Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi

By Pimoroni: Monitor your world with Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi! There’s a whole bunch of fancy environmental sensors on this board, and a gorgeous little full-colour LCD to display your data. It’s the perfect way to get started with citizen science!

 

Enviro+ is an affordable alternative to environmental monitoring stations that can cost tens of thousands of pounds and, best of all, it’s small and hackable and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.

See also: Getting Started with Enviro+

Three reasons why the periodic table needs a redesign

New Scientist: Chemists can’t agree on the best way to arrange the elements, prompting proposals of everything from spiral-shaped alternatives to radically elongated versions.

Above: This reimagining of the periodic table, proposed by chemist Theodor Benfey in 1964, emphasises the continuity of the elements rather than imposing artificial breaks.

Mark Leach at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, keeps the internet database of periodic tables, which contains hundreds of versions.

See also: other posts tagged ‘science’

Raspberry Pi has opened an official retail store in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge.

MagPi Magazine: The new store sells a wide range of Raspberry Pi boards, accessories, kits, and merchandise. More importantly, it has interactive product demonstrations and breakout areas for people to learn all about digital making with Raspberry Pi.

Gordon Hollingworth, Director of Software Engineering at Raspberry Pi: “The concept is about trying to get closer to a less connected demographic, people who aren’t involved with technology, and show them that coding isn’t an inexplicable dark science reserved only for a few. Instead show them that it is possible, with the right instructions and an inquisitive nature, to learn about computers and coding.”

The Raspberry Pi store has been gestating for “over six years,” says Gordon. But each year Gordon and Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi CEO and co-founder, “decided against it.”

Things changed when Maplin closed all its stores in 2018. “With the demise of Maplin, we decided there was the possibility of recruiting just the right person to launch the store for us.”

See also: Other posts tagged ‘raspberry pi’

National Park Service typeface

Fast Company: If you’ve ever been to a National Park, chances are you’ve come across signage with the same distinctive lettering. The type, which features rounded edges carved into wood in all caps, has become an icon of the National Parks system.

[Jeremy] Shellhorn, who was on sabbatical from his current job as an associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, was redesigning the park’s newspaper and wanted to include the type found on National Park signs. But he soon discovered there was no digital typeface because the letters are simply formed with a CNC router in the park’s sign shop, chiseled into wood. The shape of the letters were determined by the size of the router bit.

It doesn’t really exist as a typeface unless a sign is made.

Available for anyone to download for free, the typeface comes in four weights: light, regular, heavy, and outline.

See also

• Diglû: a pictographic typeface for archeology — Diglû consists of 440 characters and 404 pictograms developed for the analysis and mediation of archaeological finds.
• Anatomia: a quirky grotesk typeface — grotesk typeface born from the skeleton of an old Scotch Roman used in an anatomy book printed in the early 20th century.
• Inkwell: a typeface for expressive writing — A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.

The Equal Earth Physical Map

Tom Patterson recently made available this high-resolution Equal Earth Physical Map as public domain.

The Equal Earth Physical Map focuses on the natural world—terrain, rivers and lakes, vegetation, land cover, and the ocean floor—free of obscuring country boundaries. Because the map projection is equal-area, continents and oceans are shown at their true sizes relative to each other.

The Equal Earth Wall Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, and selling it for profit. Consider it as yours.

 

A closer look at the the European region of the E. Asia and Australia version of the political map.

Detail of the physical world map centred on the Bay of Bengal.

It is a companion to his earlier Equal Earth political wall map, which is also provided in three versions, each centred on a different regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia.

The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is.

See also

• Canyonlands National Park texture and shaded relief map — “National Park Service cartographer Tom Patterson is a master of texture and shaded relief. He’s released this gorgeous map of Canyonlands National to the public domain.”
• The first relief map — With his map Gyger reached a fundamental progress by displaying mountains – until then drawn in template-like side views – as elevations of mass.
• The AuthaGraph world map: A new way to look at the world — …it’s time we establish a new view of the world: one that equally perceives all interests of our planet.
• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world — An important and extraordinary manuscript world map drawn up on a north polar projection to form the largest manuscript map of the world at 9 by 9 feet.

