Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

The Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, is thought to predate civilization.

The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.

Mind blown, check back later (via justin).

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

“You see, Al is really involved with the project and we spend a lot of time working together in the publisher’s office. When he was reviewing the proofs, he had a comment about the typeface. Basically, he wants you to change the numeral one.”

As a result, there is an updated version of Brioni now available.

Oskar Karlin reworked the infamous London Underground map using the time it takes to travel between stations rather than the distance.

The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Apparently, they are reproductions from a book titled The 300 Meter Tower, written by Eiffel himself, and published by Lemercier in 1900. I wasn’t able to find an electronic copy of the book (it’s likely out of copyright), but I did come across another book about the tower published in 1889.

Rithmomachy is a complex, Early European, mathematical board game. The literal translation is “Battle of Numbers”. It’s similar to chess, but the capture of pieces depends on the numbers on each piece. Rhythmomachy Basics provides a few more details than the Wikipedia entry.

An awesome photo from The National Library of Wales photostream. That is all.

In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, [they] are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics — not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.

The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson’s views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically.

I don’t imagine that Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland will delve too deeply into mathematical theory.

Plotter drawings from the 1960s. These are probably some of the earliest examples of digital artwork. The Wikipedia entry has some more information about plotters.

Pen plotters print by moving a pen across the surface of a piece of paper. When computer memory was very expensive, and processor power was very limited, this was often the fastest way to efficiently produce very large drawings or color high-resolution vector-based artwork.

That would’ve been some fun programming.