GPS is perhaps one of the most audacious geo-engineering feats ever undertaken, and its traces can be felt with just an antenna and a motive.

All that said, it’s not as though there’s a cacophony of navigation data swarming around you, deafening if you could just hear it. In reality, the GPS signals surrounding you are astoundingly weak. To take an analogy: imagine a normal light bulb, like the one that might be above you now. Pull it twenty thousand kilometers away from the room you’re in, and have it flash, on, off, on, off, a million times a second. Imagine straining your eye to watch the shimmer of the bulb, two Earths away, and listen to what it’s telling you.

source: trivium

Which brings us to the first point: color spaces are all constructs. People just make them up! Useful ones are constructed in order to do useful things, but there’s no, like, One True Fundamental Color Space.

All of this is to say: color spaces can’t really be “right” (or “wrong.”) They can only be useful.

source: Dfly

What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme? Here are some fun observations and ideas I encountered while trying to answer this question, with an attempt to apply the results in a procedural animation.

source: L

In this post we’re going to visually explore different methods of retrying requests, demonstrating why some common approaches are dangerous and ultimately ending up at what the best practice is. At the end of this post you will have a solid understanding of what makes safe retry behaviour, and a vivid understanding of what doesn’t.

source: L

Here, we’re looking at two main things: the calibration of a forecast — that is, whether events that we said would happen 30 percent of the time actually happened about 30 percent of the time — and how our forecast compared with an unskilled estimate that relies solely on historical averages. We can answer those questions using calibration plots and skill scores, respectively.

This page performs a live, annotated https: request for its own source. It’s inspired by The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection and Julia Evans’ toy TLS 1.3.

source: L

In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components.

Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside:

Charts.css is a modern CSS framework. It uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.

source: L

Friends, I’m excited to offer to you a new poster. Not a map this time around, but something map-related. A 16 × 24-inch tangled web showing how 100+ different map projections are all related to each other.

source: jwz

I showed the original typewriter car scan, added my blurred-then-sharpened photo as a pathetic comparison, and asked: what is the latest in demoireing? Is there some new tech that could help me?

But this pales in comparison to the typewriter car photo I wanted to reuse, the one with all the dots, where we can see the FFT immediately betraying their repeated presence:

This sounded like a prank. You’re telling me that a problem I’ve witnessed for decades could be solved with a 1960s algorithm, and I don’t even have to be particularly careful? But I tried it out. I started crudely drawing over the peaks, one by one. Things were weird at the beginning, but then I saw something astonishing – the halftone dots started shrinking:

source: HN

This map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter - about 10000 asteroids - as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. Each asteroid is shown at its position on New Years’ Eve 1999, colored by type of asteroid.

https://github.com/eleanorlutz/asteroids_atlas_of_space

source: grugq

I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.

A reply or follow up: https://www.makeworld.space/2021/02/dithering.html

source: HN

Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results:

This is amazing work.

source: HN

That may be over selling it, but cool anyway.

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

To punt is to give up, and in the 21st century, NFL teams have given up nearly 50,000 times. Most of those punts were reasonable decisions. But a few were so cowardly, and in such defiance of all reason, that they must not be forgotten. In this episode of Chart Party, it’s our mission to find them.

Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It’s not shrinkage — it’s “height modernization.”

The grand recalibration, called “height modernization,” is part of a broader effort within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to establish more accurately where and how the United States physically sits on the planet. This new National Spatial Reference System, encompassing height, latitude, longitude and time, is expected to be rolled out in late 2022 or 2023, Ms. Blackwell said. It will replace reference systems from the 1980s that are slightly askew, having been derived from calculations that were done before the advent of supercomputers or global navigation satellite systems such as GPS.

I used this code to help me make a video to explain how SHA-256 works.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EbD6iY9zI

source: HN

Animated optical illusions. These are very nice.

For the first time during a global outbreak, scientists have been able to use genomic data in real time to track how a virus is traveling around the world, revealing sources of outbreaks and shedding light on cases with unknown origins.

By identifying mutations in the genetic sequence of samples of the coronavirus, which are markers for various strains, researchers have offered clues to whether some cases came from a local source or elsewhere in the world.