Hi! I’m Matt and welcome to Friday Links.
Source: Thoughtworks Arts
Oh this is gorgeous: Time Sense (2016) which is a headband that lets you feel the time of day. As the 24 hours of the day go by, a “tiny heat sensation” slowly circumnavigates the band.
Neil Harbisson, the artist, calls this an exosense: “an external sensory organ.” It’s a kind of cyborg prosthetic. You can totally see how the brain would internally the sensation as a kind of automatic knowledge, something that you just magically know — like we always know which way is up, for example.
(ALSO: note that this comes out of Thoughtworks Arts which is part of the global tech consultancy Thoughtworks. More companies should have art divisions!)
Internet Explorer 1.0 (via Mozilla article)
Hey, how come links on the web are blue?
Here’s the history: Why are hyperlinks blue? (A deep dive from Elise Blanchard at Mozilla.)
Some great storytelling back to the first hypertext, Project Xanadu, in 1964, and the first actual blue hyperlink which was [SPOILER] Mosaic Version 0.13 on April 12, 1993.
I love that hyperlinks, by default, go purple if you’ve previously visited the linked webpage. It maps onto the cognitive sense of “recognition” that we often (but not always) automatically feel when we see a person that we’ve talked to before.
What would it mean to see purple auras when you glimpse a person you’ve talked with previously? How many familiar strangers would you pass on the street that otherwise you wouldn’t notice? An app for future augmented reality smart glasses perhaps…
