Linked List: April 2022

Saturday, 23 April 2022

ZX Spectrum 40th Birthday Mix Tape ✶: I never used a ZX Spectrum. Wish I had! A lovely tribute.

Douglas Falkenburg, Pianist ✶: A beautiful flowing sound, Douglas brings to being.
Happy Earth Day ✶: The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

CrossCode ✶: Wonderful retro-inspired 2D action RPG set in the distant future with lovely pixel graphics art and solid physics. I’m playing the demo in a web browser and loving it. It will be in my Steam library soon. Found via Talkittynora.

Terraformation ✶: Within six months, their team had successfully grown and planted several thousand trees, including a number of rare and endangered species, working at a rate approximately 5x faster than a typical restoration project. Irrigated by the desalinated freshwater, the young native trees were finally able to re-establish themselves in a region that had grown inhospitable over the past two centuries.

If this really works it is very good news and revolutionary given the dropping price of solar power.

Starlink Satellites Visualization ✶: These satellites coupled with phased array antennas may become Hypertexthero’s link to the internet at some point.

Alphabets of Emergence ✶: The web began as a tool for thought—a small, simple tool for sharing scientific papers between computers. Yet it evolved into a universal app platform, and has been exapted for everything from e-commerce, to social media, to streaming video. How was this evolution possible? The web was designed to be an alphabet.

One of the ongoing quests of physics is to find simple rules that describe the behavior of very small, simple objects. Once found, these rules can often be scaled up to describe the behavior of monumental systems… For the Web, those elements were, in decreasing order of importance, Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

— Tim Berners-Lee, 2000, “Weaving the Web”

Away as April Begins ✶: I will be away helping family during the beginning of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. I apologize for the break, and thank you for your support.