See, about a year or so ago, I took inspiration from Kevin Smokler to set about listening through my entire music library alphabetically by song title.
I think I’m going to do this! I have a paltry 10,602 songs so it should take a mere 29 days of continuous listening.
How a writing system went from being a dream (literally) to a reality, codified in unicode.
Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.
What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.
I love this idea (and implementation)—instead of treating braille signage as something “separate but equal”, this typeface attempts to unify lettering and braille into one.
Braille Neue is a universal typeface that combines braille with existing characters. This typeface communicates to both the sighted and blind people in the same space.
Neither matters all that much and you can use every method on the same project without the universe imploding.
Some interesting approaches in the comments too.
Google’s Noto (short for no-tofu; tofu being the rectangle of unicode sadness) is certainly ambitious. It has glyphs from pretty much every known alphabet …including Ogham and Linear B!
A fascinating thought experiment from Ted Chiang:
So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters were never invented in the first place. Given such a void, the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might the consequences be?
Twenty-six letters of independent publishing building blocks.
The alphabet illustrated with CSS.
From Kornel, the genius who gave us ImageOptim, comes another Mac desktop tool for optimising PNGs, this time converting 24-bit PNG to 8-bit with full alpha channel.
Take all the fonts on your operating system, superimpose them, and whaddya get? This.
Ignoring the awful misleading title, this is a really good post from Paul on his personal experiences dealing with accessibility on one or two projects.
I’ve always thought that Brighton has a lot of steampunk appeal. Quite apart from the potential for criminal mastermind lairs within the the Victorian sewers, there are a whole slew of wonderful inventions from the mind of Magnus Volk.
The Volk’s Electric Railway is still in use today. The Daddy Long-Legs, alas, is not. And while the Jubilee clock tower still stands in the centre of town, its moving parts have been disabled (due to noise complaints and damage to the structural integrity):
The hydraulically operated copper sphere moved up and down a 16-foot (4.9 m) metal mast every hour, based on electrical signals transmitted from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
But even with all this steampunk history, I was still surprised to read the story of Alpha the robot on Paleo-Future:
During the autumn of 1932 a group of curious onlookers assembled in Brighton, England to see inventor Harry May’s latest invention, Alpha the robot. The mechanical man was controlled by verbal commands and sat in a chair silently while May carefully placed a gun in Alpha’s hand.
It all goes horribly awry according to contemporary reports, doubtless exaggerated. I, for one, welcome our new metal overlords.
Cyberneticzoo.com has more details on Alpha, including Time magazine’s account of its 1934 tour of America:
When commanded, the robot lowered its arm, raised the other, lowered it, turned its head from side to side, opened and closed its prognathous jaw, sat down. Then Impresario May asked Alpha a question:
“How old are you?”
From the robot’s interior a cavernous Cockney voice responded:
“Fourteen years.”
May: What do you weigh?
Alpha: One ton.
A dozen other questions and answers followed, some elaborately facetious. When May inquired what the automaton liked to eat, it responded with a minute-long discourse on the virtues of toast made with Macy’s automatic electric toaster.
David Buckley has more details including a spread from Practical Mechanics explaining Alpha’s inner workings.
A wonderful history of our alphabet. Set aside some time to read this.
Kanji characters that transform into the animal they represent.
A nice explanation of the ruby element in HTML5: very handy for marking up phonetic pronunciation.
Could it be that the inability of 8-bit computers to render Kanji had a direct influence on the direction of Japan's electronic product design and economy?
The first public alpha release of Apollo is out. Grab the runtime and then play around with some of the sample apps (none of which are that impressive but it's the thought that counts).