Weekly Web Harvest for 2017-10-22

  • The Massively Friendly World of Competitive Giant Pumpkin Growing – Atlas Obscura

    “We’re to the point where we pass out seeds, hand out information, invite everybody to come to our meetings and tell them everything we know,” Jutras says. “If people want to do the work, I hope they do and grow a personal best … We have a saying: ‘You don’t grow these from the couch.’”

    —–is it when ideas get separated from additional work that people get secretive and weird?

    h/t Jon Becker

  • Daydream Labs: Accessibility in VR

    . So we’ve been exploring how spatial audio cues can be used for navigating and interacting with virtual environments.

  • This Light Bulb Confuses Smartphone Cameras To Protect | Co.Design

    Researchers have developed a new light that can protect locker rooms and stage performances from omnipresent smartphone surveillance.

    — world is going to get stranger and stranger as machines fight and cooperate with one another in ways we can’t see/hear (that whole umwelt thing)

  • -andre bergs-

    Protanopia is a digital comic for Ipad and Iphone. Created as an experiment into the possibilities of digital comics. Using elements from 3D and 2D animation in a realtime game engine, it creates an unique visual style, whilst still having a familiar feeling.

  • Amazon to end virtual textbook contract with UMass

    The university received its guaranteed commissions of $375,000, $465,000 and $610,000 in the first three years of the contract with Amazon, according to university spokesman Daniel Fitzgibbons. Commissions have not exceeded those guarantees, Fitzgibbons added, though he declined to speculate on why Amazon ended their deal with UMass Amherst.

  • Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won’t Tell Me How

    I sent the woman a Facebook message explaining the situation and asking if she was related to my biological grandfather.

    “Yes,” she wrote back.

    Rebecca Porter, we discovered, is my great aunt, by marriage. She is married to my biological grandfather’s brother; she met him 35 years ago, the year after I was born. Facebook knew my family tree better than I did

  • Math’s Beautiful Monsters – Issue 53: Monsters – Nautilus

    They should make sense in the same way that a physical object would.