- Solar energy generation potential in different US cities bit.ly/2T97Sjc (Source: "Project Sunroof" by Google, bit.ly/2T8YDiZ). Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Antonio are shown to have a lot of potential in case all roof area is used efficiently for solar installations. Of the smaller cities, Shinrock (Ohio), North Berwick (Maine) and Blacksville (Georgia) show very high sunlight potential for the median roof.
- Looking at weather normalized site EUIs in Boulder, Colorado for 2017, three values impress: Boulder Community Health-Parking Garage (2655 N Broadway), Chautauqua Dining Hall (900 Baseline Rd) and Scott Carpenter Park-Locker Rooms (1505 30th Street). They have values of 674.5, 607.2 and 470.3 respectively. (Source: City of Boulder Colorado, Department of Housing, Planning and Sustainability, "Building Performance Program", bit.ly/2AWEPIE)
- Food assistance recipients by county in Iowa (31.01.2011 - 31.12.2018) bit.ly/2B1f3mr (Source: data.iowa.gov, Iowa Department of Human Services, Food Assistance Program, bit.ly/2AZxQi2). Polk, Scott and Linn counties seem to have a lot of people in need. Something positive we notice is that despite the large number of counties, the median allotment per recipient varies only in reasonable amounts. As oftentimes, it is unrealistic to assume that a single approach could work equally well across all counties.
- Average fee per registration for different vehicle categories in Iowa (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2AZgkKN. Multi-purpose vehicles seem to be connected with the highest fees, while mopeds and motorcycles—with the lowest.
- A short list of cultures grown at organic farms in Iowa bit.ly/2AZmafj (Source: data.iowa.gov, "Iowa certified organic farms and businesses", bit.ly/2TepKcB). Succotash and skullcap found my limited knowledge unprepared. Not perfectly cleaned.
- Bike paths in Madison, Wisconsin bit.ly/2AVHYsc
- Can't believe that dummerAugust started more than 10 years ago. The time has gone so fast.
- Braess paradox: The construction of a new road or expanding link capacities may increase total network delay. Yet, a factor that can decrease it has been said to be the introduction of more autonomous vehicles. Never thought about that.
- The approximate number of pictures a gallery can accomodate in a certain building may be computable too. Assuming that all of them are equally spaced (horizontal at distance k) and no two of them can be placed at the same vertical, one could sum the length of all walls (xtotal), find the average length of all existing pictures (xavg = (x1 + ... + xp) / p) and then use that xtotal must be optimally equal to (or bigger) than n*xavg + (n+1)*k. Form here, if not mistaken, n = (xtotal - k) / (xavg + k). Now nothing stands in the way of your exhibition. But going through long corridors to perceive images one-by-one feels almost "analog" today compared to a giant composition (involving perhaps polygonal subdivision of the pictures) at a single place. The latter may reduce the visitor walk time and the gallery rent costs. One could also look at the average rent cost per image (in terms of value) exhibited.
- The FLOPS/watt metric may not appear immediately useful unless one has multiple servers to compare or they know which number describes the Japan Shoubu system B.
- This explains the popularity of serverless and why noone wants to own a server anymore bit.ly/2AXalWV. Exporting innovation to Amazon (or any other big corporation) won't be consequence-free, for all of us.
- Some people mentioned surface reconstruction and I wondered whether there are cases where volume reconstruction might be needed and where it could find applications.
- Can the colors used in flower arrangements be matched against known existing palettes (to look for similarities) or create new ones?
- Making a walkway aware of how many people passed through it and how many cars had to use braking (to let pedestrians pass) in a given time interval could lead to better design of walkways.
- An upper limit of 130km/h on German highways may not be such a bad idea. If other drivers around you act and respond too fast, you no longer know what to expect and the stress level rises. This may increase the likelihood for a deadly mistake. Seeing a paper on pavement cracks also makes me wondering what happens if a hole forms and one passes through it with 250km/h. Computer vision seems to help with crack detection, but it may be unclear which locations need monitoring (on a long highway, inside a tunnel or inside a skyscraper).
- Liked the image with the streamlines around the bunny in the Arxiv paper "Computational fluid dynamics on 3D point set surfaces". Unsure about the rights, so not sharing it here.
- Suppose you have a severe back pain. Is there any forum where people with a similar problem have shared their experience and eventually what kind of treatment was effective in their case? Not needing to know this for myself, but for someone who went to doctors multiple times and still has the pain. I've read once that a woman found some relief by forcing herself to sit upright (for many months until she saw a result) instead of having her back take the "C" shape. But I have no clue whether this works in every case. The right literature is mostly inaccessible to me, so I'd rather rely on any suggestions you might have. Thank you.
- Some good points on hiring software engineers bit.ly/2T7aPAC. Admittedly, some of these were considered while creating the jobs page.
- Do you feel that the importance of "market research" has grown in recent times? How do you choose which products to develop for your clients if you are not aware of their problems, needs and wants? Most people would probably not speak about them openly, which makes our work much harder. We could try to do something that predisposes the client to speak about them or we could rely on the the growing pool of online data to seek useful insights. The second requires the use of servers with lots of storage, memory and processors, mostly available only to the biggest companies with proven data mining expertise. What remains for the rest of us is to rely on option one.
- Crystallizes under pressure. Like++
- Everytime a new editor proudly offered a "package manager", I threw it away on day two, often not understanding why. But the ones which didn't try to spare me the choice of who I wanted to be or how my brain should be wired were often helpful. Programming isn't a game who will sprinkle more code in less time. It's an excercise in creative thinking (often asking non-obvious questions), contextual problem solving and purposeful doing, all in very specific ways that make us uniquely humane. I cannot simply allow someone to come and take this away from me. But if the package manager works for you, use it to your own advantage.
- Constantly making art in the form of many tangible objects and not having a website is somewhat limiting in 2019. Using social media on a daily basis to reach clients may only partially compensate for this. But it depends on the concrete case and aspirations.
- A "desk reference" must be a written material challenging the stability of the desk.
- Libraries in Oakland, California bit.ly/2T5KT8A (Source: City of Oakland, "Oakland Public Library branch locations and hours", bit.ly/2T1X7ir). Numbers 12 and 17 seem to refer to the same address.
- Left a small conceptual defect here bit.ly/2T0lcGo. Initially consisted of lines only, made by math and code, then shaded with GIMP in place of crayons. Minimal dexterity required.
- Seeking regularity behind the locations of the Apple stores in the USA bit.ly/2T07IdK. Shows ≈270 stores, where distant places (e.g. Hawaii) have been excluded.
- Total number of passengers transported through air in Europe (2006 - 2017, log scale) bit.ly/2T2zOVL. In terms of absolute numbers, countries like UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy have transported the most passengers. High growth can be seen in countries like Iceland, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and partially Luxembourg.
- Beware of files whose end has been mysteriously cut while you think you have all the data.
- Rising salaries for data scientists, 2018 bit.ly/2SYPdq4
- Parcels in Berkeley, California bit.ly/2ASgpzL. Took much longer than the expected 15 mins. The big area seems to represent water.
- Cycling network in Sydney, Australia bit.ly/2B2obr9
- Libraries in Sydney, Australia bit.ly/2ASx8Dc
- Is there a study that explains the harmful side effects of noise/vibrations from a loud outer air conditioner body that happens to be relatively close to one's sleep location, whirling at night? Sometimes I wake up slightly dizzy and wonder why, but it might affect my ability to focus and think deeply throughout the day. Perhaps other people have similar experiences.
- Noticed that some papers used three-letter abbreviations to describe all parameters used in various equations, where only the meaning of the definitions (vars before equality sign) were explained while all other explanations appeared in an extra large legend at the end of the paper. Quite inconvenient, because by having no knowledge that such legend exists, one could only wonder. It is also fairly inconvenient to jump to the end of the paper each time only to seek the meaning of another abbreviation or refresh on one you saw earlier.
- The last two explain quite well why I work only on concrete projects with well-defined requirements for good clients only. Or why I fall back on extending the bits when I am not having good personal reasons to collaborate. You would agree that the bits are connected with much less effort/risk than entire software applications and they enable one to see the effect of the contribution immediately.
- Made a similar assumption that some people may not have liked one or more of the jobs they had, having to work overtime, in harmful environments or for pay levels below the poverty line, suffering various forms of exploitation. The idea was to let the public decide how legitimate the job offers are and filter out the bad ones (also in terms of employers) based on this context, at least in a narrow set of job positions, which I understood fairly well and which I believed were meaningful in terms of adding more value to the economy/society as a whole. The usage pattern led me to believe there's no need for this, so the need to assume that anyone was dissatisfied with their job no longer exists.
- "A fifth of China’s homes are empty. That’s 50 million apartments" bloom.bg/2SXTUQY. 22% is a high rate. Buying a third home means that two unused ones have been left behind, even if it's possible to find tenants for them (since they won't be able to live elsewhere if we assume a constant number of people). I noticed a similar trend here too: many buildings, some of which got machine equipment were left alone in the province/cities, where noone feels the need to care about their physical disintegration. So I tried to make a page where the owners could reach potential interestees in finding alternative uses for those places. Very often some people don't have even elementary offices to work from and do their job effectively while at the same time such places remain vacant long-term. Noone found interest in that. Or it could be that they are already happily using another service and see no reason to look further. If so, I am happy about that too in my hopes for more vibrant environments.
- Wondered whether if one knew the exact mineralization level of the mineral water they drink and were aware of the daily quantities, they could obtain a picture of what accumulates in their body within a year. Limestone in the washing machine is probably a useful, scary thought. Yet, many options may need to be evaluated, which is inconvenient to many. Still no reason why "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" won't be valid in this case. Do you try to reduce mineral intake as part of water intake whenever possible?
- The evacuation planning problem reminds me of an interesting bookstore said to be located underwater—this was probably in Venice. They had a special escape to save the people in case of water leakage and the books were placed on a dynamic platform which reportedly rose above water level to prevent damage of the valuable exemplars. A lot of care and attention to detail for the right reasons. Does your software have an evacuation plan or prefer to publicly blame the technologies in use? (e.g. "503 Varnish cache")
- Looks like Xerox printer specifications haven't been considered here yet. Well, sometimes we have to admit that we can't do everything.
- Did not expect to see a curve showing how CO2/CO/NOx emissions change by varying the speed (diagram in a paper). Always believed that these emissions are mostly constant independent of how one drives. Yet, now I see that even the road conditions can affect them. That this curve can be described by a function enables one to seek the optimal speed under which the emissions would be lowest. Not sure whether these optima would vary a lot across different car models and age-conditions. I suppose you are already curious to know what's going on when you push the pedal.
- This would also be a great way to support this work in the future and see more of it. Another simple way would be to remove something off this wishlist a.co/eZw8ZNK, but this option is mostly for my biggest fans.
- Do you need someone to realize your project online? If so consider communicating your functional/technological requirements, the audience you intend to serve, your budgetary expectations and the frequency with which you respond to questions. If lucky, I might agree to serve you; if not, we could both seek better luck elsewhere.
- GDP growth rate of India and China (1960 - 2015) bit.ly/2T15Scw
- "Fuel cell electric vehicles achieve 40-60% energy efficiency compared to gasoline-powered vehicles that typically operate at 20% efficiency. 1kg hydrogen contains ≈3x the energy of 1kg gasoline and is non-toxic, colorless and odorless."
- Feels like something is in motion here bit.ly/2AZrWO3, but won't run object detection on this image from the IRIS collection, published by the Canadian Astronomy Data Center.
- Scroll acceleration is a useless gimmick. Don't.
- The paper "Concrete, the durable building material" lists some properties of high-performance concrete: high strength, abrasion resistance, low permeability, low absorbtion, low diffusion coefficient, high resistivity, resistance to chemical attack, high modulus of elasticity, high resistance to freeze/thaw damage, volume stability, inhibition of bacterial growth. I believe that low emissivity could have been featured as well.
- "The Channel Tunnel crossing between England and France has been designed to provide a service life of 100 years or more." Haven't seen it yet, but sound like exceptional engineering achievement. How many things do you know of that are developed with such time frame in mind? Almost reminds me of the underground clock and the Long Now Foundation. Further: "70 years after Canada Place Trade and Convention Centre was built (1996), the precast concrete piles were still found in excellent condition."
- Hexagonal piezoelectric tiles to lighten footpaths b.gatech.edu/2AYAxR5. The author mentions 125 LEDs per cavity, but the final image seems to show 6*(15+9) = 144 slots if my counting was correct. Great idea, which is not new, but the scale and thinking possibly are.
- Traffic crashes in Las Vegas, Nevada (01.01.2016 - 31.12.2017) bit.ly/2AKLMfC. Not a small number for a period of two years.
- "Modelling weather is extremely challenging and uses vast amounts of data." But someone watching the evening news would probably see the forecast as something trivial that can be explained in five minutes.
- Clicking on "view articles" when at the page of an Elsevier journal flashes the message "popup blocked" at the top of the browser, after which nothing happens. Not sure why the browser insists to protect me each time. A second click usually succeeds, yet my doubts remain.
- Bike paths in Brussels, Belgium bit.ly/2AKX6Zm. The connection to the smaller path in the South is missing.
- Changing colors every 15 degree bit.ly/2SVK16t. Interesting that once filled, using undo/redo repeatedly serves to animate the filling/emptying of the skeleton in either direction.
- Even when it's too easy for you, sometimes it doesn't hurt to repeaat it: "Finding the coordinates of the intersection point of two lines" bit.ly/2APkEft
- Pouring in bit.ly/2SU5m03
- Straight lines inside square bit.ly/2SVjOoF. You may see the resulting lines as curves.
- Are your radars detecting overspeed only at a single point or measuring the maximal speed inside an entire road segment? The first enables any driver with sufficiently fast response to push the brakes once they approach the patrol car, allowing them to easily meet the requirements on a millisecond average. Yet, we know what's wrong with closing the eyes, because tomorrow someone might be hurt badly.
- Saw a parked ambulance and thought again of ambulance response times and the way people are treated when they are perceived to arrive too late. The cases when medics have been beaten upon arrival are still hard to shake off my consciousness. Might partially explain why there are so few of them.
- "Cooking with numbers: lessons from a food economist" bit.ly/2SQp7Wh. On the problem of hunger worldwide.
- Total electricity supply and demand in the UK (Q3 2016-Q3 2018) bit.ly/2SZVcLy. To be net zero or positive, you have to consume less than you produce. Enjoyed the comparison between the diagrams ranking electricity prices in some countries by £/kWh and by PPS/kWh, according to which citizens in some of them had much cheaper electricity (first diagram), but were still able to purchase less of it (second diagram). PPS/kWh seems like a better metric.
- Young modulus (stress:strain ratio) for some materials (according to Wikipedia) bit.ly/2SUUpv0. Presented on a log scale to preserve the visibility of most ranges. My intuition is that if the ratio is much higher than one (before log), the material can withstand a lot of stress and if it is much smaller than one, it can be more easy to extend/elongate. According to the overall curved shape that all materials build, there may be additional ones with Young moduli between the values typical for a diamond and for carbyne. An assumption only.
- Made myself a screenshot for personal use from the diagram of appliance's noise, published by Consumer Reports bit.ly/2SVYmjo. Once you see this, you will no longer believe that your blender is an outlier. The small blade radius asks for faster rotation speed to be effective, which creates extra noise. Also liked the parallel with the F-16 engine and how on average many appliances were claimed silent by the specification numbers.
- PM2.5 at measurement stations in Australia (01.01.2019-14.01.2019) bit.ly/2SYBboE. If the data is correct (it has not been verified), the first two weeks of the new year show levels much lower than some of the previous historic observations with periodic peaks exceeding 25-30µg/m3. These levels are much healthier, but it remains to be seen whether they'll be kept throughout the year. Notice how the "Florey" station shows the most variability. Sometimes values suddenly drop to zero, which looks suspicious and may signal a temporary device problem.
- Of course you won't be able to find teachers. You won't be able to find plumbers, electric engineers, truck drivers, pizza sellers, dentists, programmers. Non-payers can't find people in general and they also aren't served. Small advice: continue to rely on your income from (passive) assets and don't try to convince (active) workers to risk their health/life for the cents you offer. Feel the pain of who makes that economy.
- Rail network in Ireland bit.ly/2ALMt8o. As expected, most lines pass through the bigger cities, where the length of the bigger segments has been shown. Notice how with relatively few lines a lot of territory has been covered.
- Cities in Spain & Italy by population bit.ly/2SSOk2a (single diagram)
- Liveliness of the stations in the London underground network bit.ly/2SR9Og7. If you followed this page, you probably remember the tube map showing the stations. If we believe that close stations are more likely to have similar entry and exit values, we may come to the idea to use t-SNE to see whether it could capture such relationships and present geographically close stations as close points bit.ly/2AJqUWd.
- Monthly nonfarm employment in some US states (2005-2018) bit.ly/2SPDuu3
- Population vs. GDP (PPP) for some countries (2018) bit.ly/2AIVHm5. Interesting to observe that countries having very high purchasing power tend to have very small populations. USA seems to be one of the few that has enabled a high living standard for so many people. If I were to include the labels for China and India, this would skew the diagram significantly, because a lot of white space would be left below the bottommost point in the diagram, where the two points would appear far on the right, sending the point related to USA approximately at the position where Germany appears, making the whole diagram unreadable.
- Additionally, if you didn't seek to come in contact, the assumption was that you could: 1) solve your problem yourself, 2) didn't have a problem or 3) you didn't see your problem important enough as to be willing to pay in order to deal with it.
- There is always someone else who will do what you want cheaper. If this is what you are looking for, dummerAugust is not the right service provider for you. Please, look elsewhere.
- If you have an apartment complex and need to have plan of the apartments with clearly indicated relative sizes and prices of each unit, you could speak with your web designer about it.
- Used the numeric data on Windy to paint a picture of the expected temperatures in some cities until 17.01.2019 bit.ly/2SOfDe1
- Library branches in Miami, Florida bit.ly/2SPXeO3. "Main Library" is listed under number 39 (out of 50).
- First time seeing the metric "value per mass" applied in the context of a purse. Estimating the weight of banknotes mathematically was quite interesting, but the idea that the small coins could add a lot of weight, while not much value is one that I must have missed somehow while thinking about the much bigger knapsack. Sometimes the opportunities can be found hidden within the smaller things.
- Didn't know that wishlists too have to be maintained. Removed all items which became unavailable due to no sellers shipping them to the desired location. From a design perspective, it seems strange to do nothing and leave what has become noise among what has remained signal.
- Capacity fill/empty rate bit.ly/2SPF0fB
- A comedian is someone who computes medians to make people happy.
- Paths for cyclists in Kalmar, Sweden bit.ly/2AGpAn3 (Source: Kalmar kommun, Öppna geodata, "Cykelvägar", bit.ly/2SN7pDb)
- Cities in Sweden by population bit.ly/2AzcEPJ. The labels of Södermalm, Västerås and Örebro have not been shown to prevent label overlap. All other cities are said to have less than 100000 citizens. Do you find any inaccuracies?
- Visits per hour and book loans per hour of the libraries in Oulu, Finland (2017) bit.ly/2SLr3PH. It looks as if there was a popular July-only campaign in the "Ylikiiminki" branch based in the district "Itäinen alue". But we also see that July was connected with higher than usual book loans in many library branches. "Lainausosasto" is the one that has shown consistently strong performance throughout the year. Intuition makes us feel that the given book loan data for December may not have been very accurate. As of today, data for 2018 was not available.
- Museums and experiences in Helsingborg, Sweden bit.ly/2SMhZKF
- Had a simple idea to try to identify actors/actresses, whose work has contributed a lot to the box office of films overall. For the task, I took the short (but limited) list of movies on BoxOfficeMojo and for each movie I added the top ten names as seen in the "cast" list on IMDB. Then computed ten weights with the property that they sum to one. Used the position of the actor/actress in the list to obtain a per-movie weight and multiply it with the box office value which gave a single value for each actor and movie. Then summed these values for each individual across all films and sorted the result in reverse to see this short list bit.ly/2AB4ZAw (containing only 35 out of 4227 names, also available as a diagram bit.ly/2SGwP53). My naive thought was that if someone was willing to make a new hit that increases the total quadrature of the box office, they may find it useful to engage with one or more of these actors/actresses, which the public likes so much.
- To reach the finish line, it was needed to see a ranking of the density (in g/mm3) of all smartphone models previously considered bit.ly/2SFqpmQ. Despite Apple having the smallest number of models relative to Huawei and Samsung, they seem to be the most packed, which is what great engineering is about. This is great news for Apple. Also surprised to see iPhone 4s appearing second only to iPhone XS. CNET claims that Steve Jobs worked on 4s cnet.co/2SGRTIT (as I suspected too), while XS has been invented under Tim Cook. Interesting.
- And the same with Samsung's smartphones bit.ly/2AD84Qr. Also surprising to see newer "A" models ranking higher than Galaxy S9. Note that I've included only the first 3 pages of the results on GSMArena (173 models), so some older models may be missing. Additionally, I'm showing only the top 30 results here. Whenever a model had multiple submodels, only the one with the best characteristics was considered.
- Also did something similar for Apple smartphones bit.ly/2SJ58sn, but the number of useful features looks limited, so be sceptical about what you see here. Also note that the values are incomparable to those for Huawei smartphones seen earlier. While at the end of the list, the model numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 seem to appear well-ordered, at the top the situation is slightly more confusing, with some older models (like 7 Plus or 8 Plus) appearing before a newer model like XR (again, based on this set of features only).
- I like the NBC logo a lot, but do you find that an SVG version of it, showing six circular sectors positioned symmetrically to enable its creation in three iterations, has to necessarily weight 6.5kB? I believe you could do 10-15 times better.
- Liked the consistency in the way Huawei described all the characteristics of its smartphone models. And you would probably agree that dimensions given in millimeters speak about work of high precision. We could take all this data and compute the approximate relative value of each device bit.ly/2AzHNCB. Prices were not available, so they were not considered (varying widely depending on availability, market, seller etc). What looks interesting is the degree at which the first three models separate themselves from the rest. Sometimes, evaluating such data tells us how wrong our initial intuition was. Hope you find this as useful as I found it enjoyable, despite the effort and investment of time.
- It would have been so much nicer (and more useful) if you made your website slightly more modern, especially when selling concrete, tangible products. Try to make your audience feel appreciated by showing quality photos and descriptions of your products instead of simply giving them an empty form with qty-fields and a purchase button. It's 2019 and I'm sure your clients will appreciate it.
- Never heard of terminal dwell time, but it seems an important indicator for the efficiency of rail terminals. It measures the time vehicles spend at a stop without moving. Statistics Canada publishes such data on a weekly basis and it was available for the period between 24.11.2018 and 08.12.2018 bit.ly/2SFXJdD. Thunder Bay, Ontario had the shortest dwell time, while Ridley, British Columbia had the longest. Please, take a look at the note too.
- Visited the Starbucks data bakery to find out more about the product offers bit.ly/2SExDHH. The "Almond croissant" seems one possible way to avoid saturated fats. "Cinnamon raisin bagel" has a total fat of only 1.01g (all values are per 100g), which is good if you try to avoid it. The "Kitchen sink cookie" will give you the highest cholesterol. If possible, avoiding the "Peppermint brownie cake pop" (has 46.5% sugar) would ensure that your kids' health is not compromised. If you seek high-fiber, the "Sprouted grain vegan bagel" seems your best option (6.2g), while if you look for a high-protein food, the "Everything bagel with cheese" would give you over 11g.
- Looked into the features of smart watches made by Fitbit, where I was unsure what they are capable of. The new model "Charge 3" seems to offer the most value for the price bit.ly/2SGn4UP if all features were of equal importance. But this is often not so, which partially explains why "Flex 2" appears to make good impression too (its features may be less important). As far as I saw, only "Ionic" (the most expensive model) has a built-in GPS, which could be great if one wanted to capture and analyze trajectories, for instance (although this would require enough memory to hold the data as well). The ability to turn off the screen when unused to preserve the battery is likely as useful as on smartphones.
- Looking at the finesse with which Lady M cakes are made bit.ly/2SFnlXV. One could follow the beauty of the lines formed by the individual layers without getting bored. Perhaps tracing a sample photo could even be used to improve straight-line drawing.
- Can't look at your stack bit.ly/2AxPTM1 as a result of your past decisions. I make my own.
- Curve fitting on a shirt bit.ly/2SBSP12. With your shoes it's different. Their front will appear concave to you (sad again), while nearby people would see two convex smiles.
- Parks in Dublin, Ireland bit.ly/2SGm6rl. Not sure why "Tymon park" has the "East" label on the west side and vice versa. Double-checked, but the labels seem to be set this way, so I hesitated to make changes. (Perhaps you know better.) Could matter if someone is looking for a pitch with a given number. "Corkagh park" is the biggest and is said to have even a fishery for people who couldn't fish someone there.
- Strange thought: Having an air purifier with three modes of operation (slow/medium/fast air filtering) allows someone to make a choice based on the cubic meter per decibel-watt-second metric. Would you use another one?
- Exploring US retail store locations by brand (Kmart, Wegmans, Lidl, Kroger, Aldi) bit.ly/2AuJGk4. Does not include data about Walmart (inconvenient access), Whole Foods (site inaccessible from Europe), Target (data available on request only at city level). I suppose that these three companies can do much better if they wished so. What surprises is the large number of Kroger locations despite the store locator limiting the results to 50 per state. It seemed that their application leaked some memory after prolonged usage involving page switching. After each click for the next page, there was a visible jank until the scrollbar moved to the top to show the new results. At some point (at least twice) Chrome repeatedly/stubbornly asked to close the active tab. Aldi also does not make the full list of stores available, but only shows the visible ones inside a bounding box at high zoom level. This restricts the number of results and makes it hard to obtain all addresses. But we could write a small JavaScript code to help with the task. Aldi also needs to pay attention that their store locator neither works without JavaScript nor provides any useful fallback. That said, the diagram hints that many areas in the central-west part of the country have relatively few stores by these five brands, which may enable smaller local businesses to thrive there. Do you find the diagram somewhat accurate?
- The latest issue of Max Planck magazine contains an interview mentioning that estimated 3.3 million people died in 2013 due to air pollution, whereas after adding more fidelity, this number increased to 4.5 million in 2015 (of which 4.3 million were attributed to PM2.5 pollution). It was also estimated that smoking killed ≈6.4 million people each year. Essentially, we have almost become smokers without even realizing it.
- The 20 biggest cities in Indonesia bit.ly/2Syxkhz. Given that the country is said to have a population of 268 million people, where Jakarta is said to have ≈8.5 million, it is reasonable to expect a very long tail of smaller cities.
- Parks in Ottawa, Canada bit.ly/2SuWldA. The city boundaries look almost like a heart, but the right heart chamber seems to be slightly better supported by oxygen. The green areas in some online maps looked confusing since they showed golf courses or schools, but no labels related to parks. "South March Highlands Conservation Forest" seems to be the most distinguishable park on the diagram.
- Libraries by area in Calgary, Canada bit.ly/2ArHObA (Source: "Calgary Public Library locations and hours", bit.ly/2Appyj6). Some are quite big, so you can assume that it's easy to get lost there or lose awareness of the passing hours. Might replace your living room, at least for a while.
- These high-resolution traffic cameras from Calgary, Canada bit.ly/2Sz7oCx could make for a great demo. Noticed that the cameras in Montreal were showing some snow as opposed to those in Calgary.
- First time seeing the i5-8265U CPU (6MB cache) in a laptop amzn.to/2AuE7BV, but it looks interesting.
- Without knowing French, I somehow managed to find the libraries in Paris, France bit.ly/2Sv0f6h. Perceived a gap in the content here and tried to fill it, but other sources did better, so no need to try.
- Owned/in acquisition/sold land by the City of Chicago (as of 22.05.2018) bit.ly/2Aqt8JS. Contains almost 15000 properties, many of which are located in one of the three big clusters.
- The highest churches in Germany bit.ly/2Au2Lmc. Used bild.de as source of the data (23.11.2014), so I cannot say whether there were changes in these heights since then.
- Strange advice heard on the TV yesterday: "Now is the time to get anything you want, because over the holidays many people have received gifts, which they either don't need or are duplicates of what they already have. So they are looking to sell them at reduced prices now and this could be a win for both sides."
- Green areas in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2AsAYCO. Most areas look quite small/fragmented here, which is slightly disappointing. But it is also true that the data has not been updated for a while. Perhaps you know the name of the biggest park in the south.
- All-year-long fountains and locations to drink water in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2SzdGSA. Could not label all.
- Existing, projected and planned cycling routes in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2Sz5eTm
- Say you were a truck driver (in short- or long-distance distribution of goods) and your company was looking for a new vehicle. How would it decide which model would be the best pick? According to which criteria/weighting? I looked at some specifications with the idea to compare several trucks, but there was either not enough or an overwhelming amount of information, not all of which seemed useful. Parameters which could be of interest are engine power, speed, displacement, torque, container dimension, maximal container tonnage, maximal height, turn radius, fuel tank, fuel consumption, price and others (for many models). Isuzu specifications seem to come closest to what I was looking for, but even they lack some detail. Any ideas on finding better resources?
- Placing 300 images on a single page and asking the viewer to load them all is a fast way to prove the someone lacks the understanding about what is involved in great web design.
- Circulation of some newspapers in the UK (2000-2018) according to Wikipedia bit.ly/2Ap7gyk. Shows that "The Sun", "Daily Mail" and "Daily Mirror" have lost a lot of sales over time, while "London Evening Standard" grew in popularity to surpass the "Daily Mirror" in recent years.
- Trips across bike stations in Trondheim, Norway (01.05.2018-01.12.2018) bit.ly/2Aol9gi (Source: bit.ly/2Aq9DkF). Many cyclist trajectories overlap at the north of the city (if we assume straight lines). The attempt to find a clear visual explanation of the average travel speeds failed here due to the many overlapping lines. But numerically seen, the highest registered average speeds were found to be between the stations 30->6, 29->47 and 6->19. The median trip duration during the measurement period was 7 mins 26 sec according to the data by Trondheim City Bike.
- You enjoy the last day of your year bit.ly/2AlWcSz to return to the reality of 4% price increase for a cubic meter of water a day later.
- Libraries in Detroit, Michigan bit.ly/2SxdYcW. If we also map the schools and colleges/universities in the city, it seems that the library branch "Bela Hubbard" is relatively close to three (out of nine) colleges/universities, whereas the "Wayne State University (main campus)" is relatively close to three library branches bit.ly/2StQOUI
- Wishing you happy, healthy, joyful, strategic, goal-reaching and big-dream-converging New Year 2019! Let every second count!
- Traffic accidents in Fort Worth, Texas bit.ly/2Aroj2V. Interesting cross has been formed. Drive carefully wherever you are, especially whenever the traffic is stronger than usual, as in the next couple of days.
- If you pick your comb by the radiator and separate the lanes with a nail file, if you drive backwards on the opposite roadway being scared of the approaching cars, if you use the bottom of your boat as an umbrella to protect yourself from rain or you see an airplane taking off as an opportunity to practice your best slide (as if on a playground), there is still some time left to seek some medical help before you up that bottle at null:null.
- Also looked at Kyocera B&W laser printers, where the script recommended me the model ECOSYS P2235dw, which already appears to be "Amazon's Choice" amzn.to/2SuGmMO. In the evaluation I considered features like printer price, pages per minute, resolution, warm-up time and time to first print, physical dimensions, weight, print/sleep/stand-by power usages, CPU frequency and memory, max input capacity, output capacity, toner capacity and toner price as seen on printerland.co.uk. Almost the same value offers ECOSYS P3060dn, which is a 60ppm model (instead of 35ppm), almost 3.89x as expensive, but with 3.6x lower per-page price from toner. This model is probably better if you need to print a lot. If you print very rarely, but need to have this option, FS-1041 might be interesting to you. It is the cheapest model, but at the third place it appears to have only 33% lower overall value than the first model.
- The Brother printers HL-L5200DWT (300$) & HL-L6200DW (250$) look interesting, having in common a 800Mhz processor, 256MB memory and max print speeds of 42 and 48 pages per minute. Writing small scripts is so useful.
- With Dell monitors, the choice would be even harder. I suppose that the company has a lot more than the 47 models I found information about. Especially when many models are discontinued and their characteristics become harder to find. Yet, this doesn't mean that all of these are necessarily bad. For instance, some support pivoting, while many newer ones don't. This is especially useful for someone who reads a lot of text and always wants to see the A4 pages in their entirety rather than scroll to return to previous thoughts. Additionally, I saw a photo of two pivoted, thin-bezel displays next to each other and it looked beautiful and well-organized (consider how easy it is to have two wide displays on top of each other). While resolutions like 2560 x 1080 enable very wide displays, if they cannot pivot, they would require the same amount of scrolling as a regular 1920 x 1080 display. When I ran the script on the data obtained from the Dell's website, it surprised with a strong preference for gaming monitors (likely having high refresh rates and low response times), which did not satisfy me. The first non-gaming monitor that appeared was UltraSharp 32 8K (UP3218K) with its extreme resolution and price. But the second non-gaming model (Dell 27 Ultrathin Monitor: S2719DM) looks stunning if you consider this review bit.ly/2ApCfdE (but no pivot support). Further, the only interesting pattern I saw was that many of the models which followed had digits ending with "19" in their model names (not sure why).
- Two days ago I saw a publication in Wirecutter, speaking about the qualities of the beautiful HP Z27 monitor. Up to that point I had no idea that HP was making monitors as well. So I decided to explore whether there were other interesting models waiting to be found. Ran a small script to see what it could discover by default bit.ly/2SrTXnQ. Out of the 59 monitors, only 7 models appear significally different than the rest and it turns out that Z27 is one of them. Yet, in terms of value, my script ranks it at the third place. The first place takes a 25 inch 1080p display, which has 400cd/m2 brightness, works at 144Hz, has 1ms reaction time and weighs ≈4.6kg. Both S270n and Z27 have quite impressive characteristics (4K monitors). Z27 is only two inches bigger, but weighs more than twice the OMEN (according to HP).
- Which library have you visited this year for the first time? Did you find its architecture inspiring or its interior exploration-friendly? Any new treasures found there?
- Sadly, when broken by extreme weather conditions, solar panels start "crying" heavy metals into the soil. Slightly disappointed to learn that such clean energy could be considered conditionally clean, at best.
- If you believe that the skills used here could be necessary within your own context, consider collaborating more often in 2019.
- Also made a comparison of all Samsung TV models using the available specifications bit.ly/2AkRmF8. Had the idea to include more TV manufacturers, but some of them did not mention all the bits I wanted to consider. If you wish, you could use this data and extend it to meet your own needs.
- Comparison of Samsung refrigerator model specifications bit.ly/2SoIdm3
- Real-time traffic in Amsterdam, The Netherlands bit.ly/2Ahu8jq. Interesting to observe cooler colors towards the center (low velocity), warmer tones towards the periphery (high velocity).
- "The 100 greatest innovations in 2018" (Popular Science) bit.ly/2Sktzwd
- Listened to a person living at a place untouched by human hand explain how they thought there were too many roads built (usually to ease resource extraction), which harmed the environment too much. Sounds reasonable, so I thought about the possible stacking of two layers at reduced opacity: a bottom layer showing the current road network and a top layer showing the minimum spanning tree across all points of interest. Big differences would visually prove this person correct; computing the ratio between the lengths of the roads in both cases and looking for extra high numbers is a less visual alternative. But the main point is clear: we can no longer afford to act randomly, tramping on the environment.
- You could also focus on the clients bringing you most joy throughout the year, so you don't have to rely on episodic holidays to feel well.
- If someone has low requirements, anything would seem great to them. But real-world products can be only as good as the ciients require. Therefore, prefer to work with sophisticated clients which know the value of your work and push you harder. Seek to grow faster and earn more. Avoid becoming satisfied with any of these, but also know when you are giving your attention to the wrong client.
- If you subscribed for Internet services many years ago and never cared much, chances are that you are still using the same speed at the same price today. Meanwhile your operator offers several times higher download/upload speeds for the same price to new clients. But it's quite convenient for them not to inform you and have as many users attached as possible with minimal burden on their network. It requires some uncomfortable speaking to be switched to the new plan, so I can understand if some people would be unwilling to go outside their comfort zone to do it. Hence this bit about the positives of speaking up, listening, having a voice and opinion.
- Thought about an idea for a week or so, but lost that excitement in the last two days. The reason is simple—the competition has too much money to do anything they feel needs doing in order to crush any activity that slightly threatens their position. It's no longer even competition as the tides are far from having equal height. While I'd be happy and fulfilled to realize this in the short term, in the long term I'd be very unhappy to see my work copied or used elsewhere more successfully, while having nothing to show for my work. Sometimes it's better not to waste energy and innovate if you'll convert yourself into prey. And especially when others seek new fresh meat to come alive so they can consume it.
- Doesn't matter how fast you drove that car if you never took the time to plan your day/week/month/year. You may find the 2-2-2 rule interesting. What must happen in the next two weeks, next two months and next two years of your life? Could you do each day something small that would bring you closer to these goals?
- The following is about what I would change on most monitor models based on my observations. The majority of the value is in the display's visible area, so it makes sense to maximize it. This means that it is beneficial to keep the bezel width minimal. Doing so creates the problem of inconsistent bezel widths across the edges as long as the maker's logo and monitor controls must appear on one of them. This becomes especially inconvenient when the monitor is rotated at 90 degrees, where the exra bezel height propagates into extra width, the logo has to be read vertically and starts to stay in the way of reading horizontal text. Much better is to remove both the logo and the controls from the display, if possible, to ensure that the monitor looks good independent of any physical transforms. What I would do differently then is to integrate both the logo and the controls on the monitor stand instead. This way the stand could be used as an intuitive control device. The logo will be visible only when someone wants to see it and not when they have to (24/7). There is also no need to allow infrequently used controls to take space on the display when it is used disproportionally more often. The height lost due to both (logo and controls) could be used to enlarge the screen area and/or make all bezels thinner. This approach requires that display makers become more selfless, maybe even ready to remove their logo (or place it on the back) in the name of good design if they recognize that it takes away from the value they provide. Something else to consider is the balance of features. For instance, we can have a 24" display with 4k resolution or a 30" display with only 1080p. I find neither of the two especially useful. The first case probably provides too much resolution, while the second—too little. Which is why designers have to evaluate how much ppi the human eye really needs in order to read and work comfortably (even from a distance) and determine the screen diagonal and resolution from there. The characteristics of some models I saw yesterday led me hypothesize that pixels-per-inch (ppi) is likely related to energy consumption (W). Which means that a display with properly designed rather than ultra-high ppi is perhaps going to be more energy-efficient (and so reduce the total cost of ownership). There is also a hidden factor that stays in the way of making screens bigger—cognitive load. A person having to traverse a larger screen area will become tired faster than someone working on just enough area (and ppi) to be effective. Yet, (increased) distance between the viewer and the (bigger) monitor can partially mitigate this. I liked the fact that many manufacturers already make their models thinner on the back (paying attention to the invisible as Steve Jobs would say) and try to reduce the total weight to make them more portable. I believe that some manufacturers have arrived at a useful conclusion that for a desktop monitor, which likely won't be carried around too often, weight should not be reduced beyond the point where it starts to affect screen quality and ease-of-use. (Some may have slightly heavier models, but with exceptional characteristics such as great color reproduction.) What they did instead was focusing on reducing energy consumption (beyond the expected or believed to be achievable) while sizing their screens appropriately with the help of balanced ppi. Such monitors are quite useful devices (but see logo and controls), especially when no point on their entire surface—including bezel and stand,—has the ability to reflect light. There is also no need for lights since the state of the monitor can be directly inferred by whether it shows something or not. If there is concern how someone would know whether it is connected to the grid or not, a less-intrusive, mechanical toggle button (with well-visible state) could be sufficient. We have to remember that everyone has a single pair of eyes only.
- Came to an informative article in Spiegel that discussed purchase and rental prices in some scenic neighborhoods in German cities and made a diagram of three pieces bit.ly/2SmjVci, the last of which shows that relative to the high purchase prices, renting a room in Munich - Glockenbachviertel (despite the high cost) is still the most beneficial.
- Drinking fountains in Sydney, Australia bit.ly/2AgqoOZ. Hopefully you drank deeply from the fountain of life this year. Of course, there is always opportunity to do more, better and faster. The next year could offer a lot more chances for improvement. If you feel that dummerAugust could help you accelerate your progress, feel free to connect. If you insist, you could make the conversation even more memorable with a gift amzn.to/2SlVpbk.
- "The true path in life is the path of truth, nonviolence and love" - Indira Gandhi
- Content straight from the depths of the ideary: "OPTIMIZE TABLE regularly". Sentence complete.
- Suppose you have a shopping list (say potatoes, radishes, carrots, celery, apples, lemons) and you arrive at the local market with known positions of the booths and known product offerings at each one. Each booth is 2m long and 1m wide, the distance between two separate rows of booths being 3m. It's quite cold outside and you are freezing, so you want to minimize your walkpath (assuming the more you walk, the more time you spend). Which booths would you buy from if several have the products you need? Could you use sample information to validate your algorithm, plot the walkpath and highlight the booths utilized within the known booth geometric layout? What's the total distance walked?
- "There's surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all" - Peter Drucker
- Median home sale price (seasonally adjusted) on Zillow (03.2008 - 11.2018) bit.ly/2SfYCt4 (Source: Zillow Research, "Home listings and sales" data, bit.ly/2Sgj9xt). Unfortunately, the label for Utah covers the one of Alaska, which is slightly above New York. The highest median prices are seen in Hawaii, District of Columbia and California, while the lowest are in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arkansas (not shown, but these are the only three having medians lower than $150000).
- As expected, the largest picture frame gives the buyer maximal area for the money, despite the higher price bit.ly/2Ac16S8. Somewhat strange that the smallest and cheapest frame has slightly higher value than two more expensive ones. Combination of extremes may not look good. Dimensions and prices correspond to real (and similarly designed) items in a store.
- If car engine capacity is seen as volume, could horsepower (HP) be seen in terms of surface area? Would this analogy be meaningful to the point that the ratio between both is usable in comparisons across several models? If you already saw the examples with the supertanker and animal metabolism, you may find it easier to understand the logic behind this thinking.
- Frequently confused after visiting a website that asks me to "enter the shop". By using the word "enter" you imply that this is a separate place. Makes me think and places a barrier in front of me. Much better would be to use the website as a shop from the start and ensure that no action/decision has to be made twice.
- Didn't know that some smartphones unlock themselves the moment you look at them. Convenient and frictionless. This means that if the algorithm seeks to detect open eyes with a specific pattern of the retina, authentication with a scalp would be impossible.
- "Electrons travel faster from battery to motor than gasoline does from gas tank to piston" - Hamish McKenzie in "Insane mode". Reducing latency/better responsiveness seems exactly as important in cars as it is in web design.
- "Mastery of models improves your ability to reason, explain, design, communicate, act, predict, explore" - an excerpt from "The model thinker" by Scott E. Page. Partially explains from where my interest in it arises as well. The book warns that no model is perfect, which is why many are frequently averaged together. Reminds me of the bagging regressor and voting classifier in scikit-learn.
- If you are creating beautiful art with Processing, you could print it, put a picture frame and make a gift that stands out on any wall. Noticed that a nearby store reduced frame prices by 50%. I already have one, which I never filled. Used to be excited about Processing, before I noticed how much time I was wasting on testing small changes on a machine that was not well-suited for the task. Simply typing in the IDE made the letters sometimes appear one-by-one. So I had to write the code elsewhere, copy it into this IDE once, run it to see what still needs changing and then repeat the procedure.
- Sorry for sounding rude. Taking my words back, although it's dd-damage done.
- Looked at some gorgeous knitting patterns today (in a brochure promoting yarns). So much creativity goes into clothes made with love. Very different from those available at the local store. Additionally, you can pick exactly the yarn having the properties you are looking for and the color you'd like it to have without being limited only to what's available. Another form of good design.
- Consumer prices for 1kg of some fruits and vegetables in Canada (01.01.1995 - 01.11.2018) bit.ly/2A6FTZQ. Also included mushrooms, which happen to be much more expensive. That the price of bananas would be the most stable, I didn't expect to see (here they are relatively expensive). The most recent kilogram-price for bananas was 1.57 Canadian dollars (CAD), whereas for mushrooms it was 8.59 CAD.
- Wards in Boston, Massachusetts bit.ly/2Sas03Z (Source: data.boston.gov, Boston Maps, Department of Innovation and Technology, bit.ly/2A6EVNn). Had to add the water manually, introducing some inaccuracy in the process.
- Estimated monthly retail sales at men's and women's clothing stores (01.1992-10.2018) bit.ly/2S5Rak9. Increasing differences and decreasing periodic spikes for men's clothing stores.
- Had no idea that restaurant visitors in San Francisco have to raise their voice over the average noise level of 78dB in order to be heard bit.ly/2A6jTy8. Do you also feel energized while being at a loud place?
- Was not aware of Virgin Wines, but this came exactly at the right moment, when I looked into their offerings as well bit.ly/2SaHXXU. Liked their overall design and the way the height of the bottles was used to enhance the presentation, balancing the size of the images with the surrounding text. Followed the same template as in the last bit. The Australian wine "16 little black pigs Shiraz" came out as most interesting. But remember: Just because you can drink a lot of alcohol at the holidays doesn't mean you have to.
- Looked what I can find out about the 2349 wines in WineLibrary bit.ly/2A9a2ro. Wanted to see when and where they were produced, which regions commanded higher prices and which wines seem to be especially good value for the price. Well, you could also look for the most expensive ones if you wish. But ten of them could form a gap in your wallet, being valued at over $400, while the most expensive one is only a cent less than $2000. Notice that the scores are likely subjective, especially when being given by various people. Therefore the ranking at the end of the diagram has to be seen with some caution.
- Instead of spending time daily to finish something unique to include in your advent calendar, you could have prepared things in advance and then used a switch statement to trigger one of the 31 cases based on the current date. This way, while everyone else is waiting for your content and thinking you must be working hard on it, you'll be having a good time and celebrating with your friends/family at a nice place. Saying this mostly to trigger a smile and remind you to enjoy life more. Might have been scheduled in advance.
- Commit and if not, be aware of your feelings after the rollback.
- Some clients don't realize that speed comes at the expense of quality. They want to come as complete strangers, have the output immediately, at the lowest possible price and go. But my ideal clients behave differently.
- Sometimes being fast, efficient and profitable means someone didn't sweat enough (lower quality). Went to see how a juice press works and this was my thought after seeing the process of juice making. Perhaps I am slightly more critical than I should be. But it somehow reminded me of the way densely-packed chicken were grinded while walking around in a factory (it was probably on National Geographic). No manual preparation/cleaning/moral hesitation involved. Fast, efficient, profitable. No wonder why when people become ill, they start to care more deeply about processes and the use of things like preservatives/additives/chemicals.
- Comparison of bread types at the Ströck bakery bit.ly/2A47j2t. Update: In this bakery, 100g bread appears to contain 247.23kcal on average, while 100ml Pfanner juice (as seen on their homepage) contains 41.33kcal on average. So 1l Pfanner juice with no added sugar has approx. the same energy content as 167g bread (trying to make myself a picture even if inaccurate). Do you find this accurate, suspicious or "you can't say that, because..."?
- Half-dreamed yesterday (but then forgot it until now) of a self-aware car, projecting its pains/worn-out parts in real-time as 3D details in (green/yellow/red, depending on severity, reds alternating slowly between 50% and 100% opacity) on the central screen navigation system. Tap to find out more.
- If correct, on most days this year people in Boulder, Colorado have saved ≈3kg of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) per single charge of their electric car bit.ly/2S6V784. I find this nice, but the distribution tells us that the per-charge savings are limited, which means that either the batteries will have to increase capacity or more electric cars will have to appear on the roads. The second somehow includes in itself the first.
- Amazon has so many memory cards and I wondered how easy it is to pick the right one. Wrote a small script (using information about speed, capacity and price), which produced these results bit.ly/2A4uvOb. The first card seems to offer a lot more value for the price (might be because of the 44% discount), so it may turn out to be a good holiday gift to someone you love.
- Shipped goods amost always arrive despite any logistic delays. Shipped software rarely arrives with the developer holding a USB stick, answering potential questions and interacting with the client to get real-time feedback. It is reasonable to ask why. Internet has made code shipping and file transfers faceless. If the client believes they need to have only the code, this is what they will appreciate the most. The code, not the person. But the inability to establish a proper relationship could affect the motivation of any programmer willing to serve. Which is how code quality starts to suffer in the future.
- The Amtrak system has been fixed and the diagrams I wanted to create are also already available bit.ly/2A33LNW. Took me quite some time to query the results about these 26 cities manually, but the resultant final pattern was, I think, worth the effort. Sometimes infrastructure issues may contribute to higher ticket prices, but I am not aware whether this is valid for some of the routes I highlighted. Overall the prices per km seem homogenous (median of 0.1027$/km), which is good. While I said that Amtrak's online system was fixed, this doesn't mean it can be considered flawless. The response time can be improved greatly, especially if they take the time to involve a more experienced programmer. Occasionally, clicking on an item in an autocomplete list accepted the wrong one in the box, which made me wonder since when my clicks have started to become so much off-target.
- Had a well-planned idea for a demo using some manually gathered data from Amtrak. Now, exactly when I was willing to access it, the site tells me "We are currently conducting site maintenance". Means that the demo will have to wait (at least until 6am US time). After typing for slightly over two hours, I'd have to lose some momentum. They said "always keep your expectations low", but I hesitated to listen. Will update in case of progress. Wondering about the cost of system downtime in December.
- Made a diagram about the glycemic index of some foods bit.ly/2zZw5Ro, according to Harvard Medical School. (University of Sydney has even a more extensive list of evaluated foods bit.ly/2zZGOLQ.) Heard many times that high blood sugar levels may cause diabetes, but not sure of the reason why high-GI foods may have something to do with even more harmful diseases. This got me particularly interested and motivated to check the values. As expected, glucose had the highest GI index, but that fructose would have the lowest was somewhat non-intuitive. If a person consumes primarily rice (white/brown), potatoes and white bread, they may be exposed to a higher risk of developing a disease. Honey, normally used as a healthy sweetener, also has a relatively high GI of 61, which hints about a desirable intake of moderate amounts.
- "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo
- Arrangement of curves bit.ly/2BhHlsd
- It's December, so I was looking for some special, unforgettable experience. Decided to visit the FourPoints hotels in a way that I don't have to see the same architecture or service twice bit.ly/2BhPBbN. From Juneau, Alaska, USA, passing through Auckland, New Zealand (but possible to return back to the starting point). Happy that I didn't need to carry luggage around. You can imagine the difficulties I had—285 hotels and only 4 colors. Surprised that I couldn't find the address of the hotel in Cologne—the only one where I've stayed for a night. Not sure whether it still exists, but it was a beautiful place. The room was large and had a nice view (although it was relatively lively outside). It even had a minibar, which for someone staying away from alcohol is like "What is this thing good for?" I can also confirm that the doors were having the special "click" sound, which was described in the Mariott book on hospitality. Customer experience matters greatly.
- The idea that the orator "controls" the speech hints about real-time design with components made of words and delay-enhanced connections between them. Fluidity/intonation are not left to random rules, but result from a conscious choice.
- "Scientists are truth-hunters." Implies that truth energizes, which is probably more descriptive than "seekers".
- Liked the excerpt from "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by Richard Bach and the way the birds were presented as thoughtful creatures with feelings. Learning to fly with gracia is important, but birds with experience insisted that the eating should not be neglected. Laser-focused, well-written, with a refreshing pinch of childishness. Not sure how it ends.
- Having a hypothesis why the number of psychiatrists in a poor country might be high. On the one side, it is fairly easy to convince many people, which don't have much and which perhaps due to debt became desperate, of having mental problems, needing long-term treatment. That's a good business. On the other side, it is easy to avoid responsibility about checking the own behavior about working at salaries several times below the poverty line, because of having a cause and an understanding that an "expert" can never be wrong. So both sides remain stuck at the bottom. The result is that many people who dare to think differently are often seen as having "some mental problem".
- Any time you encounter problems logging into your freelance account, think about what other alternatives you have. Perhaps the same service that is offered elsewhere at a higher price has the advantage that it wastes less of your time. How much is your time worth to you? It is not wise to insist staying in a congested road in the existence of a nearby fast lane (which is one reason why Japan's high-speed trains are so fast). Perhaps you could think of other places you could go to or other small businesses you could work with to achieve the results you desire in a way that makes you less dependent on fluctuations in the web traffic.
