CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-15 22:43:55 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, the first music video shot in orbit.

2013-05-07 21:29:19 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Americans may enjoy that Australia's major federal political debate is over download speeds.

Speaking as someone with 1000/500 mbps at work, I do find my home connection of 100/50 mbps frustratingly slow at times.

Though none of it is any use if they keep those silly download caps.

2013-05-04 19:59:10 (0 comments, 6 reshares, 17 +1s)

“And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it’s real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs,and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic — government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

“And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours — come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.”

2013-05-01 15:21:18 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The Mario brothers go to Brooklyn.

2013-04-23 11:37:25 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-04-20 01:17:14 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

So how much does it cost to shutdown a city for a day?

2013-04-11 13:07:41 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Awesome Google Street View powered Hyperlapse by our friends at T+L: http://vimeo.com/63653873

You can even make your own:
http://hyperlapse.tllabs.io

Read about the project:
https://medium.com/teehan-lax/b82a2e1522a

2013-04-09 15:03:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A tour of the space station.

2013-04-05 17:02:20 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

An android, from the people who brought you big dog.

The video text says it sweats to regulate temperature.

2013-04-01 14:32:00 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Everyone else is busy building complex abstractions, and I'm just sitting here, not understanding arithmetic:

$ cat junk.c
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int divide(int x, int y) {
        return x / y;
}

int main() {
        int x = divide(INT_MIN, -1);
        printf("%d\n", x);
        return 0;
}
$ gcc junk.c
$ ./a.out
Floating point exception (core dumped)
$

It looks like gcc is convinced that this is undefined behavior, because if you let the optimizer at it you get an entirely different kind of wrong:

$ gcc -O2 junk.c
$ ./a.out
-2147483648
$

2013-03-31 03:56:49 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

How railway lines are cleared of snow.

2013-03-30 23:40:58 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Is there anything that could stop me reading a new Kim Stanley Robinson book? If there is, it's a review like this:

In the first part, "The dialogue looks like this," he said. "You mean a statement with a simple attribution in the tag?" she said. "Yes." he said. "And it goes on like that for quite a while I suppose," she said. "Yes," he said. "So he doesn't even bury the tag in the text, then" she said. "No, just hangs it on the end," he said. Etc.

"Later in the book, the dialogue tags become infested with adverbs," he said, critically. "Really?" she inquired, doubtfully. "Yes," he said, forcefully. "Are there any Tom Swifties?" she asked, quizzically. "Close," he said, knowingly. Etc.

Ok, I'll probably read it anyway.

2013-03-26 00:53:53 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

The asteroid that exploded near Chelyabinsk in Russia last month had an explosive power of 440 kilotons (of TNT). For reference, the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima  was around 12 kilotons.

2013-03-20 18:57:29 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Dizzying but invisible depth

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let's simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. Those are actually such incredibly... more »

2013-03-15 14:16:36 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

Researchers are having a lot of fun with quadrocopters. I wonder what the first commercialized use will be. (Sadly, they have a very short battery life.)

2013-03-11 15:07:41 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 8 +1s)

Mike Mika writes:

"My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games together. Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that. So what else am I supposed to do? Now I'm up at midnight hacking the ROM, replacing Mario with Pauline."

2013-03-09 21:28:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Gentlemen, we can rebuild them. We have the technology.

If you condensed all 200,000 years of humanity's existence into a one hour-long video and then played it back, you would have to wait 58 minutes for people to build their first city-like habitat--a honeycomb-like mud-brick town of 5,000 in present-day Turkey.

Half a minute later, you'd see another city, in Iraq, surge to 50,000 people, and 45 seconds after that, Egypt's Alexandria would swell by another factor of ten, to 500,000. In the movie's last 2 seconds, London's population would skyrocket to 5 million--another order of magnitude--just as all the rest of the developed world began to erupt in a frenzy of urbanization. During the last half of the last second, the developing world would follow.

