onfocus

Paintings of alchemists in their laboratories. Posted to Flickr by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

"People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information." [via msippey]

Tom Armitage on journalists learning to code: "Learn to think like a programmer. What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it." [via rc3.org]

"None of which is saying you shouldn't be talking to your sources, and questioning what you're told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You've got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too." [via migurski]

The new whitehouse.gov robots.txt file lets search engines and other bots roam free. This is a fantastic change, but I can't help wondering what they're hiding in the /includes/ directory. I want an open government with no disallows!

Fun discussion overthinking the timing of the President's oath of office with some nice historic trivia thrown in for good measure.

The history of Sinterklaas, Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, etc.

This iconic, cliched, overused Apollo 8 picture of the Earth from the Moon is still incredible.

Is there anything better than engravings of alchemists' laboratories?

"...future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location." [via veen]

"The Federal Government now controls what were -- up until last month -- vast private assets. These are extreme -- truly radical -- changes to how our society functions. Does anyone have any disagreement with any of it or is anyone alarmed by what the consequences are -- not the economic consequences but the consequences of so radically changing how things function so fundamentally and so quickly?"

Lawrence Lessig gives one of his trademark presentations about Palin's experience compared with past Vice Presidents.

A startup that wants to help people raise money for their projects. (via Waxy, who's on the board.)

Oregon's Peter Defazio on the bailout.

Robert Reich rants about the bailout. And he's right.

Representative Marcy Kaptur from Ohio on the bailout: "Real reform now, or nothing."

Cumputing Division, Computing Section. Wonderful/awful vintage photograph.

[via kottke]

Texas highway department: "roads simply don't pay for themselves." [via migurski]

Fantastic post about subterranean tunnels and the Federal Writers' Project that exposes some darker parts of the American West psyche.

looks like a good way to jump start a CF facebook app.

"...this moving skyscape features Jupiter above the southeastern horizon and the marbled streets of the ancient port city of Ephesus, located in modern day Turkey."

This animated gif shows the change from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet over time.

Nice sampling of the illustrator's work. Wikipedia: Edward Bawden.

Fantastic, fantastic story about the life of field recorder Tony Schwartz. Listen to this right now!

Neighborhood data for geo-aware applications under a CC license. [via joshua]

"A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her." BoingBoing comments on posts missing from their archive. Glad they explained, but unpublished has an unfortunate Orwellian ring to it.

Examples of pictures from dozens of vintage cameras. [via A Photo Editor]

Make any photo look like it was taken during Japan's Edo period. [via MeFi] Here's what one of my photos looks like after being sent back in time:

"Figure out how much each Netflix rental is costing you." I don't want to know.