Photo by Chintermeyer

Black Perl – “BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time. / open spellbook, study, select it, confess, tell, deny;” – A compilable poem, beautifully weird.

Relationship Timelines – It’s rare that a network visualization illuminates, rather than impresses, but XKCD’s Lord of the Rings et al narrative charts actually added something to my understanding of the movies. Skye Bender-deMoll has pulled together some similar research examples to try to figure out how to create similar graphs automatically, and I’m hoping he succeeds.

A deadly gift from the stars – A meditation on the fragility and unlikeliness of life, built around Iain Banks’ hope that his cancer was caused by cosmic rays rather than something more banal.

Freedreno updates – I spent months working with the then-ATI driver engineers debugging problems with the way we used their Radeon GPUs at Apple, but I was never able to see their source code. That means I’m excited to see an open-source driver for what looks like a very similar chip, the Adreno, used on a lot of mobile devices. The development process is fascinating too, I wish I’d been able to instrument the drivers to understand performance problems in the depth Rob is able to.

GitSpatial – Github are making a big effort with their GeoJSON support, which is an interesting expansion outside of their traditional code focus and into data. GitSpatial is an intriguing layer on top of that support, adding a query API with Github as the backing store.