- "Where should I store all these warranty documents?" Guess, there is already an app for that, so doing something about it would feel like seeking a justification to be a laggard.
- Happy birthday/50th anniversary, (computer) mouse. You enabled so much.
- Could you help to determine where this shape starts/ends? bit.ly/2UvMtls
- Manufactured products price index for five product types in Singapore (1984-2018) bit.ly/2UwEy74
- Particulate matter (PM10) emissions in Basel, Switzerland (1997-2017) bit.ly/2Uq4SQo. If the data is correct, this is quite an improvement over time. Sets an inspiring example.
- Population by neighborhood in Basel, Switzerland (Oct 2018) bit.ly/2B7sXCC. Only three neighborhoods have more foreigners than Swiss citizens. The total population was much less than imagined.
- 311 service requests in Denver, Colorado (21.06.2016 - 21.06.2017) bit.ly/2B4TeSf (Source: Denver open data catalog, "311 Service Requests", bit.ly/2UrApS7, 11.01.2018). A higher number of requests came from the north-west and the north-west of the central region.
- Parks in San Antonio, Texas bit.ly/2UrAs0k. One seems to matter a lot.
- Top amounts in Chicago's budget for 2019 bit.ly/2B02ze8. These sums reflect a purpose across all funds and departments. Highlighted uses related to employee compensation.
- Good to see an European Air Quality Index bit.ly/2Uqqk7Z. Place returns to the reds often.
- Similar to what else does this thing look like? Sometimes I wonder about the lack of additional uses of certain things, where this question could hint about them. For instance, when I look at an abdominal board, usually used for crunches, I also see a mini-table. Perhaps not much engineering is needed to be able to adjust the height to a level that allows knees to fit below the board. Someone has already thought about multiple height levels, so why not include one which enables not only sport, but food consumption as well? Both activities are somehow related to the belly, so while one eats there, they would also subconsciously think about the activity required to neutralize the new energy intake. Possibly promoting healthier behavior. The size of the table is constrained, so one has to think what to put on it. Unlimited quantities of visible food promoting the tendency for overeating are simply no longer possible (ounce of prevention). Additionally, if living alone, this device could save the need and physical space for an extra large, wooden kitchen table (and the trees required for its production). As a bonus, the table is foldable, so it can be carried around (in a car), allowing not only excercise in the open, but also a spontaneous, improvised picnic with a friend. To enable greater mobility, the object weight has to be within certain limits.
- Simulating a circle in 3D by moving 2D lines (CSS only) bit.ly/2B40CNQ
- Maximize revenue from smartphone sales bit.ly/2Usq48j
- A project doesn't start if it doesn't meet the payment criteria.
- Liked the detail of this etiquette bit.ly/2UlclAp and tried to isolate it. Playing around with convolution revealed the label "45th"—something which I was unable to see previously on the dark monitor setting. May have to learn more about this brand.
- Came across an article on ChinaDaily about the top 10 cities for doing business in China and made a picture to understand the scores bit.ly/2AUTVgE
- Do you know, in your context, which combinations of items people most often buy together?
- Radar traffic counts in Austin, Texas (19.06.2017 - 06.02.2018) bit.ly/2AVDvoy. The data has been captured in 15min intervals. It appears that volume has been limited to 250 cars per unit interval of time. The diagram shows that the locations labeled with "Cesar Chavezbr Reynolds", "Loop 360 Lakewood" and "Lamarsandra Muraida" registered high volumes of traffic. But the three 360 loops "Walsh Tariton", "Lakewood" and "Cedar" saw higher average speeds compared to the other locations. "Burnetpalm Way" had slightly lower volume, but still slightly higher than usual average speeds. This suggests that the less traffic there is, the more the average speed may pick up if there are no significant obstacles in using the infrastructure.
- Parking place status in Melbourne, Australia bit.ly/2B0t8zU
- Tanimoto similarity bit.ly/2UiHwMt
- Land use in Amsterdam, The Netherlands bit.ly/2UknAsv. Not perfect, but produced in reasonable time. I assume that the squares on the East resemble water, because based on a Google map, it is unlikely to have land there. But the fact that they appear in the data tells a lot about how the city is thinking about and treating its water resources—with equal care to its land resources. And I find this great; seeing it for the first time ever. Source: City of Amsterdam, Maps data, Urban Development and Planning, "Land use 2017", bit.ly/2UetVWu.
- Learning about the distribution of the largest cities in Brazil and their population bit.ly/2Ujwkz5
- Traffic incidents in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2000 - 2016) bit.ly/2ASmOKH (Source: datapoa.com.br, Empresa Pública de Transporte e Circulação (EPTC), "Acidentes de Trânsito", bit.ly/2AR8fXG). Most incidents seem to be in the north-west.
- Describing things/processes with an objective function allows you to find the optimal combination of parameters satisfying the constraints. It often requires domain knowledge to find reasonably accurate representations of the real-world phenomena. Not having such knowledge is one thing, but refusing to spend time to acquire and use it when this matters greatly is another. Try to think of anything great that was born in denial.
- Does your business measure how fast clients arrive and how long they stay? Does it have more or less clients compared to the previous period?
- Polite customer service is extremely important. Staying next to another client, where the employee was the person raising a voice to them, quickly convinced me of this. Being unaware of the decibels you use while affected is not polite. With public service and in open space, nearby people like me are not obligued to listen and make the case part of their days too.
- Pressure distribution in a pump bit.ly/2UfqnmZ. CFD simulations can be so interesting (but likely computationally intensive). The original paper contains many other pictures like this.
- Contours with Gaussian noise bit.ly/2AOBhqL
- Shortest path between two selected libraries in Frankfurt/Main, Germany bit.ly/2UfbOQ7. An excuse to see them all. It wouldn't hurt much if the path passed through "Griesheim" as well.
- Following the words of Wes McKinney about the high-speed public Internet in Nashville (Tennessee) I decided to map the WiFi hotspots bit.ly/2UdI5Hv. Surprised to see so many, I decided to select and label only ones that appear slightly more isolated, with less connectivity choices nearby, to serve as orientation. Whole four of these locations happened to be libraries, which (as you probably already expect) raised my excitement immediately.
- Can you represent a matrix of correlations as a graph with nodes being the features and the length of the edges indicating the strength of the relationships?
- Same chocolate, sold at two different locations/countries. At one of them the packaging has small, hard-to-read labels with images that don't speak much to desire. At the other location, the packaging is dominated by large, bold letters and a big image clearly showing the size and crunchiness of the hazelnuts inside. Which packaging do you think speaks better to the senses? #design
- Which features are most important to exist in the product you want and would gladly pay for?
- Sometimes you get the tools for free, but not the designer. The tools enable you to create something and say with a good weight of importance/confidence that you can do it. But this doesn't mean that whatever you did won't be a failure at the end. Personally, I have no problem pointing people to free tools when they have no willingness to work with me. Makes me regain back my time. For instance, today only, CHIP is giving away WebSite X5 Evolution 13, which you can use to design your own websites for free. No need to look for a designer. Sure you can do it.
- Sticking together pieces from logarithmic spirals bit.ly/2UcJuOn, bit.ly/2AQvVez
- The biggest parks in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2UbisXF. Lots of parks, mostly small. Slightly challenging to read the names of the bigger ones.
- Equivalent continuous sound level with frequency A-weghting (LAeq) at various measurement stations in Madrid, Spain (01.06.2018 - 31.10.2018) bit.ly/2AFDMeU. Acoustic pollution measurements at 31 places. Seen in context, during this five-month period, the LAeq has been especially high at "Gregorio Marañon" (direction Lateral Pº Castellana-C/Miguel Angel) and "Carlos V" (direction Pza del Emperador Carlos V/Infanta Isabel).
- Cycling infrastructure in Madrid, Spain (13.06.2018) bit.ly/2U7stFi. There are still some gaps, but I find interesting the way some of the bike paths would connect if slightly extended. Hints about a specific plan and not just random execution, which is great.
- Libraries in Nicosia, Cyprus bit.ly/2AH4owm. One or two may be missing—their geocoordinates were not available.
- Air quality at the Mediterraneo station in Almeria, Spain (01.11.2018 - 01.12.2018) bit.ly/2AIhaux. Carbon monoxide (CO) levels seem to vary a lot.
- Bike paths in Valencia, Spain bit.ly/2Uach6v
- Bad monitor screens can make one blind. The device designer has to think about eliminating all possible reflections reaching the eye. Not just from the screen, but from the device body as well. And also think about reducing the number of disturbing lights placed in front of the viewer. You may think that it matters where you hide them, but this is not necessarily so. For instance, if you place the battery light in front of the case, thinking that a typist will hardly notice it, that's an assumption. As soon as someone raises the device at eye level, this light receives blinding priority.
- Mazda found that reducing the number of cogs reduced the car's reaction time after driver action #popular_mechanics #simplicity
- Had no clue about what exactly fentanyl is and the effects it could have. An article claims that this new drug is 30-50x stronger than heroine and 50-100x stronger than morphine. Already killed ≈27000 Americans, this year only. Could there be a correlation between increasing wealth and the tendency to reach to stronger drugs?
- Parking place capacities in Prague, Czech Republic bit.ly/2AINlKb. The three containing "Chodov" in their names, which are located very close to each other, offer a total of 2667 parking spaces. "Radotin", on the other side, has only 33.
- Saw another interesting laptop model amzn.to/2U06O1M, this time having 32GB RAM. If you want to see me finishing my daily tasks much faster, to the point I can serve you much better, consider working with me. If you insist, you could also send me a machine like this or an older one you left unused since your last upgrade. Will likely still be much faster than what I am currently using. If you need the address, drop me a line.
- Visiting faz.de downloaded 6.9MB via 420 HTTP requests, but I thought that the animated ads were the reason behind my inability to scroll.
- Smoothing with moving average bit.ly/2U5RIaY. I like how obvious pandas has made the existence of moving median as well.
- A critical look at the clothes in a wardrobe bit.ly/2AETy9T. Forgot to mention that you could probably use thresholding as your donation/throw-away strategy.
- If you raised your prices by 50%, but then discounted them by 10% and I still bought, you must consider yourself a great seller. Selling is certainly an area, which always needs improvement, especially in small businesses. December is the time of the year when this becomes most obvious.
- "Arranging books on the shelf by topic is a form of clustering." If it wasn't some form of order, I wouldn't be able to find anything. Perhaps 25-30% of the things I made wouldn't exist.
- An interactive demo showing the times at which the metro line U5 in Munich, Germany (direction Laimer Platz - Neuperlach Süd) passes on a weekday through the various stations bit.ly/2U1ADPq. Dragging the slider (not styled here) allows you to adjust the daytime. Made according to the "Don't repeat yourself" principle. 3.2kB vs. 145.1kB for the original PDF. Due to the large amount of data, the script uses ≈2MB memory (reducible). Not ideal, but highlights an alternative way to publish travel schedules online. Hopefully the geolocation service has returned the right coordinates.
- Visual proof (display: grid) that the sum of the first five odd numbers is five squared bit.ly/2AIRHBh
- "Here is a (sa)usage example..." To complement the spaghetti core, while saving on yellow cheese? #code
- "Observationes analyticae" - Euler
- If you find the services here useful and you have a good case to justify their use, consider using the contact page.
- Morning and afternoon travel speeds on key corridors in Brisbane, Australia (05.2015 - 10.2018) bit.ly/2AuLFE9. Could it be that using the "Inner City Bypass" corridor either eastbound (Hale St/Milton Rd to KSD/Cooksley St) or westbound (KSD/Cooksley St to Hale St/Milton Rd) is especially beneficial in the afternoon hours? Yet, even so, we see that the speed on it has steadily and slightly decreased during this period. 16m/s is ≈58km/h.
- Noticed several websites with the same problem lately—drawing partial content and then quickly replacing it anew. Could be more noticeable on slower machines.
- FIDE ratings of the top 100 players as of today bit.ly/2AsKuF4
- Crime in Washington D.C. (2008-2018) bit.ly/2TPPe0n (Source: dc.gov, DCGISopendata, "Crime incidents in year x"). The word "theft" has been mentioned a total of 277933 times. Hard to imagine.
- Total visits and total media stock of the libraries in Düsseldorf, Germany (2012-2017) bit.ly/2TPYXnC. I thought that the number of media items can only grow over time, but this diagram proves me wrong.
- If you could write a script that traverses the offers on Airbnb, you would know where the cheapest rooms can be found, potentially allowing you to visit interesting new places. Looking manually within a sea of choice is simply not feasible. This is not particularly interesting to me, but you may find it relevant, depending on your lifestyle. If the transport is the issue, Ryanair or Flixbus might be helpful to you. That the latter was available in my country became new to me yesterday. Saw bus offers to Amsterdam, Utrecht and some other cities priced at five euro. Never been there, but since I look in the meaning of everything, these places are unlikely to attract me anytime soon.
- There was a good saying, which I forgot. It said something like: Acknowledge someone's behavior publicly, criticize them privately. And I fully agree with that. The other day someone criticized a migrant publicly, ending with "in that case they won't receive my sympathy". I doubt that they need it.
- If you found no easy way to answer any of the questions here, you might have missed the contact form on this site.
- When I see a PDF version of a metro schedule (195kB), I ask myself why the size hasn't been stripped down to (less than) 10kB in the form of a simple HTML/CSS page. So many schedules remain accessible only through a search form which hides most of the information behind interfaces. Can we access much more content with much less interface?
- If I were to travel, where would you like to see me and why? Can you imagine a way in which I could be helpful there?
- Libraries and address points in Anaheim, California bit.ly/2AnYOik (Source: gis.anaheim.net, "Address points" bit.ly/2Ar67FV and "Libraries", bit.ly/2TMdqkj). Each library is drawn as a polygon, and the areas hint that the "East Anaheim" branch must be one of the biggest. May have to investigate the geometric architecture of the Euclidean branch.
- Trying to imagine what could go wrong during the operations of a warehouse worker attempting wishful service bit.ly/2Aomvaa
- Most online platforms are probably using this day intensively to gather data, apply machine learning, learn the preferences of buyers, their purchase intentions and a compilation of future product recommendations. Unfortunate only that by using the biggest systems, we often help the big get bigger.
- It's Cyber Monday once again? (How many times?) Had to check whether my wishlist a.co/eZw8ZNK is already in sufficiently convincing shape. No omissions. But who knows, perhaps December hides even more surprises, smiles and joy. Sometimes it is better to be patient rather than impulsive and wait a bit more. Perhaps door number 23 would have it. Being disconnected from the US market means having to rely on someone with more knowledge (and data) to make more informed decisions. But sometimes the extreme focus on a single event in a single month seems slightly unfair towards the other eleven...
- Few things can occupy one's mind more than seeing former migrants being verbal against having more people arrive at their place of interest. (Some likely of their own nationality.) Believing to be something more than the rest and acting as if one obtained new rights to give justice (also to the people you previously lived with) seems so much out of tune, so sneaky. Really hope to see more people "of rang" lose their face in the future.
- A paper is not the right place to test your grammar and spelling. Can easily tolerate few mistakes, but not a text in which few sentences are clear. Especially when the claim is that the law of conservation of energy doesn't hold.
- Some components making the cost of a website: research, planning, design, development, maintenance, communication time, cost of materials, cost of staying up-to-date, cost of overtime & burnout, cost of leave, cost of eye care, taxes, pension fund contribution and so on. Noone ever claimed that building websites/software was cheap.
- "Work on challenging problems" Have to be good sources of liquidity. Otherwise it's better to leave them to the young and those willing to prove something. Charging first, challenging second.
- If being a digital nomad works for you, this is fine. Before saying you lived off a suitcase for an entire year, explain how much you lost by stuffing it with everything imaginable. The other day an article mentioned that the unwillingness to travel was due to "internal self-doubt in one's own abilities". Nothing is further from the truth. If I had to list reasons not to travel, only some of them would include: waste of time, floating without goals, meeting random people, working on projects with questionable value/outcome, preference for working within "alive" communities (in convenient, but not important projects), inability to rely on people's presence the next day (possible lack of acaccountability), stable cost likely exceeding the uncertain income, much stress for nothing, energy loss. The moment one knows precisely what they want, being in constant move will only postpone the moment of getting there. Still surprised that many of you don't understand that traveling can't sustainably improve your situation or make your life more meaningful. It doesn't matter how many people you meet, work with or lie as long as your skills and abilities remain constant. You can travel for life, but that won't build it.
- Payments and gifts say a lot about appreciation and even more so in the right moments. Whenever someone hesitates about the lowest possible rate, it becomes obvious that they won't be able to enjoy your highest quality work/most expensive services. In that case, it's better to look for clients elsewhere.
- A job that enables a living while disabling life is not one I'd feel proud to be in. Life is too short to waste it this way. Being aware how you feel will tell you whether it is time to quit your job or not. The sooner you find out whether it is the right one for you, the better. You have a career to build. Assume that many of the best existing jobs are already taken.
- Noise levels (dB(A)) at different locations in Dublin, Ireland (18.11.2018 - 22.11.2018) bit.ly/2TL8BYn. The patterns repeat five times corresponding to the five days. Ballyfermot Civic Centre had an "unusual" spike at 19th Novermber (can you think of a reason?). Ballymun library was louder on three days. Sean Moore Road had consistently high noise levels most of the time, especially when compared with the other locations. A detail we notice is that unusual noise levels affected mostly the highs of the signals.
- Simple excercise: Take a pen and paper and list the names of all variables you could think of (x, y, z, width, height, length, angle, inner/outer radius, velocity, power, time, solar irradiance, magnetic flux, luminous flux and so on). (You could also look at the International System of Units for more ideas.) In doing so, you will prepare yourself for better understanding of some of the common building blocks found within many programs. In addition, you may be able to visibly find possible/hidden relationships among them (combinatory play), leading you to to potential insights or optimizations in your work. You could also think of decomposition hierarchies—the smallest mini-variables through which you can describe a given variable (drawing tree branches may help). Programming/modelling is about operating with these variables by seeking the common nature among them. Which is why being familiar with this nature is quite important.
- I suspect that how tired one feels at a given age is a function of the personal decisions involving their cumulative energy investments up to that point. Yesterday a person complained that it takes them 3 hours to reach their "dream job" (and almost as much to come back home). Keeping this lifestyle for a while (assuming to have no options) is like being unwilling to face the truth that stamina isn't infinite. We age by our decisions first. Is there anything you can do to preserve more of your energy while still doing the work that is important to you?
- Age is rarely the limitation. It's what you tell yourself about it that is limiting you. Employers that discard you based on age may perish on it before you do. Listening to the conventional wisdom doesn't help much either. It will try to teach and condition you how things are supposed to be. Accepting other people's thoughts/experiences as a template of truth about your destiny is nothing else than a binding misconception.
- "Multiplicative levers" seems a good phrase to consider in a variety of contexts.
- When there are thousands of apps in the app store, each additional one is unlikely to change much. Perhaps it won't be noticed even when needed. Eating the world, but cannibalizing itself. A lesson of how what we allow gets back to us.
- Have you identified any needless items or gaps in the process graph of how your company department is working? Where should all the arrows lead to?
- Cogito ergo sum([i for i in range(10)]). Meaning: we often can't think without describing/implementing with mathematical functions.
- Whenever something got spoiled in the refrigerator, it was often due to using the shelves like a stack. When new food arrived, it pushed the existing one behind into invisibility where it was easily forgotten and could stay forever. Infrequent poppers like me rarely notice the things accumulating at the back of the shelf.
- "There are 400000 vectors and each one has 500 dimensions." Well, it could be worse than that. Having to handle this on a single core.
- The NIPS 2018 pre-proceedings seem to be already available bit.ly/2ApKEgG. Plenty of material, once again.
- Road incidents in Nuremberg, Germany (2001-2016) bit.ly/2AhCMO2 (Source: Stadt Nürnberg, bit.ly/2AjGarB)
- Spent some time creating an Amazon wishlist a.co/eZw8ZNK, serving mostly as an orientation. Few tech items, which could make a difference in the way I work. They are also much more expensive to obtain here. Could be nice if I could give my current laptop to someone who hasn't had one for a while.
- Comparing two modes of travel from source to destination with National Rail, UK bit.ly/2AiSI2C and with Deutsche Bahn, Germany bit.ly/2THobEj
- Air quality in some areas in Barcelona (October 2018) bit.ly/2TGl6og (Source: Open Data BCN, General Direction of Environmental Quality and Climate Change of Catalonia, "Air quality of the city of Barcelona", bit.ly/2THro6Q)
- Historical street sweeper scheduled routes in San Francisco bit.ly/2AhPVqq (Source: DataSF, bit.ly/2TGnkE4)
- Clusters of historically interesting buildings in Leicester, UK bit.ly/2Aemaqq
- Locations and visits of the library branches in Newcastle upon Tyne (04.2008 - 08.2018) bit.ly/2AfJLHi (Source: Newcastle City Council, bit.ly/2TEfxXl). For nearly nine years, the "City" branch has lost almost half of the visits. Notice that some branches are missing in the left diagram.
- Address points in the Niagara Region, Canada bit.ly/2TFfnPj
- Libraries in Wexford, Ireland bit.ly/2AflcKB
- Suppose you knew what particular sequences of ACGT mean. Could you then write a program that given an input of a genetic sequence produces output in natural language? Like this step happened first, which was followed by this process, ending at this moment (producing a readable story of many such sentences). Will the program be able to infer without supervision its operating context and the meanings specific for it? Can the meaning of previous sentences be "forgotten" with further developments in time?
- You might think that including ten diagrams in your paper every time you could have included one instead says how hard you worked on your problem. The reality is that you are dilluting your message, letting each atom speak less by failing the test "Does this weigh ten tons here?" Not a problem related only to papers, but to almost any online material as well. Design thinking can help you polish your work by deciding what can be left or omitted. Once finished, reread your material multiple times to identify any problems in the overall structure/composition. Does C truly follow from B and B from A (without any hidden assumptions)?
- Big brands can't afford to hire programmers cheaply as they also have a lot to lose in case of a bad user experience. One broken system during an important online shopping event or during the holidays and their name is at stake. The news can spread quickly in various circles/networks.
- Finished reading the "State of the energy market (2018 report)" by Ofgem and two diagrams in particular made impression on me bit.ly/2TDkuji. Additionally, I was previously not aware of the extent to which Great Britain relied on nuclear energy and on gas imports from Norway. But disobedient brain, once again followed its own associations, asking: "Could it be that generating electricity on an island is slightly more expensive in general?"
- Things can take either too long or crash badly. One of the biggest pains I suffered many years ago was while trying to render individual frames of a 3D animation (on a slow machine). While rotating the scene around, the software couldn't handle the limited resources well and decided to close itself on multiple occassions, causing complete loss of all newly made modifications. It neither asked me to save the current state, nor kept track of it to restore it on the next restart. I could barely keep my feelings. Since then I haven't touched any 3D software. But today, when I look at computer vision or deep learning, my old memories seem to be brought back in mind. Speed is critically important for efficient work.
- Sometimes it's the lack of electricity that determines an hour or two of your day. Still preferable over the total hours lost on a slow laptop during the hours when it was available.
- Was not aware that one could present clusters, hierarchies and labels within a circle bit.ly/2AbqUwQ. Also tried to arrange a sentence along a circle yesterday bit.ly/2Ap2bFN, but it doesn't even remotely look that beautiful.
- Flower from four ovals bit.ly/2Af7W8Q. Inspired by a similar one, but having much more vivid colors. Another option is to create a single oval and rotate it five times by a multiple of 72 degrees, again using transparency and blending. Was named a Venn diagram at one place and I thought that this was perhaps the most beautiful one I've seen so far.
- Certified farmer's markets in Santa Clara county bit.ly/2Tya18A, in case you are looking for some fresh food.
- Sometimes I like to energize myself with shapes bit.ly/2Ag0BWj. By seeing the more balanced ones here, I tried to set the current within acceptable norms. But some scenes can be dangerous.
- Median total arsenic and cadmium in the water at different locations in California bit.ly/2TwtWEZ (Source: data.ca.gov, California Department of Water Resources, "Water quality data", bit.ly/2TvXHpg). The data contains many other features, but I focused my limited attention and computational power on these two. The circle colors are determined relative to the maximum among all median values at all locations, which was 264mg/l for arsenic and 6.7mg/l for cadmium. This means that a red circle has a value close to the highest median (indicating higher concentration of the substance), yet not necessarily at a level that is dangerous for the consumer.
- If you like the type of work you see here, consider accelerating it by structurung a good, well-compensated project where it could make a difference. Be ready to collaborate.
- Relationship between road surface temperature and air temeperature in Seattle bit.ly/2Tvur21 (Source: data.seattle.gov, Department of Transportation, "Road weather information stations", bit.ly/2Aamp5U) The data came from a humongous 2.8GB file, which I had to reduce, then eliminate the very low and very high values, which were likely erroneous since neither the road surface nor the air could accept values for temperature in such range. Then eliminate the linearity created by the measurements where both values were equal (that's strange with double-digit accuracy). Still, as you can see, I do not pretend to have removed all possible erroneous values. But this shape became visible at the end. Made me wonder whether at lowest temperatures the air could be more often warmer than the road surface and whether at highest temperatures the opposite is true.
- Looks like tweets at the Heathrow Airport were most intensive after people passed through the entrance and while they were at the waiting area (Source: "Geotemporal Twitter demographics")
- Percent of people smoking cigarettes in households and percent of people bothered by noise in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2A9qhUO (Source: Bristol City Council, "Quality of life 2017-18 (ward)", bit.ly/2Tw48Zx). If you cannot imagine to which wards these points correspond, the following diagram might help bit.ly/2A9OIBy
- Tree species with more than thousand exemplars in Bristol, UK (07.11.2018) bit.ly/2A98lts
- Datashine UK Census 2011 bit.ly/2A8FNQE
- Interesting that estimating footfall in retail stores is possible from WiFi signals of the nearby smartphones. In 2017, in UK were installed 789 sensors, 219 of which in London and 13 in Wales. Which of the two locations do you think registered higher median footfall in 2017? (Source: "Movements in cities: footfall and its spatio-temporal distribution") Be aware that the authors hint about some imperfections in their approach.
- An opinion what it means to use scientific skills bit.ly/2TtJQjp. I found it slightly repetitive and incomplete, yet still a good reference.
- "Separate the project failure event from assessments of the self; particular performances are not indicators of self-worth." Nice reminder. The future doesn't end today.
- "I didn't get consumed by losses; I didn't get overwhlemed by successes" - Don Schula, former NFL coach
- Good to pay attention whether scrolling "by any means" with the keyboard is possible on the website where you explain us about your latest JavaScript framework.
- Creating a flower with quadratic curves bit.ly/2Tq8SQt. Good night.
- "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci
- Historical median speeds of cyclists by source-destination segment as seen in the City Bike system of Bergen, Norway (06.2018-11.2018) bit.ly/2A3pnZZ. Hopefully my intuition here is correct. I used the term "median speeds" to describe distances divided by median time durations used to pass through each segment (on all trips passing through it). The idea was to vary the segment color from blue to red to indicate slow to fast and observe potential speed differences in different regions. But the final diagram is characterized by very homogenous colors, indicating a quality of service with low variabilty. A pleasant surprise.
- Some vegetarian restaurants in Stockholm, Sweden bit.ly/2Tsv3Fv
- If someone comes to you, trying to rush you into a win-lose situation, happily show them the way. Being self-respectful requires working only with people who truly understand what it takes to achieve win-win and are willing to get there. No need to support another worker's grief at their workplace for purely selfish reasons. Time to recognize the impact that your buying decisions have on life and living conditions elsewhere. Question to ask yourself: "Is this helping the other side as much as it helps me? Are there artefacts of evidence?"
- Value and price curves for some Deutsche Post letter formats bit.ly/2A3TD6W. It seems beneficial to stick to the standard format as much as possible.
- Quantities of some minerals/ores extracted in India (2009-2015) bit.ly/2TpIkP5
- Water temperature at the beaches in Chicago bit.ly/2A4oHnb. Please, note that there were differences in the number of observations made about each beach. This could make the median values slightly less meaningful. For instance, Ohio Street Beach had 11291 measurements, while Rainbow Beach had only 3298. One could also explore the median wave's amplitude and period. In this case, Ohio Street Beach and Montrose beach both had the highest median wave amplitudes (0.171), indicatng slightly higher waves compared to other beaches. Lowest median amplitude had 63rd Street Beach (0.128), indicating calmer water. Calumet Beach and Ohio Street Beach were the only two with median wave period of 3 (more waves arriving per unit time), while all other beaches had a value of 4.
- Labeling along a path from bird's-eye view bit.ly/2A2gX4R. The idea was to make the labels appear as if in 3D (inspired by an image I saw). That the pavement seems to improve in quality at a distance is like an illusion. But persistence along the path... the only thing that matters.
- Accessibility: When offering a digital edition of a magazine, ensure that it can be viewed a page at a time or that at least it has this option. By showing two pages at a time (left and right), you expect the reader to be in widescreen view and have a big monitor, potentially excluding users on small-screen devices, which will have to pan and zoom a lot (until they give up). If someone can only see a portion of what they read at a time, they may have difficulty relating the current to the previous material. "Design is not only how it looks, but how it works". Or how it reads. (Continue to offer the 2-in-1 view, but for print purposes only, not for screen reading.)
- Strange. Kernel 4.19.0 seems to work well (tested writes twice), but 1 and 2 leave the journal in an inconsistent state every time upon sleep, making the disk read-only (so I have to run fsck manually, after restart, to fix the orphaned inodes after wakeup), which is very inconvenient. Likely to be fixed in the future, but also likely that I won't know when (if noone tells me).
- Air quality: PM2.5 particulate matter at different locations near London (01.01.2017 - 30.10.2018) bit.ly/2A0JtE6 (Source: London Air)
- A model used to gauge the danger of forest fire in Australia bit.ly/2A3XYqA. No guarantee of accuracy; comments and improvements are welcome.
- Nested triangles in color bit.ly/2TidesZ
- Playing with nearest neighbors and colored edges bit.ly/2zYaJD6. Very simple code.
- Average wind speed vs. average rotor speed for the "La Haute Borne (2017-2020)" project by ENGIE France Renewable Energy bit.ly/2TgYnyJ. Could you come up with an easy-to-understand interpretation of this diagram?
- Petrials of a cube bit.ly/2zZxB5h. "A Petrie polygon of a polyhedron P is a closed walk on the vertex and edge sets of P, where any two consecutive edges—but not three—belong t the same face."
- Hexecontahedron bit.ly/2Th7TC0, almost looking as if someone slightly bent the leaves of several flowers and joined them on their outside contours
- Capturing solar irradiance level with a smartphone camera also seems interestng, although I haven't seen a usable implementation in practice. Perhaps one day the entire smartphone display will serve as a solar cell to complement energy use from the grid in keeping the battery capacity level. Especially when not in use.
- Do you think that capturing same-resolution photos at regular intervals (say every 30mins) with both the camera and the subject remaining static could allow you to observe relative differences in light intensity between two points in time, resulting in a homogenous color? Or will there be still differences at pixel level due to different illumination angles and possible reflections?
- Annual electricity consumption in China (1978 - 2011) bit.ly/2ThX3eT. Fitting a cubic spline to the existing data gave me a function, whose output with the parameter "2018" is 8792.47*109kWh. RMSE for [1978, 2011] comes at 1352.28.
- That olives can suffer from bacteria too is new to me go.nature.com/2TgV4aH. Perhaps a great researcher reading this could help the region of Puglia (Italy) understand the disease before the spread of Xylella fastidiosa has a chance to affect the rest of the olive trees. (Wikipedia: There is an estimated 50 to 60 million olive trees in Puglia and the region accounts for 40% of Italy's olive oil production.) That the disease has started there did not surprise me much. For some reason I thought of "microclimate" once observing the geolocation, associating it with the redness of Florida (USA) (as the only place) in a heatmap about a natural event of another type.
- Take something less known, slice it in half to observe (or imagine) its cross sectional area, connect the components in it with their names (placing the latter outside the area) through thin lines (zero crossings), make the components interactive on hover by revealing their functionality and you've got a great teaching material.
- By the way, applying load on concrete with scientific methods allows observation how signals vary under increasing load and when cracks can be expected bit.ly/2zWFs3p. Possibly beneficial to see things in various contexts from the perspective of a signal (which is in itself some function).
- Plotting across diagrams: showing plots next to each other and letting dashed curves pass globally through (many of) them to connect "important" details. Deeply impressed and thinking of more use cases. Perhaps I should have added it to the dictionary of techniques.
- Applications for load balancing: balancing computation/storage across multiple machines; balancing the use of screen space at object level; balancing the number of variables and code clarity; preparation to balance RAM usage so that more clients can be served simultaneously; balancing transistor size and count on a chip; balancing the complexity of the solution with the complexity of the problem; balancing resource delivery (CDN); balancing visuals and words in articles/stories to make the content lightweight, clear and requiring minimal effort on the reader side; elimination of single points of failure in a system; balancing body weight over bicycle tires/car weight over car tires; balancing downward acceleration with frequent braking; balancing load on bridges through equally-spaced support columns/balancing load on dams/balancing column distances below cables in the air; balancing navigation among obstacles; balancing degrees of freedom and complexity for sufficient flexibility; balancing body movements and physical effort for long-term endurance; balancing CPU/hotel bed/parking utilization; balancing light illumination across the length of a street; ants balancing their weights and staying close together in structures to be able to float over water rather than be taken from it; balancing sound setup in a large room, so that sound does not reach people far from the scene too late; balancing the use of isolation in the building envelope; balancing the value of 3D printed objects with the cost of the material used to produce them; increasing satisfaction levels by having something for every taste; balancing the frequency of operations (batching); using simulations to understand dynamic behavior and prevent possible hazard occurrences; balancing work among teammates/manufacturing robots; balancing network flow, data capturing/retention frequencies, communication frequencies among people/devices/software components; balancing the risk of floods through stormholes; balancing usability vs. number of pins for a microcontroller; balancing decision-making through advantage/disadvantage inspection, balancing between speed and perfectionism; balancing resource/personal energy usage, energy usage in electronic circuits; balancing circuit functionality and expected battery drain time; balancing facility location, knowledge acquisition/exploration-exploitation, customer diversification, news sources diversification, portfolios/investments, risk/exposition to possible catastrophic events, risks/rewards, benefits/costs and many others I've missed here.
- Forgetting to work with dummerAugust usually comes with the hidden consequences.
- Exploring the relationships between wind speed-height, snow height-height and wind direction-wind speed at various stations in the mountains of Tirol, Austria (17:03 14.11.2018) bit.ly/2zQXeVF. This is only a snapshot as the data is dynamic. I also like the way Lawinenwarndienst Tirol periodically informs the audience of the possibility/existence of avalanches (heard of at least one person who lost its life because of them). Not aware whether a similar service exists elsewhere. A question that currently has me is whether avalanches are more frequent in summer, where the snow mass could loosen or in winter where it can accumulate. Perhaps wind could also be a factor for their appearance. Now back to the data. On the first diagram, we see that a couple of hours ago the winds were in general stronger at height above ≈2600m, although in some cases this was observed at lower heights as well. This is the "base" wind speed, not including the short-time gusts, which can be much faster. Notice how the points almost line up around the speed of 2.5km/h. At the second diagram we see another interesting relationship showing how snow height varied with the height in the mountain today. Lower heights had less snow, higher peaks—significantly more. At last, we look whether there is a connection between wind direction and wind speed. Here we see a more dense region of points, having low wind speeds of ≈2.5km/h where the wind direction is between 150 and 250 degrees, but we cannot say much about the fastest winds as they come from many different directions. It could be that at height there are less barriers to the wind, allowing it to become more flexible/chaotic in its direction (an assumption). Perhaps you could use this data source for more interesting insights in the future. Or explore whether the data archive can be valuable to you.
- "That which is absent can be imagined" - Marcel Proust
- Passenger traffic by terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport bit.ly/2T8vnJx. Unsurprisingly, Tom Bradley International Terminal is mostly used for international flights. For domestic flights, terminals 5 and 1 detected a lot of passenger traffic lately. (Source: data.lacity.org, "Los Angeles International Airport - Passenger traffic by terminal", bit.ly/2TajSkF)
- A look at some of the parameters of the HVAC and PV subsystems in the NIST net-zero energy residential test facility project (first year only) bit.ly/2zOpOHh. The normal distributions are especially well-pronounced. Also looked whether there is a relationship between the outdoor and indoor power usage of the heat pump and whether the hour of the day has impact on insolation and inverter 1 output bit.ly/2zRsHaq. Most of the time, when the average power consumption of the outdoor unit reached slightly over 2kW, the one of the indoor unit was slightly over 10KW (not sure whether it can be said that this translates to an approximate coefficient of performance (COP) of 5). About insolation, I was surprised that one hour before midnight, the PV array was still able to capture sunlight, at least on some days. The strongest sunshine through the year was registered between 14-18h, yet inverter 1 reached its peaks between 13-19h, which likely suggests that there is still something to be gained by operating a combination of PV panels and inverters with even higher efficiency. According to a paper the building reached net zero in 2012 (producing 13523kWh and consuming 13039kWh). Additionally, it was surprising that the HVAC indoor unit was installed in the basement. Perhaps the idea was to let hot air rise through as many floors as possible.
- Also grateful to the countless content producers whose work has touched/inspired me to try harder, delve deeper, seek better ways to improve. Without your effort I wouldn't be able to be the person I am today. I can only hope to be able to return this favor back to the extent I wished one day.
- Thankful to all periodic visitors and readers. When I started, I had no idea that by rolling, this ball could accumulate so much additional mass. Part of this I own to you. Thank you for your attention!
- Two recent examples I came across: minimize the maximum dissatisfaction (minimax) and maximize the minimum payoff (maximin). Confusing examples, but illustrative.
- Crime in Boston (15.06.2015 - 11.11.2018) bit.ly/2zObBu3. Added a lot of background information, so it looks more like an infographic now.
- A proper structure of your data can make your application faster; a suboptimal one will make it slower. If the data isn't in the format you want, ensure that you are applying the right transformations to it, touching only the parts you need.
- Saw a reportage of a family with two children buying a large caravan that looked almost like a modern home on the inside. Found this interesting, because now they could move around and select where to stay as opposed to being bound to a single place. They parked in the forest and the barbecue and fresh air were in front of their door. I was concerned what kind of vehicle is needed to pull this large home and then saw the large jeep too. Possibly not the most fuel-efficient setup, but "genchi genbutsu" was not possible.
- New books at the Vienna Public Library bit.ly/2zNO9ND (Source: Stadt Wien - data.wien.gv.at, bit.ly/2zLm0GY)
- Learning about MAN busses bit.ly/2zOeT0c. According to the diagram, it seems that many bus models are not very well differentiated, offering very similar features. But the Lion's City Ü2, M, 12 and 18 series (last two of which are said to be new) have more distinct features relative to the rest. (Note: I added "2" at the end of some series appearing twice, which is how Ü2 was born too.) I wondered which series offered maximal seating capacity relative to the space available. These came out to be GL2, GL and G. Then I compared engine performance relative to engine capacity, where the series 12, 18 and L2 shined. Last, I looked which series had the smallest fuel tanks relative to overall volume. These came to be G, GL LE and GL LE2.
- Mood prediction with various regressors bit.ly/2zLFiMj. Each has its own idea what would be at the end of the second month.
- Labels for diagrams about precipitation: light, moderate, heavy, intense, severe, extreme. Good labels, good design.
- Sometimes I wonder why timing diagrams do not more closely resemble this bit.ly/2zJuCO6. Having lines with equal slopes from left to right and back is perhaps fine from idealistic perspective, but realism tells us that not all connections and transfers between all nodes take the same amount of time. The variation in the line slopes serves as a reminder here.
- Cannot easily confirm that the energy expenditure per keystroke is 2mJ, but if so, relating the total watt-hour value of what I could type in an hour to a body "still" value of 60Wh brings me to an unrealistically low ratio. This means that typing should not take much effort at all, but it feels different. Perhaps it is the thinking what to type that has the disproportional contribution. Keyboard still not found to be guilty. Shorter code once again looks more interesting, from a self-preservation perspective. (Having to move the cursor around a lot may not always be connected with high added value.)
- C02 generated per unit of useful energy bit.ly/2T1URYZ
- Enjoyed "Computational optimal transport" by Justin Solomon bit.ly/2zIjEbD. Very well-written, imaginative, interdisciplinary. Couldn't get enough of it.
- "However hard they have trained, an athlete’s success hinges on their mental endurance" bbc.in/2T2U8Xp
- Am I using the best tool to obtain the desired output? Perhaps there is another one, which enables doing the same in a fraction of the time. Sticking with the known just because it is convenient, beautiful or trendy is a sign of falling in love with the work. Being unaware, this can easily lead to time waste.
- You can demonstrate proficiency in the use of ten different libraries and still create questionable results with the goal to impress rather than sell. Sometimes being a great programmer is not enough.
- If I remember correctly, 58% of the people over 65 years interviewed in Melbourne, Australia said that they engage in sport. This is impressive, considering that at this age I cannot imagine to make even elementary movements without effort (if still alive). Which is why sometimes my clouded/overworked "monitor"-mind starts thinking it needs more of the same.
- If you want to see my skills applied on your problem, feel free to propose your project according to the criteria specified on the contact page. As someone put it nicely: "You always have the right, but not the obligation to serve." Must be worth doing well.
- Dot diagram of the correlations among the distances between some cities in India bit.ly/2T1FUGg. Didn't want to spend a lot of time looking for city coordinates, so these were the first I found on my drive.
- My first violin plot is about the weekly footfall in Aviation House, London during 2016 and 2017 bit.ly/2SXrgA3
- Sometimes I wonder whether the excitement that some content management systems were free wasn't too early. Over time the deviation between where the system was and where its users wanted to be, probably only grew. In such moments it becomes obvious why a free system will never be able to replace a paid designer/developer, adapting to the new requirements as they appear.
- A minor user experience detail: Ensure that keywords like "waiting", "processing", "establishing" and so on, appearing at the bottom of the browser blink as rarely as possible. Visited a website that was like a blinking machine. Until now, I didn't realize that this was part of the experience too.
- Performance of the memory hierarchy\non a sample system (as seen in Memtest) bit.ly/2T0cF71
- A quad operational amplifier from Texas Instruments, whose design I liked for its simplicity and beauty bit.ly/2SKbEQh. Making the four outputs go towards the four edges of the component feels even intuitive to me. Small things that I like to see.
- Some thoughts on pothole repair frequency bit.ly/2SOmogi
- Electricity and natural gas usage in Arlington, Virginia (1995 - 2015) bit.ly/2SQgJGz. The x-axis could have used some better formatting, but no time.
- Hibernated the machine yesterday night. Today—unbootable. Plenty of inodes in orphaned inode list. Have a broken key on my laptop (disabled "E" by too much typing), using a separate keyboard, so you can imagine how challenging it was to have the right signs appear in the command line. Good only that fsck could save my skin this time. Not sure whether this would be possible if it happens again. Fairly scared of the opportunity of being unable to work.
- Statistic on invalid sensor readings bit.ly/2SONKmr
- Easier to do art with normal distributions than previously thought bit.ly/2SPcX05
- Degrees to radians in four lines bit.ly/2zxtPja
- You don't realize it until you get exposed to it, but the browser's back button does not remember PDF document state, whereas with regular pages it frequently brings me to the last scrolled position. Looks like a question of consistency. Once you try to return to the document, but have to start again from page one, you understand that something was not right.
- Ensure that I have no objections against your payment and you will increase your chance of working with me. Still, there are other factors that can change my opinion as seen on the contact page.
- Attributes of the parks in Nashville, Tennessee bit.ly/2SKvR8t
- Cumulative renewable electricity capacity in USA (2006 - 2016) bit.ly/2zrYxdH. Made this to get a better feeling for the growth rates. The wind capacity appears to be approximately linearly growing, while solar seems to be closer to exponential growth. The other renewable sources did not change in a very detectable way.
- Daily reservoir water levels in London (01.01.1989 - 31.10.2018) bit.ly/2zwqS2i (Source: London Datastore, Thames Water, "London reservoir levels", bit.ly/2zuBNtm). The Lower Thames Group has lower lows, but higher median value as percent of the total capacity. My naive explanation is that either it is seeing more intensive use or it has lower absolute capacity than Lower Lee Group, making the spikes stronger after draining.
- State of the reservoirs in New Mexico (01.05.2018) bit.ly/2zqE8FI. Elephant Butte Reservoir seems especially dry relative to the average historic level. NASA Earth Observatory also documented the case showing a bird's eye view with before-after comparison go.nasa.gov/2zry7Zz (interactive)
- Average retail price of electricity in USA (01.2001 - 08.2018) bit.ly/2SILEVi. Interesting trend towards increasing the spread in the prices for residential and industrial use. Small industrials in residencies will be affected most.
- Installed wind generation capacity bit.ly/2SJDpZ2. The data comes from a relatively new paper; cannot validate its accuracy.
- At the end of 2016, the cost of graffiti in Southern Nevada was estimated to be $30 million/year. They even had to do cost-benefit analysis to estimate which of the signs are effective to remove. I liked how they quantified the benefit and cost in dollar terms for each case and looked for ratios (much) bigger than one. Don't know what a rat guard is, but they found it to be especially effective, with a ratio of 23.22. Using cameras was also said to be beneficial as well, but not so much for areas where only a low reduction in the amount of graffiti could be expected. Coatings were found to be effective only on small areas, for instance on valuable sculptures. What I liked is that they took photos of the graffiti and uploaded them to a system containing already made ones, looking for similarities in the handwriting style to discover who could have made it. Interesting application of computer vision here. What surprised me was that their software provider asked them to pay a dollar per database insert, which you can imagine can become costly if you have 60 thousand cases. (Source: "Cost and benefit evaluation of graffiti countermeasures on the Nevada highways") It is not hard to magine that other places may be similarly affected by vandalism of objects with cultural meaning. Object restoration can become expensive, necessitating a more proactive, preventive approach. Last, but not least, everyone of us carries the responsibility to preserve our cultural heritage and ensure that future generations will be able to experience it in its entire beauty as well.
- A paper listed some fuels with their calorific values, which I converted into a diagram bit.ly/2zpdEV4. Can you confirm that such a big difference between hydrogen and the rest exists?
- At the local store you may see 3 blankets made of different materials (silk, cashmere, wool) at apporximately the same price. Which one would you prefer? The softest one, the thickest one, the one with the best color or the one made of the material with the lowest thermal conductivity? Having no clue about the last, I would pass by.
- Sometimes I get the impression that the line between math modelling and matmobiling is fairly thin. No doubt that the dynamics and traction are exciting, but there's still no need to end on the next turn.
- Looked for more information about the shops at Atlanta International Airport. Many pages with content appeared, but there was no easy way to type a keyword and search. For some reason, the page number navigation at the bottom of the table disappeared once I clicked page two. Only the equivalent one at the top remained (above the column names), but it took me a while to figure out that I could still move around. Once I tried to click the small "3", but clicked "4" instead, it became clear that something was wrong with the homogenous link "12345678910" (spacing, please). Additionally, Chrome showed me an endless spinner on the tab, making me wait on a false impression that the content refuses to load, even though it has already appeared silently replacing the existing one, my eyes incapable of catching the trick. You would think that I knew exactly on which page I was, but this wasn't obvious to me. Confused.
- In a report from April 2014 ("Energy efficiency and renewable energy potential study of New York State"), NYSERDA published a diagram showing rated power and discharge time for various technologies bit.ly/2zmBWPC. An interesting look.
- Computing in parallel seems interesting because dividing work among many nodes effectively reduces the total computation time. A somewhat neglected aspect of it is that more nodes will also require proportionally more power. Amdahl's law has taught us that having n nodes does not make a system n times faster, yet now we see that (in case of no infrastructure optimization) this would require n times more power, assuming each node has the same configuration. In theory, this means that parallel computation would be linked with higher operational expediture (OpEx) and reduction in efficiency with increasing scale. Which is why datacenters usually optimize performance per watt. Whether we should be fast and wasteful or slow and efficient reminds us very much of the fairy tale starring the tortoise and the hare.
- Comparing electricity usage (kWh) across several housing units on absolute terms can be misleading. Which is why kWh/m2 has become the primary indicator of energy use. If I wanted to be even more accurate (and inspecting), I would be looking at kWh/m3, but the effort of measuring the dimensions of individual objects can get prohibitive. Sufficient to look at a laptop vs. washing machine to understand the motivation behind this. And also to remember that bigger objects can accomodate more components which usually scales the required energy as well. At some point, the volume used becomes a very real constraint for an occupant who carelessly acquires everything.
- Comparing available seat miles per fuel gallon consumed and number of employees for Delta and Southwest airlines in 2017 bit.ly/2SFHRYX. Used their respective annual reports. Took some time to discover what was comparable (the formats were different).
- "Bedroom CO2 values of up to 4000ppm have been measured." Potential problem when several people sleep in the same small room (the count in some youth hostels can reach six). Frequently ventillate. An interesting unit of measurement here is "ach", which means "air changes per hour".
- Uploaded an image, but then decided to remove it, suspecting it was inaccurate. It was about the average utility bills for various facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado. But by the time I uploaded it, bots have already accessed it several times even though I haven't linked to it anywhere and haven't written any proper description to it here yet. It would be bad to see it one day circulating somewhere. Couldn't easily diagnose where the problem was. First time seeing the average function return different results with the same data on each execution. If I can't trust my eyes/intuition, I remove it.
- There are specific criteria that aim to guarantee that no condensation could build up in a place. Defined by ASHRAE, mentioned in a paper. The moving average of surface relative humidity must be 1) less than 100% in a 24-hour period, 2) less than 98% in a 7-day period and 3) less than 80% in a 30-day period. They even give the formula how to calculate it, but my knowledge is too limited to understand the difference between vapour pressure and saturation pressure, which is why I didn't implement it. But it's quite interesting to see how mathematical rules can stand behind the presence/absence of small drops on the inside of a window.
- Came across this old diagram about "inability to keep home warm" bit.ly/2SFkHls. Will become relevant once again soon.
- It's okay not to be able to afford a programmer as a company. Programming is expensive and if you fail to recognize it, you will have not much else choice than to carry the cost.
- Other mini-ideas: riders in front experience the largest drag, riders in the last rows of a peloton have the lowest drag (down to 6% of individual rider, allowing 3.2-4.5x reduced equivalent speed), but cyclists in the middle have the strongest drag reductions (see "Aerodynamic drag in cycling pelotons"), spreading the weight among the wheels is beneficial, aerodynamics may outweigh the importance of power delivery at high speeds, the back of a teardrop helmet must touch the body, not point up. Exposing the helmet top against wind reduced speed.
- Drag areas of various cyclist positions bit.ly/2SEAssQ. At the end of the paper, the authors mention that a combination of positions like "top tube 4" while no pedaling/steering is needed and "Back down 1" / "Back horizontal" while they are, could give optimal results. The question is how convenient is is to keep these positions and for how long.
- Linear regression with no external library bit.ly/2zkzYiQ. A plotter still has to be used to demonstrate it.
- Trees in Eindhoven, The Netherlands bit.ly/2SEq6ch
- Utilization efficiency of the hotel bed base in some countries (2016) bit.ly/2SFeqpE. Malta manages to get the most nights per bed.
- Normalized average CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement production per individual in various countries bit.ly/2zhYkcV. Used to believe that China pollutes the environment a lot. At least seen in absolute terms this seems to be the case and I don't deny it. We frequently hear news about the smogs there, about the need for gas masks, the heavy traffic congestion etc. But we may start asking ourselves whether there isn't a small percentage of the news used as actual propaganda to "make the opponent look worse". I've seen this in various publications and always asked myself how ethically correct this was. If we consider CO2 pollution attributable to human activity, then it means that we can't neglect the number of people causing it. Yes, China pollutes a lot, but it also has a lot of people lives it needs to support. If we normalize the total pollution as reported by Destatis and the country populations as reported by Google, and divide these two values at country level, we start seeing approximately how much pollution is caused by an individual on average. By this metric bit.ly/2zhYkcV, China gets very close to an index value of one. A valuable perspective, since compared to this level, my own country isn't polluting much less than I thought, but only "negligibly less". And we also see that some of the critics of China are polluting more than it, yet their smaller populations practically make them almost undiscoverable. Germany's index value is 1.25 (negligibly lower than that of Finland). That the country has decided to speak more recently about its emissions cannot be a coincidence. On the one side, this sets a positive example for the rest of Europe, but on another, part of the damage has already been done. USA has an index value of 2.05, which is also less perfect that they would probably like to admit. Australia (2.28), Canada (2.47), Estonia (2.70) and UAE (3.20) also receive food for thought. Luxembourg (4.11) emitted 10.1 million tons of CO2 with slightly over half a million people. The potential for improvement is everywhere—we cannot simply point as an excuse not to look deeply and ask questions.
