Links For September 10, 2015

A Germaphobe’s Guide to Buying a Metrocard

Though the multiple screens were tiresome for me, I was beginning to understand that I wasn’t the only kind of user the MTA designed for. No matter how infuriating they might be to veteran NYC commuters, the single-question-per-screen approach was designed to be foolproof for new users and tourists, unaccustomed to the city and its subway system. The interaction design reflected a “leave no rider behind” ethic and that was hard to argue with.


Europa Or Bust: Searching For Life In Jupiter’s Orbit

Nearly two years ago, researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope sighted a huge vapor cloud hovering over Europa’s southern hemisphere. Evidently liquid water is able to break through the crust and blow into space, meaning that either there is water close to the surface or there are very deep cracks in the ice. Also, this past May, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported on experiments that reproduced the red-brown color of Europa’s streaks: The markings seem to be the result of oceanic salts that reached the surface and were discolored by Jupiter’s radiation. A salty ocean is just what you’d expect if water interacts vigorously with a rocky seabed, picking up dissolved salts. And well-stirred mineral-rich waters bode well for life.


Brian Eno On Composers as Gardeners

An architect, at least in the traditional sense, is somebody who has an in-detail concept of the final result in their head, and their task is to control the rest of nature sufficiently to get that built.... Everything outside has to be subject to an effort of control.... I suppose my feeling about gardening… is that what one is doing is working in collaboration with the complex and unpredictable processes of nature. And trying to insert into that some inputs that will take advantage of those processes.... Use the dynamics of the system to take you in the direction you wanted to go.


Le1f - Koi – Produced by PC Music’s SOPHIE.