Today, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population makes its... more »

2013-03-05 15:03:40 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

"Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school's determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else."

2013-03-05 14:28:34 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Some perspective on energy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

100 W – approximate basal metabolic rate of an adult human body
1-3 kW – heat output of a domestic electric kettle
140 MW – average power consumption of a Boeing 747 passenger aircraft
101.6 GW – peak electrical power consumption of France
190 GW – average power consumption of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket
16 TW – average total power consumption of the human world in 2010
174 PW – total power received by Earth from the Sun

2013-03-03 19:51:28 (1 comments, 10 reshares, 8 +1s)

Measuring pulse from an ordinary video stream.

2013-03-01 19:36:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

If you're following along with SpaceX's launch today, the best source of information I've found is Spaceflight Now.

2013-03-01 13:47:16 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

The East Side access project is bringing more lines into Grand Central. The digging is 16 stories beneath midtown.

2013-02-28 14:23:49 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Information theory is easily the most important idea of the twentieth century. It's not particularly easy to explain, because like all really good ideas, it seems obvious now.

The best introduction is James Gleick's The Information. But Randall Munroe has done an excellent job in short essay form:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/34/

2013-02-26 14:09:38 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 2 +1s)

This is fun. My (sort of) liberal arts degree was spent reading people who started with the claim that culture and society made people different. Then they spent a lot of words saying nothing very much, and doing a terrible job demonstrating their point. I'm glad someone is finally thinking somewhat clearly about this.

2013-02-08 13:27:09 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Notes on building things. In particular:

“If we are all in agreement on the decision – then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.” – Charles E. Wilson (GM CEO circa 1950)

2013-01-29 19:55:04 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal—it would probably take no more effort than walking.

The downside (there’s always a downside) is the cold. It’s 72 degrees Kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

2013-01-24 20:03:16 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Wonderful analysis from Nate Silver.

2013-01-22 17:24:18 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Gravityloss writes:

Having had a car and also having spent time without one, it creates a striking difference how much you see other people. If you travel by bike and public transport, the places that are easiest to get to are geographically close or with large population densities (= good public transport). You never do "take away" or go to a drive in. At the tiny local hamburger joint between your workplace and home, you might see some people that you might otherwise avoid (you then realize why the drive in was invented) - and you reflect about your difference and are happy that you have a steady job. Or you can hang out with a laptop in a cafe in the city center, bump into an old friend and go somewhere together.

With a car, you're insulated from all that. You drive alone, you order your hamburgers from the drive in and go home and eat it alone. You avoid city centers... more »

2013-01-22 04:36:29 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Composite of photos taken by the Cassini satellite orbiting Saturn in 2006. Just to the top left of the bright rings is a dot. That's Earth.

http://www.ciclops.org/view.php?id=2230

2013-01-18 19:28:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

This is an interesting look into fight-and-flight responses.

<snippet>

“Adults copy all the big stuff first, and when they flip the pen and the color changes, they start filling in the details. Preadolescent kids start from one end and move across evenly; half the drawing is one color, the other half is in a second color. They move and think in a pure linear fashion.

“We test these adults in survival school about a half hour after they’ve been interrogated and out of the sixty-four guys, sixty of them copied the picture like prepubescent kids.”

2013-01-18 18:29:00 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Ingenious idea from my sister: permanently taped to her laundry detergent.

2013-01-15 22:08:05 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-01-14 15:26:02 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Baffling. In the world the WSJ lives in, single parents scrape by on a salary of $260,000, young adults must endure on a salary of only $230,000, retirees live on $180,000, and the middle class begins at $650,000.

Surely, there can't be anyone who actually believes this? Because this is off by roughly a factor of ten.

2013-01-13 14:27:51 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

You have seen the XKCD comic on kerning (http://xkcd.com/1015/), and laughed? Now you can try your hand.

2013-01-11 18:50:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"I am with you, Comrade Jackson. You won’t mind my calling you Comrade, will you? I’ve just become a socialist. It’s a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it."