- Median equivalence income vs. poverty line in various countries (2016) bit.ly/2znwQmm. Here it is easy to observe how with decreasing incomes the cushion above the poverty line progressively disappears, making poor people most vulnerable. A diagram like this tells more than thousand words.
- Country climates between 1996 and 2010 (avg. temperature (C), sunshine duration (h) and avg. precipitation (l/m2)) bit.ly/2zmn0AU (uses table A.1: Geography and climate). Interesting that Sweden appears somewhat separate. It could be due to the very short sunshine duration measured there. Thailand also separates itself from the rest, because during this period it had very high average temperature, lots of sunshine and precipitation (strange combination). Interesting too that many countries in Europe appear close together, but this does not mean that minor differences cannot exist (for instance, see the locations of Greece, Italy and Spain).
- The 20 busiest container handling ports in Germany (2017) bit.ly/2zilgZn
- In 2017, 33% of the brutto energy produced in Germany (≈654 billion kWh) was renewable. 16% came from wind and 6% from photovoltaics (according to Destatis).
- Egg production in Germany, 2017 bit.ly/2zjtn8h. My idea of the true scale did not agree with reality.
- Vegetable production efficiency in German states (2017) bit.ly/2SFy8Su. The type of vegetables grown can easily affect these numbers. For instance, yield from potatoes, sugar beets and corn had high numbers relative to other crops.
- Bundestagswahl, 24.09.2017 bit.ly/2zl89GU (table 10.1.2)
- Public theater visits by state, normalized by state population (Germany, 2015/16) bit.ly/2SwPBwe (tables 2.1.1 and 7.1.3). Looks like people in Hamburg were especially interested in stage play (Schauspiel) (363000 visits) and opera/dance (318000 visits). This leads to averages of 0.20 and 0.17 visits/person there.
- Consumption of selected foods in Germany (2001-2016) bit.ly/2zh5Btj. The data is from tables 6.4.1 and 6.4.2. Wondered why eggs appeared before vegetables, but then found my mistake. I was comparing two different units—counts and kilograms. Once I assumed that an average sized egg is 50g, the count converted to 11.6kg, which is slightly more than the potato starch (10.7kg), but less than fish (14.1kg). Most consumed were vegetables (98.5kg), milk (83.9kg), fruits (65.7kg), wheat (65kg), potatoes (57.9kg), pork (50.1kg), citrus fruits (36.5kg), sugar (34kg), cheese (24.7kg), poultry (20.9kg). All weights are per person and year. Note: data between 2001 and 2014 was not available.
- Average monthly income (brutto and netto) and expense composition of German households (2006-2016) bit.ly/2SAJ1VI. Please, notice that the time axis is not perfect. Uses the same document as the previous two, table 6.1.1. The first diagram shows a minor divergence between brutto and netto incomes. This suggests that higher brutto salaries do not necessarily translate into higher purchasing power. Investments, housing, food and transport expenses top the list, but the reason why education appears last here is less obvious.
- Thresholds for risk of poverty in German states (2015-2016) bit.ly/2zhBdiD. For 2015 and 2016, the medians compute to 913 and 949.5€/month. Since more time has passed since then, it is to be expected that earning less than 1000€/month gives you sufficient motivation to rethink what you are doing and/or whether you need to change your employer/profession.
- R&D investments by German state (2016) bit.ly/2zr8rML
- Population in German cities (2016) bit.ly/2zhzx8V. Berlin, Hamburg, München, Köln and Frankfurt are probably more interesting to new businesses which look to scale fast.
- A small collection of diagrams showing different aspects of the motor vehicle industry in Japan bit.ly/2Sz9vH5. Uses data from the publication "The motor industry of Japan, 2018" by the Japan Automobile Manufacturer's Association.
- Dropped my pen on the sentence "New technology shouldn't reuse old problems."
- "Runing an air conditioner consumes fuel without contributing to motion. Friction in engine pistons wastes fuel as does tire pressure and extra luggage. Only around 14% of passenger car fuel is converted into useful energy." Almost in line with the other frightening graphic I saw today bit.ly/2SwyCtZ. Dreaming about clients that would pay in full for my service if it were that efficient.
- Low income, high unemployment bit.ly/2zfQXCV (Source: "The dynamics of opportunity in America")
- Next step: animal and plant-specific watches
- Has someone measured their heart rate (via smart watch), then consumed chocolate and after a while measured it again? Is there a spike and if so by how much? Does it depend on the quantity consumed? You could probably write a whole post about similar experiments. #quantified_self
- "All men seek one goal: success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal—a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your goals: wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end." - Aristotle
- Likelihood of outcome and corresponding label bit.ly/2zed2Sl
- Not sure whether automated vehicles support automated parking yet. Or whether people in a wheelchair have an automated way to enter inside (any stand-ups and sit-downs can be painful). Or what happens upon unavailable/erroneous sensor reading when the vehicle relies on it to adjust behavior. Or whether data collection (where one has been and for how long) is automated too.
- If you haven't seen a "wind rose", there are some nice examples on Google Images. I like how broadly they capture directions and how brightly they lighten up in response to intensity.
- If you could see the world through an abstract painting, how would it look like? Among all the objects, would there be a place for a strange figure? If so, is there anything specific it was doing?
- Utilizing a 128-core machine with terabyte of RAM for doing things of questionable value is a gargle with the effort of the engineers who invested a lifetime into squeezing the last quant of performance possible. The 128x better decisions will have to wait.
- Similarly, payment is not an event that gives a programmer the right to leave behind anything, "koste es was es wolle".
- Lack of consistency is very easy to spot. Just look at a chaotic diagram of the pipiline networks, their paths and the colors indicating what is transported. Or a chaotic coastal area with several types of wind turbines set up by different providers (perhaps under colliding interests), a pipeline, partially revealing itself over water, an oil extraction platform and wave energy installation, perhaps a solar installation somewhere on the ground. Feels like everyone did things their own way, with their own components, wiring, approaches, methods and waste products. And it shows. As if a kid threw its toys all over the place. Wouldn't be surprised if self-interest and escape from responsibility were the primary reasons behind global warming. Maximum production and profits with minimum interest in pollution prevention and cleanup.
- "Robots building robots" makes me think of a one-hour overhead compared to one of 18 years. Is this reason for concern?
- "Overachieving can result in high costs." Doing more than required is a waste in general. But putting the equal sign between waste and overachievement goes too far. One might ask "So you overachieved?"
- "Quality and innovation can also mean solving simple things with simple means." Fully agree. To the extent possible, I have also tried to follow this philosophy here as well.
- Annual energy production from wave energy conversion bit.ly/2z8U53e. Also liked the map of the wave energy potential worldwide, shown to be higher closer to the poles.
- Bits and pieces almost led me to believe that we could use pyrolysis to convert plastic junk into charcoal for enrichment of depleted soil (no clue about process efficiency or potential of further carbonization). Never heard of or supposed that Dogger Bank could be a good place for an artificial atoll to harvest tidal power that would be close to six countries. That lithium and hydrogen can be generated by solar energy; that mile-weak car batteries are still suitable for home use; that deserts can provide 20 times the world's demand of energy; that Carnot's law limits the efficiency of solar power towers (receiving focused sunlight from many directions) to 76% (compared to slightly over 20% for solar panels today).
- Someone said that a simple way to reduce car emissions as a driver is to regularly validate that no gasoline periodically drips on the street. I've seen this so many times (one bus made a mini-lake in no time) that I almost feel guilty for having no clue about the effect earlier. Greatly underestimated it. Sharing this here as a way to increase awareness about detecting and fixing leaks early as a way to contribute to a less polluted environment.
- Found an interesting resource on biofuels, where they cite the results of different studies and the g-CO2eq/MJ emissions for different cultures from which biofuels are made. As a baseline, the authors say that gasoline emissions are 81.7g-CO2eq/MJ. Taking the averages of all available studies, sugarcane ethanol came at 20.78g-CO2eq/MJ, while cellulosic bioethanol came at 22.41g-CO2eq/MJ. Fairly surprised that these emissions are almost 25% of the baseline. Perhaps something to think about, at least temporarily, before electricity becomes the new fuel.
- Wondering how these plots are called and where else they find application bit.ly/2zhaTW3
- Earthquakes with magnitude > 4.5 in the last 30 days (labeled if magnitude > 6.3) bit.ly/2z9POwi. Assuming that "33km south-west of Mouzaki" is sufficiently close to Zakynthos, Greece. Uses data from the USGS real-time data service.
- Average all-day, one-way travel speed for selected routes around Adelaide (1998-2014) bit.ly/2z8xiEQ. Taking in account all historic data about these roads, we see a minor reduction of the average travel speeds over time. This could be due to an increased number of available vehicles, lack of investment in road infrastructure or something else. More recent data is not available.
- Residential property price index in various Australian regions (09.2016-06.2018) bit.ly/2z6hQJe. Not aware where Hobart is, but the prices have grown strongest there.
- Cities in Poland bit.ly/2Sp5Aw6. High concentration around Katowice, although nearby Kraków is much bigger. Interesting line passing through Szczecin and Warsaw.
- Sample use of the Poisson distribution to determine probability to have certain number of visitors at a store bit.ly/2z4KFpq
- Distance matrix for some cities in Spain bit.ly/2SkOlwb. Vigo and Jerez de la Frontera seem to be far from many of the other big cities. Zaragoza seems to have a very beneficial location in terms of connectivity, yet Madrid has the smallest total distance to all of these cities.
- Turns out that if many tree species are left untouched, they can be preserved for future generations bit.ly/2SjrlO1. Did not expect that their life expectancy could be that long.
- The FAOSTAT data on value of agricultural production is quite informative. We can evaluate which countries have achieved excellence in the production of which crops. For instance, it was new to me that Azerbaijan produces lots of hazelnuts, Iran and Morocco are doing well with almonds, Viet Nam and Nigeria with shelled cashew nuts, Canada is great with lentils, Indonedia and Côte d'Ivoire with cocoa beans, India and Nigeria with okra, Belarus and Russia with oats, Turkey and Uzbekistan with apricots, Italy, France and Spain with grapes, USA and Brazil with soybeans and so on. Cannot possibly mention all producers here, although they deserve it since their poduction reaches and feeds so many. Truly global this dataset.
- Greenhouse gas emissions by fossil type (2006) bit.ly/2z5xmVS. As you can see, greenhouse gas emissions span over many gases, not just CO2. Ozone (O3) is even missing here, but what I found interesting is that all these fuels are said to emit across the entire spectrum even when in different intensity.
- "Over 80% moisture creates a favorable environment for plant pathogen attacks (bacteria and fungi), while humidity below 60% creates water stress and low photosynthesis rate." 20% does not seem like a very broad band; perhaps a device could help control humidity the way thermostats do this for temperature.
- Libraries in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2z2fXgE
- Turns out Columbus is between Indiana and Ohio, which explains my observat2ion yesterday.
- Residential electricity prices by US state, 2017 bit.ly/2z7kXR4
- Cycle time is important. If someone has to wait ten seconds to compile their code, perhaps they wouldn't be able to test too many changes. They could also forget what they were thinking by the time they have to type it. And if a click on the web doesn't feel instant, there is something standing in the way.
- You could also choose a non-traditional form of support like taking care of travel/accomodation costs to see me work at an interesting problem with a team of people. More hesitant since this would be fleeting, the problem may not excite me, and it would be hard for you to extract much value from an introvert in a short time. This would feel more like an offer than a gift...
- Having a birthday after two days (27.10, Scorpio). Since international ship and delivery times are known to take a while, you can start sending me your gifts today. The joke aside, I could use a new laptop (one, not ten) that will enable me to work much faster and on bigger problems while having to wait less on computation. Currently I fear to start many things, because I know how much time similar ones have taken me in the past (hopefully you liked them or used them at least once). This is not a comforting thought. I expect the new machine to be able to raise my productivity at least twice, discounting the fact that my main bottlenecks continue to be reading, creative thinking and speed of discovery of valuable problems to work on. (You could help with the last by becoming a client.) Notice that being faster will enable me to serve you much faster as well; remaining slower will make me less willing to discuss the details of many problems, since anyone with a better hardware will be able to serve you in a fraction of the time. If you feel that I am asking for too much, there are also alternatives like multimeter, microscope, electronic components, books, anything. Did I even mention that the shipping costs can be high? The last time I checked on Amazon, they were a third of the price... so contact only if interested.
- Overall score and average daily traffic on the bridges in USA (2017) bit.ly/2yYLEHB. Uses data from the National Bridge Inventory (NBI). A total of 615002 locations were inspected with over hundred available features each. If you wished, you could also take a look at the build year of the bridges. Motivated by a report which claimed that ≈30% of all bridges (or a total of 180000) are steel-based and therefore subject to corrosion in case water is not drained properly and accumulates on the steel. (Steel coatings with zinc may offer some help.) Average annual cost due to corrosion of US bridges was estimated to be ≈8 billion dollar in 2012. That bridge maintenance can be critical is easy to recognize after the collapse in Genoa, Italy.
- If producing a coin has been said to cost seven cents, having coins of one, two and five cents seems strange. Perhaps there is a catch behind this logic.
- Motor vehicle accidents in Hartford, Connecticut (01.01.2005-13.10.2018) bit.ly/2yXO3m7. You can clearly see the streets with the most accidents and the monthly variation in accident numbers. There is a very weak tendency towards their reduction over time. In the first two months of 2011 alone, there were over 1400 accidents. The 90863 accidents were distributed over 5033 days, which is ≈18 accidents/day on average.
- "Scientists insist on stopping coal usage until 2030" (Spiegel). Not surprising given that "coal-fired power plants produce the greatest amount of CO2 per unit energy output, making coal the least efficient fossil fuel."
- Learned about some minor differences between concrete and timber bit.ly/2S9ydNQ. You may know that concrete was linked with stronger greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; timber probably emits too, but to a smaller degree. The latter was also said to be draft-proven and efficient. While beneficial, sustainable construction with timber may come at the cost of waiting longer to obtain sufficient amount of material, especially for bigger projects. But the alternative is further depletion of our limited resources (in an irreversible process, increasing the entropy of the system called Earth).
- Also saw the cams at Monterey Bay Aquarium, but everytime I tuned in to watch, the machine blocked and showed me a still image instead, mouse cursor disappearing. Possibly something small to fix on an otherwise great website. You may be able to see more.
- At risk, at risk, (critically) endangered... bit.ly/2SeiCNg. What have we done to reach a state in which even the giraffe is at risk?
- "Blindness or low vision affects approximately 1 in 28 Americans older than 40 years of age." Would be interesting to know the percentages for other nations and people older than 60, for instance. It made me (internally) happy that DeepMind directed their attention to this problem too, possibly realizing how much value hides behind finding new insights from raw data that could advance the treatment of eye diseases (like dry eyes or uveitis). Vision problems have the potential to decrease quality of life greatly, but also deprive people of the opportunity to learn from books and screens. Web designers could develop accessible websites for people with disabilities, but this is honoring the effect rather than fighting the cause. And by having to be constantly up-to-date with the latest, changing technologies, while working long hours for low pay, the designers and programmers themselves are increasingly exposed to such risks. Having more of them could lead to raising the need for better eye care.
- Spent more than a second on a paper wondering why with increasing velocity of a train, the pressure on the wheels was increasing. Not obvious to someone like me.
- "Since it is impossible to carry more information per unit time on high frequencies, microwaves are quite suitable for communications. Most satellite-transmitted information is carried on microwaves as are land-based long-distance transmissions." Having reason to believe that Steve Wozniak knows about this.
- Finding the shortest route through an amusement park that considers the queue waiting time of the attractions may not be sufficient. This way one would preferably visit the ones with the smallest queues, which may not be the most interesting or memorable. Perhaps there was a reason why everyone was waiting elsewhere? Some interestingness measure has to be integrated in the computations to seek a more balanced quality of time spent. But such information is unlikely to be available on first visit.
- Wind chill factors as matrix bit.ly/2S6LczS
- StackOverflow following the "Join, cookie, join" practice bit.ly/2yWKVXl
- Suspected, but never knew that the bottom part of the leg (below the knee) is made of two bones—tibia (thicker, on the inside) and fibula (thinner, on the outside). Not only that, but you can see that in terms of flexible movements, robots could improve a lot if they studied human skeletons bit.ly/2S7U20s. So many diverse joint types here. Thanks to Rice University for providing this amazing graphic.
- When you see the double helix structure bit.ly/2yTnbn3, do you find that it could be "interactively animatable"?
- Suppose you think of your body as a movable building, each room being a separate organ, having approximate idea how much energy they are consuming for proper functioning. Is the sum of all these values "weather-normalized"? Are bodies exposed to 5°C and 20°C equal in terms of how much heat they emit to the environment (and lose as energy)? If a value like 120W for sitting still reflects only what's happening inside, do we have to add to it the energy lost due to the outside environment (skin radiates in infrared)? If so, we may find that the skin surface area and the difference of external and internal temperatures, each raised to a fourth degree, can quickly double the original amount of energy, even in a warm environment of 22°C. Does this mean that the body, in a default still state, could be (less than) 50% efficient? And that by using warmer clothing—especially in the winter months,—we could partially decrease its energy needs?
- Energy and oxygen consumption in some common human activities bit.ly/2ySsovw. The tabular data did not reveal well that a possible linear relationship between oxygen intake and energy used could exist—the more oxygen we breathe, the more energy we use. What surrised me too was the small difference between sitting at rest (120W) and standing relaxed (125W). On the opposite sides are sleeping (83W) and sprinting (2415W), which (at least here) hints about variation of up to 30 times.
- Some time ago, I've read an article that discussed the issue of bacteria accumulating on car seats over time. It mentioned that the more often various people used the seats, the more bacteria they could accomodate. Now I see another study bit.ly/2yRsXWk, not considering seats this time, but still quite interesting. It makes one think about the areas most often touched. And that disinfectant use has to follow the rule that "microbial death of a population is logarithmic in time". This suggests that the substance will need more time than usual to fully unfold its cleaning effect. If you wish to compare observed with expected, you could also think of a microscope with a good "hello" magnification factor.
- A quick look at the cultural spaces in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2yRQMgG. Not sure how current this list is, but there are many museums/galleries, community centers/halls and artist studios in it. Higher concentration of such spaces can be seen at the north of the city.
- "Saguaro can soak up 750 liters of water in a single rain storm, enabling these cacti to survive the dry conditions of the Sonora desert in Mexico and the Southwestern United States." This could fill a water tank.
- Public libraries in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2S4NjV4 ("Cambridge Public Library locations", bit.ly/2S2Wh4X)
- Buildings with highest source EUIs and water intensities (gal/ft2) in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2ySGcG7 (Source: Cambridge Open Data, "2017 Cambridge building energy and water use disclosure data", bit.ly/2yOmOuc)
- Polygons for 10000 buildings in Cambridge, MA bit.ly/2yPQ5of
- Employment levels at some of the top employers in Cambridge, MA (1995-2017) bit.ly/2ySMqWy. Did not expect to see both Harvard University and MIT on the same diagram. Other employers include Mt. Auburn Hospital, Cambridge Innovation Center, Akamai Technologies, Hubspot, Google, Broad Institute, IBM Innovation Center.
- "Eco-Totem" bicycle count at Broadway (near Kendall Square) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (24.06.2015-19.09.2018) bit.ly/2yNevie
- Trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2EwssXV
- Ratings from inspections of New York park features (as of 10.10.2018) bit.ly/2EzAyiy. Initially used log scale, but noticed that it didn't look great. Although, it highlighted which features had somewhat lower ratings, it also created the impression that much less positive observations have been made. In other words, it greatly reduced the difference between what appeared to be positive and what negative, which did not reflect well the nature of the original data. So I switched to sqrt scale, to try preserving the green bars higher, while keeping the red bars lower, but visible enough to be able to say something about them. As you can see, most park feature inspections were positive. There were almost no issues with dirt, facility equipment, fairways, walls, sand traps. Slightly more frequent were issues with litter, paved surfaces, weeds and trees.
- US states by housing growth and average number of housing units per person (2010-2016) bit.ly/2EwRqGz. The result about New York looks strange, but according to Google, the city had a population of 8.615 million in 2016. If this is correct, New York was closest to having a housing unit for each person on average. Another question is how affordable these units were. What we also see is that California and Texas, for instance, were among the states with the smallest average number of available housing units per person despite having the highest absolute numbers of housing units.
- The question is how many companies would pay a minimum of 70-120 thousand dollar/year (depending on the city) to cover the rents of people willing to relocate there. Perhaps not too many. Europe has the same problem too, where many companies/corporations have progressively become non-payers relative to the market. And they know it. All sufficient reasons not to relocate and let them do the work themselves.
- Rent price reduction in eleven US cities bit.ly/2EvSsm5. Putting things in perspective shows that it's hard to speak about any "deals" here. Based on that data, the attempt to persuade readers that "now is the right time to rent" has no serious ground.
- Libraries in Santa Clara, California bit.ly/2Es2tAK (Source: County of Santa Clara open data portal, "Libraries", bit.ly/2S1sgCL)
- "Characteristics of electrical energy storage technologies compared by energy, rated power and discharge rate" bit.ly/2RUp8bA. Heard that Toyota Mirai would use a hydrogen fuel cell, but never knew why. Thankful to see such a diagram, potentially answering my question. What I also liked in this Arxiv paper was the mentioning of Georgetown, Texas as a city, whose energy supply has become 100% renewable bit.ly/2Ex1HCB
- Libraries in Baton Rouge, Louisiana bit.ly/2EClIIa
- Unrealistic vanishing points bit.ly/2RXodY8
- An attempt to estimate the daily revenue of a cafeteria given some assumptions about the products on offer, the seating capacity and utilization and the average client stay time bit.ly/2EE9Bub
- Company X "agreed to pay" amount Y... Nice wording. Punishment described as collective lunch at the table. Wondering how far punishers can go before receiving their own punishment.
- Noticed that many flavors of "Lay's" chips have 160calories in 28g (or 571.42cal/100g). Almost as much as 100g sesame or 100g almond.
- Think about it. You are pushing your thoughts to Facebook, your videos to Google and your code to Microsoft. How well can this potentially end for you? If you want a different kind of life, start being more conscious who you are supporting and how.
- Bug reporting s.si.edu/2EswnoF ↗
- Flower (6.8kB) bit.ly/2Es0aO9. Now is rest time.
- Testing an idea about decreasing saturation at distance bit.ly/2RUQApy. Your variants will be more appealing.
- Wondered about the average speed of a swimmer. In the case of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, the winner of the 1500m freestyle swimming for men (see BBC Sport bbc.in/2EohQKt) achieved an average speed of 6.09km/h. According to Wikipedia, this is slightly faster than a fast pedestrian (5.32 - 5.43km/h).
- First time seeing typical luminances under various conditions bit.ly/2RTtVtY
- Looked at the air pollution (PM2.5 and PM10, yearly averages) in German cities according to the World Health Organization (WHO), with data from 2016 bit.ly/2RPFkuI (Source: "Ambient (outdoor) air quality database, by country and city", bit.ly/2EltjdV). In both rankings Frankfurt appears first; Gelsenkirchen and Stuttgart are in both top tens. Berlin takes 5th place in PM2.5 and 16th place in PM10, with a consistent value of 23µg/m³. Motivated by an article mentioning that air pollution "can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year" bit.ly/2RR6OA7
- Surprised that Wikipedia ranked Luxembourg second in per-capita cigarette consumption (2016). I believed that people with a high living standard stay away from smoking, but this table proved me wrong. If someone were to smoke the 6331 cigarettes per year, assuming Marlboro and market prices, this would amount to ≈1677.69€/year bit.ly/2RNCHtz. Feels almost cheap considering the average monthly salary in this country. This makes cigarettes highly accessible, likely promoting their consumption. But I could be wrong.
- "This term does not depend on... and survives..." Survival of the fittest terms under best conditions. Have a great start in the new week!
- Library branches in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2ElEd3i (Source: Los Angeles Open Data, "Library branches", bit.ly/2Elkv7E)
- Improving my old diagram of the street lights in Los Angeles bit.ly/2RMMqA5
- Identified 250 of the most common words seen in Metallica's lyrics and underlined them according to their sense (positive or negative) bit.ly/2ROS5FW. Mostly reds, few greens in between. "Never" occurs almost twice as often as "hell", which is slightly more popular than "die" and "death". In fear that some "positives" here could be false ones.
- Libraries in Queensland, Australia bit.ly/2RMrzgp. Even with good intentions, it is practically impossible to label all 328 libraries. Noticed that postcode 4875 can refer to many islands, partially explaining the variety of libraries there. Only two libraries in this list have postcode 4000 and Brisbane as locality. We notice that many seem to follow the coastline, but the farther one moves away from it, the harder it becomes to find such fireplaces of culture.
- CH4 emission factors for manure management for non-cattle in 2016 bit.ly/2Ej7JGN. Strange that these emissions seem to depend even on the weight of some animals, at least in this case.
- Median rent by borough in London, UK (2011-2017) bit.ly/2EhL4e0. Kensington and Chelsea as well as Westminster seem to be the only two boroughs with higher median rents than the rate for the entire city. In Q3 2017, the median rent in Kensington and Chelsea reached almost 2800 £/month.
- Trying to make sense of a freely available map on Visit Talinn (screenshot: bit.ly/2EllwN1, media bank: bit.ly/2EvTHSz). Each sightseeing has coordinates, photo and description. Saw a small reportage yesterday (and a nice palace with a big garden said to be close to a beach). Unlike other places, tourists there seem to have enough information to make good choices about spending their time.
- "A map of every building in America" nyti.ms/2ROwptl ↗ has a link to the datasets from Microsoft. Also nice to read about some of the insights they captured from the data.
- Libraries in Houston, Texas bit.ly/2ElSGMC. Due to hurricane Harvey, some branches have closed (temporarily) or were moved to new locations. Still great to see that the majority continue operating unaffected. For the most accurate and up-to-date information, visit the branch search page of the Houston Public Library bit.ly/2EhxVlf.
- Always try to choose descriptive names for your variables and functions. Better to provide slightly more context than not enough. (A long variable is likely still shorter than a short sentence.) If you make other people think, there is a good chance that after some time noone will remember the meaning behind the letters. Even better is to use "search and replace" specifically to shape the meanings and form a helpful train of thought. Not understanding labels makes people reluctant to change them, reducing code dynamics and at the end, causing important functionality to be dropped.
- Simple idea about finding the yearly water leakage cost from a known number of water drops per second bit.ly/2EgLlOk. Expected a much higher amount—could you identify a mistake? As they say: "Drop after drop a reservoir is formed."
- Another figure from arcs bit.ly/2EjmLfQ
- The (former) Opera logo with a grey border bit.ly/2RNX7me. May not be exact. Contours created by functions/code, shading in GIMP.
- Was not aware that ellipses can approximate a square (rotated at 45deg) bit.ly/2Egki5B. Seems counterintuitive to me, although this is what an experiment revealed.
- Removing the most and the least common colors in an image bit.ly/2RN8Zow
- Functional decision making bit.ly/2EkjyfY also reminds me about the danger of taking sides. The words seemed to fit naturally there.
- Parcels in Chattanooga, Tennessee bit.ly/2RJRchT (Source: Chattanooga Public Library, "Parcels", bit.ly/2RIawvU). Almost 80000 shapes in one diagram. The borders between parcels are grey, so if you see too much of it, the surronding parcels are likely too small to be visible here.
- PCA on the characteristics of some airplanes seen at the Leipzig airport bit.ly/2RJXVZ2. Junkers Ju 52 and Boeing 767-300 look "different" compared with the other models.
- Libraries in Dublin, Ireland bit.ly/2RIB7ZE (Source: Dublin City Council, bit.ly/2RKwYo3). Tried to make this interactive in reasonable time, but CSS didn't agree. My initial idea was to show the hours as bars for each day when someone moves over a library name. Despite losing some time this way, the idea led to another diagram bit.ly/2EhJKbb. Surprised that the opening hours on the website were in a strange format that made me think: 10-5, 1-8, 10-1, 2-5. What a relief to have the 24hour format nowadays...
- Salad preparation processes bit.ly/2EcRkDG. For a smile and a proof of the value of process optimization.
- Geometric view of escalator and elevator paths bit.ly/2EfG7CB
- Percentage of wall area covered by windows bit.ly/2RGeJQN. Surprisingly small when we exclude the size of the frames. One might think it is reasonable to assume around 35%, but this is not the case. Some buildings already have all-glass sides.
- "The current BioNano Genomics Irys System requires one week and 1000$ to produce the Rmap data for an average size eukaryote genome, whereas it required 100000$ and six months in 2009." - in "A succinct solution to Rmap alignment". Such a great improvement factor here.
- Somehow reminds me of the "fastest return to center" taxi-driving "algorithm", according to which in the case of multiple orders, the driver starts to service them outside-in. The goal is to stay as long as possible at a place that would allow serving a maximal number of people (the single central parking spot in the city). Might explain why being far on the outside, I rarely see resting taxi drivers here. Even they learned the algorithms.
- Always wondered what happens with all the bikes which people bring to the most desired places. Does someone care that they are brought back to their original stations to prevent future accessibility bottlenecks? Isn't this process painful? Finished reading a material mentioning "reallocating docks to the estimated improvement" (in the case of Citi Bike), which seems to be another valuable perspective to consider.
- Squares smoking in color bit.ly/2EbKPRx. Good that the paper included the author names next to what I wanted to show. Eliminates one additional step for me.
- "Which materials can help reduce carbon emissions?" bit.ly/2Eb4ZeF ↗. Comes almost parallel to what I found about the thinking of Buckminster Fuller today bit.ly/2RJlVLM (Source: Wikipedia). Strong, light, energy-efficient, easy-to-assemble housing and awareness about the finite resources we have (like fuel) were among his ideas. Had no idea that refrigerants could be improved to a big impact. And transport with the burning of fossil fuels remains a major contributor as well.
- Travel time to work in Riverside, California (2006 - 2015) bit.ly/2EgGxIL (Source: County of Riverside, California, "Commute travel time", bit.ly/2EdyGfa). With the caveat that the margin of error about the number of estimated commuters was not considered. Strange that in 2015 many people traveled 30-34 mins, but much fewer traveled 35-39 mins. At least from this data, it is not easy to find a reasonable explanation why such big differences appear (in periods that are close together).
- The Journal of Optimization has a well-optimized website.
- Another valuable dataset are the historic journey times in Bristol bit.ly/2REhlyw. It contains travel time and estimated speeds at various locations and times between 12.01.2016 and 11.09.2016. Theoretically, this would allow us to look which areas within the city are more susceptible to traffic congestion. But it is not that simple. These are only point estimates and the travel times given make more sense for distances we know in advance (curve lengths, which are missing). The name of the road is insufficient in deriving this information. But we could use the estimated speeds to compute the medians for each location, if more than 15 estimates have been made. This way we derive the following graphic bit.ly/2RDDIEl. It doesn't seem to paint a uniform picture; at the cener of the point cloud we see points of widely varying median speeds. And at the periphery we have too few points to allow ourselves to be conclusive. Ideally, the addition of more places and measurements over a longer period could have helped to reduce some of the uncertainty (at the additional cost of installing and maintaining more sensors). But even so the work of Bristol City Council can serve as an example what other cities could do as well.
- You can also see the streetlight locations in Bristol bit.ly/2RG2CDm. Unfortunately, there was no wattage information provided by Bristol City Council at the time I accessed the data. If you look more carefully, you might see thicker dots at what appears to be intersections. Not surprising, considering how many vehicles pass through such "hotspots" and the increased likelihood of incidents there.
- Attempted to visualize the cycle network in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2Eds2pj. Not sure how accurate or complete this is. What I found interesting is that Google doesn't map strict boundaries around the city the way it does for other ones. Looking specifically for boundaries returns images with very diverse results. Which leads me to believe that the aspect ratio won't resemble the true reality.
- Going for a walk as the weather is nice and once again you didn't pay.
- Fire-related 911 calls in Seattle bit.ly/2EdC3CK (Source: City of Seattle Fire Department MIS, "Seattle real time fire 911 calls", bit.ly/2RHhlh4). The 758354 phone calls are for the entire data collection period, although due to a small datetime related error somewhere in the data, it was not easy to contain the events in a known time range with high certainty. Also note that not all locations have been included in this "visible" zone. Many individual calls were reported outside these boundaries. But the highest density of events was seen within them.
- If budgets are often broken down to the smallest individual revenues/expenditures, could it be a good idea to represent this hierarchical nature via a hierarchy of objects, each containing smaller ones?
- Rhombus of charges and an inseparable relationship bit.ly/2Eci2MZ. From an excerpt of the book on electricity and magnetism by Edward M. Purcell.
- "Web developer in Dresden" Wondering why someone must be willing to be "chained" to a given location to satisfy employers who don't know how to keep their people. The world is big and job titles aren't location-bound. Unfortunately, the chaining approach is getting widespread with such ideas like "we will teach the medicine students, but we want them to stay and work in the country for at least five years". Proposals which can leave one speechless.
- Something I have seen on no mobile device so far—showing the time remaining until the battery is fully charged. An endless animation may not be the most informative. What do these percentages mean? Will it charge from 30 to 70% in 30mins, from 70% to 90% in 60 mins and from 90 to 100% in 80mins?
- Used the "Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages" by the Bureau of Labor Statistics bit.ly/2E8ZyNl (scroll to bottom) to try finding locations with very high average weekly wages for three chosen sectors in Q1 2018 bit.ly/2RCI0M4. I inspected the single file for this year, weighting 535.3MB, which took some time. A bug found its place in the code since many locations appear more confidential than one might like. But you can also get the data and find the missing pieces by yourself.
- Cities in Netherlands and some connected components bit.ly/2RBQza3
- A trash bag which tears apart after bin removal forces the user to clean the floor (or the street) as well. Not beautiful. Similar to a failing software which spills its effects unpredictably. Whether "cleaning up" software is a term-coincidence?
- Frequency types and the difference between LiFi and WiFi bit.ly/2E8jEah. The diagram is based on another table from the same paper. Had to use the log scales for frequency and wavelength to visually see everything in context. Reflects my own understanding, which may be incorrect.
- "Efficient tuning of online systems using Bayesian optimization" bit.ly/2E8W0L0 ↗. An article from Facebook research.
- Bike availability considering available bikes relative to bike stand capacity and update time relative to last update time at various Villo bike stations in Brussels bit.ly/2RBhumo. Shows how color coding can reflect a combination of criteria and not just one. Red stations were closed. This is only a snapshot by the time the data was extracted. It will not reflect recent changes.
- Trees in The Hague, Netherlands bit.ly/2RCJJAW
- Using a juicer to prepare fresh drinks in the morning often leaves me feeling worse after that, not better. The reason can be described as efficiency below some critical threshold. If someone needs to stuff the machine with kilograms of produce just to get 50-100g of juice out of it, then something incredibly wrong is happening during the preparation process. "This juice is so healthy, you have to drink it!" Throwing away the essence of the products is pure waste; you can feel that on your pocket the next time you go looking for fresh fruits and vegetables. So I try to think of the body as an efficient machine, giving it the option to take only what it needs and throw the rest. If I consume the product as it is, apart from the juice, the body might be able to derive other useful fibers/microelements. If I throw the rests produced by the juicer, I gain nothing, being left only with a small amount of juice. So I woke up with the idea to find whether Energy Star has tested juicers or blenders and whether it has made some recommendations. Unfortunately, these machines were among the few not included in the tests online. At the end, the realization is near, that whatever we do first in the morning has to make us feel good about ourselves and our world. How we start the day matters far too much to allow it to be squeezed to nothing by some "greedy" technology.
- 100g Toblerone chocolate bit.ly/2E7fWhk would have 542.85 calories, which according to my diagram from two days ago (if we trust the numbers) must be equivalent to 100g poppy seed. Their saturated fats? 30% vs. 4.5% (according to Google).
- Blue Bikes Boston has a nice API to check the current availability of bikes and docks at a large number of bike stations. Using this for point cloud visualization would be only one option; collecting data over a longer interval could allow more interesting uses or the creation of infographics. (Storing lots of data requires a good storage device.) Unfortunately, from my quick check, I could not JSON parse the status page (the station information page worked as expected), but you may be able to find a workaround.
- On various occassions, between 13.12.2010 and 30.08.2018, Boston City Hall collected invoices that show a total electricity consumption of 105.565 million KWh and a corresponding cost of 18.276 million dollar, which makes an average of 17.31cent/KWh. The median is 11.08cent/KWh. (Source: data.boston.gov, Environment Department, "City of Boston Utility Data", bit.ly/2RwztKR)
- Locations of the public libraries in Boston, Massachusetts bit.ly/2RAlUd5
- A hardcover book with contents that have become soft only a year later may be worse than a soft cover book whose contents still remain hard. The environment may also have a preference.
- Which stations in Switzerland had the most connections on 05.10.2018? bit.ly/2E4MCb7. From actual data (229.2MB) provided by Swiss Public Transport (opentransportdata.swiss). The railway stations in Bern and Luzern both had over 3500 connections in this single day.
- Castles and palaces in Steiermark, Austria bit.ly/2RvRgBD (static) and bit.ly/2RzBRQY (dynamic)
- Twelve of the most common tree species in Zürich, Switzerland bit.ly/2E27S1e (Source: Stadt Zürich Open data, "Baumkataster der Stadt Zürich", bit.ly/2E2l5XJ). Grey areas on the map refer to less common trees.
- Electricity prices by sector in Austin, Texas (2006-2017) bit.ly/2E0Kf9g (Source: data.austintexas.gov, Austin Energy, "Austin energy rates - cents per kilowatt hour by customer class", bit.ly/2RAi97N)
- Electricity generation from solar installations in Wyndham, South Australia (01.08.2018 - 06.10.2018) bit.ly/2RwQ80A
- Number of breweries in USA (2012-2016) bit.ly/2Ry5zFW
- Selected museums in Düsseldorf, Germany bit.ly/2RxWnkY
- Locations of the library branches in Düsseldorf, their visits and number of loaned materials bit.ly/2RD8TzI. Took some time to complete. All sources as seen on the graphics. Remember that the broader access people have to materials, the more original demos they will be able to build too.
- Bike counts at various places in Düsseldorf, Germany (2012-2017) bit.ly/2DZloCK (Source: Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, "Jahresübersicht der Dauerzählstellen Radverkehr seit 2012", bit.ly/2Ru0AWF). Taking the sum of all fifteen-minute interval measurements reveals that during that period "Mannesmann Ufer-Totem 01" saw 3.798 million passing bikes, "KÖ Steinstr." counted 3.057 million and "OKB Nord" saw 2.716 million bicycles. Other stations saw at least a million less than "OKB Nord". To understand approximately where these places are, you can see the following map bit.ly/2E2yEGJ.
- Status of some charging stations for electric cars in Barcelona bit.ly/2E1LDZp
- Good that at least some websites allow us to browse the content in our language of choice rather than in a language they want to impose on us due to some geographical location. Designs which limit the number of options to one and automatically enforce it have usability and accessibility issues from the start. This way, lack of common sense is quickly demonstrated at corporate level.
- Winter is approaching and with it the need for ingesting slightly more calories than usual. Made a small diagram bit.ly/2yn9Umn with some foods and the amount of calories they are said to contain in 100g. As data sources I used Google and Nutritionix.
- Indicate NBA games wins and losses with no graphics bit.ly/2Rsf8X3
- Find letters in a word belonging to a given range bit.ly/2yih4Zf
- Idea to determine the current used to display a given time on a digital clock bit.ly/2yiMXRD. Suggestions are welcome.
- Imagined having three answers as intervals and attempted to visualize their intersection with the simple fill_between idea bit.ly/2yiDjOL. Does what I wanted, but only with closed intervals (no open intervals or infinities). Open intervals made me sad, especially when fill_between would expect functions for more rounded shapes.
- Side question: Is there somewhere a good analysis of EEG/ECG signals on the web we could learn something useful from? Saw many .dat files bit.ly/2yfkhcb, but not sure how to handle an unknown encoding. My usual approach didn't work.
- Always nice to see more density plots bit.ly/2RtbpbE, especially when thematized by color.
- Parental care bit.ly/2RrSQVd. Code to highlight a small percentage of the hurdles parents go through in order to raise their children (and also to acknowledge their almost heroic effort).
- Although beautiful, I have to admit that the way I see it, visualization can also work against us in some cases. It tries to present everything as it is and leaves less room for abstract/imaginative thinking. For instance, if I had a polygon and line, it would be very easy to plot both and spot whether the line is inside the polygon at any given time during an animation. An algorithm that doesn't rely on manual visual detection, however, has the opportunity to be more efficient than this by defining and enforcing the right rules rather than waiting to the end to determine the level of compliance. The ability to abstract, imagine and work with as many diverse variables (from various objects) as possible in our memory is essential in systems thinking, where visualization can sometimes interfere by showing only a temporary state or priming us to trust the superficial rather than delve more deeply. This effect makes me question when, how often and in which contexts visualization has its place.
- Imagine what would be if every city had an easily/cheaply obtainable mini city plan and timetables/route plans for each public vehicle number. Not smartphone-only, but supporting hand processing. So hard to do.
- Carefully crafting the content on your website has many positives. It enhances your site's relevance relative to the user interests/needs, it filters the important from the extraneous, clarifying and strenghtening your message, it improves the control over the resources which load and therefore the accessibility for your clients on the other side of the globe, it allows you to present what makes your company and its offers unique and finally, to structure a hard-to-resist call to action to find more customers. If you aren't sure what would be the best way to get your message across, you could ask a web designer you feel comfortable to work with. Also think about what other websites do to improve the quality, freshness and diversity of their content. And which of the already accepted practices have the potential to be harmful.
- Have you seen the map of the stores in "The Dubai Mall"? bit.ly/2IBq0xv ↗. May take some time to load, but zooming, panning and tooltips work nicely. Do you think that photos/more information about the current offers in each store could have enhanced the experience?
- If you are not careful, the label "Full path to directory and filename..." will start to look like one.
- When you see "<ponder>" in a book having nothing to do with web design, do you start thinking how often you pondered about HTML elements?
- There is an annoying bug in GIMP 2.8.22, but it is not easy to reproduce. Might have been fixed in the latest version, but I do not know since I cannot use this version with my distribution. Sometimes, after selecting the paint bucket (thinking that the current tool is the move tool) and pressing space to pan the view, plenty of new windows start popping up. This caught me on several occassions. Having to engage in manually closing 20-30 windows after a wrong action is quite inconvenient.
- An attempt to determine the space between elements (in px) within a flexbox container having justify-content: space-between and a known number of child elements bit.ly/2QvTGiB
- Fulfilling no wishes without sufficient payments. Not a magic lamp.
- There is no place for ageism, not just in software development but in any branch of the economy. Still incomprehensible to me how someone could claim that "software engineers have an expiration date". I truly believe that if someone loves what they do, they sink in it fully and don't count days, months, sometimes even years. To them age doesn't matter much. It matters to someone who has no idea how to fill their days and who has enough time to count them. If we consider the circumstances under which some chess players have died, some of us would be surprised to learn that they were actively engaged at the chessboard until the moment of their last breath, determined by a stroke. Imagine that! I doubt they were thinking about their expiration dates; they were busy kicking ass instead. More than sure that programmers who love their profession and are passionate about it feel the same way too. Can burnout, conflicts, belittlement, setbacks, lack of resources, bugs, faults, browser inconsistensies or lack of promising ideas stop them? Highly doubtful. Similarly to the names of the great chess players, theirs will be remembered too, long after they are gone. Making history seems so much better than obsessing with uncertain predictions about the past.
- The nomad list bit.ly/2xV2J5A ↗ seems an intriguing idea in itself, potentially useful to a lot of people looking to travel and work at new places. But I wonder how objective such ranking can be. Until one knows how these numbers were generated, the results probably shouldn't be taken lightly. Looking at the monthly costs (perhaps including rent in a coworking space) is sufficient to discourage beginners, since their expected salary may barely cover them. But people who earn >50$/hour may feel quite comfortable with the discomfort of traveling. Otherwise traveling is a waste of time if you don't know why you are doing it and what purpose you are fulfilling. Meeting people can easily turn into an expectation to meet people and now you have a problem. Now traveling frequently from one destination to another for new meetings will quickly destroy your productivity and leave you less employable in the future. Follow the advice of nomad sites and gurus on your own risk.
- I could imagine CO alarms particularly useful at locations where employers cram too many programmers in a room and and ask them to code, rarely turning on an air conditioner or having no proper ventillation. Quite easy to exhale the wrong gas type, which others will then breathe in. "CO poisoning" has negatve consequences on creativity, they say. Which programmer can afford to lose their creativity over time? Wondering whether better air quality could be connected with the fact that many writers experienced their best ideas after walks in parks. Suddenly, CO alarm devices start to look interesting. If I felt concerned about my health while at work, the first thing I would do would be to discuss the issues, not simply silently accept them. The second thing would be to quit if the existence of these issues has been proven, but there is no interest in fixing them. Trading health for payments doesn't seem like a good business.
- I prefer to see beautiful code with a slightly slower performance over fast code that is nowhere near beautiful.
- The energysaver report reminded me about a useful way of thinking: just because something doesn't appear to be used doesn't mean it isn't. They give faucets as an example. If after washing we leave them on the "hot" side, it means that water is being pre-heated in the background even though we never use it. Does this seem like waste to you? Wouldn't easily come to this idea myself; relying on reports is therefore a good way to challenge my assumptions. That appliances also draw electricity even when turned off and left unused also seems to defend this theme. (And becoming paranoid enough to clean the time-proven, cumulative rests in the oven is perhaps best left for another time.)
- A person decided to improve the windows in their home and mentioned the investment made and the expected savings per year for two window pane types. This enables one to look at payoff times of that investment bit.ly/2QnuzhG. This data is likely valid only within this specific environment, although it can still give us some hints. If old, wooden-frame, single-pane windows have to be replaced, the investment could pay off after acceptable 5 years, which may be considered meaningful. On the other side, if existing double-pane, clear-glass windows are replaced, it would take much longer (over 20 years) to see a net positive effect of that investment. This clearly illustrates how the same action can have different feasibility/relevance when evaluated from different perspectives.
- Drinking is still a serious problem for a lot of people. I could never understand the reasons behind the social expectation about "meeting on a drink" and usually looked for reasons to apologize for not participating. I don't think that being able to "carry much" should be seen as a badge of honor even when some people try to present it this way. Decided to find some information on average per-person alcohol consumption in a day. 13.7g may not seem much, so I looked at a fictive person weighting 60kg and asked myself how long it would take them to drink the equivalent of their own weight. Naively assuming that alcohol fills the body like it would fill a can suggests that only in 12 years no organ would be left unaffected bit.ly/2QnDe3S. May scare someone.
- Learned about the Small Wind Certification Council and its database. Unfortunately, can't do much data analysis with ten items.
- Libraries in Ottawa, Canada bit.ly/2xRiSsE. Parsing the XML file revealed one branch called "Bookmobile", which was covering "Greenboro", so I removed that. Then I saw a more beautiful map bit.ly/2xTCyw4 ↗. Learned that Ottawa is located near the Ottawa River with most libraries being close to it, at the north-east part of the city. After the dent, they no longer follow the river. The branches "Alta Vista" and "Metcalfe" reminded me about a search engine and a law respectively, but perhaps you know better whether there is any historic connection.
- Finding parks with facilities of interest in New York bit.ly/2xKeJH2. Uses information provided by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Due to the large amount of data, I have selected only four facilities (out of 41): WiFi hotspots, zoos/aquariums, ice skating rinks and paddleboat rentals. Usually the data will come from a database and won't appear mixed with the functionality. But my goal was to ensure that other people can run their own searches without expecting them to have experience with database management. If you wondered which park you have to visit to see one or more attractions, this might for you. Could this save some information-related calls to 311? Not sure. If you are looking for something else or have a specific project in mind, you can always make a proposal and we'll see whether working together could be possible to make it possible.
- "Logic is to mathematics as evidence is to science." Beautiful relationship. So we need both?
- When people want to quit your program and press "X" to avoid an "Upgrade" button and the process it could start at an unconvenient time, don't show them a new window with a big colorful button "Continue" and a small grey button "Cancel", when the default intention is to continue with the installation/upgrade. Someone who can't undersand English may never be able to close your application this way.
- NYC fatalities by movement mode (2000-2017) bit.ly/2OZr1lm. From the same "Vision zero" report: "Increased darkness in fall and winter evenings is correlated with 40% increase in serious injury and fatal collisions involving pedestrians." From the action plan: "Dangerous driver choices are the primary cause or a contributing factor in 70% of pedestrian fatalities."
- Attempted to create an infographic bit.ly/2OYtlcp about cycling in New York, integrating multiple diagrams and facts from the "Safer cycling" report, published in 2017.
- Did not expect that the Mayor's management report for September 2018 on.nyc.gov/2OYLlUa would provide so much detail about how a big city like New York operates. Plenty of things to think about—many tables with data, diagrams, references. The work breakdown by agency allows one to learn what each agency does, which goals it has and which metrics it tracks. Learned about the BYTES of the BIG APPLE™ datasets, which were missing on many other open data lists. But also about police response times, library attendance (New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library), the park cleanliness ratings, the decreasing number of consumer complaints (and the average days to close them), the electrification of the vehicle fleet (2.42x compared to 2017), the number of potholes repaired on local streets and highways, the overall traffic crashes and fatalities involving cyclists and motorists, the average number of adult families in shelters per day, the countless reasons behind the 311 calls (by number of occurrences) and much more.
- "Scientists find over 60000 of new Maya structures (thanks to LIDAR)" bit.ly/2OYqXm4 ↗
- Productivity vs. cost of work bit.ly/2xLU59w
- An example how to find nearby hotels in Singapore bit.ly/2NatSpQ
- Libraries in Singapore bit.ly/2xOoDYd (Source: "Libraries" by National Library Board, data.gov.sg, bit.ly/2xLSrEJ)
- Interactive map of the wind turbines in Switzerland bit.ly/2xLt7i9 ↗. A click on "info" gives useful information about manufacturer name, operator name, turbine model, diameters and heights, rated capacity, produced electricity within the last couple of years. One can pair this information with the accompanying wind atlas bit.ly/2xLOQXs ↗ for greater insight. There are also maps of the many hydro power plants bit.ly/2NapG9M ↗ and the few nuclear power plants bit.ly/2xFtwmr ↗. Not sure how often these maps are updated, but this is a good example of identifying a single, common theme and developing it to serve multiple (potential) purposes.
- Durations of traffic disturbances in Bern, Switzerland bit.ly/2xKsxkN (Source: opendata.swiss, "Traffic announcements BERNMOBIL", bit.ly/2N9Pra4). Approached this without any expectations, yet the diagram turned out to be interesting. There are blocks and diagonals, which I think might correspond to both long and short term planning. The median duration of the traffic disturbances comes at ≈1hour 19mins, which explains why there appear to be many single points.
- Distribution of population ages by region in Helsinki, Finland (2016) bit.ly/2xMFOJA (Source: opendata.fi, "Helsinki alueittain", bit.ly/2xKZdLf). If my interpretation is correct, three regions have the highest concentration of people in the age group 25-39 years: "Kallion peruspiiri", "Alppiharjun peruspiiri" and "Vallilan peruspiiri".
- Concentration of 33 pollen types in Luxembourg (1992-2018, log scale) bit.ly/2xLZMUT (Source: data.public.lu, "Pollen", bit.ly/2N7Jx9I). Looks periodic; when they were available, the types "Urtica", "Betula" and "Gramineae" appeared in the highest concentrations during this period.
- Total cumulative photovoltaic capacity in Great Britain (2010-2018) bit.ly/2N6UNmz
- Path through some sightseeings in Hamburg, Germany bit.ly/2xR4aSP. Found a list on hamburg.de and converted it to a diagram.
- Each time you upload a video on YouTube, you are sponsoring Google twice—once by giving up on the rights of your content (allowing embeddings on third-party sites) and once by granting the right to attach advertisements to your video that can be shown on each visit, independent of the number of visitors. By having your own website, you make clear that these assets belong to you, that they are exclusive and accessible only according to your criteria. You can decide how much to charge for anything you create and how to display it in the best possible light. You also have full control over efficiency and priorities. No need to sponsor the ultra-rich by living a life of creation in misery. To regain your freedom, sometimes you have to quit all services that suck you. Which is what I did a long time ago.
