The volume of data in our age is so vast that whole new research fields have blossomed to develop better and more efficient ways of presenting and organizing information. One such field is data visualization, which can be translated in plain English as visual representations of information.

Brewster Kahle is an unassuming man. But as an internet pioneer and digital librarian, he may rightly be called a founding father of the Open Culture ethos. In 1996, Kahle began work on the Internet Archive, a tremendously important project that acts as a safety net for the memory hole problem of Internet publishing.

In the past, we’ve brought you sound recordings from the 19th century — recordings that recapture the long lost voices of figures likes Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Gladstone, Tchaikovsky, and Thomas Edison.

In December of 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech.

The story has become part of physics lore: A young Richard Feynman, future Nobel winner, was bored with life in the remote New Mexico desert while working on the atomic bomb during World War II, so he amused himself by learning to pick the combination locks in the supposedly secure filing cabinets containing America’s nuclear secrets.

They toyed with the idea of a donkey, but they went with four sheep instead, and now four ewes are mowing the grounds of Paris’ Municipal Archives. It’s all part of a pilot program where, if successful, sheep will trim the grass of Parisian public spaces and burn no fossil fuels along the way.

Film critic Roger Ebert, like Pauline Kael before him, leaves behind a great torrent of words. Those of us accustomed to seeking out his opinion can comfort ourselves on the Internet, where his thoughts on the great (and not-so-great) films of the last four decades live in perpetuity.

Popular Science is the fifth oldest continuously-published monthly magazine—a long way of saying that the magazine has done a fine job of maintaining a niche in a crazily fast-paced industry.

Type “stupid animated gif“—or words to that effect—into your preferred search engine and you’ll be rewarded with an abundance of germane material.
Meanwhile a search on “animated gif of Stanley Kubrick rolling in his grave” fails to yield anything of significance.
Pity.

What if that screen you’re peering at was something akin to a one-way mirror? There’s a definite aspect of dressing room horror, viewing artist Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project, a video collection of the alternately grotesque and dull expressions appearing on people’s faces as they play video games and watch YouTube.