A Pretty 1940 Map of American Diversity, Annotated by Langston Hughes

Slate: This map, issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940, shows the ethnic groups living in the United States, offering a picture of their geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments.

The map omits state boundaries, opting instead to show the mix of ethnic groups by area. For heavily-populated areas, such as the Northeast or Chicago, pop-out keys framed with line drawings of people engaged in typical industries show the diversity of urban citizenry.

Altas Obscura: “Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”

See also

• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — In 1861, in an attempt to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, the Census Office produced and sold a map that showed the population distribution of slaves in the southern United States.
• WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
• The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Two cartograms from Benjamin Hennig’s Views of the World website showing how the US voted in the 2016 election and how the UK voted in the EU referendum.

366 Dogs and Their Countries of Origin

A wonderful illustration by Lili Chin who has a whole series of posters for sale for dog and cat lovers.

See also: Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world

The Spilhaus Projection

In 1942, Athelstan Spilhaus produced a world map with a unique perspective, presenting the world’s oceans as one body of water. The Spilhaus Projection could be just what the oceans need to get the attention their problems deserve.

Big Think: This is a world map unlike any other. Uniquely, it centres on Antarctica. Disturbingly, it rips Asia and the Americas to shreds. And compellingly, it presents the seas and oceans – 71% of the Earth’s surface – as a unified body of water. The map was designed by a renaissance man who also invented the skyways of Minneapolis and the secret weather balloon that caused the Roswell Incident. And yet you’ve never heard of him.

See also

• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world — An important and extraordinary manuscript world map drawn up on a north polar projection to form the largest manuscript map of the world at 9 by 9 feet. […] This printed version was published in 1604 on 64 plates, and is the only printed copy known.
• The AuthaGraph world map: A new way to look at the world — A large bulk of the 20th century was dominated by an emphasis on East and West relations. But with issues like climate change, melting glaciers in Greenland and territorial sea claims, it’s time we establish a new view of the world: one that equally perceives all interests of our planet.
• Linear lakes: These clever maps show an ‘unwrapped’ Lake Michigan and Lake Superior — What happens if you take the shoreline of a lake, cut it, and unfurl it?

Researchers map where subjective feelings are located in the body

Pixel intensities show regions where each feeling was associated with statistically significant bodily sensations.

British Psychological Society: “How do you feel?” is a simple and commonly asked question that belies the complex nature of our conscious experiences. The feelings and emotions we experience daily consist of bodily sensations, often accompanied by some kind of thought process, yet we still know very little about exactly how these different aspects relate to one another, or about how such experiences are organised in the brain.

Now, reporting their results in PNAS, a team of researchers in Finland, led by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa of the University of Turku, has produced detailed maps of what they call the “human feeling space”, showing how each of dozens of these subjective feelings is associated with a unique set of bodily sensations. [⋮]

The new results provide yet more evidence for the emerging idea that the body plays a crucial role in cognitive and emotional processes – something which has, until very recently, been overlooked. “In other words,” says study co-author Riita Hari, “the human mind is strongly embodied.”

See also: 216 positive emotions that have no direct English translation

Evolution of the English Alphabet

Matt Baker: Fyi, the above chart was actually just a simplified promo for a much larger chart – a Writing Systems of the World poster. So, if you’re concerned about the fact that thorn, wynn, or any other letters are missing, rest assured that they were indeed included on the main chart.

Entries to a Competition to Design a New Tower in London (1890)

The Public Domain Review: A selection of the more inventive entries to a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one of their own. A wonderful array of designs were put forward. Many were suspiciously similar to the Eiffel Tower and many erred on the wackier side of things…

The very practical design number 37 by Stewart, McLaren and Dunn was eventually chosen to be awarded the 500 guinea prize-money and built in Wembley Park. Construction began in 1892 but the company in charge of the erection, The Metropolitan Tower Company, soon ran into problems including falling chronically behind schedule due to marshy ground and then financial difficulties which eventually led to their liquidation in 1889. Construction ceased after only 47 metres had been completed.