- If you can't explain clearly what you want, your project is not implementation-ready.
- Idea: A click on a street (curve) can reveal information about all hotels (points) located on that street.
- "Automobile assembly and engine production plants in Europe" (interactive map) bit.ly/2N6zUrR ↗. It has always been unclear to me which car manufacturers produce which parts where and how they fit together. Good to see a visualization trying to reduce this uncertainty. It saves a potential attempt to seek how to do one thing more. Update: Using this data, I tried to indicate the presence of some car manufacturers across Europe bit.ly/2NbmR8A. Please, understand that I couldn't include all of them (or all city labels) while preserving legibility; I had to focus only on few. Also be aware that some cities may have an "additive" color if more than one company is present there. This is the case with St. Petersburg in Russia, where Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen operate. Tesla is also already starting to appear (Tilburg, The Netherlands), but it is the only company among these ten having a single presence.
- Didn't know that ATMs (Geldautomaten) were unevenly distributed across Germany bit.ly/2N5VCMo ↗. This means that some people living in smaller cities may not have an easy access to their bank accounts. I remember that during my time in Germany, ATMs were at every corner, but I heard that only more recently their number has been greatly reduced/optimized. Currently, this doesn't affect me much, since I am no longer there. It became more important to me to be treated with respect rather than simply be seen as a temporary number at a "modern" place with no rights whatsoever. No longer to be seen on German streets/corners; no longer to be seen as an exploitable material.
- Some low payments and inadequate planning have led to the inheritance of big problems like careless engineering, holes on roads, falling bridges, cracks in walls and so on. Visible to everyone. Whether this seems logical? With software it's the same: what isn't payed for now, is inherited later. Fixes could take a lot of effort and resources, which can easily exceed the original amount which would have been dedicated to a better solution.
- "Verfied and vetted by the community" could also be a dangerous phrase. This community could also consist primarily of beginners. Relying on random ideas that got upvoted and expecting them to lead to good practices asks for serious trouble. In some programming languages that trouble has already arrived.
- Have you used a code quality tool so far? Did it attempt to actually decrease the quality of your code based on some assumptions? Did it slow down your machine significantly with its real-time "as-you-type" checks? One of the many reasons I try to stay away from heavy IDEs.
- Discover Magazine: over 400 requests, over 7.5MB page weight, 50s load time (on this machine). Not to mention the periodic Ajax "metrics" requests after the end. Is there still anyone who wants to discover, while being tracked in real time? Time Magazine also takes itself time: 299 requests, 5.5MB, 58.18s. So easy to identify who has never looked to hire a good web designer.
- Visual analysis of the "Heroes and Might and Magic 3" creature characteristics bit.ly/2zxjsNy (data source: bit.ly/2zwHfgB)
- "Build a stronger brand by working with your biggest fans." Great advice. Enthusiastic fans can charge you.
- Path planning with some sightseeings in Brussels bit.ly/2OTZC4i. As long as my coordinates were correct.
- Quick overview: 311 service requests in St. Louis (2009-2014) bit.ly/2OScV5x
- When you use the end resource (water), how often do you think about the system (pipe network), the potential inefficiencies (high percent leakage) and dependencies (electricity usage for water delivery and wastewater management)? For instance, in case of USA, this electricity is said to make ≈4% of the total usage. We often see the end product (output), while the complexity remains hidden from us (black box). But the efficiency of a function consisting of many invisible operations is still reflected in the end price.
- Efficiency chart for different photovoltaic materials bit.ly/2OQsp9Z. Admittedly, a very engaging graphic by NREL.
- Container cranes vs. annual TEU at top 25 container ports by TEU, 2015 bit.ly/2OMxMak. From the publicly accessible annual report 2016 of the Port Performance Freight Statistics Program bit.ly/2OMAIDL ↗. Seems that more cranes and higher total berth length are connected with higher TEUs. What I also liked were the port profiles at the end of this document and their design/structure. Update: Now used these features to look for port similarities bit.ly/2OSBK1d (but included only ports which deal with containers). For some reason, my machine believes that the characteristics and performance of the ports of Oakland and Savannah come close, although on a closer look we see that they have their own distinct advantages. But we can see that few other ports were like New Orleans, Houston or New York & New Jersey, for instance. The performance of the port of Long Beach showed at least some similarity to the one in Los Angeles. At least, when we consider the year 2015.
- If the United States Courthouse in Los Angeles bit.ly/2zsEhKc ↗ is said to have 900 monocrystalline solar panels generating 507000kWh annually, according to my calculation this reduces to ≈64.3Wh per panel and hour on average, independent of the weather conditions.
- Street lights in Baton Rouge bit.ly/2ONjZjC. A total of 42643 lights, more densely positioned at the west side of the city (near the Mississippi River, it seems).
- Average truck speeds on select metropolitan area insterstates (2012-2015) bit.ly/2OJJD8T (Data source: bit.ly/2OHlobj)
- Did you like the work you have seen so far? So much that you would recommend it to another person or not? Do you see gaps or have suggestions how to improve it? By the way, have a great start in the new week.
- Olympic medals by age (1896-2016) bit.ly/2OID3Qc. Expected to see a difference or at least a shift between the various medal types, but there wasn't one in the data. Most medals were obtained when the athletes were 23 years old.
- Bus trip prices per distance traveled bit.ly/2OLlmzr. The current prices were as seen in my old demo on IC busses, the driving distancess were obtained via distancecalculator.net, geocoordinates via latlong.net, plotting with matplotlib and image arrangement with GIMP.
- Goal-exclamation bit.ly/2OKUXl6
- Amplitude and frequency scaling bit.ly/2OK9D48
- The MIT logo, with SVG lines instead of polygons bit.ly/2zoJoLq
- Small cities, big companies bit.ly/2OJlQGf. Had no idea that all of them were so close.
- Big cities in France bit.ly/2znjl76. If I looked longer, I would probably see a circle here.
- Inductance of a coil (in two long lines of code) bit.ly/2OJtuQW
- Passengers per unit time bit.ly/2O2ufrg. Do you find such intuition approximately correct/useful? If I raise the average speed of the wagon to 60km/h (hardly reality here) and preserve the average car speed (55km/h), both vehicle types would transport the same number of passengers if the road had four individual lanes (and if all car seats were busy which is overly optimistic). Perhaps I could have integrated the costs of the road and the rails in some way if I knew them.
- Lines moving towards the labels "ARD", "ZDF" and "VOX" bit.ly/2ODZNkk.I was willing to change the angles of the lines for each program, but fiddling with lots of numbers was simply not worth the time.
- In case you looked for some code and came across a page seemingly having what you were after, with snippets created by someone who mixed lines of code without having a clue, while at the same time having them skillfully divided by ads in-between, you were probably subject to scam. The trouble is that it becomes increasingly harder even for a skilled individual to distinguish fake from real code, when one mimics the other so well. After being bitten this time, I am already weighing how this could affect the availability of programmers (including myself) in the future.
- A positive point also deserves mentioning: software quality advances decreased download and parsing times dramatically, which becomes very visible when one tries to move over 19 vols of content. Only several years ago that would have taken much longer.
- Wrote a script to download the abstracts from the JMLR site with the idea to look for common keywords in them. Practically impossible to guarantee the absense of HTTP errors. Placing try-catch blocks to avoid premature script end helped to gather only very small amounts of data (106kB). Update: Fixed my mistake where I had for some reason "http" attached twice only to some URLs. At the end parsing the HTML was impossible only for ten links, but I noticed that someone has linked PDF files where the HTML abstracts should have been present, which somewhat explains the behavior of the script. The most common keywords bit.ly/2OFHcnU in the 2.1MB file had to do with learning, data, algorithms, models, methods, results, approaches, performance, functions, kernels, analysis, classification, regression, training, Bayesianism and errors. This means that if someone looked for papers mentioning the term "regression", they would find that the 303 occurrences of the word appeared in the abstracts of a total of 285 papers, which are further reduced to 84 papers if we require the keyword to be in the title too. And "algorithm" appears in 986 paper abstracts. This is *not* including any of the special issues or special topics. We could also find the authors with the most papers bit.ly/2OFpssE, observing that many are already well-known in the scientific community. Cannot even think of what could be hidden inside the abstracts or the contents of the entire series of NIPS proceedings.
- 3D scans have shown that plants try to make optimal tradeoffs between building a network that allows nutrients to be transported quickly and the cost of maintaining the network. Natural optimizers according to an article in Wired.
- Is there such a weapon called "silencer" in Wolfenstein? Is someone on your team already using it?
- Olive production in European countries (2007-2018) bit.ly/2OIrOY4
- Monthly visitors of the library branches in Espoo, Finland (2009-2018) bit.ly/2OE1JJk
- "Tips on visiting 26 national parks, straight from park employees" ti.me/2NXjaaW ↗
- Libraries in Austin, Texas bit.ly/2OzO5XW (Source: Austin Public Library, "Austin Public Library Locations", bit.ly/2OBSnxP). 24 branches with a slight shift to the East.
- If you have a project you seek to complete and think that it could be of interest to me and have a concrete budget in mind, feel free to propose it. Direct work with me is also the best way to support and enable one or more of the small contributions you see.
- An attempt to visualize the age of the trees in Delft bit.ly/2NVfeXZ. Dark green indicates younger trees, lighter green older trees and grey—trees with unknown planting year. If not mistaken, some eastern areas of the city have somewhat darker green. Sadly, the youngest tree was given as 6 years old, while the oldest was over 300 years (is this even possible or is it a mistake in the data?). Within the total of 35146 trees, only five species had more than 1000 exemplars: London plane (2188), European ash (2184), White willow (1857), Huntingdom elm (1306) and Sycamore maple (1150).
- Street lights in Delft, The Netherlands bit.ly/2Oz0knp
- Always struggling to remember which color temperature corresponds to which label bit.ly/2NWDSYi. Possibly a demo material if you'd like to implement a slider, dynamically changing colors and labels on dragging.
- If at one point in time you thought about integrating a payment system into your service, but then after some initial research you discarded most systems for being too complex or not exactly meeting your requirements, I can fully understand that. Developing a single system is already hard enough to justify carrying a second burden on your back. Burden that doesn't add much value to your initial offer, but potentially maintenance costs during the evolution of this additional software. Sometimes speed and flexibility are more important than having automated payments. Especially for small businesses having a small number of infrequent transactions. Better to have them face-to-face after ensuring you can truly help this client and also feel motivated to do so! With third-party payment services you can never be sure about the fan-out of your data.
- Went on the Nissan's website and looked at the specifications of a car model. (The idea was to build a data matrix to compare models I knew nothing about.) As with other car sites, noticed that the photos were quite heavy. Tried to avoid some by disabling JavaScript. But this also disabled all spefication data and made it inaccessible, the buttons stopped working and an endless spinner remained at the top. Except the top menu, practically nothing else worked on this page anymore. An obvious case for the need of hiring a better web designer.
- Can no longer remember the publication, but saw a visible image of what happens when light passing diagonally though windows and installations above them (whose name I forgot) touches the floor of a building. It looked like a two-dimensional kernel density estimation with shading according to the light intensities. My first thought: "An invisible, natural KDE!".
- Developing new materials with new properties and applications is quite important. We are still using concrete for buildings, ceramics for teracotta, wood for furniture, glass for windows and bottles, plastics for pens and enclosures, paper for (note-)books, leather for coats, silicon for CPUs. Problem is, the tried and tested sometimes isn't the least costly, especially in the long term and in the presence of waste. Sometimes, after looking at some flexible code pulling in selected functionality from 7-8 external libraries (again selected out of many), I ask myself why normal materials can't be made that way. If mixing five colors (being the vertices of a regular pentagon inscribed in the color wheel) can lead to a harmonious result, why can't mixing five of the proper materials produce a new one with desirable properties? How does the material wheel look like and why aren't there 16 million options?
- While reading one of the many reports on solar the other day, an association about a fully solar-enabled car striked me. Then I quickly forgot about it, sinking into the words that followed. But I imagined a car whose surface is made of a receptive material that directly stores energy in the car battery. Likely nothing new, but that would further reduce the reliance/dependence on charging stations. If someone forgot their car parked in the sun, at least it won't be only hot, but also charged. (Also saw a video of a Bugatti car with body made of Lego pieces.) Can a car be made to harvest energy from a hot, sun-lit road over which it naturally moves? Is there a way to have conducting roads which are safe for living things, but charging for cars, with the option to be "turned on" once, from a distance? Not sure, not sure.
- A quick idea on ad efficiency bit.ly/2NYuXpz
- Wondered whether there is a formula by which one can estimate the near-optimal distance between two streetlights, so that their illuminatied areas do not overlap, given their height and luminous flux. Retrofittings probably influence this distance as well.
- "This open data initiative was axed..." Makes me want to cover myself behind a stable wall and periodically look whether this "presentation" has ended.
- Per capita CO2 emissions (in tons) by authority in Plymouth, UK (2005-2014) bit.ly/2OtVQhU. Not sure what caused the vertical spikes in this case. An overall trend towards a slight decrease in the emissions can be observed (notice that this is still a log scale). London had the most emissions, but gradually worked towards decreasing them. As you can see, other authorities with high per capita emissions (avoided grand total emissions due to their lower descriptiveness) were North Lincolnshire, Redcar and Cleveland and Rutland. (Having no idea where they are.)
- Adelaide (Australia) has many London plane, Common hackberry and Desert ash trees, while Bristol (United Kingdom) has many Sycamore, European lime and Common ash trees. London planes take the 4th place (2717).
- "Focus only on what you can immediately influence through your work" is a phrase that would also fit the goal of a banker (or a CEO) quite well. "Deal only with your matter and don't disturb me while collecting my billions". Unfair enough.
- Library visits by year and branch in York, UK (2011-2018) bit.ly/2OsmK9L (Source: data.yorkopendata.org, City of York Council, "Performance Indicators : Art and Culture", bit.ly/2OBE38M). Some gaps are present when data was not available. "York Explore" has registered a lot more visitors than other branches.
- Monthly NO2 values at different locations in York, UK bit.ly/2Ox3FTW. This one looks a bit scary. According to the data provided by York City Council ("Readings - NO2", bit.ly/2xiIY7C), ppb differs from miicrogram per cubic meter. Not sure whether there is a formula to convert between the two.
- Libraries in Pasadena, California bit.ly/2xdqF3V (through this city's open data portal). Hopefully accurate.
- Total installed solar capacity in some countries in 2017 bit.ly/2D2Z3Uo
- "Industrial farming a cause of plummeting bird populations" on.natgeo.com/2D3rD81
- Birds waiting for bikes bit.ly/2D2TF3w. Retrieved from the Philadelphia Public Art API bit.ly/2D2U71I, which has so much great content that it can fully overwhelm even a programmer like me. Just take a look of the content theme categories bit.ly/2D1nscQ.
- In the "Where we ride" report by the League of American Bicyclists you can see the cities with the most bicyclists in 2017 bit.ly/2xkaTEg. Davis (CA), Santa Cruz (CA) and Boulder (CO) are the only three having more than 10% of the commuters riding bikes.
- First time seeing such a way for bicycles and cars to switch lanes before a crossroad bit.ly/2D2LzrE
- Libraries in Windsor, Ontario, Canada bit.ly/2D5lBnD. I doubt you could bring any sandwiches inside.
- Twenty of the most common descriptions from restaurant inspections in Alameda County bit.ly/2DfrgaT (Source: data.acgov.org, Alameda County Environmental Health, bit.ly/2D1YAC3). Unfortunately, some of the texts have been cut in the original data as well, but the rest of the details hint that the majority of the inspections had positive results. But it is still good to see what inspectors tend to look at, especially when the majority of homes have a kitchen that needs to be properly maintained. "Birds inside" even added an element of fun to my life this morning.
- Historic energy consumption by county in California (1990-2016) bit.ly/2D1hZD9 (Source: California Energy Commission, "Energy consumption by county", bit.ly/2Dbqmw2)
- Expecting melatonin and body temperature to reach their maximums soon bit.ly/2D4ivQD
- I agree with the statement that people buy with their eyes first; aesthetics is perhaps where the work here appears to be lacking. I fear that I don't have an easy fix for this as everytime I focus exclusively on it, my consciousness interferes asking about the point of that, pushing me to either try solving a problem or create a short narrative to engage the mind instead (or in addition). Do you have an advice how to deal with that?
- With mattresses you have to be slightly more careful than with pans bit.ly/2xeNLqK, judging from the area you get per unit price (from a brochure). The double spacing could even support you if you have the tendency to jump like a fish at night.
- Capacity per unit area (kg/m2) for some Schindler elevators bit.ly/2CYecq5
- The winner of the Berlin marathon (Eliud Kipchoge) ran slightly over 2 hours at an average speed of 20.81km/h. This could probably qualify as a "bike speed" as well. Equally impressive to the news of the 102-year old woman also winning a running competition for elderly people. Hints that many things are possible if our thinking doesn't constrain us to believe in some hard limits.
- Decided to codify and visualize the knowledge shared in an article on group communication bit.ly/2D1YwSF, where the recommendation was to have 4 people on a team and no individuals participating in less than 50% of the communication channels. I agree, yet my chart paints a less definitive picture bit.ly/2D0N4Xt.
- Your work? Excitatory or inhibitory?
- Traffic accidents in Leeds for 2017 bit.ly/2xaz8EU
- Parks in the state of Oklahoma, USA bit.ly/2D7FJpg. Many seems to be concentrated in the north-east.
- Innovation can easily get to your purse if you have no awareness how it pushes you in almost invisible ways. Consider the nylon bags at the grocery store. You heard that they are not environmentally friendly and should be replaced with paper bags if possible. So you forget about nylon and buy a paper bag, trying to put your goods inside carefully so as not to tear it. But at the end you dislike its durability and realize that paper is made of trees. So you look to the more expensive cotton bags and think that cotton is farmed rather than cut. So you buy yourself a cotton bag to reflect your new consciousness and convince yourself that this is your final decision promoting you to an "eco-friendly" person. After all, even clothes are made of cotton, which seems to reinforce this decision. Now comes an expert and tells you that in the production of cotton bags too much water has been used—also not sustainable. The new recommendation? A plastic bag made from two recycled plastic bottles having the best durability, but also the highest price. Would you buy that one too, please? Before you know it, you silently purchased all products in this innovation path, contributing to the corporate profits by convincing yourself that you need to "belong" to the category of people who save the Earth. Which at the end worked against you. Sometimes, the same approach is followed to encourage people to spend thousands of dollars, not just cents. Consider the iPhone series for example. Did you upgrade everytime a new model appeared? If so, you probably bought ten phones, but always used only one, wasting a whole lot of money to "comply" to this innovation path. And your "lifetime value" is probably still not exhausted, especially with increasing innovation speed and frequency of product announcements. Might feel like a rat's race just to stay on track. Peer/partner pressure seem to be common reasons how we seek to justify our purchases, when we dislike looking bad in the eyes of others.
- "Debt has tanked more farms than drought, flooding and pestillence combined" - an excerpt from a recent book on farming. I don't necessarily think that the unpredictability of nature is completely disconnected from this debt—perhaps it's a contributing factor. Self-sustainability seems so often out of reach. But zero-energy buildings have shown that eventually the concept of zero-food people too might be inevitable, with increases in the population and the depletion of productive soil.
- Glanced through the "Wind Technologies Market Report 2017" by the US Deparment of Energy to discover a table of the cumulative wind capacities by country bit.ly/2xdoTQ5. Learned that installing turbines with lower specific power (= amount of total energy generation / swept rotor area of the blades) can not only allow building projects at lower quality wind sites, but their generated output can be even higher than of turbines with higher specific power at better sites. The increase in rotor diameters effectively reduces the specific power; in 2017 the average reached 113m by an average hub height of 86m. Existing projects can reuse old hubs while upgrading old, small rotors with bigger ones. While turbine prices have fallen to $750-950/kW in 2017, the cost to integrate wind energy into the grid was said to be additional $5-20/MWh.
- Particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) levels in Sofia, Bulgaria (20.01.2016 - 19.06.2018) bit.ly/2x9Q9ze
- It frequently appeared to me that the traffic lights are too bright, maybe even annoyingly so. It wasn't until reading a paper that I understood that they were designed to accomodate for the average driver, assuming deteriorated sight and suboptimal reaction times. In such cases, bright lights could potentially help to save people lives. Designing the interface for the most common user reminds me of the beautiful work of Jakob Nielsen. No longer selfish in front of the lights.
- When I read about minimizing the walkpaths in public buildings in an attempt to improve service, I remember the length of some walkways I had to move on. They were so long that by the time I went ≈65% of the total distance (fast walking), it was already red and cars were starting to show against me, so I had to run quickly until the end. Extremely long, no intermediate pavements to keep safe from cars and practically open to be hit by cars coming from/going to three different directions (the walkway is below an "U"). Plenty of opportunity for incidents just by design. Cannot even imagine what happens with older people who can't walk fast—they probably remain slightly before the 50% and wonder in which direction to go first to protect themselves from being hit.
- A reportage showed how someone in Berlin was looking for a roommate and "90" candidates appeared. I only saw a long line, but couldn't count so fast. Finding a room there seems such a severe problem that without a well-supporting salary one would quickly have to live on the street. Possibly a problem for local businesses looking to attract international talent, since new people don't like the risk of having sky-high relocation costs they won't be able to cover. Another man with a small boy sticked ads on pillars in the hope that someone offering a room would call. One woman did. Price point: 900 euro/month.
- Publishing a scientific paper every five days on average is a quite impressive practice. Must have contributed to my diminishing interest to explore ones with seemingly interesting topics, containing results mostly irrelevant to my work. The day the good papers will be hard to come by?
- Which car would you prefer: one with a 60l tank that uses 7l/100km or one with a 45l tank that uses 5.5l/100km (on average)? If you looked at the ratios, the first car would have ≈4.7% more longevity. The question is whether this matters if it has to carry 33.3% more fuel to realize this advantage.
- Average airline passenger miles per person and nationality (2017) bit.ly/2NJJW6o. The bar length is computed by dividing the total passenger miles (number on the left) by the total population for these countries (2016) as seen on Wikipedia. Relatively seen, people in UK seem to travel a lot.
- Three block rotation bit.ly/2NChvYf
- Always wondered why flights to the same destination by different carriers aren't batched and operated at the same time. Came to the website of the London's Heathrow Airport for the first time and this is exactly what I saw under departure times.
- Historic number of visitors, beer price and beer consumption at Oktoberfest bit.ly/2MrkhdS. Strange that the increasing beer prices haven't caused lack of interest. According to this data, the beer consumption even increased, closely following the price curve. The official prices for 2018 will be once again higher bit.ly/2NFJW7l. Unfortunately, being around alcohol and its consumers has never been of any interest to me.
- Number of top universities and median university rank by country having more than ten bit.ly/2NGcEoJ. Didn't expect to see Netherlands rank so high. Fewer universities with higher ranks says something about quality and efficiency. Never had the chance to visit this country or experience what it is to study at one of these top places.
- Median electricity usage (in KWh) by building in Leeds (07.01.2015 - 11.12.2016) bit.ly/2Mq5tfz. Many schools and two libraries appear in the upper half of the list.
- Projected carbon sequestration at four woodlands (England, Scottland, Wales, Northern Ireland) bit.ly/2NEK7zT. First time seeing anything like this. The effort to assign a quantity to all these projects must have been non-trivial. Surprised that the woodlands in Scottland span a much wider area than those in Wales, but are expected to extract almost 50% less CO2/hectar. Wondering whether this can be due to the type of the trees, their age, condition, density or something else.
- "Come back after ten minutes." I often feel strange after hearing this. Someone is asking me to move aimlessly around slightly longer than I feel comfortable and slightly shorter than to be able to do something else and return. Arriving at the same location twice is a case for optimization. But the second appearance could be for something small—be it short communication, information, blood test results, exam results or something else. All of these can be checked in a location-independent way, only if the right organization was into place. It is sufficient to assign a unique ID to each individual and allow database lookups for information availability. Much more convenient than wasting everyone's time.
- There are 60 pharmacies (Apotheken) in Graz, Austria bit.ly/2MkMSBO (Source: Stadt Graz - data.graz.gv.at, bit.ly/2NAj74E)
- Sometimes positive impact could be about something small and simple as making people see themselves differently, think about the world in a new light, energize and inspire those around them or see themselves as locomotives rather than passengers. Awakening the dream-doers within. Fostering the sense of collective awareness, positivity and mutual "take foot-throw high" support. Causing more eyes to spark and more hearts to beat faster. Nature gave us two roots and two branches (raise your hands) and taught us that it is up to us to grow in all possible directions. Directions that stimulate each other through the resources they separately acquire and a governing decision how to spread them effectively so as to accelerate further growth. A plant having insufficient number of branches and leaves grows much slower than one which can catch up light through many leaves on position-diversified branches. It's of very little use to pretend being a single branch. In fact, one of the saddest things to see is probably a low branching factor. Thankfully, this is solvable (and you can do it too!): see what's available, think what's potentially missing and bring new nutrients/materials to excite this single branch and make it want to run! Periodically check and be checked.
- As a child, I remember capturing a photo and then few hours later reading that software is even inside digital cameras. Really? I just pressed buttons here and there and looked at a tiny screen, but had no idea that this is called "software". How did this "invisible" thing sneak unnoticed? How did it integrate itself (as something living) into this plastic unit? Can I "rework" it fully? Myriad of questions.
- You rarely pay only for the separate flowers, but also for the aesthetics of the whole arrangement. Whether you understand software as a complex structure of interconnected modules or see it more as separate, unrelated units that can be added or removed as needed (without much thought) may help to determine whether you can fully appreciate its value or not.
- While the price of good software or a good website is unknown in advance, since it depends on the unique requirements of the client, the value that both deliver can rarely be denied. Businesses which don't work directly with the specialists capable of doing that work for them, but rely on generic work that is cheap and widely accessible, will quickly find themselves irrelevant relative to their competition.
- If you needed six months to study a new framework that will be popular for three, the next time expect to have even less time.
- Ran a quick comparison between some LG OLED and LED TVs bit.ly/2NzEMKk. The goal was to check (as far as it is possible from often misleading specifications) whether OLED as a technology brings an improvement in energy consumption over LED. As you can see from this limited sample of devices, OLED seems to help reduce the overall weight of the TVs. However, some LED models in the LG portfolio are still more refined in their energy consumption than newer OLED devices. Eventually this gap may close with further advancements.
- Saw an article with a photo of a cyclist carrying long "noodles" attached at the back of the bike (in Toronto). The reason looked self-explanatory—sending the message "keep that much distance" to the drivers approaching from behind. The article gave a hint about some incidents with cyclists in the past. This led me to check the National Collision Database, which contains an enormous amount of content. But it quickly overwhelmed my machine, converting any attempt to learn from it into wasted time. The data was full of abbreviations and only the data dictionary was sufficient to keep me busy for at least half an hour. It would have been nice if we could group by "P_USER", having value of 4 (cyclist) (if I understood correctly, "V_TYPE" equal to 17 relates to a bike initiating a collision, whereas I was interested only in cyclists that were hit) and then grouping by "P_ISEV" and counting how many values of this variable are 1 (no injury), 2 (injury) or 3 (fatality). Could have given at least a very basic understanding about this unconventional behavior on the streets. Update: Found a way. Since the start of 1999 (for a 19-year period) there were 9278 cases with no injury, 125366 injuries and 1003 fatalities. Be aware that these numbers are at country level and not just for Toronto. Concrete locations were not available.
- Payments which aren't lead to lacking contributions.
- Can users turn off functionality they don't need and if so how easy is this to do? Is the corresponding functionality code loaded (but not invoked) or fully discarded?
- Yesterday, going through country profile reports, wondered what percentage of the countries exporting high amount of gold also export high amount of alcohol or tobacco and why this was the case. Clueless, but observant.
- Thinking that only web designers have to deal with minimizing the round trip time may be a slightly limiting view. The light that enters the body of a refractor also has to arrive at the other side with the minimum back and forth between the lenses. According to a paper, minimum round trip time seems to be important in that context too.
- Whose responsibility is it? Of the TV to reduce the volume itself once it notices that you are accepting a phone call; of the voice recognition system awaiting the proper voice command from you while your words are channeled elsewhere; of the mobile phone to instruct the TV to get silent or your own—to find the remote control and push the right button as quickly as possible? With software we also ask the first question often.
- Inserted a dynamic variable into a strangely looking piece of code: print([((i + 3) & ~3) for i in range(12)]). Starts from zero and immediately increments by 4, "remembering" the last number for 4 iterations before incrementing once again. Interesting.
- Mini effect: animated letter spacing bit.ly/2CEhNt4
- If someone can get 50 thousand views of their bad code and only a small fraction of the viewers decide to adopt it inside their own projects without any questioning or alteration, very soon everyone will be able to call themselves "expert". The fast multiplication of bad code gradually pushes the good one out of view (what many people hope for as long as their code is seen). Then you hear: "This is how it's done here".
- Is the user able to resume the last action they were not able to finish or do they have to repeat the entire sequence?
- Curious what kind of conditions can affect a sensor reading, how long the max delay time can be and whether this could be life-threatening in some situations.
- Idea: How big is the minimum file length (in terms of characters) using names (for variables & functions) whose intention would be easiest to grasp by a newcomer on the team?
- The idea of updating a vector of coordinates directly with another vector leads to much cleaner code than using three lines to touch the coordinates separately.
- The things that appear most scary often seem to work at a nanolevel. Invisible and very hard to do something about them. The dust in the air we breathe, the mucus on the keyboard we touch, the infectious microparticles set in flight after the running water collides with excrements and so on. Talk about chemicals, bacteria, interactive 3D models of amino acids or complex graphs of protein-protein interactions, apoptosis, melting telomeres or something else and you'll have me. The beauty is, as scared as I could be, this would also provoke interest in me. Someone said that not knowing what you don't know can really hurt you, but this is not the only reason. It could hurt many other people as well. My small programming practice has taught me that if we cannot understand the things at the smallest level, we cannot expect to understand the reasons for the inefficiencies at large scale. There is a relatively high probability that an inefficient program is already doing something inefficient at the level of a single iteration. Or it tries to do much more than needed. Do you apply the microscopic view on all of your work (possibly using a "camera" for real-time on-monitor projections of micro-events)?
- Not traveling much also means that you value your time and make no energy-wasting movements for the wrong reasons. A life on (an aimless) go has never been enjoyable or meaningful to me. Even the most magnificent location will have to undergo the "What will I do there?" test, most likely failing to provide what I am looking for. (If you'd like to understand what this is, look much further than the first bit.) Neither pleasures nor experiences unrelated to important work ever mattered to me. Absolutely here for something more than that.
- It is not too hard to track the number of visitors of a park at the main entrance. Problem is that by this (cheaper) approach it is harder to understand which of the many attractions people find more appealing or willing to visit again. You could also walk around and make yourself a picture of the situation ("The Toyota way"), trying to gauge this, but it means that your time cannot be spent doing something else. It also becomes harder to gain accurate, actionable insight at attraction level. And if you put your attractions near the fence, making them visible to everyone, having no infrastructure that organizes the park into separate themes, then it is not surprising that most people will look from the outside and dissuade themselves about paying the full ticket price. If what they could see inside is the same, only more closely, then the whole composition had planning issues. Can you think of a commercial web application whose code was available to everyone to see?
- You could probably create a beautiful SVG bird combining many shapes and shades, but is this the most efficient way to do it? Manual vertex pushing can be slow and nerve-exhausting. Much easier is to push the vertices in a more direct way inside a graphic editor. Choosing the best tool for the job has to be priority unless experimentation and learning are seen as more important.
- Tried some milled flax seed, sunflower seed and sesame mixed with 2 teaspoons of honey until dense. Seems energizing. Another option would be to make forms and put them in the camera for a while.
- Not having a phone means that you are not disturbed at the wrong time of the day by the wrong person/advertiser, don't capture photos/selfies just because you can, don't swipe endlessly, don't have "keyboard issues", don't use navigation at an unknown place (but your mouth to ask questions), don't care constantly about battery levels and "base" bills every month, don't read QR codes to log in etc. Makes me feel more human and knowing that whatever happens, my presence/availability can never be assumed as something granted. And if someone wants to keep contact with me, they have to show it in some memorable way. If not, they are free to substitute me with their Facebook friends.
- Curious about Orbit nutrition facts, but on the site I see something blurred (once I spin the blister) and zeros almost everywhere. Well, these widespread chewing gums available at the exits of most supermarkets must contain something after all.
- Do you believe that if you knew the characteristics of all creatures in a game, machine learning could help you find out more efficient ones to play with? Not a player myself, but data is everywhere.
- If you see a variable monster_type and your brain automatically fills the gap, it's probably time to wish someone a great start in the new week!
- The website has to representative of your company. And if this doesn't work for some reason, you can still comfort yourself with some representative "pannekaker" bit.ly/2Nxwx16
- Did you know which countries were the biggest importers and exporters of clothing in 2017? bit.ly/2O2SC4R
- Smart litter bins provide actionable data when they need to be emptied bit.ly/2O35s2O. No more overflowing/creeping garbage on the streets.
- Retail sales index Ireland (2005-2016) bit.ly/2O8N8Fu
- "Higher salaries increase the inflation". Strange what lower salaries do. Or long-term stagnant salaries gradually eaten by inflation. Are you still finding workers?
- Number of passengers at the Glasgow airport (2007-2014) bit.ly/2M8b769 (Source: Glasgow Open Data, bit.ly/2O0mjDr). Since 2011, the number of passengers has started to increase, although at a slower pace than the previous decline. Complete monthly data since 2015 was not available.
- Went on a walk through Italy to visit as many cities as possible while paying attention to exhaust the least amount of energy bit.ly/2McHXmt. Started early at Modica and arrived at Sanremo in the late computational hours.
- Nature of the 311 service requests in Philadelphia bit.ly/2NqyHjb. An impressive number of 1.357 million requests (or 60.93% of all) were information-related. Perhaps a well thought out information campaign could somewhat alleviate the burden on the service.
- Locations with seized opioids by county and opioid type in Pennsylvania bit.ly/2M9Z0FN. Due to my bad geography, initially I thought that the big dot could refer to Philadelphia. Thanks to your effort and proper labeling, revealing some addiitional context prevented me from making wrong claims.
- This time didn't even attempt to plot—no resources for that. Among the top 10 most expensive building permits in Chicago (Source: Chicago Data Portal, bit.ly/2NtwZ0v) out of a total of 545763 with an estimated total cost of ≈119.785 billion dollar and a median of 3600 dollar, most were labeled either "renovation/alteration" or "new construction". The first place takes a permit for electric wiring with estimated cost containing only 9s (close to 1e10). The centroid of all projects coincides with the "UIC College of Medicine" (if you wish, type the values 41.870460 and -87.672954 in Nominatim bit.ly/2DA6NNF to see this).
- Top100 global companies by market capitalization bit.ly/2M9P9Qh. If among them, we obtain the sum of all capitalizations per branch for 2018, we see bit.ly/2NYvynR that operating in the technology sector seems to create a lot of value.
- NO2 and PM10 sensor measurements at six locations with known geocoordinates in Camden, UK (01.03.2017-12.08.2018) bit.ly/2CwUKR1 (Source: data.gov.uk, "Air Quality Monitoring Sensor", bit.ly/2Cy1n5C). I will leave the interpretation to you.
- 17 * x = 16 * x + x = (x << 4) + x. By doing nothing, the right has become faster than the left. Bit material.
- When in such a small snippet of code bit.ly/2oNN17p two title and one alt attribute repeat the same long content, how could you expect your page to be less than 5MB after inclusion of all stories? The SEO chains are heavy.
- The cost of disrespect is similar to the cost of a dangling pointer, which is valid for the lifetime of a program, whereas this is valid for the lifetime of a client. That said, it is extremely important to me that I don't serve the same bad client twice.
- Walney Extension Wind Park was finished today bit.ly/2Cy6Fhg ↗ (659MW)
- Most parkings in Singapore seem to be working day and night bit.ly/C8RWpi (yet none of them are free)
- After learning about the merger between Kaufhof and Karstadt (see bit.ly/2oMCUQq) and that this is expected to lead to a loss of ≈5000 jobs in Germany, I decided to find the locations of their branches and see whether they overlap significantly. My logic was that close locations may see a greater level of job integration, disproportionally affecting some workers there. According to this diagram bit.ly/2Cp3999, there are at least four clusters with such characteristic. The final decision is unlikely to consider only geolocation, but also branch profitability, worker productivity and many other factors.
- Noticed that latest Chrome has slightly changed the tabs and now makes it more visible when the address bar is focused. This is all good, but doesn't fully solve some minor problems. For instance, animating growing and shrinking tabs is still slow on slow machines and the combined experience matters much more than the one with a single tab. It is slow to open a link in a new tab, where some internal algorithm causes Chrome to put it after the current one instead of at the end of the entire tab sequence. This way most tabs are pushed to the right once on open and then to the left on close, which is slow. (In contrast, operating on a tab at the end of the list is much faster—only one has to be animated.) We have discussed already the cost of reflow on websites, but still, for some reason, we allow it to happen with such a heavily used concept like the tabs. As long as the number of tabs is unclear in advance and all have to be shown, there will always be a need to adjust the tab width (most likely with animation). If instead, the browser could set a sensible default in its settings (say 20-30 tabs) and bring a slider allowing the user to adjust this limit once they have exceeded it (and don't want to close another one), the width of a single tab can be static and known in advance. This then allows tabs to be animated on the smaller side (bottom-top on open and top-bottom on close) instead of on the longer side (left-right and right-left), enabling a "treat two like one" concept. This means that a "+" sign is located at the middle of a "frame-only" tab (of the same size & easily clickable) and once clicked is animated in direction towards the top, gradually revealing the new "real" tab at its bottom and filling the empty frame. Once reaching the top, the "+" sign reappears again at the bottom in a new "frame-only" tab that has grown at the same time with the real tab on the right of it. This concept came to me after remembering how asteroids reappeared at the other side of the screen in an "Astro" game. New tab and "frame-only" tab can be animated vertically and treated together, but only the "frame-only" tab is filled on open or emptied on close. The 20-30 tabs limit can also serve to reduce the size of the "working set" and thus overall memory usage by making the undesirable harder to achieve. This can lead to a snappier interface with the browser offering a helping hand rather than letting users lose track of how they are currently utilizing the machine resources as a result of their tab interactions. With fewer tabs, the cost of switching from one to another may become less than 1.5s on a slow machine. Perhaps not a concept to adopt enthusiastically, but at least one that it shareable.
- Streets in Chapel Hill, North Carolina bit.ly/2wPeEAO. Some are missing, mainly to save on computation time.
- Diagram showing the percent of change in vehicle fuel economy, horsepower and weight for new cars bit.ly/2oKjNGA. After 2005 fuel economy has started to improve significantly, but reductions in weight became less common. If I read this correct.
- Came to the "ZEW Monitoring Report Wirtschaft Digital 2018" and saw an interesting diagram showing the results of a survey of the factors inhibiting digitalization (contains German). Then made small additions (in English) to each point, which I thought were appropriate bit.ly/2wLUxE7
- If you make your "In den Warenkorb" button larger than the photo of the product on sale bit.ly/2CmiVRX, what message does this send to potential clients? That you are more interested to close the sale rather than inform about the value of your product. Your needs are put before theirs. A good designer can "catch" such problems before they occur and minimize the potential harm on the business. Indeed, an invisible form of work, sometimes having very visible results.
- On the cost of a biscuit in cylindrical pack bit.ly/2wK7UVy. Forgot to mention that if you finished one in five bites on average, the cost of a single bite would come at 0.0234. If you forget about this, the middle cocoa layer will quickly tempt you into overspending.
- Finished reading an article about Altered: water nozzles, which have multiple modes allowing flow between 0.2 and 4l/min. They say that conventional taps can deliver up to 10-12l/min (where most of the water barely touches the surface and ends down the drain), where we rarely need more than 4l/min. The mist mode (0.2l/min) distributes tiny drops over a bigger surface, which may be great for hands and plates. Theoretically, this means that by choosing the most conservative setting (4l/min), to fill a container, for instance, someone can be up to 3 times more efficient in their water usage. And by washing hands using mist mode, that number grows to 12/0.2 = 60 times. In my opinion, quite an improvement, considering comfort, cost-efficiency and environmental friendliness. That the product is in a big market and the business has a lot of potential to scale certainly helps even more.
- "Your web app is bloated" bit.ly/2wIu4HO ↗. I dislike the last word, but agree with the idea in general. Web sites are becoming more and more memory-hungry as if the technological advancements fully justify this. Cannot test whether the statements are true (I am an unhappy Firefox user). Unsure whether this test was made multiple times, since Google Inbox with 215MB usage looks somewhat suspicious to me. But at least on latest Chrome, a Twitter feed of a sample user takes slightly more than 68576K, while this page (also a feed) takes 34836K.
- Unemployment rate as percentage of the state population (given as percentage of the total population) in USA for select years between 2003 and 2015 bit.ly/2Cn0JrE. The idea here was to look for high spreads to estimate which states have the highest absolute number of employed people. Notice that the y-scales are not consistent as I had to rerun the script multiple times to be able to output something more visible. The local economies in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania quickly made an impression (at least in these years). More recent data could paint another picture. The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Metro Nashville & Davidson County traffic crashes (2018) bit.ly/2CisLnR. Many crashes were frontal, by good weather and good visibility. Drive carefully.
- Ratio between home value and median rent in various census tracts in Indiana (2009-2016) bit.ly/2Cu2jrR (uses data by IU Business Research Center(IBRC)). Additionally, you can see the names of the census tracts with ratio below 100 bit.ly/2oFyn1S. There was also information about household income levels which could have been used for a home value to income ratio, but that would be prohibitively slow here. One day, with a new, modern hardware, this might be possible.
- Not understanding Danish, I went to the translator to inform me what people have read most often recently at the library in Aarhus bit.ly/2CePFfU (Data: Aarhus Kommune, "Reserveringer ved Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker", bit.ly/2ChGtYm). Not sure why some numbers disappear in Google's translator. Anyway. It seems that more people seek information about the phenomenon called "pseudo work". "How we got busy doing nothing" reminds me of Robin Sharma's "busy being busy", yet not in the sense of an infinite recursion.
- Average number of nights per tourist in Australia (June 2007 - March 2017) bit.ly/2CfLrEU. The data comes from the international visitor survey of the South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC).
- Can you remember how many times you had to type month names in your apps and how many typos you've made? bit.ly/2LVHbKn
- Some NFL results bit.ly/2PAwFdT. Greens for the winning team, reds for the losing one. Beware that results symmetric with respect to the diagonal aren't equal. For instance, consider Miami Dolfins and New York Jets to understand why. (Good that a matrix view enables us to see this easily). Yet, the fact that most fields stay empty tells us that this is not an optimal representation for the data. We are wasting a lot of screen space and use inconvenient scrollbars here.
- Bike stations with more than 1200 bike rentals in at least one month between April 2015 and July 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland bit.ly/2PzjXvY
- How to "cancel" a log base with the log of the base (in three lines of code) bit.ly/2PshoLU
- Stacked bar chart: "Energy usage per capita in Vienna (1988 - 2014)" bit.ly/2PwQ8Md. Usage for agriculture was very low (see the almost invisible segment at the top of each bar). Yesterday, I saw a publication which claimed that transport was the biggest energy user in Ireland. This diagram shows that the same seems to be valid for Austria's capital too (although more data for the period after 2014 could have helped to confirm this).
- Whenever "their lack of integration" is mixed with expectations about unconditional slavery, something speaks very wrong at an ethical level. Constantly projecting the shiny picture of the need for integration (to physical/mental death) as something good is nothing more than a pure escape from responsibility. Integrate with your skin-takers, so to speak. Great advice, but one having no place in future Europe.
- Good balance. If a normal user takes N continuous photos with their digital camera, does their patience diasppear first (camera speed), does the device easily slip off their hands (ergonomy), do they have to navigate inside deeply nested menus (usability), does the battery die first or the memory card fill up first? A thoughtful designer would have engineered the product for maximum utility during service time, paying attention that the various potentials for failure converge at approximately the same time point. Without testing for that balance, the product may have very good individual strengths, but be useful only for a short time.
- If you knew a building permission cost and the number of apartments in this building, the area of the apartment of interest to you, all types of materials used to build it, their approximate amounts and current market prices, the man-hours required and the cost for employee salaries, is it possible to estimate the construction cost of a single apartment and plot it relative to the asking price? Fantasizing, once again.
- The European Environmental Agency (EEA) has published a diagram showing emissions in terms of grams of CO2 per passenger kilometer for different vehicle types bit.ly/2oy9R2R ↗
- Didn't know about a special snake with round teeth that is able to take snails out of their shells. Seems like an evolutionary adaptation to the requirements. No more shells in the digestive system.
- "To view this content, please install Microsoft Silverlight." If it's content, it must be accessible by default.
- BER ratings for the energy performance of buildings as defined by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) bit.ly/2ovhc32 (Source: bit.ly/2ouNTO5)
- Libraries with most visitors by branch in Chicago (2011 - 2018) bit.ly/2PnxpCW (Source: Chicago data portal, bit.ly/2PuvGvH). On a log scale. Here you can see the 61 most visited libraries (the 18 least visited were excluded for clarity). The branches "Harold Washington Library Center", "Sulzer Regional", "Edgewater" and "Rogers Park" came more easily into view. Their median visitors for the period are 1122038, 38121, 16561 and 15240 accordingly. This shows that the differences are actually quite big. 2018 is still in progress, so the data there is incomplete.
- Highly impressed by the initiative to open the doors of 800 buildings for visitors to see bit.ly/2otmegw ↗. Let's hope that more cities will take a note of this.
- Another demo, this time about finding profitable clients bit.ly/2PvY0xR
- Finding the median of all 1061 images having dimensions 640x480pixels in the COCO 5k dataset took ≈15min 20sec on my slow machine, using 49.6% of the available RAM. You can see both the median of five selected images bit.ly/2orA96N and the median of all 1061 bit.ly/2PpBSEW. Currently the sun is shining on my screen, so it is hard to distinguish whether there are different grey levels. But at least moving the color picker in GIMP informs that it is an illusion that the color seems uniform. Also interesting is how easy it aappears on the eyes.
- Good to see more and more fire departments publishing their raw data. The latest example is the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) (bit.ly/2Pt9qlV, 487.4MB size). We can compute how long it took from the incident creation time to the actual on scene time (where both times were available). For Los Angeles as a whole the median of this "response time" comes exactly at 6 mins and 30 sec. According to the data, the best single response was only after 2 mins and 20 sec. Very often, among the units in a district which responded more than 5 times (manual constraint to somewhat minimize the effect of outliers), we see that unit types indicated as "Engine" or "Truck" have shorter response times than unit types indicated as "Rescue Ambulance" (independent whether ALS, BLS, Reserve or whether the starting indication is RA6 or RA8). Perhaps there is a possible explanation for this. Setting this constraint, the minimum and maximum response times vary between 4 min 49 sec - 4 min 54 sec (for three "engines") and 17 min 49 sec - 19 min 33 sec (for eight ambulances in various districts). A potentially useful action could be to intensify kowledge transfer between the units in districts 14, 9, 11 or 112 with the units in districts 108, 109, 111, 122 and 125, since their median response times can vary up to 2.03 times. Hopefully to the benefit of everyone.
- "The online gig economy's 'race to the bottom'" bit.ly/2wsQn48 ↗ “Whoever offers the lowest price, gets the job.” Not surprised. Unfortunately, I don't use freelance sites, because I expect my payment to be significant to be able to accept you as a client. Most of the time this won't be the case, which will also eliminate further possibility to collaborate in the future. But at least you can try your luck elsewhere.
- Some IoT wireless technologies and their key performance indicators bit.ly/2NDSLM1
- Still mysterious to me why people start using their letters in a paper without feeling the need to explain them. We can do better.
- K-means clustering on the specifications of Lexus cars bit.ly/2wu5EBB (Based on a manually created dataset bit.ly/2MDuVTP obtained from their website). Used five components (implying sedan, SUV, coupe, hybrid and performance models) to see whether the clusters would agree with the subdivision shown on the site. (Only the LX 570 appears to form its own cluster, being far from the other SUV models.) Additionally, created an overview matrix bit.ly/2NycbBH and tried to determine which of the selected features are most important in the formation of the price. Curb weight, combined MPG estimate and 0-60mph acceleration time appear to be the top three. The first one seems intuitive: heavier cars likely use more material and/or components, which can be expected to raise their price. But here price changes seem to depend less on the car's horsepower. Sometimes hybrid models had no torque given, which means that they appear in blue, as if having the lowest value in the matrix. (In the dataset, a value of -1 indicates a missing value.) The diagram allows us to observe even minor differences like in the top track speed of RWD and AWD models (among other things). A paper which claimed that the drag coefficient must by multiplied by the car's frontal area and form a minimal overall result for improved aerodynamics inspired me to determine the five models that best fit this definition. Enjoy!
- Label infused with the colors of an image bit.ly/2Nwr47N. Not as beautiful as the inspiration itself bit.ly/2wroZn7
- This library also demonstrates the value of careful element positioning bit.ly/2ws17Q1 as part of great design. Positioning is what allows us to design with text only. Rich content made available with no sense of good positioning is often like a chunk of pasted, needless code.
- Total annual visits of Toronto Public Library branches (log scale, 2012-2017) bit.ly/2NzqypC. The Fairview branch enjoyed a nice increase in the number of visitors. It also has the second-largest parking area (114 spaces compared to Richview's 129) and good program attendance in more recent years. In terms of the size of its cardhoder base, it is third, only after North York Central Library and Toronto Reference Library. Almost all branches offered a large number of rooms to rent—a service which I haven't seen elsewhere developed to such extent (many libraries seem to have a deficit of rooms to store all the content).
- Fish flakes bit.ly/2MAZJoy. Uses SVG to naturally hide objects that appeared earlier.
- Bus stops and approximate routes in Savannah, Georgia (July 2017) bit.ly/2wqDKpY
- Air temperature and global radiation at two different weather stations in Zürich (August 2018) bit.ly/2NtRK99 (Source: "Messwerte der Wetterstationen der Wasserschutzpolizei Zürich", bit.ly/2MBRRD6). Interesting what happened at 26.08.2018. The first weather station registered a much lower air temperature than usual, while the second saw a much lower global radiation at that time. But I wouldn't say that the two are necessarily connected.
- Population changes in the districts of Basel, Switzerland (2007-2016) bit.ly/2MBaW8h. For some reason, Rosental's population has increased a lot in the more recent years (relatively seen).
- Homeless counts in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada bit.ly/2NqwaC9. Not sure how realistic it is to set the expected number of homeless people to be always 40% of the total, independent of whether they were sheltered or not and independent of the year.
- Used data provided by the Australian Government to look at the traffic counts at three selected locations in Melbourne bit.ly/2NpMPWM. According to it, west bound traffic at West Gate btw. Ramps at Western Link seems to peak around 16:00-17:00. West bound traffic at Monash Freeway btw. Huntingdale Road and Forster Road seems to peak around 06:00-07:00, while east bound traffic at Tullamarine Freeway btw. Ramps at Mount Alexander Road—an hour later. What surprised me a bit was that weekends/holidays appeared frequently in the top 20 busiest locations. Could this be a sign that the citizens of Melbourne are quite active during recreation time?
- Total water withdrawals by water-use category and state, 2015 (million gallons per day) bit.ly/2NrhEdA (Source: USGS). Thermoelectric power and irrigation used the most water (41% & 37% of the total). Some categories (like thermoelectric power, industrial and mining) are further subdivided into fresh and saline water usage. Use of water for irrigation was especially intensive in California, Idaho and Arkansas. Pennsylvania used slightly more water than New York for domestic needs. Indiana and Louisiana used the most fresh water for industrial needs, while Nevada used it in mining. Water usage of 322 billion gallons/day divided by a population of 325 million means that the average use per individual comes at 990.76gallons (or ≈3750l) each day. Not exactly a small footprint, although it is much lower than the 7346.91l/day reached in 1975 bit.ly/2MZv0Rh. What percentage of the total usage could be attributed to losses due to leakage or excessive watering (also in the absence of droughts) is another interesting question.
- Blue-red band around function bit.ly/2MUMTkd
- Saucepans bit.ly/2MS2bGx. The largest model seems to offer the best litres/price ratio. For 33% higher price you get almost 45% higher ratio. But with the products from other companies, this could be different.
