This week’s interview features Dr. Steven Gass, the inventor of the SawStop—considered one of the best table saws (we love the one in our office!). SawStop has a unique safety feature that automatically brakes the blade if a finger touches it.

source: K

Photos of birds.

source: K

SSC’s Tuatara clocked a record 316.11 mph (508.73 km/h) on a dusty desert highway outside Las Vegas.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/N22JfNHiC1k

source: K

Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1626

source: K

In this edition, 162 media outlets from 34 different countries have sent in their works. Of the 1,000 entries in the competition, 400 correspond to printed graphics categories and 600 to digital infographics categories. The jury gave a total of 170 medals, 17 gold, 65 silver and 87 bronze medals in printed and digital media. From the 170 medals awarded by the jury, 58 went to the printed category (5 gold medals, 18 silver and 35 bronze) and 112 went to the online category (12 gold medals, 47 silver and 52 bronze).

source: K

Felicia Chiao’s illustrations depicting isolation, dissociation, and loneliness have taken on an added resonance during the pandemic.

https://www.instagram.com/feliciachiao/

source: K

Hand drawn animation.

source: K

Today at 14:52 I will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. To celebrate I build this machine that visualizes the number googol. That’s a 1 with a hundred zeros. A number that’s bigger than the atoms in the known universe. This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a google amount around. Or better said you’ll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that. That boggles my mind.

source: K

This website allows you to visualize elevation of any area on the map with filled area charts (also known as a ridgeline):

https://anvaka.github.io/peak-map/

source: K

hockey player checks out lumberjack while woman in Canadian tuxedo looks on in disbelief

source: K

New visual identity and product experience launch today, with redesigned print magazine and reimagined iOS App.

Mostly fluff, but the logo is now just an A because words are hard.

source: K

The massive undertaking began on October 1930. Over the next four weeks, the massive steel and brick building was shifted inch by inch 16 meters south, rotated 90 degrees, and then shifted again by 30 meters west. The work was done with such precision that the building continued to operate during the entire duration of the move. All utility cables and pipes serving the building, including thousand of telephone cables, electric cables, gas pipes, sewer and water pipes had to be lengthened and made flexible to provide continuous service during the move. A movable wooden sidewalk allowed employees and the public to enter and leave the building at any time while the move was in progress. The company did not lose a single day of work nor interrupt their service during the entire period.

source: K

And the Verge review: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943552/scroll-bar-visual-history-30-years

Sébastien Matos has built a fantastic interactive trip through the history of one of the most important UI elements we encounter every day: the scroll bar. He’s recreated, as faithfully as possible, 30 years of scroll bars from some of the top desktop platforms of their day, from Xerox Star to Windows 10.

Take a minute out of your busy day to enjoy the zen of playing with old UI design. Then come back here and read The Verge’s very serious review of scroll bars through history.

source: K

Symbolic of a larger universe, video game posters provide the gateway to a more expansive world.

source: K

Winner: a tiny turtle!

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A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians.

For the last year, Jessica Wynne, a photographer and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has been photographing mathematicians’ blackboards, finding art in the swirling gangs of symbols sketched in the heat of imagination, argument and speculation. “Do Not Erase,” a collection of these images, will be published by Princeton University Press in the fall of 2020.

source: K

In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day. This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it.

But the endurance of the Marchetti Constant has profound implications for urban life. It means that the average speed of our transportation technologies does more than anything to shape the physical structure of our cities. To see how, let’s travel back in time by more than 2,000 years, and move towards the present.

source: K

As advertised.

source: K

Taken from a top-down perspective, every aerial photograph we take is of a real place on our planet. We like to compose our images as artworks rather than traditional photographs. Other than slight colour and contrast enhancements none of our images are manipulated in any way. As we always say, “the point is not to work out what it is, but to show how weird and wonderful the world can look from above”.

Prints for sale, but free to look.

source: K

Our solar system collectively hosts nearly 200 known moons, some of which are vibrant worlds in their own right. Take a tour of the major moons in our celestial menagerie, including those that are among the most mystifying—or scientifically intriguing—places in our local neighborhood.

Pretty heavy web page.

source: K