I just want to tie together two ends of an Internet Story. A year and a half ago this TED talk made the rounds:

It’s a supa-neat video; Hans Rosling created some very compelling visualization software with apparent passion. It was noted at the time that his software had been acquired by Google, which made me say “hm, what’s that about?”. Was it for Evil Prognostication? Um, perhaps, but now you can too: they’ve released it as part of their Google Visualization API.

(via Ajaxian and All The Hip Nerd Blogs from a year and a half ago).

Here’s a video on one of my favorite topics: our good friend the Singularity. Michio Kaku (the affable string theorist) presents, which means that it’s on the lighter side but makes up for it in breadth. One of a three part series. And this comes again from Smashing Telly, an entire blog focused on exceptional documentaries. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

While debugging the site in the newest Firefox 3 beta, I’ve had ample time to reflect upon my relationship with the young Fox. And naturally, the shortcomings have a way of bubbling to the surface. How hath Firefox 3’s new Proto theme failed me? Let me count the ways.

It’s pregnant. You know, pregnancy is great, but I always felt my browser and I had a casual relationship, and I just wasn’t ready for this. What am I talking about, you ask? Behold:

Yes, pregnant. What do you mean, “What do you mean?”? Okay, maybe this will help. Here’s Safari:

See that? It’s “plump”. Plump is charming and hospitable. Safari is plump, and so is everything else in Leopard (they call it “Unified”). You’d be risking extreme embarrassment confusing pregnancy and plumpness ¹.

Alright, I can see there are still quite a few baffled readers. To resolve that, I took some slices from each browser’s UI and dialed down the exposure in Preview (equally for each slice) to make things more visible. And now it becomes quite clear:

Pregnant:

Plump:

Right.

My next complaint requires no such exposition. Here’s Firefox in front of Safari:

Pretty clear who’s in charge, no? Now, here’s Safari in front of Firefox:

And finally, so there’s no doubt as to what’s going on, here’s Safari and Firefox both in the background:

It’s like an M.C. Escher painting! Indeed, that sinking feeling is the horrifying realization that Firefox never changes, save for the subtle dimming of its close/minimize/zoom buttons. And instead of being boldly focused, Proto is a sort of “noncommittal grey”, matching neither focused nor background OS X applications. Weirder still, the Proto theme uses the “background app” shade of grey for its bookmarks bar all the time.

It’s like the uncanny GUI valley: the closer Firefox gets to emulating a real application, the more alarm bells start ringing when something’s just a bit off.

So, to conclude: always have interesting content in your browser’s pane.

_{(As a note, the GrApple themes fix the bookmarks bar and in-between-grey, but remain pregnant and ambiguously focused. I assume those issues are limitations of the theming engine.)}

¹_{See Season 3, Episode 22.}

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes the life/mind-altering experience of having a stroke. Do watch. (transcript)

(thanks, Kottke)

I’ll make up for the lack of posts by directing you to a secret stash of blogging oil (blog gold?). I could use a very long straw and just DRINK THESE UP, repackaging them as blog posts and shipping them out for $$$, but I am a generous man. Behold, the DIAGRAM OF THE DAY archive.

There’s even a diagram of the diagrams:

(click for an interactive version).

(thanks to Alexandre Castonguay).

Merging two of my favorite niches, typography and synthesis, is the extremely enjoyable Meek FM Typographic Synthesizer:

(via the only truly essential internet wonderland, Matrixsynth)

A truly wonderful man in all respects. But I’ll let him convince you of that:

You can find the rest (sadly, only 42 hours worth) here:

Conversations with Bucky¹

(thanks to the always-great smashing telly)

_{¹I’m attempting to convince the chronicler to switch to H.264 encoding and Archive.org since WMV doesn’t quite carry the right spirit (and inflicts horrible artifacts); I’ll let you know if I have success.}

Flickr must be having technical difficulties again; all the pictures have been replaced with chairs! Just the same chair, over and over, with slightly different angles.

Flickr

(And in case you were going to look at some other accounts or collections, don’t bother. I already checked. Chairs.)

Hey everyone!

We’re extremely excited to be debuting our brand-new Advertiser and Publisher Dashboard tonight at Midnight PST! It’s so much better that we’re frankly embarrassed you ever had to use the one we’ve got now. I’d post a preview, but we’d rather let you see it for yourself. Later this week, we’ll be opening a special account that anyone can use to come in and check out what Adpinion looks like on the inside (’cause we’re just so darn proud!).

But if you really can’t wait, I guess you’ll just have to sign up. And to all of those with us already, we hope you love it!

A great big thanks goes out to our own Michael Neal Jacobs for the beautiful design and tireless tweaking, and to the unstoppable Kevin Corcoran for taking breaks from his Top-Secret (and incredibly intensive) work on the Adpinion Algorithm to help me get my head around some of the more mind-bending backend issues.

Hi again everybody. This is just a quick post to kick my own ass into gear again after being scolded by another blogger for not keeping things rolling! If you’ve got a blog of your own, reader, I encourage you to scold me too. Saucy!

We’ve got a ton of really great stuff coming up! Maybe you noticed we’ve finally gotten an FAQ in place. It’s a bit sparse at the moment, so if you’d like to see it filled up, you’d better ask some questions, and frequently. Far more exciting is the rapidly approaching debut of our all-new publisher and advertiser dashboard. I broke into the R&D department and took this photo with my hat-camera before I was tazed (which I thought was really inappropriate, considering Mike and I are the primary devs on that project - NEXT TIME, JACOBS! NEXT TIME!).

Cheers

Luke