- Comb bit.ly/2PagoMk. Single element, sharpened for smoother movements. Chaotic, thin, multi-element material waiting.
- How much music could there be in an icecream? bit.ly/2MSd4rL Creates false rumours on demand.
- Most of the polyhedra I have seen so far had two different face types at most, which led me to assume that having more could be especially hard to achieve. Imagine this surprise bit.ly/2LpimGs
- Someone used a mathematical model to estimate the operating costs of a 3D printer bit.ly/2LvtaTr
- Degrees of freedom bit.ly/2LrLDQM
- Do you have a cropping calendar? bit.ly/2LsqW7p
- A nice diagram about the annual average solar insolation in Texas bit.ly/2LrF4O0. Can you confirm that the solar radiation follows such interesting geographical distribution and that the difference is that big? Especially liked the added scale indicator.
- "Tree of life" bit.ly/2MOF3su ↗
- Traffic incidents in Calgary, Canada (2017) bit.ly/2MLVdmp
- Liked the hierarchies explaining soil degradation and possible strategies for restoring soil quality bit.ly/2MOl64V. Slightly branched, but not as much as the bifidobacterium family.
- And I wondered why this thing took the steam out of my tiny figure every time I tried to move it bit.ly/2MWMJZP
- Mean daily temperatures in five cities bit.ly/2wiJSkn (Source: World Meteorological Organization (WMO))
- When you see something strange floating at the top of the sea bit.ly/2MQboyS (buoy), do you find this boring and move on, or do you look to see what's hidden below the water level to find its purpose and potentially how it works to generate electricity from ocean waves? Software all too often also hides things from us, but most of the time we have to be familiar with them if we want to make good decisions. Blurb-blurb.
- If termites have started to dismantle your existing technology amzn.to/2P5IQz3, could this be a great time to seek some external help?
- Indicating available amenities at hotels bit.ly/2MJFa8F
- Teacher/non-teacher wage ratio in US states for selected years bit.ly/2MJe8hF. If I successfully convinced myself not to create this matrix, I would have missed the gradual "cooling" from left to right. 2012 illustrates this well: the wage ratio reached new lows, with teachers earning less and less compared to non-teachers. Haven't seen data for 2018, but it wouldn't surprise me if the status quo deepened its roots. No wonder why so many teachers are either missing or seeking to enter other professions (due to low wages, high stress, insufficient recognition...). Raises the question: Who will teach in the future?
- Computing Jacobian and Hessian bit.ly/2NheQPZ. If you notice a mistake, please, feel free to correct me. For some reason Numpy initialization didn't work here (cannot convert to float), so I fell back to using regular Python lists, which had no problem accepting symbolic math.
- Also made this small diagram depicting the water footprint for the production of selected foods bit.ly/2N9812X. Animal products (especially meats) seem to be particularly water-intensive (possibly not good for the environment). Finally my doubts got quantified.
- "What's the most energy-efficient crop source for ethanol?" bit.ly/2MOfnMg. I was trying to answer a similar question for myself out of curiosity after seeing some very limited data how many kilograms of different crops are needed to produce thousand litres of ethanol and the area of land that such crops would require. Taking in account both, the index that appeared in front of me, placed maize at the first place (0.0041), followed by sugar beet (0.0089), sugarcrane (0.0296), rapeseed (0.0411) and wheat (0.0510) (lower is better). This article also placed sugar beet and sugar crane high and wheat at the bottom, so there seems to be some agreement. But I still find strange the practice to convert food to fuel.
- Used a recent article in "Spiegel" to create some diagrams about the level of rents and purchase prices (€/m2) of condominiums in some city districts in Germany bit.ly/2NexrMS. Unless someone plans to stay in the same apartment for more than 10 years (120 months), renting seems to be the cheaper option, in all of these places. But the other day someone wanted to convince that in the long term "nothing beats ownership". Most people, who feel insecure about their job, probably prefer to have some more flexibility to move to a different location should the need arise.
- "He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." - Leonardo da Vinci
- Vincent van Gogh on raising ourselves above our art bit.ly/2OZzyo6. "Gauguin gives me courage to imagine and the things of the imagination do indeed take on more mysterious character." "The best paintings, like the best people, exhibit a certain imperfection as a confirmation of their distinctiveness and authenticity." "I would never do away with suffering; for it is often that which makes artists express themselves most vigorously." "Dont fear the storm, but fear the calm, treacherous, enchanted ground" (those unchallenged by risk and adventure become stagnant). He strived to achieve "genuine power of expression". "I go out at night to paint the stars" - from "The letters of Vincent van Gogh - A critical study"
- "Algorithmic investigations almost always involve observing behavior, often at a fine level of detail" and "Styles in music are basically complex systems of probability relationships" - from "Mind, body, world". The mentioning of linear regression in combination with notes came as a shock to me.
- Sources of carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin (in some foods) bit.ly/2MJC5Fz. Notes: Where a range of values was given for a particular food, the average has been used in the diagram. On the right many foods did not have values, but this does not necessarily mean that they do not contain zeaxanthin. The authors of the paper claimed that the leading cause of blindness in the world is vitamin A deficiency. I was surprised to learn that the body cannot synthesize carotenoids, but relies on our diet to obtain them. Towards the end, they recommended corn as a good source of lutein. After my previous analyses, you are probably not surprised to see parsley and basil here too.
- Good to see FlightStats keeping track of cancellations and delays per geographic region for a period of up to a week bit.ly/2wfAxc8
- Found some traffic hotspots in West Hollywood bit.ly/2BkSImt (Source: City of West Holywood Open Data, "Citywide Traffic Volumes", bit.ly/2nWgyeV) and then realized that the data is from the end of June 2017.
- ICT development index 2017 bit.ly/2MGzH26 ↗. You may want to read the original publication to see what the index consists of and how it is calculated. Or read the second publication that gives a rank about how much it costs to make 30 phone calls and send 100 SMS messages in various countries (here my country did especially bad).
- Does your city have a website, where all upcoming events are listed with their names and locations to stimulate broad participation and promote the creation of groups with common interests? Groups that then work together on innovative projects with uncertain outcome? Can such site exist for every city and be ad-free?
- It would have been interesting to know which chemical substances contribute to which colors in a gem of given type (agate, beryl, amethyst etc.). Tried to seek information about this, but probably looked at the wrong place. Yet, at the same time, it is questionable whether such generalization is possible. Especially after seeing how many soil types exist and learning about their natural tendency to mix over time. Somehow I suspect that gems of the same type too may not be alike in their composition if we attempted to attribute minor perceptual differences to different element expositions. Whether spectroscopy could give conclusive results about this will likely remain an unknown to me. But it is clear that after seeing an encyclopedia of the gems, one cannot easily forget how beautiful they can be. What characterizes this beauty then?
- About Mini cars bit.ly/2nRI0tT (fixing hyphenation was not the point here). Uses data from the Mini site, which has been transformed and stored in CSV format bit.ly/2BoMp11
- Physical relocation has rarely been an issue for me. In most cases what mattered more were company profile (whether the corporate goal matched my interests), internal culture (prevalent behaviors and depth of relationships), learning intensity (not purely assured in words), ability to do more meaningful work within an interdisciplinary team, good compensation (to mitigate relocation inconvenience & loss of connections, rent requirements, living costs, cost of learning materials). Never found a distant company that I felt was a good fit and correspondingly lost interest in relocation. Better to avoid the risks I dislike.
- To be fair, I assumed that speech recognition was something that became possible only in the more recent times, with the advances in machine learning. You can imagine my surprise after seeing this chip bit.ly/2BoCwAJ in a magazine issue from 1988. Remembered the quote that "Everything new is the well-forgotten old".
- Number of fatalities involving large aeroplane passenger and cargo operations worldwide, 1970-2017 bit.ly/2nKAYXY (Source: European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), "Annual Safety Report 2018"). Good to see that safety in air operations seems to be improving overall. Also saw some beautiful, colorful balloons and then the warning that a key risk area with them are the landings. Who would have thought that the beautiful could be dangerous?
- SNR and current consumption by different clock frequencies for the IM69D120 XENSIV MEMS microphone by Infineon bit.ly/2Bnvjk9
- Don't you think that it is better to discharge capacitors completely (if possible) before a system is considered in an off state? Shouldn't that be its natural, default attribute? Someone opening the case to attempt a repair could be in for an unpleasant surprise, which does not feel like a good design. If a machine shuts down, but leaves a backdoor for someone else to start it remotely, how good is that? Clean startup, clean shutdown, please.
- Came to an interesting comparison between complex and complicated bit.ly/2wcPdc0, but for some reason it doesn't fully resonate with me. I believe that complex is reducible too. So how would I differentiate between the two then? To me something is complicated when it achieves a goal indirectly, following one or more unnecessary steps along the way. A form of inefficiency/waste. Complex is something that consists of a broad variety of submodules, which have different responsibilites that combine together to create some unique functionality. Lots of communication/interaction between the modules may be involved with many pieces changing state in parallel. Most people cannot easily understand how such systems work. High complexity is not desirable, since it increases the likelihood of errors and system failure. To make systems more robust, we often attempt to reduce their complexity (the number of moving parts), while keeping only what is absolutely necessary (nothing complicated). Minimalism.
- You can also see the pharmacy locations in the capital of the USA bit.ly/2wcHbjm
- Street lights by type and wattage in Washington D.C. bit.ly/2waXFZm (Source: DC.gov, "Street lights", bit.ly/2webq9l). The green color dominates, which means that a large percentage of the 70256 streets lights must be of the high-pressure sodium type. Their total wattage sums to 16.8345TW, so that the average per light comes at 239.62W.
- "A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving and there is always the possibility of surprise" - Bill Burnett & Dave Evans in "Designing your life"
- An attempt to compare the cost of living in six cities bit.ly/2wbKqHM according to Numbeo (55 price points for each city). The reported data may not have been the most accurate, so be sceptical about the accuracy of the end result as well. Another minus is that the prices in Copenhagen and Oslo had to be converted to Euro, which has likely distorted the results further. To be fair, I expected Vienna to be much more expensive, but in the data it appears almost at the same level as Frankfurt (whereas Cologne appears to have a slight advantage over both).
- Wouldn't come to the idea to use the 0.3333 rational (with progressively shrinking font size from viewer to horizon) as if the sun was saying "zzzz" before sunset. Strange thinking, but at least it makes me smile.
- Hexagonal grid with images bit.ly/2MXjGBQ
- Rivers longer than 4500km bit.ly/2MWp0Wm
- Decided to learn more about meat consumption levels (1990-2018) bit.ly/2nJq4li (Source: OECD Data). Beef and poultry lead the ranks. 100-150g meat per person and day seems equivalent to each person killing a 1kg chicken approx. every week. Unclear only how fast we could raise one by ourselves if we had to follow good practices. Would this period be shorter than a week?
- Trees in Mississauga, Canada bit.ly/2nPlvpP. Realized that I already had this bit.ly/2oWkRXG, but the new perspective seems slightly less distorted. There is an empty space at the North, which must be the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
- The reason I don't want to know your name, age and nationality and also don't like to be asked about them is simple: discrimination. Many studies have proven that it is everywhere, even inside companies who claim they don't discriminate. Treating different employees differently is an entire business, which is a practice I cannot accept. I prefer to base my relationships on helpful service and professionalism (whatever it means) rather than on biases, assumptions or perceptions about who must have the upper hand. Its your own right to be willing to exert power, but then do not expect me to be willing to serve you.
- One problem with texts that were generated by means different from human thinking is that they can become prevalent on the web, if we are not careful. Imagine someone seeking a way to degrade people's thinking to a common level, so that noone could think about anything different, innovative or exceptional. What would they do? Litter the web with nonsense and misinformation. Perhaps one of the more immediate dangers about the future of the web. And it helps to stay alert about not losing the last known good state.
- "We need it for tomorrow" rarely works with me. You could have approached me a month in advance to get a feeling how working with me looks like, but you chose to avoid this and wait for the last moment, believing that necessity gives you the right to give orders to a stranger. Well, it doesn't. And I wouldn't bend under your influence.
- One of the things that I think has helped me to keep a good finished-to-failed ratio is the idea behind the quote "If you expect it to fail, don't start it" (or its variation "(Be sure that you can) Finish what you start"). Usually one of the first things I check about client projects which come from an unknown environment. If I feel at the boundary of hesitating, I would refuse to accept the project, each and every time.
- Working directly with clients on their websites means that your work can touch almost any industry, which is a fairly unique opportunity to learn a lot about people's needs and their perceptions about added value. This in turn makes you a better designer.
- When is the right time to start adding contingencies for the resources you are using? Do you look at five, fifteen, thirty minute averages, daily averages or something else? What is the threshold that must be exceeded to actually implement the change? Will keeping the current utilization harm your work, when it is suboptimal, but avoids a cost that is too high?
- How long is the delay between the request you receive and the response you give? Do you have a mechanism in place, which measures this? What are the service times of other companies in your industry? Can you streamline your processes to respond faster?
- Do you think that a website can be useful to a vegetable producer? Imagine their production bought at a much lower price than the market rate simply because the buyers are willing to push the price to the bottom to extract higher profit on their backs. Can a website circumvent these individuals, giving producers with no physical stores access to a broader client base, so that the price is determined by market principles instead?
- Wondering whether most art galleries have their own pages or prefer to be present on Facebook/Instagram instead. Not sure that anything can beat the flexibility of a dedicated site. And not just for art, but in general.
- Seeking Toyota cars with favorable MPG, horse power, rpm and price bit.ly/2MV4hSQ. The matrix of correlations bit.ly/2nF3YAu highlights the expected relationship between horse power and rpm, but also hints about a slightly weaker relationship between horse power and price—something which may not be immediately obvious.
- Calculating shipping cost as percentage of the total cost of online shopping bit.ly/2w6XnTh
- Using a graph as a means to find the node, most vulnerable to failure, within the system's network, is another great example.
- "In 2015, Denmark broke the world wind power production record and achieved around 14TWh, providing 42.1% of the Danish gross electricity consumption." Terawhat? Curious to know the current state.
- Implementing an equation about radar received power to get a feeling for it bit.ly/2nDUqWj
- "A few grams of soil contain billions of bacteria, hundreds of kilometers of fungal hyphae, tens of thousands of protozoa, thousands of nematodes, several hundred insects, arachnids and worms and hundreds of meters of plant roots." Not sure how this is even possible, but assuming that nature knows its material well. Yet, erosion (from water, wind, ice, gravity), salinisation (accumulation of soluble salts like sodium, magnesium, calcium), compaction (heavy agricultural technology), sealing ("infrastructure over soil", e.g. roads, pavements, buildings) and others often stay on the path of this important work. Especially considering that forming centimeters of fertile topsoil is said to take several hundred years. Didn't knew which element is encouraging what: 1) nitrogen - leafy growth, 2) phosphorus - root development, 3) potassium - fruit and flower production. Assumed that highly alkaline soil would be better, but the publication claimed that a pH 6.5-7 (very slightly on the acidic side) is preferable for most plants (you may want to test that). Especially liked to idea of adding the dust from the vacuum cleaner into the compost pile, allowing clearning to serve double purpose.
- How is the heat dissipated off the device? How does its distribution on the surface look like? How can this distribution become more uniform?
- Usually quite fast at uncovering the Luxus pages on websites bit.ly/2KWKKzC. Thought I win a choco egg with a small reward inside. But the idea that missing pages can be advertised as "limited edition" is hardly digestible. I was also looking for "this", not "else", so the search below looked strange too.
- Strange that the constantly improving crash-readiness was said to be insufficient to compensate for the increased number of cars when it came to the reduction in the number of tragic incidents on the road. Wondered about a possible explanation. Perhaps more cars complexify the events on the road and the opportunities to crash increase, despite the cars getting safer overall. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that the number of fatalities per 100 thousand inhabitants is almost twice as high in China and India compared to Europe. If the infrastructure of more populous countries is burdened more heavily, this could be a contributing factor. Raises the question when (utilization level) it must expand/improve in order to effectively reduce this number.
- Hard to do simple and expensive to be cheap, especially when you save on cable insulation quality, leaving an airplane susceptible to a short circuit and eventual system failure. Want to be a passenger on that one?
- Can a different arrangement of the seats influence how many visitors come to your place? A different interior decoration? A more friendly attitude?
- Believing that you don't need domain knowledge as a programmer, just because your client will be able to provide it when needed, is a fallacy. Once you take on the project and they start discussing things like the difference between pneumatics and hydrailics (or something else), you may feel ovewhelmed with the stream of knowledge you are suddenly exposed to. This is what spending your entire time on reading/writing code does for you—it makes you completely insensitive to anything else. Therefore, leave your editor for a while and start seeing the world more broadly for what it is rather than how you'd like to be perceived. Keep looking for ways to better understand your clients, role and impact. Seek new roles that expand your worldview, identify opportunities and connections with what you already know. But this may require to become more familiar with other domains, which in itself is painful, once again.
- Developing an app must be worth it. If you will get 50 users paying one dollar each, the cost has likely exceeded the benefit. Which is why I prefer to secure the payment upfront rather than rely on wishful thinking. The paying client verifies that such problem truly exists, saving one from the need to hope so. The market size for this problem is also important. It could be very small to justify an app released to the public.
- Just (i/o)n time.
- The screen can have a ten-inch diagonal, but will it still fit well in the hand?
- What is the most characteristic parameter about this environment? Imagine your bathroom doesn't have windows and you want to turn on the ventilation only when someone is inside. What kind of sensor could you use? One option would be an infrared sensor for motion detection. But once the person stops moving, the device can temporarily switch itself on and off and the sound it makes in the process can play on your nerves. This means we rely on something that is not always there. Yet, an infrared detector could possibly be used to log when someone went inside and outside, thus giving an approximate idea what percentage of the total occupant time was spent in a given room (saw a paper with infrared sensor installations used for this task). For the ventilation, we could also think about having a pressure-aware sensor below the faience tiles. While this may work, it is not optimal too. We may need a sensor per tile, which is a costly decision, especially when the bathroom area is bigger. And now we come to the first question, realizing that this is the only room where light is turned on when someone enters—each and every time. So a light detector used to control the ventilation seems reasonable.
- Are you aware of the parameters about the life of your production machines? This might give you data to optimize their operation. When are they loudest, most vibrating, hottest, most consuming (power)? Under which conditions do they wear out fastest? Many years ago I was in a boiler-producing factory and the sound there was unbearable. Noone even thought for a moment about the noise levels and some workers felt too proud to wear ear protection. The way the machines operate is still important for the health of the workers.
- Why collect user data when you can never be sure about its truthiness? What about collecting more than that (hiding this from the user) to separate truth from a lie? Can such platforms instill credibility when anyone could post an image from their trip to the moon? Fully reflects how, when and for whom I develop applications.
- Smart packaging: if you leave it open for more than 15sec, it closes itself to preserve the item fresh. The dry bread problem.
- Mini optimization for sites using lots of videos: when a previously started video goes outside of view, temporarily pause it and resume only after the user returns to it. Otherwise resources may be needlessly wasted in the background.
- Estimating cycle time based on the cyclist velocity, wind velocity, and a sample energy source bit.ly/2McewWd. The main idea here is to think of the body as a battery and see how long it would take to deplete the energy stored in it through a sample food source (in this case a large chocolate bar). Makes no claims about accuracy. If you notice a mistake, feel free to correct me.
- "They do not lose their honor if they refuse to board an unsafe vehicle." - Robert Elliott Allinson in "On the very idea of risk management: Lessons from the space shuttle Challenger". Good read.
- As long as you feed someone else's platform with your hard work, they'll enjoy it and you'll stay hungry.
- Coral, microscope, photo. Stunning.
- Hotels on Times Square, New York bit.ly/2KLKP90
- Used Wikipedia bit.ly/2KR3LDy ↗ to look for outliers among chemical elements bit.ly/2OvaODY according the the properties group, period, atomic weight, density, melt, boil, heat capacity, electronegativity and abundance. Nitrogen, hydrogen and magnesium stand out. I wondered what happened with oxygen, but it is seen on the third diagram. Boron, beryllium and especially vanadium come surprising to me as I never heard of potential usage scenarios. But most other elements with visible labels are already used in one form or another.
- Common wheat and spelt production by country in the EU in 2016 (according to Eurostat) bit.ly/2MaowiJ
- Deserts by location and area (log scale) bit.ly/2KKaX4e. Interesting clusters and a fictive diagonal line.
- First time seeing a watch with the dates ordered in circle, using two tiny colored lines to surround the current date bit.ly/2Mam9Nb ↗. Beautiful, precise UI design. Seems intuitive too, since by moving from outside to inside, a viewer examines the time at decreasing level of granularity. Do you find that the minute ticks slightly interfere with the date indicators?
- Good reminder: If something seems surprisingly cheap, there is a good chance that someone has been made to suffer for it. Is this what we want to support (short and long term)?
- Using details from Trek bikes, I wrote a short snippet checking the suitable bike frame size for a cyclist with known height bit.ly/2Oqpzbi. However, this is to be used as orientation only and not as a substitute for speaking with a specialist at the local bike store.
- Comparing Jaguar cars bit.ly/2KGYONf
- Latest issue of Max Planck research magazine claims that we burden the environment with ≈380 million tons of plastic each year (footprint). A major advantage of plastics, they say, is their longevity (often desirable or requirement). Led me to a strange secondary thought about an unfolding long-term autogoal, but this is possibly something reversible.
- If you want me to work on your project, feel free to send me your proposal.
- Chocolate nutrient comparison bit.ly/2KHx6Ac
- "The model is not the reality and one should not distort reality to fit the model." Very well said.
- Botanic Gardens Conservation International: "We found 480 matches" (of endangered plant species). But when one sees a high variety of beautiful plants in a botanic garden, they may not immediately think about missing species. Everything looks perfect, because someone took great care in organizing the existing area so that nothing seems to be missing. This means that in high variety it is easy to miss uniqueness or easy to assume that everything is there. Interesting whether a large company with many employees can allow itself to become negligent with newcomers just because they believe they have seen it all.
- Restaurants by seat capacity in Durham, North Carolina bit.ly/2M4HjMB
- Highways in Durham, North Carolina bit.ly/2MbsM1y
- UV index readings and protective measures bit.ly/2MaNDSy
- Didn't like the tone of voice on the AccuWeather website bit.ly/2KImQHN. No to both options and your site. Greetings to your partners too.
- Weight vs. pulse for some animals bit.ly/2KEzOGp
- Reading behind the lines: "We also want the best possible exit for you, baby. Sell yourself cheap and come in our family." bit.ly/2Om28zG. Further: "Constantly articulate why a company should buy you." To lose focus or to give a giant fund a reason to disguise as a company?
- Parking place utilization in Cork, Ireland bit.ly/2OhTPou
- Number of deaths from drug overdose by US state (01.2015 - 12.2017) bit.ly/2nrt8CF. Please, note that the data for 2017 has been indicated as underreported and incomplete, but still has been considered here. During the period, six states had consistently over 100 thousand deaths per month, which is a lot. Looking where the zero is, it seems that no state has been left untouched.
- Interesting analysis on pizza dollar slices in New York bit.ly/2LYLdXe ↗. That one needs to sell 1600 slices/day to remain viable seems to go slightly too far. "98% of dollar slices are within 10 minute walk of a subway entrance". I was often suprised how bad eating decisions can become once people decide spontaneously on the go.
- Out of sight, out of mind.
- Early stage entrepreneurial activity as percentage of entrepreneurial activity (by country, 2017) bit.ly/2LXRaUk and total early stage entrepreneurial activity by age group bit.ly/2ni3sZ3. Seems that entrepreneurship knows no age.
- Fuel sales by EU member state and fuel type in 2016 bit.ly/2OgoBhv. Diesel was preferred in most countries; only in Greece and Cyprus petrol was more popular. Between 2004 and 2016, the total petrol sales decreased by almost 52.8%, while the total diesel sales increased by 20%.
- "Smart homes know what you're doing and adjust themselves accordingly." This is one of the more useful definitions I have seen. But such automated controls require, at least temporarily, (human) controllers.
- If you offer hotel rooms, do you have an interface indicating which ones are currently occupied? Can a traveler select and reserve their room by that interface prior to arrival? Or are rooms given on "as needed" basis without considering individual preferences? Wondering only.
- The 2018 top programming languages bit.ly/2LYuzaj. Great to see that my two favourites are already at first and second position. In addition, I used 6 and 8 too, but over time they introduced decisions that decreased their popularity.
- Rail network length in some countries (2016) bit.ly/2OgPYs3. Learned something new once again.
- It would have been nice if after creating a potential convex hull in 3D, I could go "inside" the shape to observe the boundaries from there (not seeing "crossing" foreground & background lines). In my case I was not able to find a way with Axes3D.
- Have you solved problems of the type "Minimize (function) subject to (list of constraints)"? I realized that CVXPY makes this convenient and beautiful at the same time bit.ly/2neNFKy. In cases when the objective function is more complex, you may need to read more about the DCP ruleset.
- Die Bundesregierung gab bekannt, dass es in 2016 der Verpackungsabfall mit 220.5kg pro Kopf ausfiel. Jeder kann für sich selbst ausrechnen, wieviel mal dies das eigene Gewicht übersteigt.
- Demonstrating a logic simplifier bit.ly/2Kr0mLb. Seems to be the type of code that can be used to optimize code, reducing the number of logic operations to a minimum. If we are not careful, logic can easily grow, become complex and easily lead to bugs, which is why it is nice to see a tool like this.
- Simple code to test three points for collinearity bit.ly/2n9JOOG
- Three lines to validate the value of a sample integral bit.ly/2Oe7zAv
- Correlations among the sales numbers of different car makers for Europe (01.2015 - 05.2018) bit.ly/2Krp9yY. According to this data, Bentley and Mini tend to often sell together while the sales of Chevrolet and Lada deviate the most in different directions. There may be some reasons behind these results, so it would be interesting to look for the whys.
- Wondering why noone built an oven, whose front cover has an integrated TV. Could save a lot of space and every time when someone watches a football game, they wouldn't need to "go to the kitchen" out of fear of having burned something, because they could smell the state in front of them. Bonus would be a "transparent mode" button to get a quick inside—in OLED quality—and a "desmell" button to run an internal absorber so that guests can feel comfortable, not having to fear to be surrounded by outside cats/dogs in the late hours.
- "Everything takes twice as long as you initially planned for." Also valid for seven-year-long restrictions, some of which end in 2020.
- Didn't know that the owner of Booking.com, Kayak and Priceline (three popular travel sites) is one and the same person. But under multiple brands this is easy to hide. People might think that they have choice, but someone found a way to simulate it. I think we are not too far away from the time when it will be a basic requirement that on every door on every "Lidl" store will also be written: "by the owner of Kaufland" and on every "Kaufland" store "by the owner of Lidl". On every "Blue Origin" vehicle and "WholeFoods" store could be written "by the owner of Amazon" and so on. People have the right to know where their money is going and who gets access to their data. Otherwise, thank you, no trust in anyone. Hopefully someone will escalate this to a law.
- Kernel density estimation of two channels of an image bit.ly/2O85s1q (Image source: bit.ly/2ObHvGs, downsized to 400 x 225 pixels). Still took a lot of time, otherwise I would have done the same with all channel combinations.
- Spring flower bit.ly/2OavVet. The circles have equal radius, even of it may not look so. Hopefully you like the overlap effect.
- 10-day weather forecast by hour for three cities (04-16.08.2018) bit.ly/2O6zvqg. Nice to observe periodicity, with each spike resembling the highest temperature in that day. From this, we can infer that the biggest temperature differences between the three cities London, Frankfurt and Vienna are expected to be between the 8th and 10th of August.
- Wondering whether it is possible to tell an algorithm which electronic components need to be connected and how and let it automatically determine the minimal feasible path lengths, which minimize the number of intersections on the printed circuit board.
- BBC Weather has a nice widget showing the ten-day weather forecast (here I selected Helsinki) bit.ly/2Oa1eX7. Beautiful icons, detail and great space-efficiency. The only things I would change would be removing the horizontal scrollbars and setting a dash between the min and max temperatures (currently on multiple lines) on a single line to support the intuition about an interval. If inside the hourly view all hours always end with "00", then this could be noise, where the letter "h" would suffice (but due to the fact that hours of the day are so common and easily recognizable as a sequence, may be omitted entirely). If I were to look from a distance, the bottom icons would all appear very similar. But vectors with known magnitude and direction can be made to appear more distinctive. It appears somewhat strange to center the wind speed inside a circle at the starting point of the vector when this number relates to the entire vector length.
- Having me in Germany has never been an issue. Studied there, learned German for almost 10 years, but still left many years ago. Couldn't find the opportunities and the respect I was looking for. Damals war mir die Miete zu hoch, die Bezahlung—zu niedrig. The decision to leave came therefore naturally. Nowadays, my skills are only selectively available to German companies and I no longer have the inclination/desire to sell them cheaply.
- Finishing precisely at 18:00 has never been my goal. On the contrary—I found that my intentions usually spiked at the end of the day when I had the most ideas and the least amount of time to realize them.
- Offering "competitive salary" is how many companies disqualify themselves. "Competitive" means mediocre or non-existent. This non-binding statement is nothing else than an attempt to play. Only employees who do the actual work know how much this costs them and whether that salary not only covers their costs, but also allows them to grow and further their carreer. Therefore, the attempt to speak with the voice of the employees seems manipulative. Sufficient reason for candidates not to apply and for job sites not to accept such job offers.
- If you saw image spacers and found them useless, wait to see the book spacers.
- Council houses by ward in Leeds, starting from 2009 bit.ly/2O43zCE. Shown are the three top wards and three with relatively high variability of the housing numbers.
- Smartphone shipments (in millions) for 2017/2018 bit.ly/2KpGHeU. Huawei seems to have expanded the most, while "Others" have shipped fewer devices.
- Indication of a process step bit.ly/2MdNwlu
- If the system is not lying and my interpretation is correct, transitioning from a C2 to a C1 state takes 57 microseconds on a SU2700. Not easily perceivable, but fascinated that it can be measured.
- Raining cats and dogs. And the lack of stormwater inlets quickly flooded the streets to the point that even busses can barely move. Update as of 15:00: The situation is much calmer now, only the grey clouds remain.
- The rain gauges in Montreal look very intentionally positioned bit.ly/2n29wo4, much better than random. Sensing the influence of an algorithm here. Usually what I like to see.
- Why not fill the entire screen with social icons? bit.ly/2mYqjbE. You do not have to adopt bad design on your site as well. Needless to say, all these services are not supported here.
- Using strokes to create a colorful square bit.ly/2KfFQgB. The "hsv" palette looked very nice (try it), but was too colorful for my taste.
- To reduce the iikelihood of destructive floods, the city of Tampa, Florida has installed stormwater inlets. You can see their density throughout the city bit.ly/2mXp9gH
- Points of interest by type in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2mZnabW. The top five types are retail, medical, public places, education and industrial.
- Bloomberg is using the extremely long article trick with ads placed inbetween to make them less noticeable (but the article itself highly profitable). Machine brought to a halt from all the flashing. Such behavior has become the primary reason why the web is headed towards becoming useless. Should concern every company at every level that publishes content online. Understand that your ability to push more is limited not by how much you can produce, but by how much your client finds reasonable to have access to in a given amount of time. Exceeding this time without even asking could be bad for your business. I hope that performance won't become a hard requirement similarly to the permission to use personal data, because it will once again badly affect the usability on many websites.
- Sometimes the reasons for traffic delay may not be known in advance to a traveler. It could be due to congestion, vehicle crash, closed streets, problems with the air conditioner, flood, thunder or something else. A simple icon on the schedule could be more informative than nothing. The worst thing to do is to keep people in the dark about what is happening and why. And periodically inform them that there will be more delay to the delay.
- Another nice-to-have (I think) would be an interface that shows people which flower types are available at each flower store on any day in a given city. This way people will know when to walk in to obtain their favourites, freeing more time to the florists to enjoy what they do best.
- It may seem that clicking on an external link is the ideal time to inform the user that they are leaving, adding a personal touch bit.ly/2M8uPj7, but this can stand in the way of browsing and slows down the user unnecessarily (and repeatedly for all links). Also, the mentioning of the word "tracking" is slightly disturbing.
- Any two or more different points of view (client, designer, clients of the client) can be unified by the look for the centroid. Describes the beneficial point of view to have. Geometry for everyone.
- Glare screens add so much strain on the eyes. Screens free of reflections should be the norm, yet they aren't. And if it's not the screen, it will be the bezel or the stand. I have enough of that.
- Cheap can get expensive. I wouldn't look further than estimating the total cost of ownership to validate this.
- Reailzed that in many hospitals one has to wait on information to find out which type of specialist can be found in which room, on which floor and when (time). A designer would instead create floor plans with the right labels and possibly make this accessible as an app on every mobile phone. Asking ourselves "Why did this question arise at the first place?" may uncover minor inconveniences accumulating over time. Maybe even hospitals need the help of a designer once in a while.
- At some point, you might start believing that adding more resources to an existing system makes it exist.
- If only the fetching of the main page takes more than a second, how could further actions like parsing, error interpretation, individual resource fetching from a CDN, DOM building, styling, JS execution, large image decoding/rendering/painting and any popups (advertisements, general cookie collection information, GDPR acceptance, location sharing), all together, stay below this threshold on a slow machine? Impossible. Used the time wget to /dev/null idea on some popular sites, but the findings were bitter.
- Strange how lettering and numbering can also become a design choice once we consider the entire palette of Intel processors. For instance, in terms of features I learned that 5200U can be very similar to 6006U. The first is said to be slightly better performing (being from the fifth generation), while the second is less powerful (006 < 200), but from a newer (sixth) generation, meaning that it has a slightly better-performing integrated graphics. And yet, 7100U has an even better integrated graphics than 6006U. The U means that they all are ultra-low power—like my current laptop CPU. Yet, does the CPU model 5Y71 speak to you as if it could be even more power-efficient than an U model? Maybe not necessarily (but it is said to be). What could this strange letter Y stand for? The fact that this processor is more recent and so efficient makes it look like a great addition to new machines, "accelerating" their price-related letters accordingly. Which brings me to a point to consider performance < performance per watt < performance per watt-dolar if possible.
- Does it break when it falls, melt upon heating, explode under load, short-circuit after liquid spill, slow down to avoid too fast, spoil without attention, break before the expiration of the product's useful lifetime? Does it speak for itself?
- Is this app animated to "cool" someone?
- Not every platform justifies the time spent on it.
- How does it feel in the hand/on touch? Does it fit well? How does it feel when used?
- I often prefer to work on the inernals of the package rather than the beautiful wrapping. The latter can be misleading or set the wrong expectations. Also: beautiful wrapping with no content inside is equivalent to cheating.
- Repetition is often avoidable if we take the time to reread what we've written bit.ly/2Lx8Qpr. Code can also be duplicated if not carefully structured. This is why each piece of functionality needs to have its right place where someone would look after it first.
- Used to test with lots of browsers, but then realized that the problem to be understood and solved is much more important than any cosmetic differences my code might introduce. However, if a test revealed very different results, then this served as early indication that something in my thought process was flawed—invaluable to know.
- Saw a mini weather station in a small brochure and thought a second about why I liked its design. It has a screen of moderate size wrapped in smooth plastic having a small logo, shows the current time, the inside and the outside temperature (may have other modes as well). And it costs 3.5€. Yesterday when I looked only for temperature sensors I found a cheap one from STMicroelectronics (but it also measures humidity) for 2.9€ (some other sensors can cost as low as 0.8€ in a single sample). And I wondered whether this device had two parts (only one was shown) with one sensor each. Electronic displays can be relatively costly—units I saw started from 2.5 - 3€ and were not of the type one would be willing to observe for long. There is plastic material that also needs to be shaped appropriately, likely a mini PCB, a battery, some logic to determine how to translate sensor voltages into temperature, another one to determine which pieces of the digits to toggle and so on. You probably already feel which question will come. How is is even possible to add so much value into such a low-cost product? Is this only the result of economies of scale (when thousands of units get produced, their price drops) or is there something more to it? Which is why I never stopped to be excited about engineering/design/programming. Always make it simpler and better.
- By choosing to work with me, you also increase the likelihood that I will be able to do more (hopefully meaningful) work in the future. Remember what Walt Disney said.
- If you didn't follow my previous words on the SSD, you might have noticed that an NVMe device like Samsung EVO 960 has much faster transfer rates bit.ly/2JYCGO1, provided your machine has the right expansion slot. It is also ≈40% lighter, meaning that a laptop could lose additional 35g of weight. For me this makes no difference, since I don't have such slot and will continue to live with my HDD for now. But that Amazon has lowered the prices to 118$/170$ for the SSD/NVMe version (both 500GB) might be a sign that the previously available wide gap in the prices of these two technologies has started to shrink.
- If you are looking for a room in a big city with plenty of options, you could attempt to reduce the guesswork by running some code to obtain a short list of rooms with desirable characteristics, such as good price, area and location. This seems much better over the alternative to manually scroll and click on countless page-related buttons to view information that may not be relevant to you. Unfortunately, not all websites make this easy enough. Understandable, since otherwise clones would have appeared.
- I don't offer packages that say this costs that much. Everything depends on your project and custom requirements. If it is something that anyone else could deliver, I am not interested.
- Global horizontal irradiation by month and hour in various cities (Wh/m2) bit.ly/2JZ3kXb. The data is from 2009, yet some is still better than none.
- Total individuals in shelter in New York bit.ly/2mGOcEK. Notice that this says nothing about the number of unsheltered individuals. It can be even higher in many cities as this quick diagram shows bit.ly/2mJ1MY8 (uses data from various homeless counts reports). But in New York, the number of sheltered individuals is much bigger, which might indicate that the city does a lot to prevent homeless people from living on the streets. A couple of days ago I saw an article about the increasing number of homeless people in Vancouver. Currently they have 2100 unsheltered individuals—an increase of 30% in the last 3 years. And if you saw my previous demo on shelter availability in Toronto, you probably wondered how in almost 80 shelters there were only few places available. Also, not only the number of people in shelters increase, but the average duration of their stay there, which is troubling. I think that all this illustrates the dimension of the problem quite well.
- Compare chia, quinoa, amaranth and millet bit.ly/2LGh79U. The values are meant for 100g of product.
- Burger nutrient comparison bit.ly/2JURdu9. This means that to reach the recommended min daily fiber intake of 30g only from burgers, one would have to eat ≈10, of the most fiber-rich type (based on the data here). But as you can imagine, this will be connected with too many calories.
- If you saw the label "Not secure" in the adress bar while on this website, you have probably updated your browser to the latest version (like me). I am fine with this, but you may not be. If absolute security is truly important to you, consider not filling any forms here in the future or not visiting at all. This way you will have nothing to fear about. Thank you.
- Maximum estimated numbers of living species (sqrt scale) bit.ly/2JTjP73
- Didn't know that the fastest swimming fish (sailfish) is only about 25% slower than the fastest running animal (cheetah). Their speeds can reach 22m/s and 30m/s.
- At the end of a film projection in a cinema, are the lights turned on abruptly, with much greater levels of luminous flux reaching your eye compared to the flux coming from the big screen while in the dark? Or is there a more gradual adjustment, leading to comparable before/after flux levels based on the current position of the viewer? Curious whether this gets measured.
- Simple code checking the validity of the binomial theorem bit.ly/2LBqIPa
- "A combinatorial miscellany" contains a beautiful visual explanation of the divisors of 60 bit.ly/2JPX9EU
- Packing as many items on unit space might seem efficient at first bit.ly/2mECUAT, but only until the viewer realizes that they can't focus on anything due to the noise. Big supermarket chains may end losing clients when they start saving on designer employment.
- Visualization of the tweet times of a sample user bit.ly/2JN7nFP (not all tweets; according to Twitter). We see at least three longer streaks when this user was not very active (look for relatively wide horizontal spacing between the points), which were interestingly followed by short bursts of activity (look for many points appearing almost on a vertical). Do you think that other people could also follow a "compensatory" approach or is this more a result of an unconscious behavior? Now you see why it is always a good idea to have time attached to each tweet/bit we write.
- Learning about the cost of living index in various countries bit.ly/2JRG5OD (click to zoom)
- Computing with a distance matrix bit.ly/2JLM9Z7
- There isn't much I can give to non-payers except an apology. They can "pay" someone else to do the job.
- The best companies tend to retain their programmers over time. Not lose them and then seek them.
- For very similar reasons stopped attempting the same on Fluke multimeters two days ago. One feature was available, one not, ad infinitum. It became tiring to track which is which and how to deal with that. Today we have so much data to the point of our own self-defeat. Things that should have been simple appear as if a team of writers/programmers provided content/information/code to another team to digest it, not to an individual.
- Started working on an idea I had about exploring the specifications of all Brother laser printers, but then noticed that I made a mistake bit.ly/2LlCUog. Does not surprise me considering that I have tried to capture 31 features per device. Sadly, correcting further omissions/mistakes would be time-prohibitive, so I'll stop here. But the company provides information even on noise and power consumption. On an old printer I noticed a usage pattern of 7W in standby and around 600W in printing mode, while one of the Brother models with many positive reviews had 0.6W/410W. Especially nice to see the 1.46x improvement at the upper end (where it is most noticeable) and the 11.66x improvement at the lower end (where the device spends most of the time). My intuition is that speed can also be an important factor in overall energy usage, because a fast printer using lots of energy may be equivalent to a slow one using much less.
- The system didn't expect a human being at the other end bit.ly/2LEdBK8 (language ambiguity)
- "So you buy them for the blades, not for the handles", I concluded. But how many blades does this thing have? One? "Two" This means you get 10 handles x 2 blades = 20 blades in total, while someone buying the 3 handles x 3 blades (Mach3) would have 9 blades at 2x the price. "Exactly". We both laughed. Always know why your customer prefers your brand.
- Brain: "Could you please determine the cost of each cookie type in the mixed bag? I'm inerested in the relative price difference between the one with the jam and the one with the half-inch of chocolate at the bottom." No. Due to your refusal to ask more interesting questions, you won't get anything today.
- You turn on the TV, but the picture is unclear, having too much noise—intolerable. How much would a 10% improvement in picture quality be worth to you? If not that much, you could ask yourself for all divisible-by-ten percentages up to 100%. Perhaps the curve you will get this way won't be linear. In order words, the joy of having a perfect picture can come at a cost that is too high. For some people, cable TV is synonymous to that perfect picture. They can select and enjoy a large variety of channels and exactly the ones they like whenever they like them. Yet, at the same time they may complain of having to pay around 100$/month for this privilege. This may not seem too much at first, but eventually over time it adds up. Which may be one reason why some of them have decided to cancel their cable TV subscriptions, realizing that a good antenna can give them a reasonable quality signal at a one-time cost instead of having to pay recurring, long-term fees. And even when the plan is hypothetically 30$/month, the investment in an expensive 80$ antenna (if it works as expected) may pay off in less than 3 months. A very small period if one could live with a smaller selection of programs and eventually some noise. And if one watches primarily to know approximately what happens (degree of certainty if you will) rather than to be aware of every small detail. But this requires installment, tinkering, location and orientation adjustment, performance tests... many will find it much easier to continue watching with zero risk on missing anything.
- On a "good" multimeter you are said to able to get 4 updates/sec of the value you see on the screen. Strange to see this coming from an environment having a requirement of 60fps/sec for animation. But what if a device cannot refresh the display once a value is measured? Will this mean that someone has to set & remove the probes 60 times per second to obtain a somewhat accurate result? Change could be on its way...
- Average bytes per pixel for a directory of images bit.ly/2JLotUG. This ratio looks good.
- Eyes on the prize.
- Selective blur of image fragments bit.ly/2JHNosi using code only (no Photoshop). The combined image was compressed at the end.
- Having a project you want me to work on? Thinking that the conditions might satisfy someone like me? Then get in contact and we'll see.
- Quantifying the cost of distraction (idea) bit.ly/2LwJLab
- Gradient in circle bit.ly/2uPEZO3
- Can't even imagine what it is like to use a slow website on a mobile phone when I see poor-quality websites increasingly blocking my machine. When everyone is rushing to push things online, this is what happens.
- If I could I would send some of our currently pouring rain to Sweden, where currently 40 different fires are spreading, according to Zeit.
- Learning about packaged salads bit.ly/2mv4ZKU. A minor inconvenience while creating this appeared in the form of loss of focus. Every time I clicked on inspect element and switched to my editor to copy a small JavaScript code and paste it in the console, focus returned to Chrome (effectively hiding my editor) to show which element was inspected (I just wanted to open the console). Perhaps using F12 would have been better, but sometimes you find this after you have finished.
- Speaking of visual explanations, "Draw to win" might be interesting.
- Something small I had trouble understanding in C++ code for a long time was related to memory addresses and the effect of writing to an address belonging to a device. I am still mostly clueless, but saw a useful, "lumped" description. Someone drew a single big address space and then enclosed address ranges for the RAM, the ROM, the I/O device registers etc, with some "dead zones" inbetween. Single address space for all of them—a convenient form of abstraction. The address ranges can be hardware-dependent, but the access scheme remains the same. So grateful to see someone sharing this. Now tell me that visual explanations don't matter.
- I admit that I never thought about AI and machine learning in terms of one being superset of the other. Buth their limitations looked suspiciously similar to me.
- Website interactivity may not solve all possible issues; it may even create more than it solves.
- Thought of creating something simple with colorful stripes describing a sequence of serials running on different TV channels in parallel (TV guide), but then saw that someone else was faster than me on that one as well.
- After the costs of a big, failing project become clear, the cost of an expensive programmer may start to appear negligible.
- Some labels used to categorize projects bit.ly/2zPMJFz (Source: UK Infrastructure and Projects Authority, "Annual report on major projects 2017-2018"). The article in IEEE Spectrum claimed that among 133 projects none were "green", which I found slightly depressing, but not extraordinary. It also mentions that failure is part of the innovation process, which I fully agree with (where only repeated failure is worse). Sometimes projects get canceled and the previous investments become sunk costs. A couple of days ago another article mentioned that Lidl lost 500 million euro over many years to finally give up on using a platform developed by SAP. We see that the more ambitious projects are, the higher risks they carry. While label colors reflect this, it is unclear how much they mean to the actively engaged problem solvers sweating every small detail.
- An interesting article describes the inefficiency of having a car engine run at stops bit.ly/2mutqb3 and provides a pointer to an electronic device that could help reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Always nice to see when someone starts by describing a real problem, introduces a solution and then lets people decide how good it is instead of telling them that it is "much better than", "unlike any other" or costing "only" so much.
- Possibility of firm bankruptcy bit.ly/2uFZ4q0. Interesting that people have tried to create models to predict this. Shared mainly for its beauty, not for its accuracy.
- Is it just me who finds the repeated titles "Getting ready", "How to do it", "How it works", "There is more to it...", "See also" in each chapter of a book (think 50 times) unacceptable? Don't repeat yourself is a high bar for some writers/editors/publishers. And it takes some non-trivial thinking how to weave the text to achieve that. Much easier is to dump it into something that appears structured, where the pieces are so disconnected and superficially treated that no long train of thought could ever be initiated. Who wants to read page fillers?
- Seems that manually getting geocoordinates is less reliable than one might think bit.ly/2zMDVA8. Here I tried to draw the bike paths in Germany as seen on Radtourenchef. Unfortunately, few places did not exist on the map, so I had to remove their points. Once I draw the connections with straight lines they looked anything but believable (no need to even color the paths to see this). That a path moves from the north to the south with zero intermediate locations, looks like a severe mistake (and there seem to be many). The only thing that can be inferred is that southeast Germany (Bayern) has the highest concentration of notable bike paths according to Radtourenchef. You may not see it, but there are 570 unique locations on this map, so it wasn't a small effort to obtain their (sometimes likely invalid) geocoordinates.
- Never heard about this useful function letting you compute how long it would take to repay a given loan knowing the payment and interest rates bit.ly/2zKeaR4. In the example provided, if interest rate was zero, it would take 53.33 months to repay the loan. But at 7% interest rate, this requires almost 11 additional months. The bank would be happy.
- A relatively good/cheap SSD like this one from SanDisk (240GB) seems nice-to-have amzn.to/2mkADKP, but I see two potential problems. First, I am still on a single-core machine (by choice, ask yourself why), so this will likely not unfold the full bandwidth of the device and it may saturate the slow CPU. Second, shipping and customs would add 50% to the device price, which makes this purchase a lot less interesting. But if you are on Amazon's land, it may seem reasonable to you, which may also remove one spinning part from your device, slightly reduce its power consumption and make it run up to a couple of times faster. Another assumption is that it may speed up the handling of big datasets if you find yourself in need to do data analysis. If your budget allows, you may choose a version with more capacity.
- Is it possible to 3D print mirrors for a telescope? Wondering how advanced and accurate this technology has become. Also not having access to PopSci or similar. Speaking of mirrors, we have relatively little sunshine these days and I remembered that one technique photographers use to improve the quality of their photos in such cases is to place mirrors on the side which reflect light to the main subject. What if I made my main subject a plant and used one/more mirrors to reflect sunshine back to it to try stimulating its growth? Could this even work, is it stupid or just cost-stupid? Perhaps the mirrors can adjust according to the sun rays' angle of inclination (computer vision), the soil composiition could be optimized (data analysis), a sensor could signal when uninvited guests have arrived (e.g. spiders drinking spare water from the saucer), an IoT system can control the amount and frequency of water drops for less variance, a 3D plant model could mark in green which parts are ready to be cropped. Must smell like basil.
- You could place a generic bed into your bedroom, at least until your backbone starts to hurt bit.ly/2zSvbZx
- Suppose that in exchange for an increase of a membership fee with 90$, you earn a one-time right to buy an item 100$ cheaper (having other choices as well). If you buy exactly this item, you have "saved" 10$ or at least you might think so. Now you get the additional information that this is said to be one of the most deeply discounted items you could buy. Would this make you happy, inform you to cancel your membership in the future or motivate you to buy a lot more slightly discounted items (some of which you may not need) in order to compensate for your membership fee? An interesting dilemma, but possibly slightly less so on the selling side.
- The openness of countries is also an important topic itself and one good thing about open data is that it can foster/encourage it. Again, by choosing to visit, you agree to support the typical practices there. And if you hear how "discredited people must be bankrupted", this statement could quickly make you rethink whether to touch this ground. You don't want to be welcomed at a place where someone could be actively working in the background to eliminate the inconvenient. This is not open.
- "Open" may not be truly open the way you define it, similarly to how organic food may not be sugar-free despite the fact that someone wants to convince you that it is healthy. You have to check the labels/terms of use to understand whether they are consistent with your expectations. And if they aren't, you have the choice to avoid the open participation and resource usage. Remember that if you use a resource, you become automatically a supporter of the practices behind it. Of all open data sites, I found only 3-4 whose terms of use I found problematic and didn't consider open enough. If possible, when you work with open data, always try to read the small letters to avoid any surprises later.
- Being tolerant doesn't mean accepting incompetence as a story of intolerance. Once someone tries to defend their work this way, the saddle point of the trust function has been reached and the tendency has become clear.
- A woman said she visied 119 countries, having a goal to visit all 174 (if I remember correctly). I also like traveling, but never allow it to determine my life. For me it is always bound with very concrete goals. I tend to evaluate the project, the people, the skills to be used and the reward. And I rarely wander around wasting time. She spoke about personal growth and how important connections/friendships truly are; to me connections matter much less and only when. If you aren't mindful who you speak with, you end up knowing too many people, which then start calling, inviting you to go out, make you look after their kids etc. Each additional contact takes you time until you are left with none. What kind of life is that? Always keeping the minimum number of connections.
- "Anerkennung drückt sich nicht nur in Worten aus." bit.ly/2zH3ZwJ Genauso ist es. All the companies I left and the people I stopped speaking with have forgotten or were unwilling to hear about the importance of this point. Quite possible that they are still looking for people.
- Made myself a little reminder yesterday after trying two apps, which I didn't like. The first app consistently used 1.3% CPU and 3% memory while doing nothing except polling and the second had a non-intuitive interface, where I couldn't find the option I was looking for. The code I wrote only shows a popup window and allows me to hit the close button, then waiting on the next event. Good that it was possible to run it in the background without the need to keep a console window open. Resource usage was so low that it wasn't even registering on the first screen of top. Then after moving away for a while and coming back to turn off the machine and go to bed, I saw a big window "Turn off the boiler". Seems that good things happen when you least expect them. So now I had to go back and do the "manual" work of pushing a button, but even this can sometimes be better than doing nothing.
- Didn't watch the game of the games. Also avoiding people who associate with concrete teams or try to impose their results in front of me.
- Ratio between median value of million dollar homes to median value of homes for some US cities bit.ly/2uCj1Or. Surprised to see Houston at the top of what could be considered home inequality. San Jose, which has the highest median values, appears last, which means that according to the article, it must be a place where the most expensive homes of the rich look most similar to the homes of ordinary people. Or at least, this is my interpretation.
- Happy not having to discuss my decisions with too many people. Went to see how the Python mailing list looks like and this was my first thought.
- Amost no screen time today. At midday I spent some time observing the life of the refrigerator and more specifically how often it chooses to breathe and for how long. Noticed that when it was calm, usage was 0W. Opening the refrigerator section led to 13.5W, while opening the camera section led to no difference (yet there is no light inside). In active mode, it started from 97W and very gradually came down to 80W, keeping this level for a relatively long time. Immediately after plugging it in, it used 500W, but only for a brief time. Then at the afternoon washed some clothes, cleaned the kitchen from some pests, which were conquering the oats and the rice (unfortunately had to check everything else to figure this out). Then received a "gift" in the form of wild blueberries, 4.5kg, which traveled approximately 400km, to be cleaned from any impurities and put in bags, facing the inside of the camera. Then noticed some slack at the small terrace, where a couple of containers stayed empty and it bugged me that I had soil, but no seeds. Went for seeds (25 min walk), took rosemary and watercress (strangely the store offered almost no choice this time) and planted them in the evening, dealing with moist soil and the cleaning of fine particles. Tired and falling asleep now. Tomorrow (today) (hopefully) I will have some more time to read/write code.
- I was excited about open data at the beginning (which I think was also visible here), learning a lot in a very short time thanks to your effort and hard work. But then this excitement gradually started to disappear: most websites seemed to be updated only very infrequently if at all. Or they contained old data that was no longer relevant. Or they used platforms overloaded with content, where finding valuable one was possible, but took a disproportionate amount of time and required deep concentration. Also, some of the more interesting datasets are incredibly rich (size in the gigabytes range), so it takes a lot of time to download them, load them and glance through a good amount of the data in order to understand it, understand what type of questions it could answer, how valuable they could be and how these answers can be woven into something meaningful. Takes a lot of work, thinking, tinkering and dealing with edge cases where the availabiilty of values is optional. This raises the possibility of making mistakes and having a viewer question the accuracy of the results. Sometimes also due to the fact that the data is incomplete by default and there is not much we can do about this, when we were fully separated from the way it was collected. All this leaves one dissatisfied; despite all attempts to prevent mistakes, it is always possible that an error will sneak somewhere. At the same time I remembered how someone said that people don't like paying for news in general, which is constantly proven on a daily basis. Perhaps this type of content isn't interesting or at least my way of presenting it wasn't. I am also consistently questioning whether my contribution is great enough, given that the majority of the effort has been in the data collection/labeling phase. This led me to believe that perhaps I am doing something wrong here, by attempting to let my curiosity walk into these "foreign homes", which it will never be able to truly comprehend and which are better left as beautiful as they are. The feeling of understanding could be nothing more than a fallacy. For this reason, in the future I will try to work much less with data, especially open data. If the right circumstances present themselves, I will still stay open to any possibilities.
- If you believe that you simply "need" a website, you might be right. But history has shown that being unable to define what makes your site unique can quickly make it indistinguishable from the hundreds of other similar alternatives once they are available. Then the apparent need suddenly becomes a liability—you continue to pay for years to programmers and designers, for domain and hosting, for social media account management, for supporting systems/processes and so on, but you rarely see the return on that, because all your competitors look like you, do and sound the same. Then you enter a physical store and tell yourself—great, they sell a lot of products here and make a good profit, so perhaps I could replicate this success online! And you tell yourself that you "need" an online store as it will help you sell more, become independent and chase your dreams at scale. Now the problem is that hundreds of other stores have started to open and yours is once again somehow lost in the noise. But you are young and still believe to have plenty of options. Then you tell youself that cryptocurrencies will make you rich and that you "need" to be active in this area as well, so you go and buy yourself expensive hardware and hope that this way you will be able to multiply your money while sitting in front of the TV, crunching popcorn. But after a while everyone starts thinking this way and they all invest in the same hardware with a similar intention. Now the system gets busier and more sluggish, and it starts to return much less to each participant on average. This can't be real, you think. What could be the reason that "need" was never enough? Lack of sufficient starting capital, lack of differentiation, concept quality, lack of long-term strategy/vision, inability to execute or something else? It could be many factors that in their whole have led to this result. Yet, Jim Rohn had a shocking lesson for us all: "You are paid relative to the value you bring to the market." That is. This value, more than anything else, is determined by uniqueness. If you are connecting people and are the only company called Facebook, you become incredibly valuable. If you are the only producer of Coca-Cola and most people enjoy your beverages, you are certainly quite valuable. If you are the biggest bookstore and your success can't be repeated, you have become incredibly valuable. By providing something noone else can. So the question is not what we need, but how unique is what we can provide. Whenever a client starts a conversation around their need, ask yourself whether their work is truly unique and justifies help on your side; otherwise you might be wasting your time on a "me-too" project.
- Whether something is significant or not, depends only on you making it significant.
- The effect of a good and quick payment can be overshadowed by having to work with a client that is quite slow to respond or not sure about the direction of the project, leading to frequently changing requirements. This way the person implementing the project must stay idle most of the time, do waste work or seek to guess the intention of the client, which can easily lead to project failure. If within the same timeframe three other clients can be served and the collective revenue would slightly exceed the one connected with this single client, then serving this person is perhaps not a good idea. And it is much better to diversify the sources of revenue. Possibly explains why good/quick payments aren't everything.
- When I type a destination quickly and it appears letter by letter, what does this mean? Are you tracking each of my keystrokes (without returning any results), making Ajax requests to a database every 10ms or sharing my information with advertisers in real-time?
- Big, heavy, slow systems. Responsible for flight checking if only you were patient enough. Understandable that users who spent 2-3 mins waiting for the offers to appear will be terrified by the possibility of losing their "binding" session. By seeing less options per unit of time, they are effectively nudged to accept the more expensive ones. Whether this is acceptable, only the travelers can decide.
- Are you doing more with less or less with more?
- Tracking the resource usage of a process of interest bit.ly/2mekFBR
- Two German economics professors: "Salaries in Germany are too low because of the very high productivity and salaries elsewhere in Europe are too high because of the very low productivity." Neither, nor. Both are more likely explained by the willingness to exploit and the inability to do so. Which has much less to do with productivity than one might think. Sad to see "high-profile" people traveling across Europe to explain the rest how inferior they are. Doesn't matter: after the Brexit we'll check again how prevalent arrogance continues to be and it could be interesting to see whether people will connect it once again with the need for further exits. Because if they do, nationality and position may play a much smaller role than one might think.
- Visualization of the last actions on directory files bit.ly/2usSFOJ. May be useful on rare occassions when it is unclear what happened within a directory; visualization can help to find outliers.
- Simple disk usage feedback bit.ly/2mcwicA. Here 1KB has 1024 (and not 1000) bytes.
- That 300MW of installed solar capacity is sufficient to power approximately 210000 homes tells me that the average US household uses ≈4.0-4.8x more electricity than a directly observable one. Hard to imagine how many (smart) devices/appliances such a home has.
- Someone could pay regularly slightly more than usual to prevent a disease or they could avoid the payments and health checks, letting the disease progress to a point where it becomes very hard to heal it and where each subsequent treatment/intervention costs 100x the initial amount. It would be easy to claim that they didn't have a choice, but fact is, they were responsible even for their inaction. When someone refuses to seek help on time and suddenly appears and expects everything to be fixed by a magic wand, in a short time and within a tight budget, their expectations may have become unrealistic. And even with the best intention in mind, a person may be reluctant to help due to the risk of not meeting these expectations, being worried about the impact of an unhappy customer on their future practice. A similar dilemma seems to exist in software too—many companies try to implement their projects very cheaply by cutting all kinds of costs and then start wondering why this has become quite expensive.
- Have you noticed how the creators of some libraries try to trick you into believing that they created something incredibly complex and deep? By having a project full of directories with hundreds of files, each having up to 3 lines of code... It is easy to imagine how impressed a reviewer would be by looking at this, especially when they don't take the time to see what a nonsense the whole is.
- Took off some small leaves from the basil to practice my findings about drying. Looked which were extraneous or interfered with others and removed them (as in code). Some water, sunshine, only 1.5 days after snipping and a dangerous fall from height did not prevent the plant from restoring its original, beautiful crown. Will see whether the mint likes more sun as well, but it could have been damaged by cutting some of the main stems from a low point. Once I saw this... please ensure that you don't cut too much and that the plant has a chance to restore itself and bring you joy longer. If in doubt, remember what the anteater did.
- "In Hong Kong they don't eat bread... and everyone looks so beautiful.", said a store owner while speaking with someone else. Somehow implies that someone must be rich in order to behave intelligently—something to disagree with. As I saw yesterday, having the convenient/pleasant options taken away from you may actually unconsciously improve your options. The example given was people in USA consuming lots of meat and other junk food (suffering many heart attacks) and people in some African countries relying mainly on plant-based food (and registering almost no cases). But if you said that by default all Americans choose wisely and all Africans cannot possibly have any good choice, you would be wrong twice in a single sentence.
- It is not you who will determine how much I get paid, but you have the option to bid against that and see whether your project will be accepted or rejected. Usually I avoid working a second time with people who previously rejected me (common) or who I previously rejected (common)—out of fear having negative sentiment affect the quality of future work.
- Many companies hire 1000+ people and then start believing that the cost of hiring one additional person should converge towards zero. And many people who enter later for some reason agree to buy into this well-knit lie. And if they don't have self-respect, that makes it so much easier for the rest to "postpone" theirs and manipulate them easily. You could try to promote the idea that work should be free in front of me to see how far you could come, but you will have to fear speaking for the last time, either as a member of a big group of people or as a CEO of a company. I also seek someone to do my work for free.
- Many years later learning about a new shortcut: Ctrl + Del (without Alt) to delete words after the cursor. I always used Ctrl + Backspace to do the same for words appearing before it. As they say, everything comes in pairs.
- In the ingredient tables I often see mono-, di- and tri- of something, but with chemicals I rarely know when less or more is better. Sufficient reason to stay away from the ones the body didn't produce itself.
- Which recipe among five could best satisfy our own taste? One way to think about this could be in terms of calories received or total satisfaction. Depending on what we are interested in, we can assign an index from 0 to 100 (for better accuracy). Then we could assign costs for all "materials and resources" allowing us to make the final dish. If 50g olives, 200g cheese and 250g salad have to be used (among many others), we could multiply each of these values with the price of the products and sum the totals at the end. But to this amount we also have to add the cost of the resources used: you probably agree that baking for 20mins at 150℃ and for 2hours at 200℃ are different things. Or using the large hob for 30min at degree level 2 is different from using the small hob for 10mins at degree level 3. How many kitchen devices will be utilized in the preparation and for how long? How many plates/bowls needed for intermediate steps will have to be cleaned later? What percentage of the total preparation time requires manual work and what does this cost us relative to our hourly wage? Once we have this clarity and add the resource cost to the materials cost, we could use normalized satisfaction index / normalized total cost as a metric to rank the recipes. Not a perfect example, but adjustments are possible anytime. Glad that it fits in a bit.
- Land yield comparison bit.ly/2m8SPqG
- Parks in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2m8juUQ
- "But if the cost of your survival exceeds potential taxpayer savings, your life is deprioritized" bit.ly/2m7FFKR. Also: "High-tech tools that perfect human rights and strenghten human capacity are more difficult to build than those that do not".
- Global Innovation Magazine seems an interesting one, but the fact that it is available only on Issuu and not as PDF makes it very hard to read. I need to load ads every couple of page turns, the fullscreen mode allows the ad to take the bottom of the screen, the interface feels bulky and non-responsive (it takes ≈10s to turn a page and 3s to zoom on the right section). Do you know of other innovation magazines that are interesting, but less popular?
- One article mentioned the problem with the lack of truck drivers and identified two possible reasons to be low payments and overtime. Knowing very little about trucks or driving, I tried to jot down what else could be causing this situation bit.ly/2zhOrzi. Didn't even come to algorithmic inefficiency of road selection, improper task allocation sequences or competition pushing the less effiective businesses out of the market.
- Watched a very small part of some cycling race in France today (usually staying away from TV). Noticed how getting water and food during the race can be distracting. Then wondered whether a 500g reduction in the weight of an already lightweight bike, if this would cost 1000-2000$ more, is money well spent compared to exchanging a sloppy 400g shoe for a 100g one at a cost of 200-300$. The pictures convinced me that it is not only the bike that contributes to the weight, but also the helmet, the shoe, the equipment, even the cyclist himself. Yet, I suppose that exclusively focusing on weight reduction would actually reduce performance.
- It is not only important to learn, but also to observe how we are learning and to choose carefully what we learn. If we improve fast, but at a very high price, we may end with a good amount of debt making our subsequent learning very hard or impossible. Would learning this improve our situation tomorrow or would it be a waste of time and resources?
- Decided to take a look at the design of some metro/bus timetables available on the web. The ones I have seen so far were not great; almost every plan had at least one or more aspects that could have been improved. Some were so disorganized that I couldn't tell immediately what I was looking at. Some integrated the assumptions how people might want to look at the data into complex, hard-to-follow drawings. Some had poor contrast (grey background with a thin font), some asked for start and end point via an online interface, where there was no way to select a station if you didn't know or couldn't remember its name. Also no hints were shown on typing; when a map was available, an improper zoom level allowed for very rough/imprecise target setting. Some timetables wasted a lot of whitespace or showed hard-to-read vertical labels. Some crammed too much content close together so that individual times became hard to separate. Some plans were not print-friendly, others which were had 40-50 pages of content for a single route. One of the plans I liked most came from MVV (Munich), although the interface used to arrive at the printed materials was slightly dated and not always intuitive. I also noticed that bigger cities had slightly more polished plans compared to smaller ones, but opportunities for improvement are everywhere.
- Finding Energy Star washing machines with desirable properties bit.ly/2m3WTbS
- Cities by number of business hotels having five stars (Source: Five Star Alliance website) bit.ly/2ueDcl5. Forbes has also written a more detailed article on the topic bit.ly/2lZVjYl
- Street lamps by their wattage in Melbourne bit.ly/2uduaVM (Source: City of Melbourne, "Feature Lighting", bit.ly/2uf6jVx). The lamp with the max wattage is 500W, while the total power consumption of all 4090 street lights with known wattage is 213033W. The median came at only 35W, while the average is slightly over 52W.
- Looking at the streets with the currently fastest average speed in South Dublin bit.ly/2m0bZPu (Source: South Dublin City Council, bit.ly/2zl1rEa)
- You may like at least one of these Häagen-Dazs icecream flavor combinations bit.ly/2m5AhrD
- Learned that the anteater digs the anthill carefully without destroying it, then pushes its 60cm long sticky tongue inside many times per minute, but takes only ≈140 ants, after which it moves to the next anthill. This is to ensure that on the next return, this place still has enough ants to feed it. Did not expect this animal to be so clever.
- Positioning the figures for the next chess game may seem a bit tedious, but few lines of code offer some help bit.ly/2m1WcQl. You could also rewrite the second line as flank + main + list(reversed(flank)), saving one function call.
- Datahub published a GeoJSON file with the contours of many countries, which you may find useful in your own work. Here you can see the contours of Germany as an example bit.ly/2lXPL0x
- Initially, I was very frustrated to see functions with twelve parameters, when my mind refused to accept so much information at once. Then came datasets with fifty and more features, large matrices and algorithms operating on them in non-obvious ways. Whenever I wanted to print and see what happens with a matrix, the output quickly filled my screen, so I had to learn to be more selective. Recently I saw a datasheet of a microcontroller having 176 pins (some of these are reserved for output as well) bit.ly/2m0BSyN, which reminded me that complexity is subjective. This chip probably holds many different functionalities together, but we know nothing about how efficiently they cooperate and whether in our particular case we truly need all of them (we pay the full cost). When something is too complex, it is easy to hide/mask inefficiencies/imperfections or explain design decisions as tradeoffs. Even when abstractions are powerful and ease our thinking, I still think that we should strive more towards simplicity at the conceptual stage—eliminating the needless and avoiding the tendency to pick fail-safe/tried-and-tested defaults.
- Once a mere-mortal sees this, can they do something useful with it, make it practical, visible, real, memorable? Or as long as it is sufficiently abstract and intricate there is no reason to bother about that? Are we working for others or for ourselves? The market size of the last is one and it's a lonely place to be.
- Happiness levels in various countries seen from above (2015-2017) bit.ly/2zgaR3T. Not surprising why more people from Africa are taking the risky path to Europe. We see a pronounced happiness "staircase" in that direction. It is expected that a world boosting a high degree of inequality will at some point have to deal with its own creation. Saying this as an European.
- "More than 90% of the world's population live in areas with levels of air pollution that exceed WHO guidelines" and "Research suggests that plastic waste in the world's water is finding its way into humans. People eating seafood could be ingesting up to 11000 pieces of microplastic every year. Microplastics are found in 83% of the world's tap water." - "The Global Risks Report 2018" by the World Economic Forum
- Top 20 solar system installers by installed capacity (in kW) in the NREL Open PV project database bit.ly/2lYh0rW. Happy that this time the machine didn't fail me although it was fully unresponsive for around 10 mins. If the data is correct and current, SolarCity has installed ≈1.193TW, which relative to the 16.523TW announced on the project's main page means that 7.2% of the total installed capacity belong to this company. Sunpower, the next company on the list has 3.7 times less installed capacity than SolarCity, which is not a small difference. Made this primarily to learn about more companies in the sector. Initially, I saw "Self" at the end of the list and had some doubts about it, but after searching for "Self Solar" on the web, they quickly dispersed. The cities with the most installed solar capacity include Roseville, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Bakersfield, San Jose, Fresno, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lancaster, Indianapolis (in that order).
- Beautiful street carpets bit.ly/2u9hCyF ↗
- Virtue tracking card bit.ly/2u6oMn5. Be aware that it won't store your data.
- Frequently having to remind myself that direct clicks sometimes come at a penalty. For instance, reading PDFs in the browser is something I dislike (especially on scroll). But when I click on a link to a PDF document, it is downloaded and opened in the browser, after which I have to click the download arrow, which sometimes starts another download of the same document before it finally appears on the disk. Much easier and faster: right click on PDF link, "save link as...", save. Download happens only once.
- Collecting parking occupancy data very frequently (say every 5 mins) may not be such a good idea. The frequency has to be adjusted at least in some way to the planned lifetime of the project. For instance, if it was initiated 5 years ago, then we can estimate the number of collected data points per parking to be (5 years * 12 months * 30 days * 24 hours * 60 mins) / 5 mins = 518400. If the city has many car parks using this system, this could create an amount of information very hard to analyze later. Moreover, the changes between the points may seem so small that we start questioning their significance. We could also ask ourselves how critical it is to have always absolutely accurate information, adjusting the velocity of the stream accordingly. Tracking a car park may be less critical than tracking the processes in a nuclear power plant or in a high-frequency trading system.
- Comparison of two Gaussian distributions bit.ly/2lVKsPj
- Characteristics of some fuel-economical SUV car models according to AutoBild bit.ly/2lUMeAk. Takes in account displacement (cc), power (HP), weight (kg), acceleration (0-100, s), top speed (km/h), fuel (diesel/super), original price (euro), test date, test consumption (l/100km) and shows the rank each car was given. Looks like the algorithm placed the only cars using super instead of diesel close together (8 and 10). For some reason it believes that 21 has more distinctive characteristics compared with the rest and we see that this is a quite powerful car. But that we see 5 not too far from 18 comes slightly surprising.
- Merck product sales for 2017 bit.ly/2lQVoO1. In the top five of the best-selling products appear two for diabetes treatment and two vaccines. You can also see AstraZeneca's product sales for 2017 bit.ly/2lPqdme. At the top appear two respiratory and three cardiovascular/metabolic products. In both diagrams, only concrete products with known sales have been shown. Whenever products were considered in a group having a single sales value, they were not shown.
- Health care facilities in San Francisco, California bit.ly/2z8KwV5 (via DataSF). Most general acute care hospitals seem to be located at the north of the city. There are also two interesting clusters, but there was a minor inconvenience while trying to find out more about them bit.ly/2lS1fCT. My desired behavior would have been to have the numbers stick to the points as in the original picture without having to adjust the code.
- Some upcoming events in Florence, Italy bit.ly/2u1hT6M. Reading about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo made me want to learn more about the city and create this page. You can also see a sample path to visit the 15 top-rated tourist attractions in this city bit.ly/2lTAQ7G.
- The nutrition table on the oats package tells me that 100g resemble only 7% of the recommended daily energy dose (kcal). Someone who doesn't see what is written below, might assume that they need to consume 1428g of oats throughout the day to come to the 100% of energy. But if they covered this need in this way, they would have an oversaturation with microelements as only 250g of oats cover 100% of the needs for calcium, magnesium, zinc and some others. Meaning that by trying to weigh on a single parameter we would be (very) wrong surprisingly often.
- Do you think there could be something like a "work album"? A reflection of common style typical for a limited time period of the life of its creator. What if a portfolio isn't a consistent style throughout an entire life, but a collection of many work albums (something to which we return often)? Where does one end and another one start? Which pieces fit together and why? Whenever I look at websites presenting portfolios, the answers to these questions often remain unclear to me. That's strange, because my own work has probably been "periodic" in one form or another. A possible reason why perfectly polished portfolios don't look natural to me. But they seem to be of the type people enjoy most.
- Initially, I liked having straight edges in graphs. Simple to construct, beautiful, existence of force-directed layouts, visible intersections, available metrics like betweenness / closeness / eigenvector centrality, counting of cliques / connected components. But then, at least it appeared to me, the real world is less than linear. To go from A to B, someone may need to travel around, depending on which road is currently under construction. This trajectory can take any shape, which a straight edge cannot capture well. We may assume that just because there is a theoretical connection, a real one exists too, but an obstacle on the way may prevent the driver from moving towards the destination and force it to return to the last, known to be good location (A). On a graph we can only increase the weight to communicate that the cost of passing through the edge has increased (or remove the edge altogether), but we need to have prior knowledge about that where in reality someone needs to have been in the situation that asked for the change in the model, which is then eventually communicated after the fact and once again has temporal nature. Our world is not certain, but the certainty of the straight line is somehow embedded; to add more realism to the path, we would need significantly more detail (think how many point coordinates you would need to describe a long, winding Bezier curve), which is expensive to obtain, maintain and compute with. So we fall back to the straight edges with questionable weights.
- The countless algorithms with fancy names do not change the fact that classification and regression remain only two. And it is not very surprising that when we find new data and attempt to hammer it with these two nails only, we leave out a lot of potential insight undiscovered (opinion).
- "People are good at generalizing newly acquired knowledge". As long as the assumptions are clearly communicated, this may be a lesser problem than staying absolutely silent due to the risk of potential errors or a flawed logic. (Not everyone may agree with this.) If you believed that floats are extremely accurate, machine learning always 100% correct, all algorithms exact (never approximate), Bayesian networks always perfectly capable of quantifying uncertainty, mathematical modeling always precise in describing real-world phenomena or all papers ever written had no mistakes, you are in it for a surprise. The fact that we continue to use all these tools and resources despite their limitations tells us something. Therefore, please do not hesitate to commicate clearly (even your generalizations), but be highly selective and remain open for feedback.
- Budgets are also frequently cited in large, bulk numbers, which normal people have a hard time to comprehend. Much easier to speak in front of others when noone understands you rather than make the effort to explain what this budget means to a concrete person. There is also an increased risk of conflict if these people see an element of injustice that applies specifically to them.
- "Hundreds of trillions" is a strangely incomprehensible phrase to find in two separate, independent articles. The one describing the possible number of bacteria in the gut and the other the possible number of neurons in the brain. (Unfortunately, I haven't kept the references.) Whether there could be a connection between the two is hard to say, but I remember creating a graphic trying to hint about that. Back then I didn't suspect that the numerics might also agree, at least superficially; this could simply be my own confirmation bias. But the common theme is that at such scale even supercomputers are said to have a hard time. Sufficient reason to keep a secret from the DOM.
- Someone created a great interactive tube map of London bit.ly/2lPh1OM, showing the stations by historical daily entries and exits. Much better than my own attempt from a while ago.
- Locations of the bottle banks in Berlin bit.ly/2z6rxuw
- I don't like watching films, but do you think some of these could be interesting? bit.ly/2z6mKco
- NO2 measurements (air quality) at three locations (out of five) in Bath, UK (08.07.2014 - 02.07.2018) bit.ly/2lNURwg (Source: "Bath: Hacked", "Historical Air Quality Sensor Data", bit.ly/2z4gbXZ). Wanted to include more locations and criteria, but almost half of the parameters had missing values.
- When you see this function bit.ly/2zc8Tl9, do you think in terms of two lines of code?
- "I have not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that don't work" - Thomas Edison
- Still "affected" by Keith Devlin's blog post on using math to improve the design of a bicycle, which I saw yesterday. The Wikipedia page he pointed to was highly informative as well. I think this touched in a great way on the possibilities of mathematical modeling. It is exciting to be able to see more such real-world applications. Examples of deep thinking, complex system representations, testing from first principle and writing of custom software with the goal of optimization. If someone can point me to more resources like this, I'd be grateful.
- The sunny exponential sum seems to work fine bit.ly/2lNrdHm
- Who knows, it is probably even possible to combine computer science with medicine and statistics bit.ly/2z1ioU6. Can you think of something concrete when you see such combinations for the first time and would it work if implemented? Can a combination of subjects describe the way you see your work?
- As seen on HackerNews, Microsoft released new data on building footprints in all US states bit.ly/2tVsWyh (scroll down to see it). In the past, I also looked at some building footprints in some cities (find the links if interested), yet never at such scale. Ran "top" to see how fast the decoding of the big JSON file will deplete my machine's resources and as expected saw that this won't work. But sharing the link here means that hopefully someone else will be able to do what I couldn't and structure a meaningful and valuable article around their findings.
- Superfoodly has published Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) values of some foods (as of 16.01.2018), so I looked to see whether I can discover something interesting bit.ly/2yUZvCf. As you can see in this partial view, three different spices had dramatically higher values when dried compared to when they were in fresh condition. This is new to me, usually assuming that fresh food is always better. Also, canola oil was given with slightly higher value than extra virgin olive oil. But even so I noticed that the maximal value in the oils category was at approximately the same level as a mid value in the olives category. This means that by processing the olives into oil, potentially useful ingredients may be lost (or so the logic of a non-professional). For nuts, pecans had the highest ORAC value, but I never saw one. I looked specifically for the more common nut types and their top-down order—walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, peanuts, cashews. Similarly, never saw an Indian Gooseberry (Amla Berry) which has a very high value. But for some other common berry types, the order was chokeberries, elderberries, wild blueberries, cranberries, mulberries, blackberries, red raspberries, blueberries, goji berries, strawberries. Of the seeds, cumin and black chia seeds made good impression (the latter having a 5.14x lower value).
- Common environmental noise levels according to the Central for Hearing and Communication bit.ly/2z2S1Ng. A crying baby is said to be equivalent to someone shouting in your ear or having a disco at home. Notice how the tractor and the electric drill must also give up against it. Sadly, normal conversation appears almost at the bottom of the list, meaning that many other noise types in the environment can easily silence it.
- Libraries in Raleigh, North Carolina bit.ly/2tR2wO8
- Max power vs. module efficiency (STC) for LG and Jinko solar panels bit.ly/2lKxtQv. The LG solar panels seem more differentiated, whereas Jinko Solar offers many panels from different series with very similar max power and efficiency characteristics. Sometimes this difference can be as small as 5W of max power. Currently we see that both companies achieve maximal efficiencies with panels whose max power is not the highest, but falls in the mid range, which is interesting. When we also account for the panel width and height, but leave out depth, then the Eagle PERC 48 series from Jinko Solar looks most promising. The model JKM240M-48 with dimensions 132.4cm x 99.2cm weighs only 14.8kg and has 240W max power at 18.27% efficiency. If we also account for depth (total volume), then the Eagle Dual 60 series starts to look interesting. The model JKM285PP-60-DV has a thickness of only 6mm (many oher panels have 40mm) and reaches 285W max power at 17.33% efficiency. Unfortunately, this comparison is incomplete as long as the products of many other companies are left out, but it highlights how we could use all existing data to support our decisions.
- Calm nesting levels are much easier to follow than overly excited ones. The second can be seen as a less obvious form of a bad code smell. Possibly worth mentioning.
- Always wanted to know about my brain mass index bit.ly/2tMesjW
- Glad that I was able to come up with so many and diverse ideas and implement them in reasonable time. Thousands of small pieces of functionality. If you wish to have something a lot bigger, specifically made for you, according to your requirements, it will be hard to avoid the big price tag. Working with dummerAugust has never been cheap.
- Simple dot product of two patterns bit.ly/2ySDrYS
- Learning from the annual reports of the airport in Sydney bit.ly/2yR0q6q. Looking the one for the year 2017 will also expose you to some beautiful design. My only problem is that for some reason I cannot stand thick, bold fonts for too long and frequently struggle to find a good balance where I have to use a bold font. Perhaps this is why font families exist, but they may not always be available to the designer.
- Historical performance of some indicators of NXP semiconductor (2013 - 2017) bit.ly/2lE6FkH. The source of the data are the annual reports provided by the company.
- Couldn't learn much from the Samsung's annual report. Looked specifically for performance breakdown by sector, but I might have missed it. However, they mentioned three devices which I didn't know about: a small 850g laptop (NP900X3L), a big 27" monitor with 36% lower energy consumption (LS27E65UDS) and a large 15.36TB SAS SSD on 48-layer 256GB V-NAND. I need to read less.
- Revenue and market capitalization of some semiconductor companies (as of 03.01.2018) bit.ly/2lGzPQ0
- Walt Disney segment revenue and operating income (2015 - 2017) bit.ly/2lIgvBX
- Some litmus strips for a quick proof how far some websites have deviated from the 8s rule (for some it's a 1s rule) bit.ly/2yPTNkQ. These results were obtained on latest Chrome—imagine what would happen with an old browser. Seems that many companies have gone too far by being indifferent to the amount of content they post and the scripts they load. Speed has either lost its priority number or they want to convince us that they can't afford to find and hire at least one great web designer. When bad practices are rewarded, but good ones aren't, this leads to some measurable consequences.
- if you want me to work on your project, consider using the contact page and meeting the standards described there. They haven't changed much since dummerAugust started, but if you assumed that the page is already old, simply because of not being recently updated, you would be wrong. The basics always remain the same.
- A look at the hotels in Toronto listed on booking.com bit.ly/2tJEG6C
- Net sales by sector for DowDuPont (2015 - 2017) bit.ly/2lDkwHO
- Net sales by sector for Procter & Gamble, 2017 bit.ly/2lB9enJ
- First time seeing the interesting idea of using vertical wind turbines to capture car-induced wind. Not sure how useful it can be on congested roads, with speed restrictions or with no easy connections to a grid. Not a driver myself, but I find that having something spin consistently at the front can possibly be mentally exhausting.
- With some simple code and CSS/multi-column layout I shrinked all the food additives listed on Wikipedia (see E numbers) to a two-page document bit.ly/2tF5rJE. Green means this additive is approved in at least one place, red that it has been banned (or is in the process) in at least one place. Interesting reference to refer to before the next Exxx appears in sight.
- Ariel, Persil, Tide or Perwoll? Why? Any chance that poorly rinsed cloth contains enough chemicals to affect our health?
- Numeric look at Cadbury sweet products bit.ly/2yI1h9z
- Libraries in Long Beach, California bit.ly/2lvoSku. Twelve in less than 20kB.
- Slightly surprised to see how much bigger "Gates of the Arctic" is compared to the other US national parks bit.ly/2yGgCra
- "More than 96% of the citizens in Hong Kong use mobile phones to access the Internet every day." In some other countries it is either too expensive to have a good mobile phone, too expensive to pay the monthly bill, or too expensive to have Internet on-the-go. This three-level "system" has been conveniently designed to maximize the number of people going into debt.
- Cell radius in cellular communication systems (log scale) bit.ly/2lBbEm1. Starting to understand why some telecom operators are complaining about their infrasrtructure costs.
- Range and current consumption of some wireless technologies as seen in a paper bit.ly/2tBILtE
- A student estimated through mathematical modeling the efficiency of a water irrigation system and used this to find the cost of water overuse in local terms for a local project that was using many sprinklers.
- Building energy benchmark, Washington DC: Source EUIs bit.ly/2lvqIle (Source: dc.gov, bit.ly/2tCV9Ka). Relatively few buildings differ from the common values by a large margin.
- Hardware seems to be much simpler to sell than software, which might be a good reason why 34 of the top 100 most innovative companies were in this sector compared to only 6 in software (Clarivate Analytics report, 2017). It is much simpler to show a physical product that can be touched and felt rather than try to explain to an audience what your software does, how it can be used, which advantages it has or why it is needed. With software, there is always some degree of misunderstanding about what is included in the price or for how long, the expectation being that it covers the maintenance as well. And clients often think they know what good software looks like, believing that it is the new, trendy, highly starred or recommended product (none of these). When they come with the wrong expectations, they stimulate the good programmers to leave the profession, showing no appreciation of their work. Observe how many new gadgets were created in the last year compared to how many software products became widely known and used in the same period. One question arose in my mind the other day while walking: "In a tight economy, where everyone has to work most of the time, who is going to be able to sit down and spend time at login screens? Who will actually use that software and for how many minutes?" Remember that when some software companies thrived at first, there was frequently an "immersive user experience" element about their creations: people could sit down and spend hours of their time looking at a screen of streaming content, opportunities to contribute and get noticed. But this also means that in a world where many do not have the time, the stable base of the existing software may start to erode and new software may not be able to gain sufficient support to thrive. Hopefully, an assumption. But this possibly further strengthens the hardware industry. Devices which fully integrate into our lives tend to be more visible and memorable. They will be there even without an internet connection, without electricity, without an on-screen interface. And if this trend continues, programmers will have to be increasingly occupied with them and deal with this new looming variety rather than with the concrete, device-unrelated problems of other human beings. The question whether we need so much new hardware is not too different from whether we need so many new frameworks or even programming languages.
- The publication ITRI Today, No.93 mentions that microLED displays can have more than 2000ppi resolution, more than 20000 nits brightness, low power dissipation and no backlight source. Compared to usual LCD/OLED TV screens, this could save 90% of the energy consumption. One such display was demonstrated at Computex 2018. In other words, sleep well and find yourself progressively obsolete.
- Vienna's air quality sensors show very low median PM25 and PM25.1 values today: 2.79 and 3.53. It's a weekend day, but I doubt that this is the only factor.
- Parking place utilization in Nottingham, UK bit.ly/2yAU62U. Tried to scale the map according to the view in Google Maps; you likely know better whether this looks well. But in all cases, it can be considered approximate.
- Good to see that according to the operating budget data for 2018, the City of Toronto is planning to have a well-balanced budget bit.ly/2lvziR6. You can see the planned revenues and expenses by category, where results having a zero were excluded from the view. Reminding myself that a balanced budget is perhaps more helpful than a pure focus on higher revenue or expense suppression.
- Parking place utilization of UParks in Adelaide, Australia bit.ly/2tuydfV (Source: City of Adelaide, "UPark Car Parks - Available Spaces", bit.ly/2ltaQQo). Could be slightly slower than usual. Shows only the available spaces.
- Plotting the telecommunication network in Lille, France bit.ly/2yvKKVZ (Source: "Réseaux de télécommunication", bit.ly/2lu9wfP)
- Thought about trying to find electronic components with some favorable property within the sea of existing options. For instance, voltage regulators with low quiescent current. Not sure whether someone would be interested in this, but a circuit designer might be. (An electronic designer claimed in a post that the designers were not designing anymore, but simply joining parts together. I thought that this is perhaps not a unique observation, but one that could easily transfer to web design as well.) Unfortunately, Mouser does not make it very simple to parse the characteristics of the components on sale. They use divs for tabular data, where the div of each row contains a class whose name ends with a number indicating the index of that row. But if we look across several components, we will see that sometimes some rows are missing, which means that selecting by the same index could possibly lead to inconsistent results. I was hoping to have more universal and non-ambiguous means of selection; thinking of regular expressions does not calm me down.
- Selected traffic camera images from Surrey, Canada (21.06.2018) bit.ly/2yyMIFa (Source: City of Surrey Traffic Operations Department, bit.ly/2lqMRBq). Much better to look through the "eyes" of a city during the day. The number of available cameras is over 200, which is why only some are shown here. The page is static; refresh it to see other views.
- Historical pavement condition index (PCI) of various streets in San Francisco (via DataSF) bit.ly/2lqH0fm. Between 2010 and 2011 the quality of many street segments seems to have visibly improved, but between 2012 and 2017 most streets were said to have a PCI index in the range 75-85. The last year also marks significant improvements of some street segments. We see that few which previously had an index of ≈25 quickly rose to 100. Such sharp improvement seems unique when we observe the entire period after 2000.
- t-SNE on the scores from the "Academic ranking of world universities" bit.ly/2lpPO4W (Source: bit.ly/2tsqSgK). Only the first 100 universities are shown. Please, see the original source to understand the arrangement.
- Used the Australian Energy Update 2017 report to create this stacked bar chart of the total energy consumption by industry in this country bit.ly/2tvJRHB. Renewable energy production is increasing, but what surprised me was to learn that Tesla has completed the largest Li-Ion battery in South Australia (Hornsdale Power Reserve).
- A short video showing past public art in Tacoma, WA (28.7MB) bit.ly/2yoTJsj (Source: Office of Arts & Cultural Vitality, "Tacoma Public Art Tour", bit.ly/2ytKkj6). There are 191 images (few unavailable) with a total size of 4.6MB. One reason the video became so big could be the large screen area recorded. As you can see, scrolling was not very smooth.
- Slowly developing interest in mathematical modeling lately (reducing my code output accordingly). Code frequently contains math models too, but they are too intransparent and known only to the developer who implemented the idea in several lines of code, combining individual letter-variables, whose meaning only they know. But it's exactly this meaning that is interesting, as it allows us to see how the parameters are related (as a very simplified example, consider period and frequency) in the model. Reading letters only all day long is anything but creatively stimulating and I feel that it harms my ability to think clearly. (It also did so when I started programming.) In a known mathematical model we can at least use our intuition and judgement to identify why the elements are connected in a particular way, whether one or more unknown ones are missing or whether there are too many. And it is especially enriching to look at models from a variety of fields, describing a variety of situations, environments, complex systems, decisions and assumptions. Pure code cannot capture the essence of this thinking (sometimes filling entire papers and books), it simply gives it another, machine-understandable representation. By reading only the code we are often observing the effect, while the actual cause may remain hidden to us.
- Non-negative matrix factorization of the data describing the pedestrian footfall in Dublin city centre (25-34 week, 2014) bit.ly/2ypSMQj. Intuitively, if a point is far from the most dense point cloud(s), then it must be the most dissimilar to them. Points at the upper right corner seem to be such; we see that they correspond to the locations Grafton St at Card Gallery and Grafton St at M&S. Now, if we return and look specifically for these locations in the data, we will see that during peak times in some days they have registered ≈4000 pedestrians in a single hour, which is much more compared to the other locations. Update: The result of scaling the data followed by independent component analysis is also available bit.ly/2tndMS6.
- Cost of Li-Ion batteries over time bit.ly/2tieZKl. They expect that the price could still halve until 2025 (after almost halving in the years 2015-2017). In absolute terms, however, it may seem that the pace of innovation is slowing.
- Some land parcels in Philadelphia bit.ly/2ylKmJQ (data: City of Philadelphia, Department of Planning and Development, bit.ly/2lfWse3). The map appears slightly distorted since I did not check the proper aspect ratio initially. These are slightly less than 10% of all parcels; doing much more on my machine would be infeasible. However, plotting detail-rich maps made of polygons frequently gives nice results.
- Historic annual average daily traffic (AADT) of the busiest street in New York since 1977 bit.ly/2liWG4g according to on.ny.gov/2tgyOSr. Only this street meets the criteria of having AADT more than 200000 in all examined years. But its label reads "GEO WASHINGTON between NJ LINE G WASHINGTON BR RT and END 1/9/95I OLAP START 1/95I", which Google does not seem to find. For some reason I have a hidden feeling that it tries to describe the George Washington Bridge, which has its separate Wikipedia page bit.ly/2tiPyZj, containing the gem "... the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge" and describing on the right which areas it connects. I knew about the Brooklyn Bridge, but not about this one. When I saw the picture, my first reaction was that I must be looking at the Los Angeles bridge...
- Great websites do not monopolize the CPU and their designers care deeply about the scripts they execute in order to show the buttons on the page. Because if they don't, their competitors will. During the work on the last bit I was slowed down on several occasions, which makes me even happier now that I finished. Still, this could have been faster. Perhaps not every suitcase or backpack needs to have a hover animation showing what is inside once it opens.
- Comparing suitcases and backpacks bit.ly/2yn4Di0
- Plotting the Montreal's road network and a close-up bit.ly/2lgeHjK (data: "Service des infrastructures, de la voirie et du transport - Division de la géomatique", "Géobase - réseau routier", bit.ly/2lj1oix). Took an hour on a slow machine despite the optimized code.
- Library attendance by branch in Montreal, Canada (01.01.2012 - 31.12.2017) bit.ly/2lgiiyc
- Trees in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2tfrdDA. The given median age is relative to the current date. Had to translate from French and fix dates with Vim.
- I usually browse with the soundcard turned off, not just sound level set to zero. A minor detail that makes me avoid something I use rarely and allows me to stay concentrated on my current activity. On the one side, automatically played videos can't reach me, but on the other, voices in videos frequently remain mysterious to me. Which is why normally I hope to see a transcript as an alternative content (like the "alt" in images).
- Suggestions how to improve a paper: have a short "meta" description (3 sentences at most in normal font weight, using sufficient margin that would make it stand out from the body); remove the extensive list of names, reference numbers and years at the start of the body (keep a reference at the end); very clearly indicate the problem you are trying to solve (use as much bold but only on as few words as possible) and why solving it is important at all; keep a well-structured exposition; describe your approach in depth without omitting important/relevant details (think about reproducibility); avoid or at least reduce near-duplicate content (e.g. images filtered to a slightly different effect/progress frames); batch content types (or avoid frequent switches between text and images/diagrams); avoid keyword stuffing (also check whether you assume pre-existing knowledge); omit phrases like "In this paper...", "our result is better than..."; reduce unnecessary words; avoid theorems and proofs if possible (but have them at the end for those who are interested); do not extend mathematical reductions over several pages (simplify, simplify); express formulas in words instead of variables where possible; choose a less pretentious word than "conclusion" for your final paragraph where you explan your result and take a moment to evaluate its vitality and fitness for real-world applications; finish with a small thank-you to the people who helped you and the organizations who sponsored your research, if any. Be wary that a bad font or inconsistent letter-spacing can decrease readability; ensure that at common-percentage zoom (e.g. 200%, 250% or 300%) the text fits a small-screen 4:3 frame neither leaving too much white space, nor too little (or negative in case of disappearing text at the start and end of each line). You may disagree on some points or I might have missed some other, important details.
- The nature of relationships is that they tend to atrophy over time when some external force does not keep them constantly refreshing. Many people forget this, start taking their connections for granted and then wonder where some people disappeared (possibly attaching some bad labels to them). Noone owes you anything; if you weren't present enough, feel free to live happily with your other connections. Once you are (unexpectedly) removed, consider it permanent.
- As they say, "you always get what you pay for". Or not. This does not exactly describe how I work; people who tried to start a project with me in the past know that they can't necessarily expect it. And if for some reason they take my availability for granted, they may find themselves with plenty of options. Better to have slightly more scared clients than ones who approach me as if any behavior should be possible.
- Do you think that AI can be part of an elevator so that it learns how to behave based on the time of the day, the past usage patterns and the current combination of requests to move between the floors? So that it anticipates users and stays as close as possible to them? At the very least, do you think that it could it be a good idea, when left idle for a while, to transition it to the center of the height, so that people at the top/bottom floor have to wait half the time for it? Or is this undesirable due to potentially higher maintenance and electricity costs?
- Libraries in Madison, Wisconsin bit.ly/2yibY2C. The city becomes narrow in the middle (between the two lakes Monona and Mendota) and it also seems to have lots of trees, where a small street on the "thin area" going to something like a plaza has an above average concentration.
- The advantage of a library (like WU) providing the data about its catalogue is that you can type a single line of code and obtain all the results you were interested in (only the signal), in less than a second. If you were to access the data from the web site, you had to load the interface, the supporting libraries (back-end and front-end), the images, the spinner animations, the trackers/ads and the section telling you what else people like you liked in the past. Sometimes even more than that.
- Strange how some websites rank and show content based on "relevance". Isn't relevance something that only the visitor can determine according to their needs?
- Looked at a boxplot showing 65 variable distributions.
- Productivity index per hour worked in various industries in Austria (01.2015 - 02.2018) bit.ly/2l31MRR (Source: Statistik Austria, bit.ly/2sXASOM). Dealing with waste had the highest absolute index value achieved, but there were other industries which were more stable over time, where productivity has remained consistently high (as you can see in the diagram). Notice how big the difference between manufacture of other transport equipment and of wearing apparel seems to be.
- Does this hospital minimize the internal paths for the patient?
- Straight-line path and intermediate stations of ICE 707 from Berlin to Munich bit.ly/2y6lVzO. Considering distance traveled per time, the short segment between Erlangen and Nürnberg seems to be the slowest on this route, followed by Nürnberg-Donauwörth.
- Number of outgoing flights by carrier and destination from Pittsburgh International Airport (Dec 2017 - Apr 2018) bit.ly/2y5Zmve (Source: "Pittsburgh International Airport - Scheduled passenger traffic", bit.ly/2l0FVum). Not quite clean, but at least some destinations for which all five values for all periods were known are visible. American had most flights to Charlotte, Delta to Atlanta, United to Newark and Southwest to Chicago (Midway).
- Good to see that the city of Pittsburgh currently values the overall benefits of all its trees at 4.33 million dollar. I was wondering which ones were the highest contributors to this astonishing result and created a small rank with the median values for each tree type bit.ly/2l0P2vc (Source: bit.ly/2l5LS9s). What comes surprising is that within the 30 most appreciated tree types, 8 are different types of oaks and 3 are poplars. Yet, only "Oak: Pin" and "Oak: Northern Red" appear in the top 15 most common trees. The first has 1667 exemplars and is the 8th most comon tree and the second has 973 exemplars and is the 12th most common tree. The city has 45279 trees, 3707 of which are "Maple: Norway" and 3417 are "Maple: Red", defining the landscape accordingly.
- Pedestrian and bike counts on the Elliott Bay Trail in Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle (01.01.2014 - 31.05.2018) bit.ly/2y3qDyd (Source: SDOT, bit.ly/2l1dInh). The seasonal cycling window has opened once again.
- Highest source EUIs by building type in Seattle, 2015 bit.ly/2l1lkWQ. The lowest energy requirements had worship facilities and non-refrigerated warehouses (median source EUIs of 59.2 and 60.7); the highest—supermarkets/grocery stores and medical offices (median source EUIs of 608.6 and 225.6).
- Daily maximums and weekly medians of bicycle counts at Fremont Bridge in Seattle bit.ly/2l18eJ9 (Source: Seattle Department of Transportation, bit.ly/2sZ11No)
- Comparison of water surface degree temperature and pH at two locations in Queensland, Australia bit.ly/2l00neK (Source: Environment and Science, Queensland Government, bit.ly/2sZUW30). The spikes could be due to measurement errors or unusual situations.
- This chatbot informed me of train delays in some cities in Switzerland bit.ly/2l04I1H. Zurich and Lausanne had no delays, but I was lucky to find one in Basel.
- Theoretical transfer speeds of some wireless standards bit.ly/2l3HbNr. Seems that 802.11n served well for a while.
- Some people connect summer with beach time. But bathing without knowing what we expose ourselves to is not a good idea in general. Sometimes, checking the daily beach water quality forecast may not be enough; we could also see historical data about a given beach. This is what the UK environment agency provides, for instance. As you can see bit.ly/2l4O1SB, one of the beaches was in more than 50% of the cases with increased risk level for swimmers. Some beaches had 0% such cases, but they were examined only 15 times, so I decided to exclude them from the data. But there are plenty of other beaches which went through many probes and were in most cases found in normal condition. You can also see a comparison of the water quality of three selected beaches over time bit.ly/2xYZtbV. The most frequent reasons cited for the risk of reduced water quality were heavy rain, animal waste, system tests (possibly involving the water purifiers), oil spills/leakages, dredging, sewage, harmful algae.
- Feature importances determining the "product class" (a number) of an air conditioner sold in Australia (from sample data) bit.ly/2y0nsr3. If I understood correctly, EER and COP are ratios related to cooling and heating efficiencies. For instance, Mitsubishi SRK20ZSXA-W had EERtestAvg of 6.4373 and COPtestAvg of 5.9745 (ranked first). From the result we see that in this case physical depth of the air conditioner seemed to be slightly more important than EERtestAvg in determining the product class. Could it be that greater depth improves the performance of the device? Width was the least important from the three dimensions and EER may have been collected inconsistently.
- You probably remember how beautiful variable-width lines can be bit.ly/2y8Pnp9
- When most inventors lived (according to Wikipedia) bit.ly/2kXcadU. The years between 1920 and 1930 look interesting. Note that this diagram is mostly about the past and tells nothing about the future. The data may also be incomplete, omitting some notable names. Now, we could go further and develop a graph of the connections among the inventors who lived around 1930 to see how many of them knew each other and how this has influenced their work.
- Electricity used in the residential sector in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (1990 - 2015) bit.ly/2xZBjxP (Source: "Open data Newfoundland and Labrador")
- Locations with highest cumulative amounts from parking tickets in Regina, Canada (03.01.2006 - 05.06.2016) bit.ly/2l0QsG5 (Source: City of Regina, "Parking services – outstanding parking tickets", bit.ly/2xYnvDM). Google thinks that "U of R" means University of Regina.
- Annual program attendance and total circulation in Ontario libraries, 2016 bit.ly/2l0gSaH (Source: "Ontario public library statistics", bit.ly/2BUa2gU)
- Median household income and median gross rent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2008 - 2015) bit.ly/2kW7XXU (Source: Milwaukee Open Data, "Economic data")
- Libraries in Tampa, Florida bit.ly/2l0nRAu
- Total program attendance by age group at the Memphis Public Library (01.07.2014 - 01.04.2018) bit.ly/2xZNGdq. The number of young entrepreneurs is increasing.
- Selected Texas performance indicators bit.ly/2kZydRl. Uses data from the Texas regional economic snapshots.
- "All-in" programming does not help much, because once that "all" is changed, you have to start once again at position zero (like when the syntax gets changed). Exactly what happened to me years ago with JavaScript 6+. This was the red light to start becoming much more well-rounded rather than investing all my time in a single technology, always chasing (but being unable to catch) the latest developments. Since then I also follow the "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" rule. And if someone asks me to use specific frameworks, I view this as an extra.
- Strange question, but do you believe that working with/on materials (wood, plastics, silicates, concrete) could be connected with higher PM2.5 emissions?
- Feature correlation, Toronto economics 2011 bit.ly/2kVHfyC. More businesses looks highly correlated with higher local employment. Higher home prices seems moderately corelated to higher debt risk scores. The same type of diagram, related to transportation bit.ly/2y3BmZQ, shows that the more stops there are, the more road kilometers one might expect. The road kilometers themselves were well correlated (0.78) with increased number of traffic collisions.
- Three locations in Toronto linked with high collected parking fines in 2016 bit.ly/2xTwmXv. While looking for their geocoordinates, I didn't expect that a zoom on the map will show some cars parked nearby. Ah, well. The second location registered the highest number of parking tickets (9 x 40 each).