(via @PublicDomainRev)

See also

• Descriptive illustrated catalogue of the sixty-eight competitive designs for the great tower for London — on archive.org
• The Pedway: Elevating London …a documentary on the post-war redevelopment in the City of London – focusing on the attempt to build an ambitious network of elevated walkways through the city. The film explores why the ‘Pedway’ scheme was unsuccessful and captures the abandoned remains that, unknown to the public, still haunt the square mile.
• Johnston100: a modernisation of TfL’s classic London Underground typeface

Medieval trade routes and geography

Even before modern times the Afro-Eurasian world was already well connected. This map depicts the main trading arteries of the high middle ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.

Credit for this map goes to Martin Månsson who posted this on /r/MapPorn, which has some interesting discussion.

The map also depicts the general topography, rivers, mountain passes and named routes. All of which contributed to why cities came to be, and still are, up until modern times.

The Silk Road is not just one, but many roads that leads through all of Asia, from Constantinople in the west, through Central Asia and the Himalayas, to Liangzhou in the east. During this time, the Chinese Song dynasty was in its height and it was one of those Chinese dynasties that were open to foreign trade and invested in commerce and infrastructure. Foreign trade was mostly concentrated to the southern ports were both Jews and Muslims had their own communities.

(via @stephenniem)

See also

• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world — An important and extraordinary manuscript world map drawn up on a north polar projection to form the largest manuscript map of the world at 9 by 9 feet. […] This printed version was published in 1604 on 64 plates, and is the only printed copy known.
• Subway-style map of Roman roads, c.125 AD
• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860

Is My Mid Century Modern Desk An Homage or a Cheap Knock Off?

Caleb Kraft for Make: I needed a desk for my office. Being a maker that is also loaded down with fancy tools, I couldn’t bear to go to the store and buy something. I decided I wanted to make something, and the design would have to be one that I wouldn’t mind looking at for long periods of time.

The big question at this point, however, is what to do with the files. Do I share them even though this is a knockoff of Helmut Magg’s work?

This is a lovely project idea and something I would very much like to do for myself.

This particular project raises some interesting questions as the desk is based on a fairly famous 50s writing desk designed by Helmut Magg. It and other similar Magg desks are still sold from licensed vendors for thousands of dollars apiece. There is also a pretty healthy knockoff market. Like the author, I think these kinds of designs are fine to use as inspiration for personal projects, but selling them — or even giving away the design blueprints — definitely puts you in a grey area. You’d probably be opening yourself up to a lawsuit, even if you were ultimately well within your legal rights.

See also

• Make: Design for CNC — This book introduces the knowledge and skills that you’ll find widely applicable across all kinds of CNC projects. Not only will you learn how to design, fabricate, and assemble a wide range of projects, you’ll have some great furniture to show for it!
• Around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are computer generated
• AxiDraw: a plotter that uses your pens
• Colourful digital restorations of historic computers

True Colors

A visual experiment that evaluates the evolving graphic symbolism of the United States, True Colors is a collection of flags generated from the 2016 American Community Survey. Each flag is based on data specific to its state, and provides information at a glance.

District of Columbia

California

North Dakota

Florida

Massachusetts

Mississippi

Arizona

Alaska

Most existing flags share the same common visual cues: stripes, circles or polygons, and stars. You’ll find these familiar components in the flags of True Colors as well but their color, size, shape, and position are all determined by data.

Population – background

Housing – stripe

Economy – foreground

Education – star

Each layer of the flag corresponds to subjects that provide an informative snapshot of life in that state. The background visualizes population, the stripe shows housing, the circle or polygon represents economics, and the star indicates education.

(via @WalterStephanie)

See also

• Flag Stories: Infographics revealing the hidden stories behind flag designs —
  A project to discover the hidden stories behind the design of flags.
• The flag of the Refugee Nation — “A black and orange (colors of the life vests) is a symbol of solidarity for all those who crossed the sea in search of a new country.”
• WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
• The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Benjamin Hennig is a geographer whose work looks at social inequalities, humanity’s impact on Earth, global sustainability and new the development of concepts for analysing, visualising and mapping these issues.
• Block Bills – 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain — Each banknote represents one block in the chain and the whole series consist of 64 consecutive blocks.

