Modcult

Aurochs fighting Wolves, from The Wonderful Paleo Art Of Heinrich Harder

There was a cheap Malaysian comm that he’d once bought because of its hyped up de-hibernate feature – its ability to go from its deepest power-saving sleepmode to full waking glory without the customary thirty seconds of drive-churning housekeeping as it reestablished its network connection, verified its file system and memory, and pinged its buddy-list for state and presence info. This Malaysian comm, the Crackler, had the uncanny ability to go into suspended animation indefinitely, and yet throw your workspace back on its display in a hot instant. When Art actually laid hands on it, after it meandered its way across the world by slow boat, corrupt GMT+8 Posts and Telegraphs authorities, over-engineered courier services and Revenue Canada’s Customs agents, he was enchanted by this feature. He could put the device into deep sleep, close it up, and pop its cover open and poof! there were his windows. It took him three days and an interesting crash to notice that even though he was seeing his workspace, he wasn’t able to interact with it for thirty seconds. The auspicious crash revealed the presence of a screenshot of his pre-hibernation workspace on the drive, and he realized that the machine was tricking him, displaying the screenshot – the illusion of wakefulness – when he woke it up, relying on the illusion to endure while it performed its housekeeping tasks in the background. A little stopwatch work proved that this chicanery actually added three seconds to the overall wake-time, and taught him his first important user-experience lesson: perception of functionality trumps the actual function.

–Eastern Standard Tribes, Cory Doctorow

Apps on the iPhone can ship a ‘default.png’ in their bundle. When you start the app, it’ll first show this image, then load the rest of the app. The idea is, you can ship a picture of the start state of your app, and it’ll appear to have started very quickly. This is why some apps are unresponsive just after they start — they’re not actually started, you’re just looking at a picture. Other apps misuse this feature to display a splash screen. Urgh, splash screens.

–Tom Insam on the iPhone, via Daring Fireball

When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, “I had a stack of macks.” Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel – the “mack” in prison lingo – was the standard currency.

Hippopotamus

‘From the Greek ἱπποπόταμος (hippopotamos, ιππος hippos meaning “horse” and πόταμος potamus meaning “river”).’

Walrus

‘The most likely origin of the word is the Old Norse hrossvalr, meaning “horse-whale”, which was passed in a juxtaposed form to Dutch and the North-German dialects of the Hanseatic League as walros and Walross.’

Bill Hemmer bravely challenges Fox’s Rose-Colored Glass Ceiling

Rick Rubin in the Wall Street Journal

I know you’ve heard it’s over now and war must surely come,

The cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone.

But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk,

All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?

–Leonard Cohen, Stories of the Street

Haagen-Dasz’ commemorative ice cream special, celebrating the Beirut Truce (available only in Beirut)

Optimus Prime rushes to save people of Texas.

An incredible photo of the Large Helical Device in Japan built to test plasma fusion confinement. Translation: This is the beginning of what you need to have your own little star right here on planet earth… Without actually making our little blue marble into a star. –Long Now Blog

An NASA ASTER satellite image of crops in Kansas watered from the Ogallala aquifer. The circle motif is due to the use of center pivot irrigation.