- Toronto city wards, said to become effective at 01.12.2018 bit.ly/2sUavJF
- Electricity and gas usage at half-hour intervals in 38 schools in Dundee, Scotland (12.03.2016 - 12.03.2018) bit.ly/2xV6xX4 (data: Dundee City Council, bit.ly/2kZkkmg). All values on the y axes are given in kWh, where the value in each thirty-minute bin is the median of all values in all days for that hour. Orange describes the first year of the study while blue—the second. As this is a lot of data, you might question whether it is appropriate to see it all at once. For exploratory reasons, when we look for better understanding first, we may choose to look at the overall pattern (no matter how large) from a distance. This in itself could show an interesting pattern on which we can then narrow down. In our case, we see that 5-6 schools are using the most electricity, approaching a median of 100kW per hour. Similarly, 4-5 schools are using the most gas, approaching a median of 200kW per hour (probably an equivalent). Once we know this, we can filter out schools that appear less interesting and focus on telling an engaging story about the rest. We could look for behaviors by the hour or seek to relate the data to actions that were taken by the time. It is rare to see such logging effort that is broadly inclusive and deeply detailed at the same time. A sufficient reason to give credit to the organizers here.
- Street lights in Dundee, Scotland bit.ly/2xS5oiZ (source: Dundee City Council, bit.ly/2xXmjAG). Shows only the lamps with known or easily extractible wattage, where a bigger point size represents higher wattage. Although somewhat hard to see, there are some areas with higher requirements. The total wattage of the lamps shown here is 1.644MW.
- Having a subset of many parameters that are repeatedly passed to the same function in a tight loop may not be optimal. If there was a way to define them once outside the loop and then reuse the definition on each function call, this could reduce the communication needs. Learned about rcParams, but in my case I had parameters which had no equivalent key in this dictionary. Which unfortunately brought me back to the inefficient, but at least tried and tested approach.
- Motor vehicle accidents in Hartford, Connecticut since 2005 bit.ly/2sSg8rM. This shows the data touched upon in the last bit, the approach having both positives and drawbacks. Using PIL with some manual scaling and custom functions to interpolate between colors (here blue for events far in the past and red for more recent events), it takes less than a minute to draw all points (compared to the previously estimated three hours). The drawback is that the points are fully opaque, so the red ones overlap most of the blue ones. I chose to plot in event date order, which gives most recent events an unfair visual advantage.
- Suppose that you saw data on vehicle accidents and had the idea to show their locations using color to encode their recency. Showing all points if they had the same style would require a single function call, which would be almost immediate; showing per-point colors seems to require many function calls, which can sometimes become slow. You run the code, but it never ends. You then look more carefully: there are 88359 events. This does not seem too much, so what could be wrong? You decide to inspect the behavior of your plotting library (Matplotlib or something else) on your machine, resetting a performance counter every time a batch of 1000 points has been plotted, logging the time this took. You plot the number of points processed so far against the time and see the following diagram bit.ly/2kXQL4e. After 39000 points you notice that adding 1000 more took more than 100 seconds, equivalent to less than 10 points/sec. Yet, at that time there are still 48000 points more to plot! You try to estimate the total time instead, using ridge regression on the data you just generated, optimistically assuming preservation of linearity at scale. It tells you that coming from 87000 to 88000 points would take additional 227.48 seconds (4.39 points/sec). At the end you sum all times observed and all times predicted in the whole interval after that, keeping the 1000 increment. You divide by 3600 and come to ≈2.815 hours. Whether the result could be so beautiful as to justify 3 hours spent on it (the show function also takes time), is something everyone has to decide for themselves. At least we saw how slow plotting can be; improving the time it takes, especially at scale, could add significant value.
- Some performance indicators of library branches in Boulder, Colorado (01.01.2014 - 01.12.2017) bit.ly/2xSCzTr
- Drinking fountains in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2kYIPQm. In case it is hot outside and you need some refreshing options.
- Libraries in San Antonio, TX bit.ly/2kZSJ4p. Made in a hurry and it shows.
- A short path passing through many universities in Germany bit.ly/2sNxGFC. I suspect that some universities are missing, which is why I am not using the word "shortest". The initial idea was to create a minimum spanning tree.
- Information about some provinces in Italy bit.ly/2kVCN32. There are over hundred provinces, so I could not capture them all on my small screen while still having their labels visible. Used data from Wikipedia bit.ly/2xM3pfY.
- A small fraction of the buildings in Linz, Austria bit.ly/2xQOcKz (Source: CC-BY-3.0: Stadt Linz - data.linz.gv.at). There is also a TIFF file weighting over 320MB in case someone is willing to print the map of Linz. Not sure whether printers would handle an image of such size without problems.
- Trees in Grenoble, France bit.ly/2sR5bqG
- Food hygiene ratings of some businesses in Camden, UK (02.01.2010 - 31.10.2017) bit.ly/2sNbMlA. The Food Standards Agency has given high marks to most businesses in all four criteria: hygiene score, structural score, confidence in management score and rating value. Taking away the rating score, structural score tends to be highest, followed by the confidence in management score and the hygiene score. Red points indicate high scores, blue points refer to low scores.
- Available parking spaces yesterday night in Camden, UK bit.ly/2JgeOu0. Higher availability can be seen in the North, lower in the South. Observe what happens at latitude of 51.53.
- Soft drink consumption in the UK (2010 - 2015) bit.ly/2JdJV9i. Good to see more people switching to bottled water instead of carbonates and dilutables (the two top categories by the time). Coca-Cola is probably the most well-known carbonate brand; Step is one of the few dilutables I know about. For some reason, the consumption of fruit juices (said to contain "100% fruit") has slightly declined, while that of energy drinks has increased. The first column shows in absolute terms that people consumed almost twice as much carbonates as bottled water.
- Already saw several interactive walkthroughs of buildings that were quite impressive. Thinking about whether the hotel industry wouldn't also benefit from them—by letting people look before they book. My services don't offer such level of interactivity, but I noticed on several occassions a minor, yet annoying detail when the smooth animations finished at a static Youtube video, waiting for a click to proceed. Not only did the Youtube logo appear very different in that context (inside a video about a building), but also the fact that one video was waiting on another. Not natural to a viewer; less smooth transitions between the stories. This decision could have been made to reduce the load time (longer videos are heavier), but the experience becomes a sequence of discrete events rather than continuously smooth.
- Seeing formulas defined in natural language instead of one-letter variables or numbers helps me understand them more easily. Now, if I need the variables or the numbers, these are easy to substitute. But in case of one-letter variables, these have to be first used and then defined, so the eye has to scan them twice, which until recently I didn't perceive as a possible inefficiency.
- Some companies invest in lots of books, which on the surface might seem great. I also like reading a lot, but sometimes I also think more critically. Such investing may be a good way to "amortize" the high cost of acquiring and spreading the skills necessary to do the job without having to pay each employee for the effort to acquire them themselves. What this achieves is demoralizing the employees and telling them that their effort doesn't matter. Here are your books, now you are aware how little you know, so better stay silent about your salary. This "convincing and conditioning" strategy (others always know more than you) could be, I believe, the major trigger for the decline of most companies in the future. Not AI, robotics, cryptocurrencies or chatbots. Until we learn to live together and start investing in people in the way that is required to see them grow, it is not realistic to believe that the clouds over the global economy will magically dissolve themselves.
- A roof made of tiles that are a bigger version of keyboard keys looks creative. The slope is still preserved for good ergonomy. And that tile size likely makes the typing of a giant even easier. Cannot possibly think of the kind of remains to be found between the keys.
- Have you seen the "cigarette cards" in the NYPL digital collection? on.nypl.org/2sLoRMx. I like the colors and consistency across all the cards showing animals. Reminds me that each collection of stamps I have seen had its own distinct style.
- Wondering whether the owners of some carpet stores thought about placing photos online as an alternative of waiting for a client to come in person and spend a lot of time digging in the piles. My guess is that revealing the designs is not an option; otherwise it would be enough to have the them "be" the web design.
- A hierarchical sunburst diagram can be made with D3 bit.ly/2sGXIu5
- Food product annotation with the help of some SVG bit.ly/2Hpbvuv
- Area of polygon by the shoelace formula bit.ly/2kQSYi7. Good that it seems to eliminate the step of manually subdividing the n-gon into triangular pieces, seeking their individual areas (Heron) and their total sum.
- Power against cubic centimers for the vehicles from the New Zealand's fleet for 2018 bit.ly/2sHOhux (source: bit.ly/2Hk7YOc). Had to clean up the data a bit, because many vehicles were given with either zero power or zero cubic centimeters. But it is still mysterious that some vehicles with a power rating of over 700 have a very low cubic centimeter rating (these may be noise). The two most common car models in the fleet are Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux. After the cleanup, the correlation coefficient between the two features comes at 0.6935. Another not immediately obvious way to relate the features of a car would be to use a parallel coordinates diagram as seen in this case bit.ly/2sJiJEn as long as the number of models is kept reasonable.
- Footfall at various locations and times in York, UK (30.03.2009 - 28.05.2018) bit.ly/2JaXh6m. Once again uses data from the Business Intelligence Hub of the City of York Council. Coney Street seems to register a small, gradual decline in the number of people passing by. Unsure whether Parliament Street at M&S and Parliament Street are one and the same thing, especially when the two pictures show signs of being able to be merged.
- Room occupancy and average room rate in York, UK (01.04.2010 - 30.11.2017) bit.ly/2JeRixz. Prices seem to have moved up a little at the end of the previous year. The average price for the entire period came at 82.46 £, while in July 2017 a maximum of 115.09 £ was reached.
- Monthly container throughput, Singapore bit.ly/2sGXvH4
- Was not aware that vectors with known start, length and angle can be clustered similarly to points (optical flow).
- If you also experienced the problem of being unable to export your database schema from MySQLWorkbench (at least on 6.3.6, cannot speak about the latest version), it is perhaps a good idea to try this on the command line with mysqldump. I tend to forget that MySQL isn't limited to a visual, administrative interface. Forgetting about the command line in that case left my databases empty for far too long. Yes, I very much like SQLite and can use that one too, but sometimes I prefer a client-server model instead of having to deal with a physically generated file, which is not that easy to hide.
- Still astonished to look at DevTools and see that pages which used to take 400ms per request now take 150ms. In case you are using a platform like the browser, you will perhaps see your code become faster over time without being actively engaged with it. This is fascinating. Only if the quality of my code could improve faster than the quality of the platform...
- Sometimes, if you spend five more seconds on proper database design, you can save on some computation time taking the form of if statements.
- Starting the week with a simple page dedicated to the idea of reducing the number of unused buildings and machines bit.ly/2sDTQdo. If you find it valuable, feel free to use it. No registration required.
- Distance between point and line bit.ly/2sChVB0, hopefully without a mistake.
- "Public humiliation is always a demonstration of power" — from the latest issue of the Max Planck research magazine. Very well said, which is why it does not have place in our society. Unfortunately, some people at managing positions still believe they have the right to humiliate/shame others. Not surprising why their companies can't find employees and why the ones who stay, see and silently support this practice quickly lose their connection with the leaving.
- Wrote a small script to parse the top Energy Star refrigerators for 2018 and rank them according to a custom criteria bit.ly/2J5mhfp. Contains a lot of text. Notice how models of the same brand often appear close together.
- An interesting diagram bit.ly/2Hd5cKz indicating that the smallest PV installation may not be connected with the lowest cost per watt. In this case, we see that 8-10kW systems had significantly lower price than 2-4kW systems (in 2014). Beyond that point, not much gains were to be realized.
- Took some families of microcontrollers from Texas Instruments and compared their characteristics min RX current and max throughput bit.ly/2sA6w4G. Found it eye-opening that during data reception one microcontroller was said to use a minimum current of 1.8mA (assuming consistency of measurements), which my guess is, greatly extends the battery life. A maximal throughput of 5Mbps is equivalent to 625 KB/s, but it would have been interesting to see the current at this rate. Always wanted to find time to look deeper into what makes a microcontroller good and eventually look into whether I could program one. Still, the number of available options can seem overwhelming for a beginner, especially without having some way to filter them. Yesterday, I saw an issue of AnalogDialogue where ultra-low power microcontrollers were said to use current in the range of 30-40µA/Mhz and thought about how great this metric (I never heard about) is.
- Number of rainy days at the Changi climate station in Singapore (01.1982 - 03.2018) and prediction for June 2018 bit.ly/2H8NQ1r. We'll see by how much this number will deviate from the truth (and then update the model).
- Good work costs good amount of money and if a client is unable to recognize this, we will part our ways very soon.
- Appropriate air flow in a concrete example bit.ly/2H6X4LL. Please, note that I am not a specialist on the topic, but simply use the information I find and what I observe.
- In a freely available report, mass.gov created a diagram describing the opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts (2000 - 2017) bit.ly/2IVClzZ. The increase after 2010 does not seem ordinary. Even with the small decline in 2017, it still comes at 370% relative to 2010. But it's not only this state which is experiencing the problem bit.ly/2H1ifyN. Another report on.ny.gov/2sowFU9 shows that opioid-related painkillers are linked to more deaths than heroin, which I found stunning.
- "In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous." - Leonardo da Vinci. Interesting that this applies to the nature of good programming practices as well.
- Transport for London has this application showing the bike stations close to gardens of touristic interest bit.ly/2H0HEZf. What I like is that the points appear with some delay only when the user has spend time looking at the nearby text. This effectively masks the load time by giving alternative content to look at. What I slightly dislike is the delay that occurs after clicking a point—it can take 3-4 seconds to load the name of the station and its current utilization. This is partially understandable due to the large number of points, but improving responsiveness may still be possible. Additionally, showing all stations with the same marker causes the distinct information to be kept at a click distance instead of being more immediate.
- If someone uploads a personal photo and images of the clothes in their wardrobe, the algorithm should be able to help them (at least in theory) choose the clothing pieces that would create the best overall styles, ranked. Accounting for body proportions, skin color, eye color, hair style, hair color, accessories, maybe even previously rated images of outfits. Could reduce the time people spend in front of a mirror, in search of the right combination. Or the chance of combining blue shirt with red hat and green glasses.
- Beautiful and useful are necessary characteristics of almost any work that has to appear publicly. Something is missing when either of the two is missing. You would probably agree that style transfer is an amazing technique, but it is unclear how useful it is. Simply creating beautiful images, neglecting the fact how and in which contexts they can be used meaningfully marks the end of an otherwise interesting idea.
- I like how detailed the data about the restaurants in Nice, France is. Beside name, street address and geocoordinates, there is information about phone and fax, email, website, list of services, list of amenities (public parking, air conditioning, WiFi, animal-friendly, terrace etc.), atmosphere (Jazz, Latino, Lounge etc.), languages (which likely the staff understands), opening hours, capacity (broken down by group, indoor, outdoor and total), number of rooms (if available), supported payment methods. Really helpful to someone willing to invest the time to create a high-utility application. Not only that, but it also sets a very positive example about the possible dimensions existing open data can be further infused with.
- Ridge regression (assuming a linear model) on energy intensity data of European countries and some other regions to see how much it deviates from the data given for the world bit.ly/2GXRFGN. Also tried gradient boosting regression, but in this case it comes very close to the straight line. If you wonder to which country the points with a growing trend belong—they refer to the Middle East region.
- Do you think there could be some tendency in the way big corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft choose the locations of their offices? Using data from their websites and some geocoordinates (if correct), we can construct the following diagram representing the current situation bit.ly/2kxkgtC
- Realized that I haven't visited the sites of motherboard makers like ASUS and Gigabyte for years. Looked around to compare features of their latest mainboards to learn what is new and newer. What I saw instead made me let go of this idea quickly. The features were hidden behind 1) long descriptions, 2) images and clever marketing messages (Unleash your dreams...), 3) (gaming) optics and plenty of shining lights. Sad to see that they worked hard to leave the impression that the motherboard must be a gaming board. Then remembered why this might be the case. If you heard about the rewards given at some gaming competitions, you would start pulling your hair asking yourself why there aren't such rewards in science. It should then come as no surprise: what the world appreciates most, it gets more from it. Gamers, bitcoin miners and social media experts.
- Nutrient composition of four rice grain types as median values across selected EU countries bit.ly/2sjaazN. It seems that the positives I've heard about brown rice are not unfounded. Also tried to create covariance matrices between the features observed in each country bit.ly/2shGNhr, but the results look unlike other covariance matrices I have seen.
- If you want me to do something specific for you, this has its price.
- Someone said that the mark of a vibrant city is the extent to which its inhabitants perceive the problems as their own and act on them. Here is what people in Dublin report once they notice problems on the streets bit.ly/2kvVJVM. Does not include all submissions, but still gives an overview.
- Crime by type in Little Rock for 2017 bit.ly/2sialvv. Didn't expect to see so many cases in such a small city.
- A small effect of having a big, always visible, two-level horizontal navigation, followed by a body, at the bottom of which a horizontally spanned ad is shown and another footer below it, is that when looking on a small screen, this site appars as a collection of five patches of approximately equal height. You may need some "guessing time" to tell which patch belongs to the content.
- A store locator can start with an "uncalibrated" map, asking the user to drag and zoom around to find markers to click on (a challenge on a small screen). After the click, it may take one second for the spinner to show up and additional 2-3 seconds to retrieve the address of the branch. If someone clicked on three markers, they have spent 10 seconds in waiting. Information should be made conveniently accessible and searchable, not hidden behind popups and clever navigation patterns.
- Many map services start by showing a view close to the current location. I wonder how appropriate it is to load the same content every time without even asking the user. I would prefer starting from an empty screen, providing the right input to obtain the right information (also the approach seen on this site). Did this app just made me wait for something I never asked for?
- Implementing the Kesteleyn formula in very little code is well possible. That it doesn't give the same result on a sample input as presented by the author who introduced it, is slightly dissatisfying. Whenever you can, check the validity of the claims you encounter.
- Are there any products you used recently and were very satisfied with? Which ones? Did they do something differently that you found more engaging?
- Coordinates of vehicle stops in Denver which were connected with arrests bit.ly/2kq3AE9
- Libraries in Wellington, New Zealand bit.ly/2seKWCC
- "Cities with highest average salaries after taxes for workers" bit.ly/2seBcbw. Based on an article in BusinessInsider.
- Learning from Boston's CityScore bit.ly/2IJnadc. The label case and spacing as well as the diagram size aren't perfect here (trade-offs).
- Noticed something interesting about the top buildings with the highest 2016 source EUI in San Francisco (lower is better) bit.ly/2koNWsM. The median value for all buildings comes at 119.9, where seven of them exceed an EUI threshold of 1000.
- UK house price index for London and its boroughs bit.ly/2kqdeqj
- Bicycle hires in London bit.ly/2GOK8d9 (Source: Transport for London bit.ly/2GOhyJ3). The line going down at the end of the third plot indicates that 2018 is still in progress.
- You may remember one of my old attempts to build a radar chart with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (for draggable points along the dimensions). This didn't work quite well. Here is another radar chart, this time slightly more "scientific", but non-interactive bit.ly/2saP0nC
- Greenhouse gas emissions for 15-50 MPG cars bit.ly/2s71SLi. Used several data bits from the given site to compile this. Since Hyundai Ioniq, Toyota Prius Prime and Tesla model 3 were all said to have MPG >= 130, I wanted to span the curve until there, but the few available data points made it impossible to escape overfitting (at least with common methods).
- Metro stations in Melbourne and zoom on the closest five to the centroid bit.ly/2ILzxFu. People near the station "Tooronga" seem to have plenty of metro options.
- Many years ago I avoided PDFs since their relative size was heavier than the websites I visited. Today the situation has changed: these documents are now much more lightweight than the average website. Additionally, once downloaded, no additional HTTP requests are needed, no bulky frameworks are downloaded, no hundred clicks are required to move from page to page, no advertisements or popups are shown, no video/audio is started automatically. The only downside is lack of interactivity. But if websites continue to grow in size, it is possible that more people start to ask about their PDF versions.
- Levels of NO pollution at four locations in Bristol, UK (25.03.2018 - 24.04.2018) bit.ly/2IFMaC9 (data by Bristol City Council: bit.ly/2kk7Ipf). A boxplot diagram is also available bit.ly/2IIuJAK
- Learned a small trick to estimate the number of dimensions needed to capture a given level of variance in the data, so I share the code along with the credits bit.ly/2s7P7QI. On a test image, it tells me that I need only 29 dimensions to capture 95% of the variance or 7 dimensions if I can live with 80%. Somehow reminds me of the need to determine the number of clusters (k) for k-means (see silhouette coefficient). Fairly useful. Also nice is PCA(n_components=0.95). Peviously I assumed that the number of dimensions must be at least one, but was unaware that this parameter in this context can be interpreted as variance too.
- The outer product of three vectors is a cube-like tensor bit.ly/2klOfVg
- Sometimes I download things to read later, which usually never comes. Turns out that the fall 2013 issue of INNOVATION magazine (by IDSA) had an article on Tesla model S, mentioning some design/engineering decisions. The battery pack was said to be positioned under the floor, while motor and gearbox were between the wheels. Stamped aluminium for the body to reduce weight; a single moving piece (the rotor) to reduce noise (for "studio-quality sound recordings"); suspension progressively lowering the car during acceleration to improve aerodynamics; optional third-row seating; on-screen control for sound/lighting adjustments and efficiency tracking; drag coefficient of 0.24. And the idea that better engineering of each small piece quickly leads to compound results. Good description for someone who never touched the steering wheel.
- Simple pattern of squares and circle sectors bit.ly/2s4kRq4. Both use complementary black and white colors. The square size and the radius are adjustable to explore how they relate.
- Wrote some code that slightly changed the image of a dahlia bit.ly/2kedMzA
- Simple visualization of the dot product of two matrices bit.ly/2s8xBvY. Similarly, we can look at the structure of almost any matrix. For instance, if a matrix of weights is changing frequently, plotting each step may allow us to see the effects at each stage.
- Well-designed floor plans are always a pleasure to look at, especially when the purpose of each room is clearly indicated, when there is an arrow pointing from the model to current photos/videos of this room and when the whole continues with information buyers need to know about and finishes with the appropriate contact coordinates. Still rare to see an offer that skillfully draws attention through design. But I can imagine that a great web/visual designer can help a lot with that.
- A structure knows its name but still not its line fit bit.ly/2IDH2OK (code: bit.ly/2GHaFsC). Sometimes experimentation rewards with additional views bit.ly/2IEB7cs
- Implementing the Hungarian method for optimal assignment was slightly harder than I thought. In particular, the striking of the zeros in the cost matrix with the minimum number of lines can be made in many different ways. (Then went to see an existing implementation on GitHub which had several screens of code.) Mine had only 1.5 screens (including all comments) before it became intricate. And it was only for simple one-to-one assignments. Despite of this, it is still useful to know the process and be able to apply it in practice when needed. Yesterday, I learned about another case for it: "assign each paper to each available reviewer". The input could potentially be a 100x100 cost matrix, but whether someone would bother to craft it by hand is another question.
- Comparison of UK rail (National Rail) ticket prices for four selected routes bit.ly/2rZvSJc. Someone complained that the yearly ticket price between Brighton and London is expensive relative to the distance traveled, so I decided to take a look. Considering the distances between the cities (albeit on a straight line), this route shows very similar characteristics to other ones. What surprises is that currently it doesn't seem to matter much whether a ticket is for one, three or six months in terms of daily cost. This pricing scheme probably encourages people to switch to monthly or yearly tickets only. But while the difference between 7 and 30 days is small, the same cannot be said for the one between 30 and 360 days (for simplicity I assumed that each month has 30 days). The diagram shows very similar switching incentives for the two (irrespective of the route), which means that a monthly ticket could offer much more flexibility if you are ready to incur a small loss.
- Still surprised to hear how many companies throw millions after people who don't help them grow, perhaps even contribute to their decline. Then they start looking for "better" employees which cost cents and wonder why they can't find them. Things don't work that way. Market conditions.
- "Skills are always an issue. Getting top-class talent is never easy, but you can make it easier on yourself by going where the top talent is." Better to see it before you believe it. Actions speak louder than words.
- Sample storyplot bit.ly/2rZhjFm
- What is the current level of CPU utilization of your servers? A somewhat counterintuitive diagram consisting of two lines suggests that some servers can be less energy-efficient at low utilization. The power they use rises more slowly than the energy-efficiency they achieve with increasing utilization. We might think that less computation would reduce the overall energy use by a lot, while the actual effect could be much less pronounced. What decreases are both efficiency and utility since a server in an idle state is not adding much value. On the opposite, a fully utilized server can reach high efficiency and be used to create many new assets, while the increase in power usage may not be significant. (Please, feel free to verify this with your own servers and data.) Keeping utilization at around 80%, leaving 20% slack for unexpected events is perhaps a good way to balance against the possible interruptions from services executed in the background. Reminds me of the finding how some hotels regulate their used capacity at peak times—once it exceeds 80%, they start raising their prices to guarantee smooth operation. In short, having fully utilized servers may not be a bad idea if you have a steady queue of complex, high-value tasks you can assign to them.
- Code showing that eiπ = -1 bit.ly/2rZPeO6
- You may remember an attempt to show the vacant parking places in Melbourne, Australia. Pleased to see that the data was made much more digestible and fresh (updates at regular intervals), which means that it can be easily converted to a demo. But since we see this when the local time there is said to be 02:20, it is not surprising that very few places are currently occupied.
- Good to see how people in Helsinki tend to think about their libraries bit.ly/2rYQ4e4. The average of 12.36 books borrowed per year across 5.5 million readers tells about deeply ingrained reading habits—something that the new library may seek to leverage. What impresses are the photos of these well-organized places, having many small-sized bookshelves. I cannot imagine that every possible book is available there and wouldn't be surprised if they use data analysis to find out which books to load instead of trying to keep all of them—no matter how old or dusty,—in a single building, which is hard to manage. Sad to hear that so many libraries have closed in England since 2010.
- Enjoyed the excerpts from the books "Bayesian data analysis" and "Applied predictive modeling". Both seem to be well-written, but the full texts could give some wider and more useful context.
- Connections between determinant, rank and inverse of a matrix bit.ly/2k8hY3O
- "My convex skull hurts" might be a sign that you are a programmer with a headache.
- Applying non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) on an image bit.ly/2rU8Fbf with the idea to associate basis vectors and their weights. Here four components were used. In the resulting image we can see that some areas are much brighter/darker than others, which leads to a less harmonious result. A viewer who is scrolling around, would first perceive the highlights before they reason about the subject in the image.
- If you also saw grids of images with oriented lines having white and black and wondered how they were obtained from an image, independent component analysis (ICA) applied on the patches seems to be one way. PyDeep even shows an example of this.
- Finished reading the IPOL's paper "The noise clinic: a blind image denosing algorithm" and thoroughly enjoyed it. Since real-world data is often noisy, I can imagine it could be a good pre-processing step to improve the quality of images before they appear online or in publications. Observing the difference images allows to directly see the effect of the algorithm.
- Looking back, almost eight days have passed since I mentioned my issue of being unable to plot with matplotlib. Today, you released another update and after installing it, my issue magically disappeared. Words can't describe how grateful I am to you.
- If you heard how many different contexts the word "publishing" can have for a library and the heroic effort required to manage everything on a "squeezed" budget, would you think of the need of an International Library Day? I see libraries as a complement to the web and I think we should maintain/expand their heritage the same way we push for an open web, never taking both for granted. Possibly explains why the coordinates of so many libraries were included here in the past. And I still believe that the search within the catalogs of many libraries can be improved.
- Saw a statue of a thinking programmer in front of his laptop in an article on reflective practice. He probably realized that he can't make himself forever through his work and asked a colleague to cover him with molten metal instead.
- "Success is determined less by what you know than by who you know." Consider why you are unable to speak with me then.
- Derive fruit prices from fruit mix prices bit.ly/2rKsTnE
- Suppose you have a limited energy budget for movements. Where would you go? Would you reach your planned destination? Is there a sufficient reward that will enable the next move to explore the space or will you get stuck, fully exhausted? This thinking might help you the next time you find yourself rushing mindlessly through the day. The more energy you are ready to burn through to obtain a small reward (relative and computable), the easier it will be for others to manipulate you. Better to conserve it and use it when it brings you the most and when this provides you with some more to keep going.
- Showing a bipartite graph with many nodes on both sides and a single edge between the two groups is a fairly creative way to describe the rarity of true love through a simple and expressive graphic.
- Not available on any time frame. If you've made plans to communicate with me "later" and "in case if", better don't start. I am not your substitute.
- When as a tech company you organize a conference on which internal employees greatly outnumber external visitors, do not expect to hear a lot of questions/criticism. That's convenient since you can then go to great lengths to explain how "grand" your products are. Someone might even believe that.
- Have you checked the Flesch-Kincaid readability score of your ten-screens long article discussing pets and puppets? Höchste Zeit.
- Sometimes I create diagrams from articles. Finished reading one, which mentioned that the production of 1MW electricity takes 345kg plastic junk, but only 132kg natural gas. The former releases 880kg CO2; the latter—360kg. Could have been a matplotlib diagram.
- Getting rid of old papers is much harder than accumulating them. You have to go through each one to ensure that you are no deleting anything that would support the "not knowing what you are not knowing" case. Takes time.
- The answer to this question bit.ly/2rESezt might be rooted in the way one wants to be perceived. Many people who go to theater tend to appreciate culture or simply want others to associate them with it. But imagine a performer who is trying to do their best to entertain the audience—how would they feel midst yawning/sleeping people? How could they possibly understand whether their performance is good when they are receiving no feedback? Sleeping during a performance when there is no physical tiredness or precondition that necessitates it is an act of disrespect towards the work of the performer. It is almost symbolic, because at a place that is attempting to sow the seed of culture, lack of culture is being tolerated. Therefore, I would understand if the performers went to their audience and politely asked them to leave, assuring them that they would receive their money back. Not every performance has to be for everyone.
- Reminds me of the words that whenever someone writes a book or creates a music piece, their work is at some point done, whereas the work of the software developer is rarely ever done (and especially so in the case of using dependencies).
- Deutsche Bahn slightly changed one of its pages and as a result the demo page relying on the IC bus prices had missing data and a broken layout. This should be fixed now (at least temporarily), but as always, if you notice problems, let me know and I will try my best to resolve them. Many eyes see much better than two.
- I was wondering once why I was reading a math book, which was hard to understand, when the shocking thought came to me that math could be used to prevent computation. If a result is known in advance or can be derived on paper, then the loop that would be used to generate it, can be safely eliminated. And if the result is unknown, but doesn't change between executions, then computing it once and replacing the loop with it would save the repeated execution on each request of the code. Was not exactly improving my math skills.
- If I raise 6 to powers bigger than one and then sum the digits until I come at a single one, the result always seems to be 9 (6^2=36, 3+6=9; 6^3=216, 2+1+6=9; 6^4=1296, 1+2+9+6=18, 1+8=9; 6^5=7776, 7+7+7+6=27, 2+7=9; 6^10=60466176, 6+0+4+6+6+1+7+6=36, 3+6=9...). 9 is just a reversed 6, right?
- Electronics also seems to have a lot in common with programming. The need for careful design of the architecture, component selection, the choices about the component characteristics, the sequence of connections (inputs and outputs) hint about this. In addition, speed of the circuit may also be important where memory modules enable the access to data. The interface hides the complexity behind a black box to ease the use of the device while not bothering anyone with irrelevant details. Optionally, the user can toggle the desired functionality, see feedback on a small screen or input data on a specialized keyboard. In programming we often keep the size of the code small to ease maintenance; in electronics this translates to miniaturization of the components, minimization of the interconnection path lengths and optimization of the total board area. Increased power-efficiency due to reduced current/voltage enable better designed circuits to operate longer, potentially reducing strain on the battery/supercapacitor. Therefore my guess is that working on electronics projects could help us become better programmers (in some non-obvious ways).
- Chord diagram bit.ly/2rACCwQ
- Matrices find so many and diverse applications. As I learned recently, they can describe even the pattern of yarns running along a fabric. But in cases where plotting is unavailable (suppose that your matplotlib is also broken), understanding a matrix by looking at the numbers can become relatively hard. And I still believe that some important techniques are still missing/unavailable. From web design, we know that if a technology is not available, a fallback must ensure that the content is still accessible. With a matrix, its numbers are the content, but unless we visualize them, we have only a vague understanding of the context. Even a color blind person should be able to tell the specifics of the structure of the matrix, the available relationships and similarities. Maybe even get a "numeric heatmap" as a fallback to the visualization. It is unrealistic to believe that with dimensionality reduction, spectral analysis, correlation/covariance, matrix factorization / decomposition, several statistical methods and others we have fully exhausted our ability to learn from a matrix. And if we fail to learn at a basic level or develop more methods that enable it, we can expect to understand even less once the computational complexity increases (which is already the case with neural network variants). When we see a matrix of moderate dimensionality, it is helpful to ask ourselves what percentage of it we understand from the context and what potential knowledge we might be discarding by seeking a convenient reduction capturing the maximal variance.
- Multiple paths over the pixels in an image can selectively preserve image detail, where the rest can be set to the background color of the context. Given enough visible pixels, this allows images to appear nonrectangular while at the same time using the viewer's ability to derive the missing details. An interesting question is what the minimum number of pixels could be that allows the image subjects to be properly recognized. And which pixels are more important than the rest.
- A piece of me engaged in unsolicited word play: microscope over horoscope = horror #funnyfriday
- NREL has published some very informative stacked bar charts describing the cost of solar PV installations in the years after 2010. From what I saw, it seems that in all sectors (residential, commercial, utility-scale) the cost is decreasing not linearly, but exponentially.
- Blue whirl bit.ly/2I96USk
- A short brainstorming session about the possible nature of edges in graphs bit.ly/2rz27hZ. Slightly unreadable.
- Joint probability of a sample Bayesian network bit.ly/2I2IdHb using another one as a reference. Although a useful model, we rarely have knowledge about all probabilities, so deriving an accurate end result may be hard. Created with LibreOffice Draw.
- The results obtained by various image segmentation methods (mean shift, normalized cuts, convolutional segmentation nets) are often fascinating, especially when the parts of the whole object are colorized using a harmoniuos palette.
- If you have an image of a cat looking at the camera and you use SIFT for feature extraction using red points (not great), you could get the red-eye effect for free.
- I wanted to try illustrating with code that the product of multiple Gaussians is a Gaussian (idea said to be used in the Kalman filter) when this error happened. Now describing it in words only.
- After updating some packages, I noticed that matplotlib stopped working on my machine, showing the following error message bit.ly/2I758Ba. Installing python3-tk as suggested did not help. It seems that other people had this problem in the past too, but none of the suggestions worked. Still wondering what could be wrong.
- There were few instances where I started working on a demo just to find out that I already reached that goal in the past. Have you experienced the same problem? The disadvantage of completing many things is that the search time to verify that you don't repeat yourself starts to take longer.
- Serving people who are losing real money tends to be easier. If they wouldn't seek help, their losses might increase. Payment is then not much of an issue, due to the realization that it is the lesser evil. Then the willingness to collaborate and respect naturally comes. If someone isn't seeking your services, they may either not have a real problem or not care much about the quality of the solution.
- It is worth remembering that long-term employment at below market average salary is preparing the degradation of your skills. Simply because other people who get paid meanwhile will have more resources to gain advantage and prepare for the future better than you will be able with lots of effort from a low starting point. Additionally, the capacity to bring more effort isn't infinite or forever.
- Impressive how fast the living standard in China is improving. According to an article in "Zeit", the average salary in the countryside is already ≈1600 Euro, while in the cities it comes at ≈4350 Euro, if we preserve the same conversion rate. Only 5-10 years ago some people in Europe were laughing over the low standard in this country, but now, it seems, the roles have changed. If the numbers are correct, the average salary in China's cities (unclear how many) already exceeds the equivalent one in the top 40 US cities as of Q3 2017 (≈4380$) and approaches the averages observed in the top 5th US city. Interesting times.
- Have you noticed the average cost of providing your service the past week/month? Was the service worth it?
- "For a 486 PC with 4MB RAM, the largest network that can be used is 13000 nodes and 50000 arcs without road names loaded in." My CD-ROM can't even get how this was possible. Excites me much more than reading a paper about a medium sized problem (possibly solvable on a laptop), where the machine setup included 128GB of memory or more.
- No respect means no work from me. It is something that I tend to check very early and repeatedly and where many of you have failed before. In this case, it is clear that you also lose the chance to communicate with me.
- Quite amazing to see parallel coordinates visualization which doesn't use lines as boundaries, but circles/polygons, rotated in 3D, where the lines move between them. Sometimes visualization seems inexhaustible, especially when you combine multiple related concepts. Also interesting to see a scatterplot with consistently-sized (space-efficient), enumerated points, on the right of which a bar chart is located, which adds a "depth" dimension to each point, while still using clear 2D graphics for both. I won't discuss the third idea, because eventually it might appear in a demo if I find the time and stamina for it.
- Wavelet transform of a sequence bit.ly/2rhTRTq
- Weighted median filter of length 11 bit.ly/2HGAH4K
- Utilization of shelters for homeless people in Toronto, Canada (01.01.2018 - 01.05.2018) bit.ly/2rjpoVl. Most shelters seem to be reaching their full capacities. Some of them report strange numbers (e.g. capacity lower than occupancy). (Occupancy is shown in blue, while capacity is in red.) Some shelters, two of which are for families (Birkdale Residence Motel, COSTI Edward Hotel) and one that seems more generally available (COSTI Radisson Hotel), have expanded their capacities this year, but the demand at these places increased accordingly. A bandwidth in red indicates that the capacity fluctuates or alternates on subsequent days. It could be that one day (when capacity is reduced) is used to organize an event to enable the increased capacity on the next, but this is only an assumption. The capacity of S.A. Maxwell Meighen Centre seems to fluctuate the most.
- Some people can't truly comprehend what it means when you tell them that someone is ill and can't speak with them on the phone. They continue ringing the entire morning as if no rule is valid for them. That's cheeky and further convinces me that not having a phone myself was the right choice. Better to not allow random callers and promoters to distract me. Feeling subscribed to a device everytime I can't limit certain calls.
- Comparison of theoretical signal loss at 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies, depending on the distance from the access point (excluding external influence) bit.ly/2HEJzIf. Made this primarily for myself to convert an interesting formula into something I can more easily comprehend. No guarantee of correctness.
- Used to commute to one of my previous jobs for 75-90mins (in the one direction). Almost a year later I felt physically exhausted (in line with the previous graphic) and dissatisfied with my learning and earning rates. Then I asked for a pay raise, believing that it could partially heal at least one of the side effects. After waiting a couple of days and still having no response, it became clear that the time to leave has come. Since I came there with the help of an intermediary firm, it was not hard to suspect that they were looking for a cheap, not necessarily qualified employee. And so, out of dissatisfaction with the existing opportunities, dummerAugust was born.
- Came to an interesting graphic in "Why sleep matters: The economic costs of insufficient sleep" by RAND Europe, which highlights some of the factors affecting sleep loss bit.ly/2HCydnR. "Financial concerns" ranks at the second place; worrying about money on a daily basis seems to make people progressively more tired and unproductive at work (see the meaning of "presenteeism"). Another reason to ask your employer/clients to pay fairly, according to your expectations and not simply serve mechanically and in fear of using your own voice.
- As a client you have some important superpowers. You can ask your designer/programmer how they obtained a particular result to see whether they have a good understanding of the process. You can ask to learn more about an aspect of it (something small, but specific) to see whether the explanation of what they did seems reasonable. This shows that you are not only interested in the final result, but also whether it was produced specifically for you or copied from somewhere else. If you know what the difference between novel and copied work is in terms of effort required and you find that equal compensation for both is unfair, you make yourself a much more desirable client. Your designer/programmer will also look at you differently the next time. Otherwise, as a client you may be sponsoring the "copy-paste" practice, which affects the willingness of the people who work hard to continue doing it. Anyone can run an automated bot today, download any online content and call it their own. Anyone can use a content generator or CMS and claim they were "hand-crafting" your site. When in doubt, ask the person you are working with to do their work in front of you.
- Still checking my work multiple times in the full knowledge that this slows me down and out of fear how I might see myself after the fact. Some corrections I've made helped to avoid a couple of serious mistakes. When you try to work fast, you also tend to make lots of mistakes. But what repeatedly worked for me was staying with the task for a while and developing intuition about it. Then it was this intuition that was telling me I was wrong once I saw the result.
- "Tracking mouse cursors provides new ways to understand visitors and their needs." I can agree with this only when it is a limited-time, pre-launch experiment used with a small control group representative of the entire user base. But I would disagree when it is used for universal spying of people's actions, becoming part of the business for no good reason. If you find yourself tracking cursors or even keystrokes, stop for a while and evaluate what you are doing. Dynamic forms of tracking are especially harmful when they cause people to avoid certain sites and become more wary of new services.
- If you don't have time to discuss your project or have no idea how to organize your thoughts, you won't find a solution.
- Very often I see papers where a variable is discussed early and it is expected that by the time it is used in a formula the reader already knows and remembers what it was about. Found an example bit.ly/2qWbF6C that is free of assumptions, which reminds me what good design was about. An alternative to using a single sentence (which saves space, but is somewhat harder to read) would be a format "variable - meaning", each variable being on a separate line. If after re-reading your paper you find that your formula looks like a meaningless collection of letters and symbols, please take a moment to see it from the perspective of your reader.
- Sometimes work receives an additional, ethical dimension. Suppose you are frequently paid on time, but your client is unable to fully take advantage of your product. What would you do if they insist on "trying harder", paying repeatedly in the meantime? It could feel that you are doing half the work, yet taking full advantage of the situation. How often would you be willing to do that? Would you try to find another client who needs a better portion of your skills or would you rather stay in this relationship when you think that leaving it could harm your client even more? Would you continue to serve as usual (and get more money) as if nothing happened?
- Usually using great weather for work and today is no exception.
- Wrote down some keywords in my ideary after reading the paper "Ellagic acid in strawberries": antioxidant, antiinflammatory, antidiabetic, cardioprotective, neuroprotective, prebiotic effect; for prevention & treatment of: cancer (skin, esophageal and oral, cervical, lung, breast, colon, prostate, liver; all suspected), diabetes, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, kidney, liver, eye and neurodegenerative diseases, depression and Alzheimer. EA available in fruits (if not dry) and leaves. Knew that berries are superfoods in general, but even so this list surprises. However, they are probably safe only when not chemically treated.
- Wondering whether a heatmap of body functions can exist. Some organs probably work harder than the rest (relative to historic measurements), so it could be useful to know which they are. Now reminds me that I wanted to learn more about the Weibull distribution and the probability of system failure.
- Here I try to produce content the way I would like to consume it. But I cannot cover all possibilities and tastes: one visitor might prefer watching only YouTube videos, another may want only images and figures, a third one may prefer in-depth articles that are ten screens long. I am not convinced in the format of any of these, which is why they aren't used here. But when someone writes about "making text on the web unnecessary" in favor of much higher video quality content than exists today, I begin to wonder why YouTube hasn't been completely textified yet.
- Sooner or later you will eventually hear about cases where young people, just entering the workforce, start at salaries much higher than yours, the person with many years of experience in multiple programming languages etc. The question then is whether this "industry" deserves you at all. Perhaps it should be left either with no people or only with those having no experience.
- "It is important to be likeable when on a software team" was a message I saw in a blog post yesterday. While I appreciate a conflict-free atmosphere, I also have to disagree with this statement. One of the great lessons I received while still at university was that professionalism comes first, even when it could impact the quality of the relationships. We were taught that doing the right thing is more important than being respected within the team. "Likeable" here would mean a "me-too" attitude, possibly paired with fear of self-expression out of constant awareness how others might perceive you. A fear that I also had in my early days.
- The quality of many projects today has a lot in common with a squeaky sheet of metal that previously belonged to a high-end car. Avoid.
- If five individuals alternated to give you a different advice every day how their project should move forward, tell them that after some careful consideration you decided to adjust the project cost to 5x. Then see whether they'll pay the new price, seek consensus to preserve the old one or leave. Keep in mind that making 3 of 5 people happy may not be qualified as a successful project outcome. That carries a risk for you.
- If you couldn't pay, you didn't belong on my contact list. Either as a company or as an individual—it didn't matter. Did I say that company names don't impress me much? Plus, if I left your company, I also left your people too. All of them.
- Didn't realize that you could send a query to multiple search engines at the same time and obtain a rank from each one, the combination of them being the rank within your own system. This may be something that price comparison search engines use, for instance. But the HTTP request cost is the reason why you won't see something like this in my work.
- Problem sizes matter. If a system allows you to browse up to 50000 items, is it reasonable to expect that it will work equally well with one or even ten millions? Probably not. Try to think differently before you hammer the same nail type.
- It's not true that you should always be asking questions. Very often the cost of doing so is higher than the potential gain. Plenty of people exist who try to take advantage of the fact that someone is asking or expect the same peson to bow to them. Great only that a thing like Internet exists to alleviate issues like this. This is to say, use your own judgement. And if the other side doesn't treat you fairly, seek help elsewhere.
- Many algorithms can't work well with spurious data. So the requirement quickly shifts to "provide all data"/"fill all existing fields", which the average user perceives as invasive (even I do). This results in fewer filled forms and less data for new companies to begin with. The users feel they are sharing more than needed and fear that at a given point this might be used against them (eventually it will be). We have to ensure that the data gathering process is less dependent on a concrete algorithm implementation. And that people have more freedom to choose to share only the bits and pieces they find appropriate relative to the task they are trying to accomplish. Some users may not want to share their age, nationality or company, because they fear discrimination, for instance. The software has to be able to accept and handle their choice transparently rather than balk about its own requirements. Its task is then to connect the given pieces in meaningful ways. A problem with this approach is that a user might then say: "If person X isn't providing this data, why should I?" The answer is simple—complete lack of data means either a very low-quality service or no service at all. The saying that "users make or break the service" is entirely true. Another question: "If all companies collect so much data, why should ours stay behind?" You are not other companies and are fully responsible for your own choices. If they made a serious mistake and were quick to scale it and very slow to correct it, what does this say about their business?
- If you assume that a given question has only one right answer, you may be unable to see how several possibly connected factors interacted to lead to the effect you observed.
- Just-in-time programming means you write the code at the time the client expresses the need for it rather than ten days in advance, attempting to address a fictive need that may not exist at all. This helps to eliminate a lot of waste and reduces your technical debt to a minimum.
- Digging deep into various freely accessible reports, I came to a figure about driver fatalities by age and sex in 2015 in USA bit.ly/2H4OguF. A quite valuable graphic saying nothing about who drives better, but something about who could.
- To avoid focusing on feelings and memories of what happened today, I tried to shift my focus on something different. And here it is: "US states Internet connection speed similarity (30.06.2014)" bit.ly/2H3q1Nh. This is what I had in mind yesterday night.
- Back from hospital, scared and saddened. Wishing you to never be a passive observer of someone's convulsions and loss of contact. After an initial scan, doctor rebuked: "I've never seen something like this". Me neither.
- Unaware until now that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has fine-grained data on delays about departures and arrivals by airport and carrier. For instance, you could look only at airplanes operated by Soutwest Airlines which departed from the Atlanta International Airport to learn more about the various delay reasons (departure, carrier, weather, national aviation system, security, late aircraft arrival) and the destination airports affected.
- Extracted some of the most common addresses and the most common complaint cause about each one from the Louisville 311 service requests bit.ly/2GYmPCp. If 27 people complained about the same place, citing the same reason, only in a short time, perhaps something there is wrong. But the roots may go deeper, because the issue may present an unaddressed historic problem.
- Good to see Louisville providing air quality data from several stations. What I couldn't understand is how PM2.5 could have negative values bit.ly/2qzyoVB. Also, since the stations do not measure the same parameters (or use different means to do so), the results are likely not comparable and require the writing of specific code to parse each case. This makes creating a useful and usable demo from the data especially difficult.
- Polynomial fit to z-scores bit.ly/2GYzVjj
- Increasing n as in n-gon bit.ly/2GYtooN
- Gallons of fuel pumped for each vehicle of the fire department in Louisville (25.08.2011 - 13.04.2018) bit.ly/2GZ5YQ2. Overall, diesel consumption is higher (2.03x), but there are only 79 vehicles using diesel compared to the 132 using unleaded fuel. This means that on average diesel vehicles received more gallons. The top consuming one received 26462.54 gallons whereas the top consuming one in the unleaded category received only 8283.91 gallons. The refueling history by fuel type bit.ly/2H3sJ5C shows a repetitive pattern of loading up to 20 gallons of unleaded fuel at once, whereas for diesel we see that it is more rare to load over 25 gallons at once. Still, sometimes up to 50 gallons of diesel were needed.
- Most streets with maximal pavement condition index (PCI) in Portland seem to be located at the north-east of city bit.ly/2qBxnN8
- City Centre and library branches footfall in Cardiff, UK bit.ly/2H2aI7t
- The zoo in Cologne has a plan for new visitors that my monitor can't even fully capture bit.ly/2qvaeLW. I also miss the label on some animals, being unable to recognize at least a few.
- Lines and stops in Prague, the Czech Republic bit.ly/2qsYcCW
- An attempt to visualize a green circular walk path in Frankfurt/Main bit.ly/2GY3wJF
- Ratings from hygiene inspections of restaurants and takeaways in Belfast (07.08.2007 - 12.01.2016) bit.ly/2quEt5G. I was looking for a relationship between location and rating, but the figure does not hint about any. The data comes from the Belfast City Council.
- The last demo now takes time into account when considering the number of comments. This is due to the realization that 100 comments left within 2 days might speak of a higher enthusiasm about the book than 200 comments left within 10 days. Also made the rank values more visible (lower is better). Still not understanding why sometimes the data loads and sometimes doesn't. It may have something to do with when Amazon decides the request is valid and when it believes it comes from an automated bot.
- New books by release date on Amazon bit.ly/2GTHNCu. Made this because it was hard for me to track which new books were appearing, which certainly led me to miss some good ones. Greyed out titles whose release date is in the future (pre-order only?). Placed some green checkmarks on few titles which the numbers hint they might be good. Note that this list may stop working anytime Amazon makes changes to its page structure. If you care about it, feel free to send me a notice when this happens.
- Finding the families of plant species bit.ly/2GUBuPk. Didn't know that coriander belongs to the family of carrots. Tasted honey with such flavor once and after a few days the jar was empty.
- Don't say you have an entire year of measurements about multiple locations when your sensor captured values six times on a single day at a single location.
- International roughness index (IRI) of the streets in Montreal, which had perfect pavement condition (PCI=100) in 2015 bit.ly/2qtjOiv
- Point adresses in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2qsVTjd
- Parks and green spaces in Shawinigan, QC bit.ly/2qrAXZT
- Public Wi-Fi spots in Quebec, Canada bit.ly/2GRn7uY. High concentration on the east.
- From very incomplete data, having lots of null values bit.ly/2qrQVmZ, I was able to extract the average daily traffic flow at least at some locations in Quebec bit.ly/2qpXwy6. I was interested to which place the separate red spot belongs. But it says only "Bouvier Street (east of highway 358)".
- Public roads in Quebec, Canada bit.ly/2qrzym2 (via Ville de Québec bit.ly/2GPMH3z)
- Good to see so many organizations having corrected so many critical violations in childcare bit.ly/2GTUTji according to the DOHMH's (Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) childcare center inspections (bit.ly/2qu0SQX). These numbers show so much improvement. When we consider it, we all were kids once before, so we know how easily bad behavior can affect a child's psyche. At least several publications show the long term impact of bad early child care. Whether a mother that screams louder than her child is crying—in an attempt to calm it down—does properly, I leave to you to decide. But every neighbor may have a different opinion on this.
- Some land subdivisions in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2GP9Z9G. Uses data provided by the City of Columbus bit.ly/2qoFoog.
- Comparison of the characteristics of some EIZO monitors bit.ly/2qqweaT. By reusing this code (without the pricing attribute) and adding hundreds of iiyama models, we obtain the following result bit.ly/2qproKT. The first model in the code is also first in the rank; yet not everyone might like a diagonal size of over 100cm.
- When your web page is in "stand-by", it shouldn't consume close to 50% CPU. Someone might by trying to type while wondering why their letters appear so slowly.
- Seth Godin talked about the need of speaking what can be improved. Since I am a happy Linux user, I noticed one small thing that could still make a difference, at least to people like me. It falls into the file management category. The built-in file manager often takes disproportional amount of time to open a large directory. By switching to another one which loads all files in reasonable time, I noticed a side effect: If I have small number of files in the left and right pane, file movements are almost instantaneous. But If I have a large directory (say "Unread") and want to move a file from it to another one (say "Read"), the time it takes is non-trivial. When multiplied by the number of papers opened over time, it quickly adds up. Not sure whether this is an issue with the file manager or with the kernel. But kernel updates seem to gradually reduce this time. Still, it can take up to 4-5s per file and if it can happen within 1s that would an improvement factor of 4x. Probably worth speaking about. Perhaps some of you observe a similar behavior?
