May 2011
11 posts
“During the introduction [at BioBarCamp] many people expressed an interest in “Open Science”, “Open Data”, or some other open stuff, yet it was already pretty clear that many people meant many different things by this. I think for me the most striking outcome of [a session to define it] was that not only is this a radically new concept for many people but that many people don’t have any background understanding of open source software either which can make the discussion totally impenetrable to them. This, in my view strengthens the need for having some clear brands, or standards, that are easy to point to and easy to sign up to (or not).”
—Science Commons » Blog Archive » What’s open science? (via arielwaldman)
Roman Numeral Ten Thousand
Sometimes 500, usually D, was written as I followed by Ɔ, while 1,000, usually M, was written as CIƆ. Sometimes CIƆ was reduced to a lemniscate symbol (ↀ) for denoting 1,000. Similarly, 5,000 (IƆƆ) was reduced to ↁ; and 10,000 (CCIƆƆ) was reduced to ↂ.- Wikipedia
I had no idea.
Whaaaaat?
Tibetan Mark Gug Rtags Gyas
With ༺, a bracket. - Unicode.org
Wait, really? I wonder what gets bracketed by these. It looks like the kind of thing that you’d read with fanfare, like:
༺This character is too awesome for words!༻
Dun-da-dunnnnn!
“The total company expenditures since being founded in 2002 through the 2010 fiscal year were less than $800 million, which includes all the development costs for the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon. Included in this $800 million are the costs of building launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, as well as the corporate manufacturing facility that can support up to 12 Falcon 9 and Dragon missions per year. This total also includes the cost of five flights of Falcon 1, two flights of Falcon 9, and one up and back flight of Dragon.”
—Elon Musk, setting the record straight on SpaceX
Yi Syllable Ie
Modern Yi (ꆈꌠꁱꂷ) is a standardized syllabary derived from the classic script in 1974 by the local Chinese government. It was made the official script of the Liangshan (Cool Mountain) dialect of the Yi language in 1980. Other dialects of Yi do not yet have a standardized script. There are 756 basic glyphs based on the Liangshan dialect, plus 63 for syllables only used for words borrowed from Chinese.- Wikipedia
The whole Modern Yi character set is like something you’d find etched in Martian caverns. Impressive stuff; it’ll probably be my go-to set for inspiring logos and icons.
When I lived in Venezuela, someone told me the story of a farmer who was bitten by a snake while working in the field. Enraged, he ran after the snake instead of tending to his wound, hacking away at the tall grass with his machete until he found it and killed it. By that time, however, the snake’s venom had spread throughout the farmer’s body, killing him in turn.
…
We got our snake. I hope it’s not too late for us to purge his venom from our system. I don’t think it’s too late.
meanwhile
This morning, as yesterday morning, the sun is shining and the birds are singing outside my window. I hear someone died last night. Whatever I hear about that, I also hear the birds singing. Whatever I feel about that, I also feel the warmth of the sun.