Diglû

Diglû consists of 440 characters and 404 pictograms developed for the analysis and mediation of archaeological finds. It was developed as a research project of the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research as a part of the doctoral thesis of Fabienne Kilchör.

A lineal typeface designed with 6 weights and 844 pictographic symbols Diglû is a substantial subset of the Unicode standard focused on one specific area of application.

Diglû will be made available through the independent type foundry Extraset.ch, where other pictograms serving different niches will be developed.

(via @typeroom_eu)

See also

• Diglû on Behance and Emphase.ch
• Anatomia: a quirky grotesk typeface — A grotesk typeface born from the skeleton of an old Scotch Roman used in an anatomy book printed in the early 20th century.
• Inkwell: a typeface for expressive writing — A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.
• Google’s Noto Project: a unified font for all languages — Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.

VHS Distributor Logos

Reagan Ray has compiled an extensive gallery of retro VHS distributor logos on his blog: I was a little surprised to find out that there have been over 2,000 different movie distribution companies since the late 70s. Most of the heavy hitters are still around, but a lot of them are long out of business.

Super Video

Midnight Home Video

Cannon Video

Trans World Entertainment

GoodTimes Home Video

Walt Disney Home Video

Children’s Video Library

VCR, Inc.

Wizard Video

CIC Video

Medusa Home Video

Thorn EMI Video

See the rest →

(via The Latest)

See also

• Reagan Ray: 80s Movie Studio Intros
• The evolution of the Star Wars logo
• The best Logos from the Commodore Amiga Scene

Julia Evans: Blogging principles I use

“I constantly write things on this blog like “I’m not sure about this part…”. I try to not be falsely modest (when I do actually know something, I try to just state it without hedging), but when I don’t know something, I say so.”

See also

• Follow Juila on Twitter: @b0rk
• The Shapes of Stories, a Kurt Vonnegut Infographic
• Lessons about language from a Turkish typewriter

Antineutrino Global Map 2015

The open source AGM2015 provides fundamental data for experiments, assists in strategic detector placement to determine neutrino mass hierarchy, and aids in identifying undeclared nuclear reactors.

“The open access availability of these antineutrino maps represents the next generation of cartography and gives important insights into the basic understanding about the interior of our planet.” Shawn Usman — NGA R&D

“This is what Earth would look like if you could see its glow of neutrinos–from natural radioactivity mostly, but lightly dotted with nuclear reactors. Amazing map. [⋮] Continental rocks are enriched in uranium and thorium, so the continents “glow” in antineutrinos.” — @coreyspowell

Further reading

• NGA.mil: New NGA global map advances R&D in geophysics and nonproliferation
• Nature.com: AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015
• Ultralytics.com: Interactive Google Earth presentations of the AGM2015 data

See also

• Man wearing gas mask and sandals explores Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone — “The radiation level is still very high in the red zone. not many people seen this town for the last 5 years…is like it vanished … i can find food,money,gold,laptop and other valuable in the red zone….I’m amaze that nobody looted this town clean.”
• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Peter Donnelly and colleagues use such data from a selected geographically diverse sample of more than 2,000 individuals from the United Kingdom to reveal remarkable concordance between genetic clusters and geography.
• What’s up in the Solar System? — A diagram by Olaf Frohn, updated once a month, of active space missions traveling beyond Earth orbit.

Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world, full of places and creatures, real and imagined

Altas Obscura: Born near Milan in 1544, Urbano Monte lived a life of leisure and luxury. For him, such freedom meant scholarship, and the accumulation of a library renowned in the region. In his early 40s, his interests turned to geography, and a mammoth 20-year effort to synthesize and consolidate everything known of the world’s geography into a few volumes. More than that, he wanted to make a planisphere map of the world “to show the entire earth as close as possible to a three-dimensional sphere using a two-dimensional surface.”

If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This

National Geographic: If birds left tracks in the sky, what would they look like? For years Barcelona-based photographer Xavi Bou has been fascinated by this question.

Ultimately he chose to work with a video camera, from which he extracts high-resolution photographs. After he films the birds in motion, Bou selects a section of the footage and layers the individual frames into one image.