2013-01-08 13:49:40 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Using a phone for content creation.

2013-01-07 10:36:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

"Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule."

2013-01-03 21:23:00 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-01-01 17:32:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

A compelling description about how copyright extension is reducing the number and quality of books and movies we have available today.  Copyright is a contract between authors and society: if you write more stuff, we'll let you profit from it.  That contract is being broken.

2012-12-28 03:48:59 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Getting serious:
        num := new(int64) 
        numptr := uint64(reflect.ValueOf(num).Pointer())
        p := i64.Program{                                                                
                {i64.MOVQ, i64.Addr64(numptr), i64.BX.Addr()},
                {i64.MOVQ, i64.BX.Ind(0), i64.BP.Addr()},
                {i64.ADDQ, i64.Addr8(7), i64.BP.Addr()},
                {i64.MOVQ, i64.BP.Addr(), i64.BX.Ind(0)},                                
                {Op: i64.RET},                                                           
        } 
        code := p.Bytes()
        fn := unsafe.Pointer(&code[0])
        fmt.Println(*num)
        call.Call(fn, nil, 0)
       fmt.Println(*num)

Prints:
        0
        7... more »

2012-12-22 17:01:33 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

For a holiday project, I am learning X86 assembly, by writing a lightweight in-process assembler.

Sadly, this is nothing like the last assembly I learned. For Sparc V9, I spent a few hours reading the spec and a day looking at the output of gcc -S. Done.

I am two days into Intel's 3000 page, three volume x86 manual, and more confused then when I started. So far the only thing that's helping is the Go linker, which very helpfully annotates a hex dump with the assembly.

$ cat junk.go 
package main

func f(a int) int { return a + 78 }
func main() { f(5) }
$ go tool 6g -l junk.go
$ go tool 6l -a junk.6
codeblk [0x2000,0x11c00) at offset 0x1000
...
002013  8b5c2408             | (3)      MOVL    main.a+8(SP),BX
002017  83c34e               | (3)      ADDL    $78,BX

The second column isthe hex dump, and opcode ... more »

2012-12-15 12:29:34 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This is entirely too silly.

2012-12-10 00:17:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A modern cabin.

2012-12-08 22:45:02 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I am really enjoying this new camera.

2012-11-29 15:41:45 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

2012-11-28 18:36:17 (9 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Christmas came early.

When I was home for Thanksgiving, my mom (+Sandy Fitzpatrick) asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

"Boxers with a pocket for my phone."

(Considering that I work from home a lot, am addicted to my phone, carrying it everywhere, and I don't like wearing pants.)

I said it halfway jokingly but she went and bought a 6-pack of boxer briefs, cut one of them up as pocket material, then sewed on little Galaxy Nexus-sized pockets on the other five.

Woot!

Unfortunately I need to get to work today, which means putting on pants at some point.

2012-11-16 02:15:39 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Foosball the way it was meant to be played.

2012-10-21 02:28:00 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Polymorphic container with runtime type tags.

2012-10-19 23:06:41 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I never ceased to be amazed by the lengths the city of San Francisco will go to strangle itself.

It's apparently not enough that companies have been pushed out of the city by bad laws. Now the employees need to be pushed out too.

2012-10-19 18:14:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

LeMessurier tried to take comfort from another element of Citicorp's advanced design: the building's tuned mass damper. This machine, built at his behest and perched where the bells would have been if the Citicorp tower had been a cathedral, was essentially a four-hundred-and-ten-ton block of concrete, attached to huge springs and floating on a film of oil. When the building swayed, the block's inertia worked to damp the movement and calm tenants' queasy stomachs. Reducing sway was of special importance, because the Citicorp tower was an unusually lightweight building;, the twenty-five thousand tons of steel in its skeleton contrasted with the Empire State Building's sixty-thousand-ton superstructure. Yet the damper, the first of its kind in a large building, was never meant to be a safety device. At best, the machine might reduce the danger, not dispel it.
...
"To put it... more »