The Typeset of Wall·E (2018)
The article explores the design and typography in the film "WALL·E," highlighting the use of the interpunct in the character\'s name and the extensive use of the Gunship typeface throughout the movie. It details the influence of various historical and futuristic design elements, including Disney\'s EPCOT and the ALWEG monorail system, on the film\'s visual style. Additionally, the article notes references to other sci-fi works and the efforts of amateur type designer Dan Zadorozny in creating fonts that appear in popular media.
DuckDB Meets Postgres
The blog post discusses the integration of DuckDB into Postgres to support querying Apache Iceberg tables, a highly requested feature due to its scalability and cost-effectiveness when handling large datasets on S3 and Google Cloud Storage. Initially, the team chose DataFusion for its extensibility and Rust-based development but switched to DuckDB because of its better out-of-the-box integrations, familiarity among users, and superior performance. The next major update for pg_lakehouse will include write support, allowing Postgres tables to be copied into external object stores as Parquet or CSV files.
Qualcomm\'s Oryon core: A long time in the making
Qualcomm\'s Oryon Core, derived from the acquisition of Nuvia in 2021, showcases a strong architecture with 12 Oryon cores in the Snapdragon X Elite, aiming to compete with AMD and Intel by balancing power efficiency and high performance. Despite promising designs and competitive performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024, Oryon faces challenges such as platform fragmentation, compatibility issues with existing PC ecosystems, and high device costs. Qualcomm must collaborate with OEMs to lower prices and improve compatibility to attract consumers and developers to ARM64 Windows devices.
Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it
Scientists at Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital identified a molecular defect promoting lupus, a disease affecting over 1.5 million people in the U.S., and demonstrated that reversing this defect might reverse the disease itself. The discovery highlights an imbalance in immune responses regulated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR), which, when insufficiently activated, leads to harmful immune cell proliferation. Activating the AHR pathway with specific molecules could potentially reduce these disease-causing cells and offer a more targeted treatment with fewer side effects than current therapies.
Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
The text discusses the cultural and technical significance of the stipple pattern, also known as the root weave, that appeared on the boot-up screen of the X Window System, a historical element familiar to many early Linux users. It highlights the complexity involved in configuring the X Window System in the past and the eventual disappearance of this stipple pattern due to modernization efforts in the mid-2000s to 2010s aimed at improving boot speed and accessibility. The author nostalgically revisits the past configurations and how bringing back the stipple pattern can be achieved using modern methods.
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