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• The origins of abc – "We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A."
• Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected – This is brilliant. "A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?"

• MacPaint and QuickDraw source code – This is awesome: the original source code to two of the most important pieces of software from the 1980's.
• If I have two children, and one is a boy, what are the odds that – Where common sense makes no sense. Sometimes. Probably.
• June 23, 1912: Computer Pioneer Alan Turing Born – "He’s also a genuinely interesting figure, albeit a tragic one. An eccentric who liked to bicycle while wearing a gas mask and who occasionally wore pajama tops underneath suit jackets, he was also a prodigious and eclectic genius."

• June 22, 1783: Icelandic Volcano Disrupts Europe’s Economy – It's not just 2010 where this was a problem…
• WWDC – The Acceleration – "But at one point everything exploded and there was no way to keep up with all the new API:s and all the new things Java was attempting to do. I feel that we’re approaching that point with iOS (formerly known as the iPhone OS)." As someone who does this in my spare time, this is certainly something that I'm feeling right now!
• I’m Comic Sans, Asshole – Your favourite font responds to criticism…

• iPad App Pricing – Nice analysis of iPad and iPhone application pricing.
• The Value of Ideas – "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Or actions speak louder than words.
• The IBM Muppet Show – "IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff."

• Arab society’s crunch points – Interesting talk about the Middle East and how change might be made. Hint: it doesn't involve "regime change."
• iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out? – "We have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one)."

• Realism in UI Design – "The more realistic something is, the harder it is to figure out the meaning."
• Jan. 19, 1983: Apple Gets Graphic With Lisa – And without the Lisa there wouldn't have been the Mac…
• Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?