May 2012
3 posts
All the gold in the world →
My own second-favourite way-to-visualise-the-quantity-of-something is that all the gold in the world (not including gold we have yet to dig up or somehow extract from seawater) would make a cube only 20 to 22 metres on a side, depending on who you ask. To help visualise the size of the cube, 21-ish-metres is about the length of two city buses parked nose to tail.
I think the conclusion is that...
April 2012
6 posts
WatchHalf a million secrets (via TED.com)
Economist Debates: Airport security →
Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That...
Wind Map →
designlanguage:
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s beautiful animated map of wind patterns in the US. It even shows speed based on the contrast. Oh, and the map is almost in realtime.
March 2012
4 posts
No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto →
Happy Tau Day!
February 2012
12 posts
Teller Reveals His Secrets →
Teller is a surprisingly good writer.
Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are...
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to... →
Path just earned a permanent delete. Why do I have to email them to delete information that I didn’t give permission for them to take in the first place?
Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its...
January 2012
7 posts
U.S. Carriers Don't Want Stock Android Phones →
John Gruber:
Negotiations with the carriers:
Android handset makers: Here are our phones. How would you like us to change them so that you will sell them?
Microsoft: Here’s $200 million. Please sell our phones.
Apple: Here is our new phone. It comes in black or white. We will let you sell it.
Don't start from scratch →
I found some new reading material.
A common mistake people make when trying to answer a mathematical question is to work from first principles: it is almost always easier to modify something you already know. This article illustrates the point with examples that range from simple arithmetic to the forefront of research.
December 2011
10 posts
Daring Fireball: Merry →
“How much then, for one day with what my family has right now? How much? Everything.”
November 2011
17 posts
At the time Southern Cross sleeps →
Yasuaki Segawa:
