Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground, by John Gruber. Here’s what I want from a Twitter client: Tight, usually one-line display per tweet (I don’t want to see your mugshots, at least not all the time), incremental search (who again twittered about that?), marking visited links, ability to see a user’s last links easily, a simple way to copy the text and the URL of the permalink, a multi-line input widget that actually fits 160 characters, a way to post tweets with time lag (e.g. post these three tweets in the next hour), a reliable way to see if my tweet has been posted, a threading view, drafting tweets. I currently use Twitterific and am more than a bit unsatisfied.

GeoCities will close later this year, a significant loss of internet culture. Also, see this.

How False Rumors Can Cost Lives, by Kragen Sitaker. Must read.

This Diseased Utopia: 10 Thoughts on Swine Flu and the City

Minkowski’s question mark function

jwz’s meta key, I mainly use ESC in Emacs. (Now laugh.)

Meat cards, WJW.

Coherence is an experimental programming language. It is the continuation of Subtext using other means. Very interesting.

Maths and the bomb: Sir Michael Atiyah at 80

Open money is a means of exchange freely available to all.

Real Fonts on the Web, an Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow by Jeffrey Zeldman at A List Apart.

Note-keeping in 1786, Blumenbach’s System of Maps.

Our Favorite Typefaces of 2008, at the relaunched Typographica.

ix empfiehlt Blogs, man folge den Links für weitere gute deutsche Blogs.

How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter, must read.

uzbl, browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy. Hardcore minimalist.

Exactitudes

Phallic Subway Map

VON LAIEN REGIERT:

Wir fordern die Bundesregierung auf, die durch die Listen offensichtlich bekannten illegalen Websites zu schließen und ihre Urheber bzw. Betreiber strafrechtlich zu verfolgen. Wir lehnen Internetsperren ab, die ob ihrer Intransparenz und technischen Zweifelhaftigkeit eine Gefahr für die Demokratie in Deutschland sind. Wir fühlen uns durch die von Fachleuten wiederholt in Frage gestellten Zahlen und Fakten, die das Familienministerium kommuniziert, als wählende Bürger belogen.

Wir halten Wahlkampf-Taktiken und politischen Populismus für äußerst unangemessen, wenn es um die Bekämpfung des Verbrechens der Gewalt an Minderjährigen gehen soll.

The Tricki is now live! A brand new Wiki-style site that is intended to develop into a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques.

The Language Designer’s Dilemma, Gilad Bracha reports from lang.net 09. For the talks, better go here and get the .wmvs. (And do at least watch Erik Meijer’s, it’s worth it.)

Hawala is an alternative or parallel remittance system. It exists and operates outside of, or parallel to ‘traditional’ banking or financial channels.

Sand/Stone, “a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert”.

Why Being Smart Won’t Get You Laid, recommended reading.

Delimited continuations in Scala

Cantor’s Non-Diagonal Proof

My First Dictionary

Leaving Your Mark

Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.

Phusion Passenger 2.2.0 now supports nginx! Awesome.

Understanding Twitter, by Dan Kennedy.

GitHub Issue Tracker!, simple but useful.

Inside the precision hack, they did it for teh lulz.

Spectrum of Online Friendship, by Mike Arauz.

Wo sich die Kanzler quälten würde ich sofort einziehen. Das Gästezimmer sollte aber renoviert werden.

Boomerang is a programming language for writing lenses—well-behaved bidirectional transformations—that operate on ad-hoc, textual data formats.

Lichtenberg’s letter to Johann Beckmann seems to be the oldest preserved written reference to the idea of using the square-root of two as an aspect ratio for paper formats.

The Atom Publishing Protocol is a failure, says Joe Gregorio.

Great Challenges To Wikis

The Word Problem for Free Groups

Forget everything you thought you knew about squid porn

Vote YES for licensing sanity!, and make Wikipedia migrate to CC-BY-SA.

Mathematical seduction, an introduction to p-adic analysis. Contains explicit math acts.

