsible reaction to the climate change we've brought upon ourselves. It's innovative and beautiful too: look at this architecture firm's projects (referred to in article). Neat.

i've been learning more about fonts and how they work. To that end, i've created a simple font that mimics my own handwriting. It's far from perfect, and it doesn't properly handle some of the characters that i'd like it to, but it's a start. If you'd like to see an example of what it currently looks like, you can see Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (pdf) rendered in the font.

I enjoy the balance that fonts give between artistic/aesthetic decisions, rigorous formal requirements, and arcane technical minutiae. I also find it really amusing to be able to search for text in a pdf reader and have it pick out characters of what looks like my (terrible) handwriting.

Given the looming energy crisis, the increasing popularity bio feul, and human blood lust, its sort of hard to believe that it's taken this long for someone to make gas out of dead animals. This German inventor has been making batches of bio diesel out of, among other things, road kill cats (oh yes the irony is not lost on me).

Although I can't imagine it would ever be very efficient to husband animals for fuel (uh, wait, did I just say that?), if we, as humans, were ever able to move beyond the mental sophistication of pond scum, I think we could probably power a lot more than cars with all of the dead humans, especially considering the impending population explosion. OR, with no need to move beyond pond scum AND taking advantage of our blood lust, maybe we can fuel our roving armies by just rolling over the slaughtered. Man, wouldn't THAT be efficient. I can just imagine future humvees outfitted with inverse cattle catchers that just suck up the bodies as they plow through the battle fields. Now that's what I call progress.