Category: Blog

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”.

10 Seconds of Extreme Trading. Via Jody.

Gou Miyagi via Iain Tait.

The world is a much safer place now than in previous years. In the 1980s, the threat was total annihilation of the entire world, and today, it’s some terrorists blowing up a vehicle. Yet, politicians deceptively and dishonestly justify endemic mass surveillance by the world being “more dangerous”.

Rick Falkvinge on politicians.

Dangerous Minds on Francis Bacon and his struggles with chance.

Microsoft releases a common bridge for Kinect.

A new Laser truck, but as The Register says:

However, El Reg suggests the boffins in the military read Arthur C Clarke’s short story Superiority – which is on the reading list for industrial design students at MIT, and describes the dangers of such advanced weapons systems. A highly visible laser truck is going to be the first thing any enemy will want to take out.

The story of “The Fallen Astronaut” – the first (and only) art on the Moon.

Maurice Benayoun thinks that Parrhasius was the first Interactive Artist.

I’ve always been fascinated by JFK, Errol Morris and Tink Thompson are too. I remember doing a fifteen minute presentation on the assassination when I was at IBM before Imperial. I even had a pointer.

A stabilised shot.

John Naughton writes in the Guardian on “Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia”. Which reminded me of Stuart McMillen’s comic adaptation of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. You can find the original comic here.

I loved drawing maps as a boy, of treasure and dens and labyrinths. The Workers have just created a delicious website for the new book “Where You Are” by Visual Editions.

This is what immortality looks like. Is that what all actors desire? All of us? As Bill wrote – “All the world’s a stage”. Do we just want to be noticed? VHX distributing again – they keep picking up great films.

Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay on what is wrong with the modern world that stirred up several responses. Ironically, his original piece has been taken down as the Guardian’s copyright has expired.

This is why China is going to the moon.

Gay Talese remembers the late Peter O’Toole. I think the first time I saw him was Supergirl – the next moment I remember was that most famous of all cuts:

Dazed is going down to six print issues a year and scaling up its website.

2013 in review from Google Ventures. Always interesting when rivals pick up your investments.