This current work, he says, combines his passion and his profession. “It’s technical, challenging, artistic, and natural. It’s the connection between photography and nature that I was looking for.”

See also

• Movile Cave: The unique life isolated deep underground for 5.5 million years — “Almost 30 years after its discovery, Movile Cave remains perhaps the most isolated ecosystem on the planet.”
• Timelapse: The “slow life” of a coral reef, sped up — Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion.
• Pigeons are gross. They’re also wildly underrated.

The Internet, as photographed by ​Peter Garritano

Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.

​Peter Garritano is a photographer based in New York City.

See also

• The seven keys to the internet — “It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. James Ball joins a private ceremony, and finds the reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix.”
• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security, by Scott Culp c.2000

Hitler rehearsing, 1925

Mashable: Hitler asked his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to take photos of him rehearsing speeches. Hitler would try out various gestures and expressions, then review the pictures to see if his postures looked stunning or stupid.

Though Hitler ordered Hoffmann to destroy the pictures for being “beneath one’s dignity,” the photographer kept them in his studio. He later published the photos in his memoir, Hitler Was My Friend.

See also: Hitler was high during most of World War II

ZeroPhone

Hackaday blog: There are several open source phones out there these days, but all of them have a downside. Hard to obtain parts, hard to solder, or difficult programming systems abound. [Arsenijs] is looking to change all that with ZeroPhone. ZeroPhone is based upon the popular Raspberry Pi Zero. The $5 price tag of the CPU module means that you can build this entire phone for around $50 USD.

Features:

• Raspberry Pi Zero in a PCB sandwich
• No proprietary connectors, hard-to-get parts or chips that are tricky to solder
• All the specifications for making this phone yourself will be available
• Python as the main language for developing apps (aiming to add other languages later)
• UI toolkit making development quicker and easier
• Numeric keypad, 1.3" 128×64 monochrome OLED screen (with screen header supporting other types of screens)
• 2G modem for phone functions, can be replaced with a 3G modem
• WiFi (using an ESP8266), HDMI and audio outputs, a free USB host port
• GPIO expansion headers for customization
• RGB LED and vibromotor – for notifications
• Tons of Pi Zero-related hacks that were discovered along the way, that I'll share with you as the project goes =)

See also: Other posts tagged ‘Raspberry Pi’ & Phones for the people

Inkwell, by Hoefler & Co.

A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.

This typeface family is gorgeous. I am itching to use it for some publication!

Typefaces, by design, are unyielding in their style: a good typeface commits to a single visual idea, and explores it with thoroughness and consistency to produce a dependable tool for designers. Contrast this with handwriting, which serves only to record the thoughts of an author, but has the freedom to move from style to style as the message dictates. A writer might scribble a paragraph in cursive handwriting, but punctuate key points with capitals, or backtrack to over-ink some crucial point with darker and more deliberate strokes. It’s a flexibility that makes handwritten communications compelling, and makes the medium of writing infinitely expressive. By comparison, typography can feel almost stifling.

Roman Roads

Sasha Trubetskoy: It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.
Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. Huge shoutout to: Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘fantasy subway map’ genre, but it’s the research and real data that make this one special. I think I’m going to order the PDF to print my own! (via kottke)

See also

• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Britain has a long history of invasions: over the past two millennia, various armies from the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons conquered the bulk of the British Isles. A new genetic analysis of the country has revealed which invading force had the greatest impact on its DNA.
• Mini Metros — Peter Dovak — a graphic designer and self-confessed ‘lifelong transit nerd’ — has shrunken and simplified 220 metro and light rail maps from around the world to produce this fun poster.
• Anglo Saxon London, mapped — a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD)

Portraits of Imaginary People

A work in progress by Mike Tyka:

For a while now I’ve been experimenting with ways to use generative neural nets to make portraits.

Adding a third stage allows upressing up to 4k. However I dont have any actual training data at that resolution, meaning the network only learns to generally predict smooth edges etc, It can’t know the details of what skin pores or eyelashes look like. A super-highres database of faces would be needed here. Still for purposes of printing it’s nicer to create some interesting looking artifacts at this resolution, rather than bilinear interpolation of just pixelation.

