- How the design of Disney parks affects our perspective – Disney Cicerone
The layout of the Disney parks may not be something you think about except for at the end of the day when your feet are aching and sitting feels like the best ride ever. Or when you’re hiking around the Epcot World Showcase in the blazing sun and afternoon heat. But the ways the Imagineers have creatively designed the parks influence your experience more than you think, and in ways you might not have considered before. - Africa’s Merchant Kings – Archaeology Magazine
Two recent projects, at the sites of Beta Samati in Ethiopia and the ancient port of Adulis in Eritrea, have revealed what life was like in the empire more than 1,700 years ago. These excavations have highlighted the Aksumites’ sophisticated building techniques, drawn attention to the important role that Christianity played in their culture, and, above all, underscored the existence of the trade networks that were the kingdom’s lifeblood and key to its rarely paralleled success. - LilyPond – Music notation for everyone
LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts. LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project. - Meet Microsoft Office’s new default font: Aptos – The Verge
Microsoft is replacing its Calibri default font with Aptos, a new sans-serif typeface that’s inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss typography. Previously known as Bierstadt, Microsoft has been on the hunt for its new Aptos default font over the past couple of years. The software giant commissioned five new custom fonts for Office in 2021, and the Aptos font was picked as the default after years of feedback. - Missing Wings on an ‘Alien’ Beetle Pose an Evolutionary Mystery – The New York Times
“OK, this is a prank,” Vinicius Ferreira, an insect taxonomist and evolutionary biologist, said to himself. “It’s a joke.”
The beetle — only one-tenth of an inch and found in 1991 in Oaxaca, Mexico, among leaf litter of a pine and oak forest floor at an elevation of more than 9,500 feet by the naturalist Richard Baranowski — was most definitely a male. But it was missing one of the animal’s defining characteristics: the tough forewing casing known to scientists as the elytra. - Essay: How Different Translators Bring New Life to the ‘Iliad’ – The New York Times
Over the years, some 100 people have translated the entire “Iliad” into English. The latest of them, Emily Wilson, explains what different approaches to one key scene say about the original, and the translators. - (4713) Beauvais Cathedral Construction Sequence – YouTube
Of all the stories of the greatest Gothic cathedrals, the tale of Beauvais is the most exciting. Construction of the Gothic cathedral began in 1225 at a time of bitter turmoil when France was establishing itself as a nation within its familiar modern geographical bounds. Beauvais, the tallest cathedral in France, was never completed, having endured two major collapses and a series of structural crises that continues to this day. Our Sketchup animation follows this dramatic narrative. - Alt-F4 #65 – Factorio in Unreal Engine 5
FUE5 (short for Factorio in Unreal Engine 5) is an experimental project with a simple goal: to visualize the 2D world of Factorio in 3D space. It was created by 3D artist Hurricane and Factorio modder Nuke during a five month period, starting on January 10th 2023. While many creative people in the Factorio modding community create awesome large-scale mods like Space Exploration, Bob’s mods or Angel’s, we decided to take a slightly different approach. To put it simply, this project is a 3Dvisual… - (4522) A1111 in Photoshop – One Click Install Plug-in – YouTube
The Auto Photoshop Plug-in brings A1111 and Stable Diffusion directly into Photoshop. - (4520) I Made a 32-bit Computer Inside Terraria – YouTube
“I document my journey implementing Computerraria: a 32 bit CPU running inside the game Terraria. I’ve been working on this for over 6 months now and thought it’s cool enough that other’s might be interested in learning about it.” - Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time
These waves are thousands of times stronger and longer than those found in 2015, with wavelengths of up to tens of light years. By contrast, the ripples detected since 2015 using a technique called interferometry are just tens or hundreds of kilometres long.
“We can tell that the Earth is jiggling due to gravitational waves that are sweeping our Galaxy,” says Scott Ransom, an astrophysicist at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia. - 100 years of Le Corbusier: what does he mean to today’s architects? | Le Corbusier | The Guardian
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Picasso was to painting, a towering and egomaniacal creative force who transformed his discipline for ever. His buildingshave inspired admiration, sometimes devotion. He is an icon, granted the nickname “Corb” or “Corbu” by architects. He has also been vigorously attacked, as a mechanistic fanatic whose ideas inspired inhumane tower blocks and concrete jungles. - Open-source “Davids” are taking on GPT-4 and other Goliaths
A new wave of open-source LLMs, available to anyone, is knocking down the chatbot barriers. - One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1842 -Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn’t have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.
Tales of Drudgery & Boredom.