Some Things I Read Last Week Dec 26 — Jan 1
Last week was a week of fascinating new concepts: Post-Architecture, organ donors in a driverless car future, mysterious signals from space, an internet without paying a service provider, and more!
In case you missed last week:
Interesting
Post-Architecture is the concept I’m most excited about from this week. Post-Architecture can be narrowly thought of as defining people through space. Here, Daniel Fraga breaks down how it is that spaces define us and our behavior, and how post-architecture can be transformative.
What first caught my attention regarding his work, was how he uses this concept to build virtual spaces. As VR, for me, has never been about video games, his writings provide an interesting starting point for those that are interested in building virtual spaces to alter our reality.
Inspired by an art piece from Petros Vrellis, this article shows how to make a drawing using a singular piece of thread and a circular loom.
I normally don’t endorse self help “lists”, but this is actually a fairly solid list of things to do and more importantly for me, things to stop doing to yourself in order to grow.
Not likely aliens, but still fascinating.
Our copyright system has continued to grow and longer and longer, far extending beyond the life of the original creator. This article show’s what would have been under the public domain if we hadn’t passed the 1976 Copyright Act.
Design & User Experience
Modular design and working with the 4px grid.
If you’re interested in data visualization and psychology, then have I got a treat for you. This article delves into the research behind modern data visualization, and it helped me to better understand when to use each technique.
Decentralization
Swarm is a key piece in the Ethereum ecosystem. It’s similar to bittorrent, but it has built in incentives to store content and it can provide certain levels of guarantee for long term storage. I highly recommend checking out the research paper below.
swap, swear and swindle incentive system for swarm [pdf research paper]
Virtual Reality
If this article peaks your interest, please check out the first article in this post under the “Interesting” header.
Make VR experiences using web development techniques.
Technology
I hadn’t really thought about the effect of self-driving cars on organ donations, but this article brings up a problem that we’ll need to solve in the years ahead.
I used to play around a lot with video encoding and decoding, and I still found quite a few things in this list that surprised me. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t give any counter examples, but I still recommend it for any developer that’s working with video.
The TL;DR is, sometimes. So, you should always shoot for server side/isomorphic rendering when you want Google to index your site.
Are you working on a project that involves realtime networking? Then it’s important to know the difference between UDP and TCP and when it’s the best time to use them.
