I can’t wait for “Under the Skin“. Via Trevor Jackson. Good interview with Trevor on DesignBoom.
Stross on how to survive (coding) death marches.
Regex Golf and a rabbit hole. Meta xkcd in other words. Always go meta!
How to build a fictional world – Kate Messner.
I’ve recently been reading Stewart Lee’s excellent autobiography/self critique “How I Escaped My Certain Fate”. It’s great. One of the best bits wasn’t actually about Stewart, but rather the genius that is Simon Munnery and his “Self-Knowledge Impregnator”, deployed at the Cluuub Zarathustra. I won’t ruin the joke, just read. Bonus! Plagarism, in both directions. Double bonus! How to do stand up.
40 maps that explain the world.
Automatically generated new music genres.
The phrases that pay on Kickstarter.
Kerbal Space Program looks great. xkcd’s advice about it, if you work at NASA.
Fusion propulsion IAmA on Reddit. Is IAmA the future of interviews?
“Like The Wickerman sacrificing Bill Oddie to the gods of Countryfile,” Jaguar Shoes said, “Hand of Glory is a pop-up pub that unites a collective of artists in a disquieting, but colourful exhibition of British folk culture.”
New Folk bar in Dalston.
The Pegasus Touch is an SLA 3d printer that looks promising. Things are getting very interesting in the 3D printing space, with several key patents expiring soon.
How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View. Via Golan Levin.
It’s interesting to realise that Reddit largest stockholder is Condé Nast‘s parent company, Advance Publications. Will iama beat Vanity Fair in the long run? Has it already?
Building a living photo frame using Raspberry-Pi, by Samuel Clay.
Face Substitution in JS by Audun Mathias Øygard via Stephane Allary.
I read about the Cool Tools Book success with interest. I’ve always wanted to do a super thick magazine on low quality paper with just tons and tons of open content – Wikipedia articles, TV schedules, weather forecasts, doodle pages, everything. Perhaps everything on a persons hard drive?
Light Table, a promising new kind of IDE is now open source.
Physics editing in the three.js editor. Via Christian Östman. What a great way of modelling – using physics throughout.
Interesting thread on reddit, on the three most important battles in history:
“Salamis (480 BC) – The Athenian navy defeats the Persians at sea, turning back the Persian invasion of Western Europe. What would our world look like today without Greek civilization?
Saratoga (1777) – The American victory over the British brought France and Spain into the war against Britain, and globalized what had been a regional conflict. The world today would look a lot different had the British defeated the colonists.
Moscow (1941) – The Red Army turns back Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and turns WWII into a two front struggle in Europe that Germany had no hope of winning from that point onward. The world today would be a dark place indeed had the Wehrmacht succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union.”
Using K-means clustering to analyse the taste of different single malts.
“As an Islay fan, I wanted to investigate whether distilleries within a given region do in fact share taste characteristics. For this, I used a dataset profiling 86 distilleries based on 12 flavor categories.”
All done using R.
“Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. Pinterest. Every day, you hear about another successful startup by kids who are just out of school, or even still in school. Hardware is different. You never hear about a new team successfully making a high-performance microprocessor.”
Dan Luu on why making new microprocessors is hard.
I’ve been fascinated by the Eurion symbol for some time. More research on security in banknotes.
“I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”
Turns out memories may be transmitted through generations via DNA. Via Stewart.
Building a Mesh Network in Rural Somaliland. Mesh FTW!
“The Island Review is an online magazine dedicated to great writing and visual art that comes from, is inspired by, celebrates or seeks to understand the extraordinary appeal of islands, as places and as metaphors.” Via Katherine Hibbert.
Video lecture recorded in 2000. An introduction to the life and style of the amazing Paul Erdös, who for more than six decades lived out of two suitcases, criss-crossing the globe chasing mathematical problems. Paul Hoffman describes the life of Erdös in an intimate and entertaining glimpse into the global world of mathematics.
Via @randal_olson: Cool #dataviz! 5,000 vs 50,000 prime numbers plotted in polar coordinates.
The annual Chaos Communication Congress has just finished and it was full of good. My highlights:
Travis Goodspeed – “Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit”. Also an interesting because of PostgreSQL as a way of sharing data between many different small applications or daemons.
Joscha Bach – “How to Build a Mind – Artificial Intelligence Reloaded”. He believes that the building of AI’s should be a big cultural project – and that Companies and organisations will be AI’s in the end.
Trevor Paglen – “Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes”.
Richard and Anne Marggraf Turley – “Policing the Romantic Crowd”.
“Both live 20k north of Aberporth, Wales, UK, where Europe’s only test facility for civilian and military drones is situated”.