Announcing Unicodinator 2.0 →
joewlarson.com
Use Joe’s Unicodinator to search and explore the wild world of Unicode.
April 2012
60 posts
March 2012
45 posts
How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1974 edition →
evgenymorozov.tumblr.com
From Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1974 collection of essays “The Consciousness Industry; On Literature, Politics and the Media”
The open secret of the new electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come is their mobilizing…
“Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”
—
With video
Washington Post Op-Ed: A Budget for the Rich →
washingtonpost.com
This is hilarious. In a good way!
The budget plan of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) reduces the safety net for the unemployed to prevent them from living lives of “dependence and complacency, that drains them of their will and incentive to make the most of their lives.”
Oh noes! We CAN’T have that! It would be just terrible.
But while we’re helping all those poor unemployed people live more productive lives, we should also be helping the wealthy too. It isn’t fair to neglect them!
This sounded reasonable:
raise the inheritance tax, so that heirs must work, and the tax on capital gains, so that people who depend on investment income must work. Otherwise [they could fall prey] to increased indolence and reduced incentives to assist the growth of the economy.
;o)
H.P Lovecraft's Notebook →
lapetiteclaudine.com
This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on.
—H. P. Lovecraft circa 1934
via La Petite Claudine: Commonplace Book
with thanks to The Lady Google for an exceptional find
IndoEuropean family of languages chart →
best-infographics.com
This is definitely the best language tree I’ve ever seen. The Indo-European family of languages covers an awful lot of territory, so to speak. That’s why it is really helpful how chronology is included too.
I tried to link to the original source, which was hxxp://www.criativopunk.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/indo-european-family-of-languages.JPG
However, the website hxxp://www.criativopunk.com.br no longer exists. In fact, I found this image somewhere else yet, don’t recall where now. It did offer a link to hxxp://www.best-infographics.com as the source, where it appears with some accompanying text. The image is quite tiny though. They gave attribution to the non-existent website above. I would hazard a guess that the now non-existent folks’ website probably scraped it from somewhere else, back in May 2008.
After my own careful scraping to Imgur, I was able to capture it in a higher resolution, detail-visible format. So if you want to actually see the details, click:
FULL SIZE VIEW OF INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES
If you want to see the best-infographics website, click the link at the very top of this post. It is a nice website. Many good infographics may be found there.
Final thoughts and casual promisesThis kind of, no, very much, reminds me of a periodic table of the elements memorial to Dmitiri Mendeleev. I’ll try to remember to post that image next, for chemistry fan boiii’s and grrrrrls, one of whom I am.
Sausage Fest
Today, I made a project that combines my repeaters with the wonderful New York Times Campaign Finance API. Called Sausage Making 2012, it visualizes the total campaign contributions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as the speed at which meat is ground— evoking the famous quote,
“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made,”
often falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck, but likely first written by the American poet John Godfrey Saxe.
Now THAT is spectacular! Talk about sausage fests! Looks like coarse ground beef to me, but I laughed. A lot.
Do check out the N.Y. Times Campaign Finance API.
Young Zack Gold is a clever one, rest assured of that! This was re-blogged from one of his many tumblr’s, see URL above.
I got into the spirit of things and scraped this cutie
from the website of Downtown Josh Brown (The Possibly Reformed Broker). More sausage.
The Jacobian is a matrix filled with partial derivatives
Excerpt from isomorphismes:
In the world of linear approximations of multiple parameters and multiple outputs, the Jacobian is a matrix that tells you: if I twist this knob, how does that part of the output change?
Pretend that a through z are parameters, or knobs you can twist. And pretend that F¹ through Fⁿ are the separate kinds of output…
N.B. The Jacobian is just a linear approximation. It doesn’t carry any info on the connections between variables, curvature, wiggle, womp or kurtosis…
Emphasis mine.
Data: Even if it isn't big, it should be clever →
blog.buzzdata.com
I’ve worked with data throughout my career (possibly for my sins).
I’m not a data scientist, but even before BuzzData, barely a day went by where an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file didn’t end up in my inbox. Sales forecasts, cost-benefit analyses, market research, product test results, benchmarks…
Is this intended as a universal ETL? I’m not sure. It would be nice though. We could certainly use something like that.
“Over in the UK the majority of Pinterest users are male. Is the UK press going on and on about how male Pinterest is?”
—
Pinterest and Feminism » Cyborgology via s-m-i
AlternativeAssets tumblr said:
It is called Pint-erest in the UK, right?
Good find!
I read this comment to the post on Cyborgology (excerpt):
I’m a man, I enjoy lots of what I’ve seen on Pinterest… But it does seem undeniably, non-neutrally “womanish” to me, and it’s not about the recipes or pink images or lack of depth.
Let’s get real. It’s simply this: You get a nice post on music, architecture, how to prepare a great meal, and then one about how hunky…
to which I responded in style (or so I hope)!
If you view it, you’ll find a link to something pink, spiral-shaped and cool-looking. I promise.
Before starting a hedge fund, read this →
soberlook.com
Sober Look blog is a recent find of mine. Not tumbling here with us, but one can’t have everything.
This was a rather practical post, with an embedded document.
These types of transparency requirements were unheard of a few years ago. But times have changed dramatically for the industry and “a couple of guys in a garage” starting a hedge fund will no longer fly.
Enjoy.
Scientists →
lookslikescience.tumblr.com
All photos.
All scientists.
All good-looking.
All the time.
Benford's Law and Hanselman's Apple ID
Scott and I were talking yesterday about his compromised Apple ID. I was telling him I didn’t understand why he was so upset about it - it seemed perfectly reasonable that Occam’s Razor applies here: Scott had his login/password hacked somehow. But that’s not the problem - turns out there’s a lot more going on here.
This isn’t recent at all. The Scott referred to is Scott Hanselman of Microsoft. The reference to Occam’s Razor was from TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, and not anything special. But the substance of the post WAS interesting, in its reference to Benford’s Law and cloud security.
Read the rest of the post Could Benford’s Law haved saved an Applie ID? on Wekeroad’s long dormant tumblr.
