annuario pontificio

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and do give a listen to the Pontifacts podcast. A slightly irreverent romp through all the popes from Paul to Francis with indulgences on offer, each episode gives a biographical, hagiographical overview of each of the Vicars of Christ and some studied explanations of Church hierarchy (from the Greek for president of sacred rites) and other developments in catechism and rates them in the style of another one in our play-list, the Rex Factor.

c+c music factory

Found at The Awesomer, a group of researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley campus have created software for the motion retargeting of video subjects which can—most importantly—transpose dance moves from the source to target. Though the output is not has a few glitches and is not perfectly rotoscoped, it’s really remarkable that the process is nearly instantaneous with no special sensors or studio required.

7x7

secret garden: Google Earth leads a team of researchers to an untouched mountaintop rainforest in Mozambique

ultima thule: on its encore mission, Pluto probe beams back its first image of its next target

comnenian period: an exploration of Byzantine architecture from draughtsman Antoine Helbert, via Kottke

amos rex: a subterranean museum opens in Helsinki  

seven points of articulation: a visual history of the past four decades of LEGO Minifigs (previously)

drainspotting: a tour of the manhole covers (elsewhere) of Massachusetts  

hyperpolyglot: what the people who’ve mastered dozens of languages can teach us, via Digg

🔣 or extended character set

Thanks to Duck Soup for directing our attention to the first instalment (update: here is part two and part three of the series) of Keith Houston’s investigation into the fascinating history of emoji and its linguistic cachet.
First originating as an unexpected outcome of Japanese teenagers using pervasive pagers (pocket bells, poké beru) in a novel way with messages encoded in numerals, the company that oversaw the country’s largest cellular network conceded to popular pressure and enabled what we would recognise as texting with the number keypad. Eventually the ❤ was added to the vocabulary of possibilities—which is a bit ambiguous in terms of meaning in different contexts. Temporarily abandoned as a frivolity, customers demanded it back and inspired the company to offer more. Be sure to check back with Shady Characters to get the next parts of the story.