On November 24th at 9:28pm GMT, the first 3D printer built to operate in space successfully manufactured its first part on the International Space Station (ISS). It is the first time that hardware has been additively manufactured in space, as opposed to launching it from Earth. Mission patch and the First Zero-G 3D Printer That's right, it was made in space! And of course, it was developed by Made In Space, a company whose aim is in "constructing hardware that can build what is needed in space, as opposed to launching it from Earth." Clearly way over my head technically but perhaps the First...
German university unveils what may be the world’s oldest Qur’an
With about 95% certainty the team at the Coranica Project, part of the University of Tübingen, have placed a manuscript of the Qu'ran to between 649-675 AD. Using carbon-14 dating on select samples of the manuscript parchment researchers conclude that the manuscript, which is written in Kufic script, one of the oldest forms of Arabic writing, originated between 20-40 years after the death of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad making it one of the earliest known copies. The Coranica project, is a collaboration between the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Paris and the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. It is sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and...
The New Pelican Has Landed
After a 30 year slumber Pelican Books has returned. In its heyday it was an essential ingredient to a well-rounded view of the world. Coming from the mind of Allen Lane, who revolutionized the reading experience with the introduction of Penguin paperbacks, it provided affordable non-fiction to the masses: Costing no more than a packet of cigarettes, and aimed at the true lay reader, Pelicans combined intellectual authority with clear and accessible prose. As the first British publisher of intelligent non-fiction at a genuinely low price, Pelican became an informal university for generations of Britons. With books on economics and...
chromapoems: Text Visualized
The latest technology to touch the textual world is Chromapoems. Utilizing the software program, Processing, which "promotes software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology," Lola Migas translates the text from some well known works into radial graphs. Each word is represented as a block within each ring. A group of blocks in a similar hue all belong in the same sentence. The more frequently an uncommon letter is used, the more saturated a block becomes, which in turn affects the hue of the sentence. A new ring signifies a line break. [vimeo width="640" height="300"]http://vimeo.com/111263365[/vimeo] I can't wait for the...
If Hemingway Wrote Javascript: Imagining the literary greats writing code
The tech world collides with the book world in If Hemingway Wrote Javascript, a new offering from No Starch Press. For writers as with computer programmers it is all about the language. It is the starting point for each discipline and to succeed at both one must master the craft while developing their own style. If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript is a book that "playfully bridges the worlds of programming and literature for the literary geek in all of us." Written by Angus Croll, a UI guru at Twitter and a leading authority on Javascript, the book is a compilation of imagined short Java...