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June 2009
writing | ben fry » Transit Trekkies
“They actually … attempted to downplay what the existing control center looks like, because they wanted to make it look real to the average eye as compared to… we’re pretty Star Trekky up in the new control center now.”
Le réseau Twitter émerge comme source d'information pour les médias - Technologies - Le Monde.fr
May 2009
PIRATERIE EN SOMALIE - UN WEB DOCUMENTAIRE DE FRANCE 24
Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships
The Plenitude - The MIT Press
We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound—composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the "Plenitude." And in this book—at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy—he tells us how to understand and live with it.
BLDGBLOG: Earthquakes on Street View
Imagine, though, owning the building centered directly over the earthquake that destroys your whole city... And imagine the weird derived value such a property might hold in the future for disaster enthusiasts.
You go to purchase a small house at 3706 W. 106th Street in Los Angeles – only to find that you've been outbid, by several orders of magnitude, approaching $50 million, by an earthquake enthusiast in Japan. He or she has gone around the world purchasing epicenters, strange plots of land in the middle of nowhere that have no apparent use or distinction other than that they figure into the unfolding seismic history of our planet's surface.
It's an otherwise unknown subculture that has remained camouflaged within the international property market.
This is why text messages are 160 characters in length
And why 160 characters? Again, when Hillebrand discovered during his research that the average post card usually contained around 150 characters; people were already used to communicating using so few characters. (Telex messages were usually around this length, too, meaning that business users could easily adapt to text messages.) You’ll also find that your average e-mail today isn’t much longer than a text message.
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April 2009
Numerical Enigma | Smartkit Puzzles and Brain Teasers
YouTube - Average 40Matches
March 2009
< H X A 7 2 4 1 > : MiniLight minimal global illumination renderer
MiniLight is a minimal global illumination renderer. It is primarily an exercise in simplicity. But that makes it a good base and benchmark for development and experimentation. And it just might be the neatest renderer around (on average, about 570 lines). There are translations into several programming languages.
Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship | 43 Folders
Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.
Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.
S is for Semantics: MIN and MAX in SPARQL
It is a bit embarassing when I teach SPARQL to someone with a background in SQL. Once they figure out how it works, they start to appreciate it as a powerful language for representing just what information you want from a graph. Then they start asking about some of the commonly used query operations from SQL - things like aggregators and grouping operations like COUNT, SUM, MAX, MIN and AVG.
Evolution of the Web from 2000 to 2007 - average web object size quintuples since 2000
Summary: In a comparative survey of data traces from 2000 and 2007, University of Twente researchers found that the nature of the Web has changed from a static one-way medium to a dynamic platform for interactive services such as photo and video sharing portals.
The Web has changed dramatically over the past seven years. During that time the Web has moved from a static one-way medium toward a dynamic platform for interactive services such as photo and video sharing portals. In a comparative survey of data traces served over the Web from 2000 and 2007, University of Twente researchers found that the nature of web sites has changed (Sadre and Haverkort, 2008).
February 2009
L'écologie profonde est-elle un humanisme ? I - Mouvements
une règle des bibliographies françaises sur l’écologie : elle ne compte aucun représentant, direct ou indirect, de l’écologie philosophique, de l’éthique environne-mentale, ou de la « deep ecology ». Ni le Norvégien Arne Naess (né en 1912), ni les Américains John Baird Callicott (né en 1941), Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), Edward Abbey (1927-1989), Edward O. Wilson (né en 1929), ni le Britannique James Love-lock (né en 1919) n’y figure. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’ils ne sont pour ainsi dire pas traduits en français. Pourquoi ne sont-ils pas traduits en français ? Parce que l’écologie philosophique a chez nous la réputation d’être une pensée « controversée ».
Documentation for the Combine (focused) crawling system
The Combine system is an open, free, and highly configurable system for focused crawling of Internet resources. It aims at providing a robust and efficient tool for creating topic-specific moderate sized databases (up to a few million records). Crawling speed is around 200 URLs per minute and a complete structured record takes up an average of 25 kilobytes disk-space.
Cost and Challenges of opening a cafe
Les rêves de révolution… et d'être le propriétaire d'un café.Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.
January 2009
Le vertige fractal
Une véritable mystique a entouré les images fractales lors de leur apparition, née essentiellement de la notion "d'auto-similarité", qui invite le spectateur à une plongée vers l'infini. La notion d'infini a toujours fasciné, et voir une invitation à l'infini se matérialiser sur une figure est autrement plus suggestif qu'une réflexion philosophique abstraite
Alberto Posadas - biographie
"Ce qui comprend et gouverne toute chose". C'est ainsi que Anaximandre définissait to ápeiron ou le commencement de tous les êtres. Par ce mot qui désigne littéralement "ce qui ne connaît pas de limites", Anaximandre fait moins allusion à un infini physique que mental. Pour mieux comprendre cette acception nous pourrions parler ici d'un infini se développant dans un espace fini. C'est sur ce paradoxe que repose aujourd'hui la musique fractale. Les profils d'une figure fractale, par exemple, tendent vers l'infini et sa dimension est définie par un nombre irrationnel. Le même ordre se reproduit à des niveaux chaque fois inférieurs ouvrant ainsi des paysages constamment nouveaux. Alberto Posadas s'est appuyé sur cette idée stimulante pour écrire Ápeiron
Automatic Tile Cutter - Google Mapki
L'album le plus vendu sur Amazon en 2008 était aussi offert gratuitement - Numerama
L'album le plus vendu sur Amazon en 2008 était aussi offert gratuitement - Numerama
The average person speaks | Antony Loewenstein
Google: Firefox and Chrome Run Gmail Twice as Fast as IE, Says Google
December 2008
La Légende de Bouddha
Conceptualizing AtomPub for Map services « Vish’s ramblings
AtomPub is both a format and a protocol. And I think that the AtomPub is a natural way to expose data especially also GIS data. I am going to go over how in my opinion GIS data exposed as map services seamlessly falls into the AtomPub data container structure. The figure below illustrates a simplified data container structure in AtomPub.
