The origins of abc | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog.
The origins of abc | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog
August 13th, 2010 by John No comments »The Difference Between Infographics and Visualization | eagereyes
August 11th, 2010 by John No comments »Robert Kosara at eagereyes.org helps differentiate between visualization and infographics. Among other differences, he points out that
Visualization is context-free, infographics are context-sensitive.
This short but informative post discusses The Difference Between Infographics and Visualization | eagereyes.
Lincoln’s Constitution by Daniel A. Farber: Book review
August 2nd, 2010 by John No comments »
Lincoln’s Constitution by Daniel A. Farber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Excellent and thoroughly researched review of the issues surrounding Lincoln’s presidency, specifically how the Constitutionality of his decisions could be viewed during and since his time in office. Farber clearly understands his topic, providing both ample detail and excellent additional references to both primary and secondary sources. Finally, he makes this potentially very dry subject palatable through clear and concise prose.
A Presidential History of the US
August 2nd, 2010 by John No comments »
Section of the complete graphic
Rachel Mercer‘s graphic “Presidential Costs” shows, in a circular timeline, the history of the US through a history of the presidents, from Washington through Obama. Four layers of rings plus a ring of bubbles visualizes the time periods, key legislative acts, foreign conflicts and wars, and national debt. Very nice graphic.
The Cawood Sword: History of York (and early password generation!)
July 30th, 2010 by John No comments »
One of the finest Viking swords ever discovered was found in the River Ouse near the village of Cawood, a few miles South of York.The Cawood Sword can be dated to 1100 by comparing it to a very similar sword found in Norway which was probably made by the same craftsman. The swords are almost identical except the one in Norway has an inscription on its hilt in Runes. Both swords can be fairly accurately dated from the clues in this Viking language.
via The Cawood Sword: History of York. Later in that same article:
The inscription runs down the blade and is made up of a number of capital letters which do not form known words. On one side they are in Roman script and on the other they are in Lombardic script. It is believed that these letters stood for words which in turn represented a phrase or saying. By looking at similar inscriptions it is thought that the phrase is religious, with the sword’s owner believing the words gave him extra strength in battle.
Turns out that this is a medieval example of good password generation, known as mnemonic password (c.f. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1143120.1143129), which Google recommends (see “Solution 1″).
