A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:
The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.
It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
Applying Postel’s Law to relationships:
I aspire to be conservative in what and how I share (i.e., avoid drama) while understanding that other people will say all sorts of unmindful things.
Useful FAQs.
Your grandmother is not just a starship, she’s a highly individual starship with her own goals and needs!
Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.
The first in a series of articles looking at the history of British airships a century ago …just in time for the revival.
I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, teaching, mentoring, coaching …this article by Ivana McConnell from last year is packed with gold nuggets of wisdom concerning apprenticeships.
As lifelong learners, we may be reluctant to call ourselves “masters.” But that’s missing the point, and it discounts the fact that teaching is learning. We’re not there to guarantee mastery—we’re there to give our apprentices fundamentals, to foster their respect, and make journeymen (or women) out of them. Mastery will come; we just offer the tools.
This article on airships has my new favourite sentence in the English language:
During the First World War, Germany and its allies ceased production of sausages so that there would be enough cow guts to make zeppelins from which to bomb England.
Of course it was Simon who pointed me to this. Of course.
A subset of one of my favourite sites on the web:
Explore the Arctic of the past from the deck of a whaling ship.
Choose your vessel and get transcribing.
For when you just have to name something after a Culture General Systems Vehicle …or maybe a General Contact Unit.
Airships in the atmosphere of Venus. More plausible than it might sound at first.
Albert-László Barabási and Robin Dunbar are among the authors of this paper — it’s the scale-free network equivalent of the Avengers.
And the award for Best Euphemism In An Online Column goes to...
This is great news! Brad Fitzpatrick and Kevin Marks have built a new Google API that will spider XFN links.
David Recordon announces a new developer tool for tracking status changes on social networking sites.