Anyways, the goal is to make these into printable physical-world art pieces but I found in practice the resolution and detail has to be pretty high or it just doesn’t look nice printed. Like I said, it’s all work in flux and progress, more soon.

(via waxy)

See also

• Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm — filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays.
• Blooms: Strobe animated sculptures — Clever 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light.
• Wellcome Image Awards 2015: The art behind the science of life, death, sex, and disease —
  The best in science imaging talent and techniques.

Skyline Chess — New York City Edition

Following the success of the London edition, we are delighted to present the next skyline in our range – New York City.

We are funding on Kickstarter to allow us to complete our first production run of sets and packaging – this will allow us to produce the full 32 piece chess set, complete with presentation box and folding board. Each set contains an information sheet with details on each building and how to set up the board.

We’ve chosen a range of buildings from across the city, some of which capture the essence of the early 1900’s construction boom and the growth of skyscraper architecture, through to their more contemporary counterparts, along with some of the city’s most recognisable silhouettes.

We gave careful consideration to selecting each piece on the board, to ensure that it both visually reflected the appropriate chess piece and also reflected the architectural status and scale of that building in the city.

King – One World Trade Tower

Queen – Empire State Building

Bishop – Chrysler Building

Knight – Flatiron Building

Rook – Guggenheim Museum

Pawn – Brownstone House

(via ARCHatlas)

See also

• Skyline Chess – New York City Edition on Kickstarter
• Beautiful and unusual chess sets — Some designs, as with the Communist Propaganda set, arose from ideology. Some were born out of wealth, such as the opulent rock crystal and silver set from 16th-century France. And some were made from necessity, such as the cardboard pieces created during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.
• Chess set architecture — As chess increased in popularity across Europe in the 1800s, the proliferation in the variety of chess sets caused confusion amongst competitors, especially those hailing from different countries.
• Architectural playing cards — designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.

Juno Perijove — Jupiter Flyby

A wonderful video by Seán Doran putting recent imagery from the Juno spacecraft to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères, famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the original video: This computer animation uses the JunoCam images of PJ-05 as textures, and SPICE trajectory data in order to reconstruct the flyby as seen from Juno’s perspective.

Above: Edits by Seán Doran // Below: as featured on APOD

On May 19, the Juno spacecraft once again swung by Jupiter in its looping 53 day orbit around the Solar System’s ruling gas giant.

APOD: Beginning at the top, this vertical 14 frame sequence of enhanced-color JunoCam images follows the spacecraft’s rapidly changing perspective during its two hour passage. They look down on Jupiter’s north polar region, equatorial, and south polar region (bottom images). With the field-of-view shrinking, the seventh and eighth images in the sequence are close-up. Taken only 4 minutes apart above Jupiter’s equator they were captured just before the spacecraft reached perijove 6, its closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit. Final images in the sequence pick up white oval storm systems, Jupiter’s “String of Pearls”, and the south polar region from the outward bound spacecraft.

See also

• JunoCam — A part of the Juno payload included by NASA for public outreach, to discuss and decide which points of interest on Jupiter should be photographed.
• The pastel astronomical drawings of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1882)
• Chart of human space exploration

Block Bills – 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain

Creative Applications Network: Created by Matthias Dörfelt, ‘Block Bills’ is a series of 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain. Each banknote represents one block in the chain and the whole series consist of 64 consecutive blocks starting at block #456476.

See also

• Matthias Dörfelt: Block Bills project page
• Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm
• AxiDraw: a plotter that uses your pens

Better Letterer

Comic lettering tips from Nate Piekos, who has created some of the industry’s most popular fonts and has used them to letter comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Image Comics.

See also

• Blambot’s Comic Book Grammar & Tradition — The majority of these points are established tradition, sprinkled with modern trends and a bit of my own opinion having lettered professionally for a few years now. The majority of these ideas have been established by Marvel and DC, but opinions vary from editor to editor, even within the same company.
• How the comic book typeface developed
• Comic Neue: A more palatable Comic Sans