Age of Invention: The Beacons are Lit!
Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
Link tags: signal
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Signal >> Blog >> The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you
The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.
You can try to use Facebook’s own tools to make the invisible visible but that kind of transparency isn’t allowed.
How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine
Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
Signal v Noise exits Medium – Signal v. Noise
Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.
ARP Observatory (@ArpObservatory) | Twitter
In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.
Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.
ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.
The Analog Web | Jim Nielsen’s Blog
This is wonderful meditation on the history of older technologies that degrade in varied conditions versus newer formats that fall of a “digital cliff”, all tied in to working on the web.
When digital TV fails, it fails completely. Analog TV, to use parlance of the web, degrades gracefully. The web could be similar, if we choose to make it so. It could be “the analog” web in contrast to “the digital” platforms. Perhaps in our hurry to replicate and mirror native platforms, we’re forgetting the killer strength of the web: universal accessibility.
Temporary Constellations — Buckley Williams
This is a really lovely project by Dan and Nat—Christmas cards featuring the fleeting invisible constellations formed by the mesh of GPS satellites within which our planet lies.
Why Instagram Works — Rainypixels
It’s all about the signalling.
telegraphic and signal codes : scans, transcriptions
Before there were HTTP codes, there were telegraphic codes. The Victorian internet indeed!
Immaterials: Light painting WiFi on Vimeo
Timo Arnall has some fun mapping WiFi signal strength with long exposure photos.
Any chance of adding hCards | Basecamp Answers
Basecamp is now chockful of hCards. Excellent!
ThinkGeek :: Wi-Fi Detector Shirt
Dear Santa Claus, I have been a relatively good boy this year. Please may I have a t-shirt that actually detects and displays WiFi signal strength? No, I'm not kidding. Give my love to the elves, Jeremy.
Hand Signals
How to interpret those military hand signals they always use in the movies.
Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
The PDF book of the T-shirt of the philosophy from 37 Signals. There are 4 chapters online for you to sample.
The next Web revolution
An over-the-top article at Salon about 37 Signals.