The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics, typesetting .

Toward Understanding E-Prime, by Robert Anton Wilson.

How not to render 3D graphics, 40 ways to get a blank black screen.

The short and thankless life of the Goomba

To Create is to Destroy

Is Astrology a Science?

Smiley boobs

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, by The Band.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, by Joan Baez.

Am Tag, als Conny Kramer starb, by Juliane Werding.

Der Tag als Thomas Anders starb, by Die goldenden Zitronen.

Germany muzzles WikiLeaks, was für eine Riesensauerei. Sämtliche Zensurversuche sind jedoch zwecklos: Information muss frei sein, und Information wird frei sein. Und nun nehmt halt wikileaks.org.

Modern History is a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos.

List of spherical symmetry groups, for your egg-painting needs.

Taylor R. Campbell’s blag, in finest plain text. (How simple could the web be if we all stepped back a bit.)

Lecture Notes: Introduction to Categorial Logic, by Steven Awodey and Andrej Bauer.

REDUCE is an interactive system for general algebraic computations of interest to mathematicians, scientists and engineers. Has some interesting libraries. Now BSD-licensed!

ILC 2009, photo gallery by Edi Weitz.

This is That, a collection of reasons to live.

historical del.icio.us

Live and let live

Structured Programming with go to Statements (PDF), by Donald E. Knuth.

Psychological Criticism of the Prototype-Based OO-Languages, by Juha Petteri Pesonen.

Capabilities for External Uniqueness, by Philipp Haller, Martin Odersky. Has an interesting “Related Work” section, too.

Bastard Culture! User participation and the Extension of Cultural Industries, thesis by Mirko Tobias Schäfer.

The BLDGBLOG Book is there! I’m preordering mine.

Synagogue Turned East Village Penthouse

Latex/Guns/Gnosis: The Matrix Turns 10

Tarski’s high school algebra problem

Old GUI videos, by Don Hopkins. Featuring NeWS, HyperTIES, Emacs.

Interview: moot of 4chan (Part 1), from re:publica 09.

How to survive the Web without embracing it, Cory Doctorow at re:publica 2009.

Three Versions of Judas, by Jorge Luis Borges.

Debian & Android Together on G1, Debian already supports ARM EABI, which is the underlying architecture of Android.

Scala on Android, not that hard.

The technical problems with ‘sender stores messages’ schemes, very good points.

Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2008, very comprehensive.

Purely-Functional Incremental Mutation

Workspaces – No computers!

Unusual Map Projections

Yes, we kern.

On URL shorteners, by Joshua Schachter. The historian in me cries every time when he sees a shortened link that will certainly outlive the link site (that is, on Usenet and mailing lists).

Wrong Tomorrow, time vs. pundits. Keep track of predictions of the future by public figures.

Join Or Die, Justine Lai: “I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order.”

Any.IO, providing access to Twitter and Identi.ca through DNS and finger, as well as finger through HTTP.

Faster than a speeding photon

Agnosticism and the theological question through open hypotheses, “The direct influence that this question has on the course of lives of a significant part of the world’s population … makes me see agnosticism as an unacceptable abstention.”

Can we pass a law saying that until you’ve read the Bible, you’re not Christian?

What is the color of the Internet?

Palace of Soviets

A New Factoring Algorithm, “Her result is nothing less than a new approach to factoring. If correct, it will break factoring based crypto-system in random polynomial time.”

RFC 5513: IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms

RFC 5514: IPv6 over Social Networks

CCC: Internetsperren greifen zu kurz, “Der Chaos Computer Club unterstützt eine Initiative gegen das Ausdrucken von einschlägigem Material aus dem Internet. Nach einem nun vorgelegten Plan müssen Politiker und Beamte endlich keine mißliebigen Inhalte aus dem Internet mehr ertragen.”

Introducing CADIE, Research group at Google switches on world’s first “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system.

Gmail Autopilot

Interview with the author of “Mastering cat”

If I Was a Robot