- Realized that the graph from two days ago didn't minimize edge crossings. Should be more careful next time.
- On the branch information page I noticed something small that left me unimpressed: there are arrows placed on the left and right of the photo of each branch, but they are decorative and not functional. My expectation was that on click another branch photo would appear, allowing me to move between the photos. Yet, clicking had not effect. By making the design look as a usage pattern it is easy to violate the user expectations. If there aren't more photos, the arrows are redundant.
- Conrad branches in Germany (08.04.2018) bit.ly/2GL4vws. Still remembering the large catalog with various parts that my father showed me when I was a kid. It was thick, containing thousands of pages with electronic parts in various shapes and colors, all having different functions and characteristics. There were potentially countless ways in which these parts could have been combined, which I found fascinating. I spent a good amount of time learning about them, but the well-polished boxes with the screw mechanism made a big impression to me. I could imagine using them to keep smaller parts or something precious inside. The entire catalog was as if someone took an entire museum and presented it in visual and popular form in front of me. Currently, the catalogs I find on the Conrad's page bit.ly/2GHk74p do not seem to have such a variety. They still have the boxes (towards the end of the catalog), but only few models where previously they were around 20. Here are the designs of two sample pages from the 2017 catalog: bit.ly/2qhcO8f and bit.ly/2GK06dh.
- Vienna seems to have a lot of green space relative to its territory bit.ly/2GG5EW7. One source even claims it to be 51%. Even then, there are still many white zones. Uses data provided by the city of Vienna (data.wien.gv.at) and the European data portal. With the help of additional sources, we can see how other cities (world & UK) compare to that bit.ly/2GHllg5
- Good visualizations help us understand the story even if we don't know the language bit.ly/2qe6u1y. In this example, the locations of several places of interest are shown on a map first and then to each one we see multiple air quality measurements assigned. Notice the clever use of the available space at the top and how the title is aligned both to the text on the right and to the map at the bottom. The legend at the top stands out nicely and the lines further clarify which part of the bar the texts describe. The measurements at each place are shown on a sky-blue background (signaling that the domain is air) and the bars are mostly in white (signaling that they are about something we hardly even notice). No attribute label appears twice: each bar is associated with a small icon, which in itself leads the eye to the legend on the right. This saves a lot of space and removes a lot of potential clutter. Even when the diagram is about 2016, we still see how the air quality attributes have varied historically. The subtle box "Index=100" informs us that these values are relative and not absolute. Both the temporal and spatial perspective are given.
- Good to see some parkings in Rotterdam transmit information about per-place occupancy along with physical boundaries instead of showing the counts in the "free" and "occupied" categories bit.ly/2GFM0JR. If there were much more parking places, tracking this in real-time could become more interesting.
- Highlight the most connected people in a sample social network bit.ly/2qeDtCV
- Locations of the libraries in Vienna, Austria bit.ly/2GF9uiq
- The star cluster NGC 3293 in a colorized grid bit.ly/2qe2b6b. Original image by ESO/G. Beccari. The images page of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is also worth a visit.
- "Patients are sometimes kept alive for 31 days (after surgery), so that their mortality is not reflected in the hospital's metrics." - Jerry Z. Muller in "The tyranny of metrics". Terrible and even more so when you realize that this could happen to almost anyone. The author gives some good examples how "beautifying" and obsessive fixation on metrics can have adverse impact on people motivation, company performance and more.
- Line-circle intersection tests bit.ly/2qbMqwJ
- This week's offers at Lidl bit.ly/2qacLLo
- It is very easy to assume that the patterns someone invented which then became widely spread/adopted are the only good ones worth using. But this is a fallacy. We can't do our best work when we blindly apply the same techniques irrespective of the domain and the needs of the project. And if we think about it, doing so only makes these patterns even more popular. It follows that popularity can arise simply from misunderstanding, which in intself may become a requirement.
- Comparing people flow bit.ly/2Emjffj. Inspired by an idea which probably deserves its isolation.
- A payment that didn't pay has not fulfilled its purpose. It's like a worker who didn't work.
- "We provide data from many sensors located across the entire city." Then I check one—no response. Another one—the same. All of them automatedly instead of manually—only four respond with values (each measuring one of humidity, temperature, pressure or CO2), yet they have the same geocoordinates. I doubt that this is sufficient to summarize the state of an entire city well. Despite having 24-hour data about these attributes, some of them don't seem to vary much, which means that even a time series graphic may not give a good picture of the current situation. Not what I expected, since it effectively cancels what I started.
- Annual consumer price indices in various countries (1960 - 2014) bit.ly/2JksAYN
- Speaking about exploration, Xplorit has virtual tours where you can see in a 360° perspective how various places in USA look like. (Santa Clara's website refers to it.) You can even take a look inside some buildings and move between rooms by clicking around. Or even look at the city from above, moving on a sky-fly spherical trajectory from one place to another. Fairly impressive website, considering the quality of the perspectives and how fast it loads. A small problem is that it is not immediately clear when the images were last updated. But this could make you realize that a shopping center too can have virtual tours of its stores, so that people can see what's going on there at the moment. However, this may require a significant investment in expensive equipment, which makes the idea hardly applicable at most places.
- Noticed that many websites of shopping centers/malls simply show the logos of the companies which rent space there. I admit that having grey blocks with carefully designed and centered logos having the same consistent color looks beautiful and helps to inspire trust. Yet, the function of a great website is not merely to be beautiful, but also useful. The logos can only inform the visitor which brands are available, but they tell nothing about physical location. If there are more than fifty spread across multiple floors, the visitor of this website would be no better in knowing where to seek one than a random person who enters for the first time, not having visited the website first. Providing a plan of all stores enables people to also see the shape/location of each one and use their spatial memory once they enter. It also helps to have a small description of what makes a given store unique. Imagine that brands like Sony, Pentax, Nikon and Canon have stores on the same floor. Should someone with interest in photography visit them all before being able to accomplish a task? Which one should they enter first? That's not helpful and wastes a lot of time (in walking and asking questions). It is better to know the strengths of each store in that particular mall. Perhaps, for competitive reasons, all brands have adjusted their offers and a person who looks for a camera may see only models who stand well relative to the nearby store offerings. Or a tripod may no longer be available at one store, because another one decided to present their entire gamma. Yet, there is noone who helps new visitors develop the right kind of associations in advance, which is a missed opportunity. (A pure list of brand names positioned before an escalator is also nonconclusive where someone has to look upon arrival.) This is what a web designer having to work on such a website can do. And it also means that to present that center well, one has to stay in constant touch with representatives of the various brands to know and be aware of the changes they introduce and the impact they have on the place. It is far too simple to serve (and produce blocks of logos) only in the interest of the landlord when this is the entity that pays for the website. But without brands willing to rent space, there will be low or no income for the landlord, which can become costly to the point that they decide to save on the additional cost of developing a website.
- Routes and stops in Albuquerque bit.ly/2EjNlzW
- Total installed solar PV capacity in UK bit.ly/2Jiu8SZ
- Never heard sound files from cumulative energy usage over time before bit.ly/2Ejz4mR. Considering the number of appliances this house has, analyzing the audio might be interesting. Unfortunately, the sound cannot give us information about the exact time of the measurement or the appliances which produced it. And the data itself is enormous: 16 weeks * 180 files * 200MB + 1 week * 77 files * 200MB ≈ 591.4GB. Maybe this is the reason why not the entire year worth of data was captured about this house.
- City of Topeka expenses bit.ly/2Ej6XEr (Source: bit.ly/2q5DdWG). Included only the top 30 sources of expense, where construction, interest on debt and employee compensation/benefits are found frequently. I am slightly sceptical about the starting date, but have no easy way to check it due to the size of the file. I took the minimum and maximum of all dates, but 01.01.1970 seems slightly suspicious to me (perhaps you can check this yourself). Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is the thought that the value of a dollar ten years ago is quite different than the value of a dollar today, so by taking the sum of all amounts, I was effectively doing value comparisons. Not good.
- Median NO2 concentration by the hour on Market Street, Hebden Bridge in Calderdale (01.07.2016 - 31.12.2016) bit.ly/2q6IKft. Some values were missing, so the picture is approximate.
- Feder bit.ly/2uJNRYL
- Air quality measurements at different locations in Eindhoven, the Netherlands bit.ly/2uMrLox
- Domestic and international passenger traffic at the Dulles International Airport (1962-2016) bit.ly/2GvdGBn
- Comparing windows bit.ly/2JfFtmN. Ironically, during my work on this, received the request to clean the windows, which was a demo in itself.
- If salaries rise much more slowly than rents, then at some point people will have to either renegotiate them, look for jobs that pay more or switch to live in cheaper neighborhoods. The effect could be that many employers who used to employ cheap workers will have to look for new ones.
- Average WG room rents in some German cities bit.ly/2pZNlQx. Made this primarily for myself to see how much rents have increased relative to the time when I was a student there. Based on an article from a couple of days ago. The author mentioned that in Munich, for instance, the average room rent has reached 616 euro/month, while the average rent for a 30m2 room has reached 785 euro/month. Rooms in Frankfurt and Stuttgart were said to be available to students at ≈480euro/month on average, based on the offers on a well-known website. Compared to that, rooms in Magdeburg, Cottbus and Chemnitz were said to cost 241, 230 and 212 euro/month on average. If a student spends 5 years in a 30m2 room in Hamburg, provided the rent doesn't increase, only their rental cost would come at 5 * 12 * 500 = 30000 euro. In addition to this debt, elementary things like food, handouts/books, communication, transportation, events can quickly increase the costs. In my opinion, it is no longer realistic to believe that part-time work during the study can cover such expenses.
- When some previously weakly typed, interpreted languages are updated to look as if strongly typed, one starts to anticipate that code written in them may need to be compiled soon. Something that made weakly typed languages popular in the past is in risk of being removed.
- Reminds me of a mistake Facebook did many years ago. They pushed an ad about car parts in front of me, showing a modern new car and a provocative woman lying on the front hood. I found this insulting, not only due to the fact that cars and women were precisely the two topics I was least interested to hear about. Something struck me deeply about this combination and the lengths they were willing to go to capture advertising revenue. In addition, I received the ad again in a language that they thought I was interested in. Needless to say, after the long waiting period, I left the site (having to delete all my posts one by one) and never looked back. This was probably some 7-8 years ago. The Twitter account I had lasted only three months longer. Both sites were not what I expected, so I am still happy with my choice.
- Dear Coursera, don't send me mails in a language I don't want to see. You might assume that I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to understand it, but you are wrong. Plus, I have my own preference how I want to read my information, yet you didn't bother to ask.
- If you believe you have a good project and the necessary funding, while seeking someone to realize it, and you think that working together would improve the outcome, feel free to contact me. I consider all proposals even when I have capacity to accept only few.
And if a stubborn backup doesn't annoy you, that's even better. - Currently going through the painful process of backing up files on a slow, external drive, after remembering how I lost almost half of those I had once before. I didn't do more recent backups, so this was necessary. The big files were copied relatively fast, but the small ones (mostly code from various libraries) seem to be challenging, since the copy speed has fallen to ≈210Kb/s (and still is) and I get estimated time left of more than a day. To avoid thinking about this and meanwhile do something else, I tried to browse some visited websites. Previously, I always perceived them as fast, but now they were mostly stuttering, likely due to I/O effects. Even when the backup won't end soon, this gave me a nice reminder to not assume that the websites we create will be the only users of a given resource, when it might be shared across tasks. If possible, we have to test our websites under more conservative scenarios than we expect.
- An idea to reduce waiting time at supermarkets bit.ly/2pRc89r ↗. Spent another 10mins in line today, which could have been used for something else.
- "There was quite a controversy in the UK when the National Health Service (NHS) gave Google DeepMind access to patients' medical records. That didn't exactly inspire trust." Maybe because data has the tendency to reach third parties and be used for reasons beyond the original purpose (considering the long view). What if patients started to receive recommendations for pills or surgeries? The wider problem: Which individual researcher could sound as convincing as to get an equivalent approval? Or: Given this data, can DeepMind contribute valuable insights to the public domain (NHS possibly operates in the name of social interest) which are broadly useful without mentioning the states of concrete patients? All interesting questions.
- Never agreed to work against unrealistic expectations; accepting anything that appears like this is unprofessional. A big educational institution was seeking a web application developer that can "scale the education process and organize secure exams". While the first part of the requirement appears almost fine, the second doesn't. They can go and inspect the security in any Fortune 100 company—it doesn't matter which one they choose. Because we still keep hearing stories about them, full of accusations, lawsuits and disappointment. And here this institution comes, to expect from an individual what a corporation can't accomplish. It is for reasons like this that I made the jobs page a long time ago and why I still don't regret it.
- Had no idea what stress taxi drivers in New York have to endure bit.ly/2Gd9HoJ
- While testing an idea over an image with coffee art, got an unexpected result that the contours of the coffee cup have become more colorful bit.ly/2pIzJtE
- "To keep pace with population growth, more food will be needed in the next 50 years than has been produced in the past ten thousand years combined."—Daugherty/Wilson in "Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI" Sounds scary. So we have to see whether precision agriculture can become that precise. Also liked the examples with the cooperating robots and how an AI system analyzing natural language helped Virgin Trains reduce their manual complaint-response work by 85%.
- Parcels in El Dorado County bit.ly/2pD1jZt (Data source: bit.ly/2GaWHzU). The black areas were not supposed to exist, but the diagram gives a good overview overall. Took hours to compute; had to add the title after that.
- "The original Kangaroo Route from Australia to London was named for the seven stops it made over four days back in 1947." (A direct flight from Perth to London (9009 miles) by Qantas Airlines took 17 hours and 2 mins.) Average speed: (9009 * 1.609344) / (17 + 2/60) = 851.18km/h?
- Not sure to what extent rainfall contributes to higher or lower wheat (or any other crop) yield, but I think that questions like this can often reveal interesting findings. What is important is that we have the tools to look at such relationships, the only limiting factors being data availability, our time on Earth and insatiable curiosity/willingness to explore.
- Surface-level urban line stops in Milan, Italy bit.ly/2pDz2SC (Source: bit.ly/2pEO5e0). DBSCAN is able to identify only five clusters where over 20 line stops can be seen within a very small radius.
- In some cases new pavements are said to be built to last for a period of up to twenty years. They must be unbreakable and durable, no matter the weather conditions or what attempts to grow from below. If the edges stick out, someone might stumble over or slip on a surface when it's snowy. This raises a question about how we should be thinking and approaching our own design and code, even when the possibility to have them visible/operational after such a long timeframe might seem unrealistic. Every subsequent change of a product is a chance to examine whether the gains realized by usage of the previous version have fully covered its development plus operational costs. Because by proceeding, we agree to continue this perpetual, temporal theme, where taking suboptimal decisions could mean that someone, somewhere, one day may not have a good pavement/base below their feet. We have to know the past of the context to understand what can be improved and see whether our processes and execution quality fully reflect the years we would like our new creation to survive. How big should the improvement factor be—5, 15 or 50 times (for that many years)? That said, software, which must be changed/adapted every two months is likely having cracks in its structure; before providing value to its users, it already asks for costly rework, effectively taking resources away. If the previous cycle had a negative outcome, proceeding further means that we bet on the reasons why it will be different next time (high-risk). Having unclear vision backed with short-term fixes/hacks can very easily repeat the last cycle. At some point, even if a "software cathedral" appears, it's construction may be unstable or its further maintenance prohibitive.
- Statistics on New York yellow taxi trip records for 2017 bit.ly/2pC8lh4 (Source: on.nyc.gov/2pEQDJN). An interesting finding is that on average every second in a taxi costs the client around five cent (0.05$) if we consider all trip durations and the total amount charged for each trip (that's not cheap). This rate was observed throughout the entire year. If you have seen my previous work, you probably remember that the median trip duration of ≈12 mins looks very similar to what some bike systems have registered (strange). You probably agree that the total amount of 150-160 million dollar/month charged for all trips represents a big opportunity for most taxi drivers and businesses. May was an interesting month, because passengers used taxis longer and paid more, but for some reason the number of registered trips seems to have decreased quite a lot.
- Street lights with known system wattage in San Jose bit.ly/2pzLNxo (Source: bit.ly/2pEdYv9). Only 718 such lights exists, having a total wattage of 63389.80W. The average unit system wattage comes at 88.29W.
- Point fitting with a polynomial of second degree bit.ly/2pA4lhc
- Seeing four football playgrounds next to each other for the first time (on a photo). Formed in a 2x2 grid of rectangles with a small control building at the center. Minimum wasted land, maximum playable area. Finding applications of optimization is always interesting.
- Number of mosquitos trapped in Plano, Texas (03.2016 - 03.2018) bit.ly/2pAMs0L
- Learning about O'Reilly conferences bit.ly/2G3FuZ6. The keyword "Web" appears in 11.11% of all conference names/themes. "Artificial Intelligence" is becoming an increasingly popular topic.
- I admit that (state, action, reward) triples modeled on a graph could become interesting. Each node holds state and reward, while each edge has an action verb attached to it. Only that knowing this information (which depends both on the agent's and the wider context and can theorefore change every second) in advance is rare. In theory, nice theory.
- Measure daily progress against an exercise target given by a fitness instructor bit.ly/2ubrmM2
- Kernel density estimation of the commuter times in Riverside, California (2006 - 2015) bit.ly/2IItsGw. As you can see, the number of people who travelled most (over 90 minutes) has increased in 2015. But the group of the most people (traveling around 20 mins) has also expanded and the commuters in it have slightly increased relative to 2009.
- Block averaging of an image bit.ly/2pnyGhY
- Countries by population density (2018) bit.ly/2pmMsS2. Monaco and Macao are most crowded, but their areas are very small. Singapore and Hong Kong follow. Despite having the biggest population, China (ranks 79th) has only 64% of the population density of Germany (ranks 57th). USA ranks at place 177 with 36 people per square kilometer. Canada and Australia have only 4 and 3.
- Used ridge regression to attempt predicting the electricity consumption in the Phillippines bit.ly/2pl3nUS. The value of 84807.31 (units were not given) for 2018 must be seen as an estimate.
- Loving the effect of getting the average of multiple images bit.ly/2pjtlIw. The one at the top is obtained only from six other images, while the one at the bottom is produced by the combination of fifteen. The first looks clearner while the second appears more color-rich. Weighted average could have brought forward selected silhouettes—of the rose, for instance. With Numpy the results come fast.
- Average announced rents in different districts in Luxembourg (01.07.2016 - 30.06.2017) bit.ly/2IwjS9w
- National geopaths in Luxembourg bit.ly/2ItzdaZ
- Departures and arrivals at the Luxembourg Airport bit.ly/2pheAWw
- Average rent in some cities in Finland bit.ly/2ItnetW
- Cost of living and wage/salary indices in Finland bit.ly/2IwYfpE. Looking only at the last couple of years shows a slightly more positive development.
- Comparison of domestic and international air traffic at the airport of Helsinki-Vantaa and of all airports in Finland bit.ly/2phPK8U. Please, note that with the exception of the last year in the graphic (2016), the data has been collected at an interval of 5 years, which means that the values of in-between years are interpolated and may not resemble the actual values in these years. I tried to clarify this visually as much as possible.
- Bike paths in Helsinki, Finland (plan 2025) bit.ly/2piqGib. Not sure whether 1.5 years later this is still accurate.
- Most Nobel Prizes were given for advancing medicine, closely followed by physics. Wondering whether this could make Stephen Hawking happier. Worth remembering how often physics is misunderstood/underappreciated. How forces interplay, kinematics, wave propagation, electricity and magnetism are all interesting topics in their own right. The degree to which physics can make itself invisible is both fascinating and beautiful.
- Do you find that a patient needs to know about the availability of a given medicine in nearby pharmacies before they physically enter them? If so, are you aware of attempts to enable this?
- Found a visualization of the traffic noise at facade points in Göteborg bit.ly/2ItJ1BN. Haven't seen noise data mapped in such detail before.
- Location of the GTFS stops in Sweden bit.ly/2peYqwU. The diagonal between Stockholm and Göteborg seems particularly strong.
- Lines inside circle and code bit.ly/2IszESJ. A drawing explains itself in a 24kB image.
- Saw a self-generated graphic from a dataset describing that the efficiency of photovoltaics and offshore wind installations is expected to grow (initially much faster for photovoltaics, but then slightly faster for offshore wind, so that it gradually approaches the first over a very long time). I am reluctant to show the figure, because I don't believe that someone can project for the next 100 years, no matter how accurate they think their model is.
- Compare image similarities by Euclidean distance bit.ly/2Iu4Xg0
- Pairwise element operations in a matrix via operation matrices bit.ly/2Isly3V
- An inconvenient truth: understanding high dimensional data is also a function of reading ability. Before we instruct the software to parse only what we need, we parse with our eyes first to decide on this (data exploration). Each and every time. A reason why unsupervised methods have received so much interest. The only question is whether hardware decisions can fully replace human decisions and the extent to which they are available and efficient in use.
- Interesting that there is a measure how well one polygon approximates another. Seeing this for the first time.
- "Why do you need to study math when you have no applications for it?" It does seem like waste, doesn't it? A good reminder is that the applications don't come to us falling from the sky. They are something we have to find ourselves. By exploring wide and deep, we increase our chance to find good ones. We don't have to be mathematicians in order to apply math in the same way we don't have to be designers in order to design.
- Country features as a matrix bit.ly/2pd6xdn and t-SNE applied on them bit.ly/2pdAmKU. Relatively interesting groups. At the top, unfortunately, the labels of China and India overlap. Regarding t-SNE: Better not to use it on datasets exceeding moderate size (e.g. all-time history of access logs) as it may not finish in reasonable time.
- Street segments in Boston bit.ly/2pbhLit
- Libraries in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2paXNnT. A diagonal walk could reach most. You can also see the street tree types with more than 300 exemplars in this city bit.ly/2Ip23cq
- Garages by registered capacity in San Francisco bit.ly/2InMFNf. Most seem to be located in the Northeast.
- Office buildings in Minneapolis with high source EUI bit.ly/2p9TKZ4. First time using exponential scale to bring some data points into focus.
- The global innovation index next to the innovation efficiency ratio for 2017 bit.ly/2p7VySq. Also liked the graphics about the top 5 innovation clusters, said to be Tokyo-Yokohama, Shenzhen-Hong Kong, San Jose-San Francisco, Seoul, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto.
- Creative goods exports, data from 2015 bit.ly/2InxsMh. A category that I find quite important.
- Visualization of the smart cities index for 2017, published by Easypark bit.ly/2ImXfo3. Not perfect, but at least informative. Even cities in the bottom 25% of the matrix score high in the categories "environment protection" and "WiFi hotspots".
- Average age of the cars (in years) at different places in Barcelona, 2016 bit.ly/2IpOoC0. Although I used the same initial data, my weighting seems to differ slightly from the one used in the dataset, where the averages for each place were given (which are slightly different). For instance, for cars less than a year old I used weight 0.5, for cars one year old, 1.5 and so on, always averaging between the start and end point in time. For car ages 11-20 I used a weight of 15.5 and for cars older than 20 years I had a weight of 25. For instance, the average car age given for Barcelona as a whole in the dataset is 11.3 years, whereas with this weighting scheme it comes at 11.77 years. By obtaining the approximate coordinates of each place, we see that some neighbors have very similar average car ages. The newest cars were driven in the South (la Marina del Prat Vermell) and in the East (Diagonal Mar i el Front Maritim del Poblenou). The oldest cars were driven in the North (Torre Baró and Vallbona) and some areas in the South of the city.
- If the spinner has time to make more than 3-5 full rotations, this indicates a possible problem. And if there are 3-4 spinners at different sections of the page that run simultaneously, this creates a very awkward feeling.
- Do you remember the games where the player "unlocked" more features the more intensively they played? Good software doesn't have to overwhelm the user with functionality from the start. It can gradually unfold it over time, the more it is used. This way it can be adapted to current needs of the user without introducing more than necessary (frequent cause for seeking alternatives). Someone might say that this is incremental, while competitive products might be iterated much faster. But I believe that the long-term effect of having careless users is more negative compared to some loss of opportunity arising from not being first to market. Validating a concept before scaling it instead of going the other way around, must be priority. Simply increasing development effort and cost when this is not justified can quickly lead to waste.
- I decided early on that I don't want to be known for my name, age, gender, nationality, race/religion or other societal "norms", often used for comparative/discriminative reasons. I want to be known only for my work. If you find this unacceptable, there are plenty of other people you can speak to.
- Convex hull can be used to mark the extent to which a disease has spread. Can you think of other uses?
- "Storage is not a very good business model." I suppose that it depends. If you are offering someone 5MB to let them read their email, perhaps that's not adding a lot of value. But if you provide enough storage to NASA to enable the analysis of all galaxy data, enough storage to NCBI to enable analysis of all existing genomes, enough storage to understand all types of weather conditions, or enough storage to understand highly dynamical systems, then perhaps this is another story. The result of having many businesses lack enough storage is that they can only analyse a limited amount of data, which can lead to a more narrow view of the environment (and lost opportunities to bigger companies). We already see that the most valuable datasets are multiple terabytes big and a powerful neural network on powerful hardware can extract a lot of insight from this volume compared to more manual approaches on a small machine that can't improve its data locality. But if storage capacity frequently remains unused and the storage business has no utilization plans for mining (more) valuable data, then this is a form of waste. Could be what hides behind the original statement.
- An article I came across claimed that Uber and Lyft aren't providing data to the general public. I don't believe they have to. A fundamental right of every business is to not disclose things that can hurt it. Otherwise everyone would come and ask for insight and free source code to see what their competitors are doing better to earn their millions. There's no such thing as free lunch. Everyone must decide on their own what they can and can't afford to share.
- Stores in shopping centers/malls also generate lots of data (which isn't public). There are many metrics they can track: costs/number of clients per unit floor space, store visitors/passing people, buyers/store visitors, sales/size of sales staff, median value of unit sold. Plenty of opportunities for people able to squeeze knowledge from the data and utilize it to plan concrete actions. But many businesses still don't know how to utilize the data they have.
- Finding numbers dominating the rows and columns of a matrix bit.ly/2IixK76. A very similar idea (mentally striking the rows and columns) can be used while solving sudoku puzzles. We can "crystallize" the important, while muting the irrelevant values. For this purpose masked arrays work well, but manually inspecting large matrices becomes increasingly harder.
- Saw a map with the Las Vegas traffic cameras bit.ly/2Ij3HvX ↗, but when I click on one, I get the message "This plugin is not supported". Who knows, perhaps something simple can be done to make the images appear again. #accessibility
- Mobile telephony antennas in Geneva, Switzerland bit.ly/2p6cb0R. Do you think that such antennas are harmful in general? I heard both positive and negative opinions, but never saw data on the topic. I suspect that Wi-Fi radio may have the same effect, so whenever possible, cable communication is probably preferable due to the reduced exposure to waves. Edit: The sentence "Long term exposure even to small amounts of x can be harmful" may not refer particularly to Wi-Fi, but it doesn't hurt to be paranoid and consider it seriously.
- Clustering teams from NBA standings bit.ly/2p6hT2R. In case you notice mistakes, feel free to correct me.
- Impressed that you can take an old tree off the ground, pneumatically remove the soil from its roots and trim them to the absolute minimum it needs to survive. This method is said to be able to extend its life, but I wondered whether it could be more general. That to become once again "younger", one needs to trim some of the roots and beliefs accumulated over time. To forget about any previous setbacks and see the world from a fresh, non-judgemental perspective.
- Park facilities in Boise bit.ly/2p5pcYl. Many trailheads and off-leash dog areas. Seven swimming pools, two golf clubs, one zoo.
- Invitation to dinner bit.ly/2Dj9Uo0
- 60-70 thousand cars passing through a street per day means 42-48 cars passing each minute on average (on a Los Angeles street). That's a lot of traffic. Friday and Thursday appear more busy than usual, but after the weekend days in reversed order, Tuesday shows the most reduced level of traffic. (Source: LA County, bit.ly/2p868ci)
- Speaking of annotation, do you find it a good practice when the labels on a metro map are rotated at almost arbitrary degrees and positioned sometimes before the point, sometimes after? I understand that where lines join there may not be enough room left to place a label, so that special rotation/positioning becomes necessary. But what about all other cases?
- For fast annotation, you need to know what to annotate and how useful that might be in your software. Valuable data is usually not available elsewhere and is one that can lead to useful, actionable insights that can be implemented in your everyday work, in a given context. Delegating this work to the users means that you expect your user base to generate data much faster than you do, which for new, unproven software is unrealistic. A fast typist can generate a lot more data and in a much shorter time than many dedicated users can. The reason is simple: the typist works on the task full-time and has full control on the quality of the data, while the users come sporadically, use the app for a short time, provide optional/incomplete/tainted input and then switch doing something else. It's hard to scale your database or create anything of value when the quality of your input is so low. ("Garbage in, garbage out") Since automated label extraction already exists and tasks are often handled remotely/in the cloud, the work of the individual typist is now not valued highly enough or is outsourced for cents. But the opposite might also become true one day: once the algorithms consume all available, valuable information, more data annotation might be needed to feed their curiosity beyond that point (as otherwise they would be relying on "old" data). We already see the first signs of the wave of problems that automated data generators, chatbots and other systems have started to create. Sentences feel as if written by someone who knows the words, but is not quite capable of combining them into a meaningful sentence; music sequences are hard to stand for more than three minutes. While the underlying algorithms are just starting to appear and there is no doubt they will be improved, there is an important difference between human-generated and artificially generated data: algorithms don't have life. And it is life itself that generates our data. An algorithm doesn't even know what a plant it, because it can't smell it, can't see how long it is, what's the color of the leaves or how many there are. All this data was purely enabled through life and it needs someone to explain/annotate/codify this in a format that it can understand. It's not just life in the wider environment, but also in every biological cell, every individual, every virus. An algorithm therefore has no notion how life itself might change. Unless it is equipped with the same sensors and thinks like a human being, it would be relatively indifferent if a major flood happened tomorrow, for example. But if trained, it could eventually predict that event or incoporate the knowledge of the present into future estimates. Because there are hardware limitations (you can't store an infinite amount of data to enable infinite precision), smaller entities might need annotators in the future as well, since efficient/succinct annotation will reduce their storage costs (allowing direct expression of concepts) and enable much faster computation than at places with unclear/lax data format priorities. An additional advantage of smaller entities is that have unique information that motivates the need for such annotation. Since we have a lot more smaller companies than big, the job of the good annotator is unlikely to be replaced soon, even when the current common wisdom might point in that direction. So instead of saying "We don't need you anymore", think about some more polite ways to explain your annotator that you were happy to work with them and that you will eventually come back once your algorithm begins starving for more annotated data.
- Implementing functionality noone uses is possibly one reason why more apps weren't created. Every app needs its users and not eventual, probabilistic usage. When the users don't come, app creation for the sake of creation becomes pure air.
- Radical syntax changes in a programming language incur a cost to all programmers in that language. From that viewpoint, programming seems to be at a disadvantage compared to math. Can you remember when basic symbols for sum, product, integral or gradient were changed for the last time? In programming, syntax might change every month and merely staying up-to-date with such pace can be exhausting. Someone might come and overhaul the language completely just because they think it works best this way. (It doesn't.) A better alternative would have been to ask the wider community about the best way forward, not only to gather opinions, but also support for the proposals. Working to the principle "ask for apology after the fact" is always possible, but this has a universal cost. If the changes don't happen according to a checklist, but haphazardly, we risk having to work with languages which increasingly resemble collections of patches, encouraging "stick-this-here" thinking. Weakly typed languages add constructs to mimic strongly typed ones. Prototypal languages become class-based. The "function" keyword disappears and "var" gets updated to "let". How much change are people willing to endure? Are they willing to spend their entire lives learning about syntax changes or should they switch to broader, syntax-free concepts, more often described in papers? If many people chose the latter or switched to another, more stable language, future changes/additions wouldn't matter much.
- There is no need to work for a salary lower than your monthly rent + consummables, no matter what "experience", "connections", "opportunities", "social benefits" or "salary raises" a company has to offer you. You live once and deserve better. If you postpone your life, you'll regret it. Sharpen your negotiation skills and learn how to deal with unscrupulous people or hidden attempts to force you into work focusing primarily on your weaknesess instead of on your strengths. If you see that after starting at a company, it gives you new, obscure technologies to learn while you can't apply what you are already best at, this might be a sign that explaining how unproductive you are was planned in order to tell you that your current salary is a bit too high. If you let others talk your skills small, you'll eventually become small.
- Sad to see so many small businesses feeding the large platforms. Imagine what would happen if instead of offering your work on Ebay, Etsy or elsewhere you took photos of all your porcellan figurines and offered them on a dedicated website, avoiding direct comparisons and price wars, while at the same time making your brand more exclusive. Currently, you are one of the many; the willingness to trade conveniently from a couch costs you a small fortune. You can be known and sell many items at profit close to zero or you can be much less known and sell few items at profit you determine. Which one do you think could work better in the long term?
- You can program the interface or position and adjust every single element manually. This is the difference between robotic and human interfaces. The usual excuses why the second doesn't happen: "it takes too much time", "it's not maintainable", "it's not scalable". Or "you shouldn't reinvent the wheel" when library X is available. What if everyone else is also using sacrosanct library X? How will you distinguish your work when you are unwilling to invest the hours or to go beyond the well-trampled path? CSS and web design are still about element positioning first, but not positioning in terms of absolute perfection. Anything that looks perfect is just not believable as "perfect" doesn't exist. Creating perfection programmatically is an artificial step that moves us away from the chance to appear more human. From the chance to evaluate the utility of each element, to position it manually and to examine how it relates to other elements. You probably already tried to create a complex drawing through code—the more nuanced it was, the more entangled your code became. At a certain point you asked yourself whether a painting program wouldn't have worked faster. Where a lot of flexibility is required, adding more code may not be the best approach.
- "The marginal cost of software is zero" Don't know. I charge. The butterflies in front of your eyes, if you can afford that.
- Used a Kaggle dataset to check how the unemployment rate in various US counties evolved over time bit.ly/2oZHfzf. Among the top 20 counties with lowest median unemployment rate, ten are in Nebraska, eight in North Dakota and the other two that register are South Dakota and Virginia. Not sure what happened in San Juan County, Colorado in Jan-Feb 1992 when unemployment rate exceeded 55%. Perhaps someone can provide some background here.
- Mushroom classification: edible or not edible. Overconfidence in algorithms could be dangerous.
- Perceived performance matters equally in transportation and web design. A driver can bring a person very fast from one location to another, but that won't matter much if the vehicle arrived after 20 minutes of waiting time. Similarly, you can have the most beautiful website, but that too won't matter much if everyone has to wait 2 minutes to load the heavy scripts which enable it. Drivers transport people, websites transport assets.
- You can also see the locations of the trees in Mississauga bit.ly/2oWkRXG, the botanical description of the top five types and their prevalence as a percentage of the total number of trees.
- Libraries in Mississauga, Canada bit.ly/2I8xQ1a. The city has also provided information about the average service time per request in minutes for all branches. Not something that can be seen often. During the short period of examination in 2017, the slowest branch had an average service time of 4.4mins/request, while the fastest had an average service time of 1.5mins/request. Many regular food stores are much slower than these mental food stores.
- Strange that only two letters must be at the right place in each word bit.ly/2p0EyO7
- Thinking about Hercule Poirot and graphs, where the nodes indicate times when particular events happened and a path describes a sequence of events. That's probably a different way to look at graphs. It always surprised how he could draw a single polyline solution at the end.
- Attractions in Amsterdam bit.ly/2oW7GFW. "Museum Escher in het Paleis" in the south-west sounds intriguing. Uses content from Amsterdam Marketing.
- Parking places in Helsinki, Finnland bit.ly/2I926sA. Unfortunately, without current occupancy metrics. The many places make the individual polygons small and hard to see. You can zoom with Ctrl-+ and then return to the original dimensions with Ctrl-0. Not sure how usable this might be on your platform. I frequently find applications which rely on zooming and panning hard to use, but you may see this differently.
- Popular books at Edmonton libraries last week bit.ly/2I6n4IL
- Having trouble to select one bit.ly/2oPIIIm, so mostly relying on the production machine bit.ly/2I3G8Hw. Turns out that larger circles become increasingly harder to paint, where the blurs also aren't cheap as well.
- It is well-known that Germany has traditions with beer, but I was not sure how common breweries are in USA bit.ly/2I5EOnA. According to this data, on a log scale the number of breweries is increasing in most US states. In decreasing order, the states with most breweries in 2016 were California, Washington, New York, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon. The many breweries could mean that beer consumption is also strong there.
- Merged some pieces on noise pollution at the Brussel's airport bit.ly/2I3F5Y9. Good to see the noise levels in decibels at day and night. "B787-B Dreamliner requires two tonnes less fuel on average over a distance of 7000km than B767."
- Monthly hotel average daily rate and occupancy, Arlington County (01.2014 - 10.2017) bit.ly/2I2fKh8. Arlington County Data API was used for this purpose, but it is not endorsed or certified by Arlington County. The normalized versions of the two patterns also exhibit some similarity, although not a perfect one. The daily rate has slightly increased over time while the occupancy has not changed much. When the occupancy was high, the rates were often high as well (and vice versa).
- Total aircraft operations and total passengers at the Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport in Arlington County (normalized values, 01.2015 - 07.2017) bit.ly/2oQFSD0. A nice correspondence of the normalized values can be observed.
- Monthly expenditure by department in Arlington County (07.2016 - 06.2017) bit.ly/2I68MYG. Even when nondepartmental transfers have been omitted, the diagram is still hard to describe in words.
- Libraries in Arlington County bit.ly/2oT5K0O. Only few, but well-distributed.
- Average monthly income per household in different regions of Thailand (1998 - 2015) bit.ly/2I2hjfh. Had to use Google Translator to understand anything. The labels of Nakhon Pathom and Nonthaburi overlap as they were quite close in 2013, but as you can see, their lines diverge in 2015. Good to see that overall this country seems to be improving.
- Caltrans route performance (2014 - 2016) bit.ly/2oOIgKr
- The files from 2014, 2015 and 2016 contain the words "San Bernardino", "San Bernadino" and "SBD". To check in which file the typo occured, I was using the pint() function...
- Trees in Delft, the Netherlands bit.ly/2oLEzoQ
- Visits and total circulation of the library branches in Delaware (2013 - 2017) bit.ly/2oK6DJc
- Streets with high median traffic counts in Delaware (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2I0M5oP. The north part of the state seems to be more exposed to strong traffic. You can also see the names of the top 30 streets if you like bit.ly/2oNABfp
- An attempt to show the parks in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2I0Ddzd. Can you confirm the presence or absence of mistakes?
- Visits of library branches in Manchester (2016) bit.ly/2oPEsbE. The difference between the Central Library and the rest is staggering.
- Various performance metrics about the Texas airport (2012 - 2014) bit.ly/2oMp5B6. I found the revenue per enplanement especially interesting as it is a metric I see for the first time. Hopefully the data collection process is extended so that subsequent years can appear in the data one day in the future.
- Reducing the average duration of outages matters. The City of Texas went down from 84.68 mins in 2006 to 48.87 mins in 2016. Every hour of outage means that someone isn't able to do their job and depending on how many people are affected, this can cost a lot.
- Water quality at 4 locations according to 3 criteria in Texas bit.ly/2oKBOnE. You can examine the parameters of hundreds of locations bit.ly/2HWrHox
- Didn't know that Talinn, Estonia has free public transport, which was introduced 5 years ago (currently for native people only, but looking to make it free for foreigners too). I find this very forward thinking; someone is setting an inspiring example here. This suggests that people can meet and exchange information much more frequently, which could be an additional reason why the country is known for its innovation. No longer surprised why the free transport theme is discussed in Germany now.
- "On-street car parking sensor data - 2016" by the City of Melbourne bit.ly/2HYMQPb looks interesting, but I don't have enough space to look at data, whose size is over 1.7GB. Perhaps you could extract interesting facts and present this in a short article that is easier to digest. I noticed that the column "in violation" contains True/False strings, which could have been encoded as zeros or ones to somewhat reduce the disc space requirements. When you have over 34.1 million rows, such minor details start to matter. In web design too, every single character we put on the page has to be tracked closely. With too many DOM elements there is a penalty for lax character packings.
- Traffic cameras in British Columbia, Canada bit.ly/2oJKpa4
- Producer and consumer price indices for fruits and vegetables (1974 - 2017) bit.ly/2oKjB9H. Reminds me how supply and demand must cross. If someone pays too much to see their production stay long on the shelf, even at a low price, then that's not sustainable. If on the other side they pay little, but due to intermediaries or other factors their production reaches the consumer at a very high price, then that's not sustainable too.
- Crime by dispatch hour in Philadelphia (2006 - present) bit.ly/2oKzltk. You can also see the most common dates and locations bit.ly/2HY6w5t and how crime has developed over the years bit.ly/2HXXsxq. Note that 2018 is still in progress. The number of cases is decreasing, which is a good sign. In case geolocation worked fine, then 8 of the top 30 addresses must be very close bit.ly/2HXa0VW
- Currently, air quality seems to be good across stations in Florida bit.ly/2oIryMI. However, some more detail regarding PM2.5, PM10 and SO2 would have been nice.
- Not perfect since some places seem to be missing (could be either due to missing data or due to my own coding mistake). But at least you can see most of the Pennsylvania municipalities by their location, name and areas bit.ly/2oGqdGe. One municipality may be composed of multiple polygons. After I saw boundaries only, I thought that seeing some more detail would have been nice.
- Bus lines and stops in Houston bit.ly/2oH2xkU (uses two datasets by the City of Houston). Most lines describing the routes seem completely covered by stops. But some short line segments show a comparatively low bus stop density assuming that the data is complete. Perhaps such rarefaction is motivated and intentional.
- Cumulative electricity usage and bills for properties of the City of Houston (07.2011 - 06.2017) bit.ly/2oHEhPD. Small notice: I removed the first item in each category ("Various"), since I thought that it is unclear what it means when it cannot be attributed to a concrete address. I wanted to create a historical perspective, but unforunately the dates across the multiple files change in format and I was unwilling to make the conversions. If you wish, you can take on the task. The City of Houston provides the data you need bit.ly/2HYDpze. We notice that there is high degree of correspondence between electricity usage and total due bills. But lets take the third and fourth label on the two lists as an example. The gap in electricity usage between the two is relatively big, but the gap in due bills is relatively small. 1001 Chenevert also uses less electricity than 4501 Beechnut #C, but pays slightly more. The advantage of showing many labels is that such relative comparisons become possible.
- Street lights in Boise, Idaho bit.ly/2oHb0Vx. Individual points with brighter color correspond to lights having higher wattage. You can also see the locations of the lights with the highest wattage (top 15%). An article I've read claimed that Idaho was one of the states with highest population growth in 2017, so I found that interesting.
- Population of some of the biggest cities in USA between 2010 and 2016 bit.ly/2HXbKPc. Tried to include Portland, but it showed the same growth pattern as Las Vegas, so that the two labels overlapped and I decided to leave this one out. Log scale was used on the y-axis.
- Needed to restart my machine after an attempt to parse a 172MB JSON file. This is what happens when you try to describe Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's municipalities as a polygon with as many points as possible. The alternative could have been to use as few as needed, but it is hard to know after the fact which are the ones that truly matter. Shape simplification reduces memory requirements and may even prevent programs from quitting unexpectedly. You start to appreciate this when you are in the middle of an important 3D project and try moving individual vertices...
- Wondering in what kind of condition this leaf was bit.ly/2HWBoDq. It's probably an extreme example, but it might explain why Seattle's fleet auction could be of interest to some bidders.
- Locations of the wind turbines in Rostock, Germany bit.ly/2oHEy58
- Art organisations in Ghent, Belgium bit.ly/2oGujyg
- Ghent parking zones before/after bit.ly/2HVVTA8. The same idea applied to the residence zones bit.ly/2oGky36
- Traffic at selected locations on the city ring R40 in Ghent, Belgium bit.ly/2HRP3vs
- Buildings ranked by floor area in Freiburg, Germany bit.ly/2oDdUu8. Given that the dataset contains only schools the results are not surprising. What surprises is their number.
- Number of tourist arrivals and tourist nights in Freiburg, Germany (1938 - 2015) bit.ly/2oBnw8S. The values for the Germans category are obtained as the difference between the total values minus the one for foreigners. If we divide the median number of nights by the median number of arrivals for both Germans and foreigners, we get 1.8839 vs. 1.5670 nights per arrived person. This means that historically seen, Germans tend to make better tourists, at least in Freiburg. But if we look at the last year only (2015), avoiding medians, the situation changes: 1.8392 vs. 2.0610. Relative to history, Germans have performed slightly worse, while foreigners have improved a lot. But it is unrealistic to assume that for such a long period all measurements have been subjected to the same criteria.
- Number of walkers at 8 locations in Leeds (2017) bit.ly/2oDPZed (data by City Centre Management : bit.ly/2oEBO8P). Not sure how many times the data format has changed over time, so I tried not to look earlier than 2017. Even then, sometimes one of the columns was called "Location", sometimes "LocationName". In one case the date format was different from all other files (causing the script to break). Some dates were either missing or having "r"/"o" values. Most months had hourly measurements, while the last three had only daily totals. Such small inconsistencies made it hard to produce coherent results. Initially I looked only at the last month and was ready to confirm that Briggate registers the most walkers. However, after we normalize all months to daily totals, the picture becomes more blurry. But at least the band around 20000 walkers seems to be densest. The measurement values are said to be used for planning purposes.
- An attempt to estimate the reduction in car value over time for the fleet of California bit.ly/2CsxrHj (data: bit.ly/2CqN566). The years of few disposition dates were given very far into the future (2713 and 3012) and I doubt that any car would have survived that long. The estimate shows that every 3 hours cost the taxpayer almost half a dollar per vehicle, the assumption being linear depreciation. Median car use time is formed as the median of the difference between disposition date and acquisition delivery date, converted to seconds. Chevrolet Impala LS seems like an interesting car and I wondered why so many were in the fleet. Then I went to the car maker's site to learn more and found that it was highly ranked in the publication "Consumer reports". Then went to see whether other car models get mentioned too and found that a new set of best cars was proposed for 2018 on the site bit.ly/2GRJ0WB. I expect that the final results would be membership only, but at least the proposals and the voting are public.
- Found a curious fact: Leeds City Council might have to dispose its only Jaguar XJL Portfolio in slightly more than a week bit.ly/2GRvDWp (as indicated in the data from 07.12.2017, bit.ly/2CpLuxe). This probably hurts, but it shows how expensive car parks can be, especially when cars have to be used for 6 years at most. Most models have been indicated to use diesel and relatively few use petrol, hybrid or electric. Peugeout Partner, For Transit Custom 290L1 and Volkswagen CR50 Welfare Mellor seem to be the most common models. Overall, it is very common to see vans or minibuses, so I wonder whether this is specific for this park only or a practice followed by other City Councils as well. The median of all odometer readings comes at slightly less than 20000km.
- Energy efficiency (£/m²/year) of some flats in Leeds in the past bit.ly/2Cr62p8. Contains information on a total of 48353 flats and uses two datasets: bit.ly/2GOXQx4 and bit.ly/2CpLVaX. Smaller points belong to less energy efficient flats. The bubble effect was not expected.
- Visitors of the libraries in Leeds bit.ly/2BWpxof
- Bicycle and green network in Toulouse, France bit.ly/2BRz7Jj
- The municipalities of Grenoble, France bit.ly/2EY0qo3. Uses the "Les communes de la Métropole" dataset bit.ly/2BY5hma, produced by Grenoble-Alpes Métropole. I like the stepwise effect in the data, but the label positioning could certainly be better if done by hand.
- Find an address in Aachen, Germany bit.ly/2EYz2q5. Quite slow, but works. If it finds the address, it will set a red point. If it doesn't it won't do anything.
- Population of Aachen, Germany (official, 01.2011 - 09.2017) bit.ly/2EXC4La
- Find the approximate position of streets in Halifax, Canada bit.ly/2EVCphi. Used a 46MB KML file for this demo. Initially wanted to make it an interactive SVG, letting the user type a street name to highlight the corresponding line segment within the map. Unfortunately, the resulting SVG became 16.8MB, which was still infeasible to use on a website. And since that SVG was already well touched, SVG compressors couldn't help much. Then I created a simple image out of the many SVG lines (reducing the lines opacity with the curves tool) with the idea to show only the entire line segment after the query is made. But I had to store all point coordinates in an array (avoiding a separate DB), and a multidimensional array didn't work well, exceeding the allowed script memory limit on the server. Then I converted it to a simple string to continue working on it. I noticed that most lines were really short, so this made me question how useful it is to have them inside the page when they can't be seen even with a higher than usual stroke width. Since the demo was only about approximate positions, I could compute only the centroid point of all points and substitute the many lines in the segment with a single point.
- Land tax in Seine-Saint-Denis, France bit.ly/2oqNQU4
- Total capacity of beds offered by merchants in Corsica bit.ly/2BRTgPm. Includes beds in all types of establishments.
- Street lights by category in Bordeaux bit.ly/2BRkQMK. Not sure what all these abbreviations mean.
- Libraries in Ontario, Canada by number of active cardholders, number of in-person visits, self-generated revenue and total operating revenues and expenditures for 2016 bit.ly/2osmAEw. Has some interesting results.
- Gasoline prices (including tax) for some countries (01.01.2012 - 01.01.2018) bit.ly/2oqXNRg. I cannot confirm whether this is true or false as I cannot take the Canadian view.
- Copenhagen's roads bit.ly/2BTRUnn. Didn't try to color-code the allowed speeds, because I'm not sure whether the data about them is still accurate. Had to look for the function of the large empty spot, so geographically I learned something new once again.
- Sports facilities and halls in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2ETEA57
- Restaurants in Berkeley which passed the inspections violation-free (07.01.2016 - 22.02.2018) bit.ly/2ETZGAd
- Poverty lines for one and many-person households in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany (according to the new, median-based method) bit.ly/2BQvxPr
- Natural monuments (mostly trees) in Bochum, Germany bit.ly/2orQed1. What happens in the middle of the figure is disturbing. Scaling could fix it, but then not all of the points on the periphery would be visible. Or they could be if the graphic is made sufficiently large, which would make it heavier. With images, whitespace often matters for the final size, which is very different from enforcing it through the use of margin/padding.
- Bus network in Montpellier, France bit.ly/2BPq2Rc. You can see the names of all bus stations. Based on this, it seems that "Albert Einstein" is the eastmost station. Took some deep dive into data and extraction of relevant pieces from multiple files, composing them together at the end. Still slow and some points could eventually be removed. Since many of you seem to have liked the tube map of London, I hope that you will enjoy this one as well.
- Utilization of some currently open parkings in Montpellier, France bit.ly/2oroNjx. You can also try to infer about the topology of the city by looking at its point addresses bit.ly/2BQzO5q
- Impressions from places to eat/drink in Amsterdam bit.ly/2oq3f78
- It happened multiple times to me that whenever I press Enter after having filled an input field, nothing happens. On the page I am currently seeing, pressing Enter a second time submits the data (not sure why). There is also a nearby button, but I need to focus it first and then press Enter again. Not only is this less direct, involving one more action, but it also interferes with my expectations. Using a mouse is another option, but the form has to work as much as possible regardless of the input method.
- Annual percentage change in per share book value of Berkshire Hathaway and S&P with divident included (1965 - 2017) bit.ly/2BUG1gK. Saw the numbers at the start of the latest annual report and decided to look at them from a visual perspective. As you have seen here before, historic data can capture a lot of detail, not just help to create great diagrams.
- Events in Amsterdam bit.ly/2BPjJgn. Has some really inspiring content and it is great to see data of such quality be made publicly accessible by Amsterdam Marketing. In my case, some of the content appeared not enclosed in a tag, which limits the opportunity to style it. Each entry uses different formatting and due to the large number of items, it is not possible to account for each individual case. But I hope that you'll find it useful even so.
- The PyeongChang 2018 closing ceremony of the Olympic Games was really impressive, even on screen. Thank you for making it possible and for sharing your exceptional performance with the world. Everyone who participated, sent a strong message for peace and togetherness. And that hard work really matters and is more visible than ever. Feeling pumped and trying to imagine how Beijing 2022 would extend on this theme.
- How easy people can opt out from your newsletter is also a design choice, whether you realize it or not.
- New strategy of some well-known websites: show visitors third-party ads, skillfully embedded within the content after every 4-5 paragraphs of text. The browsing experience is best described through a periodic pattern of jank. But sometimes you believe that the site is actually usable.
- The theater in Bonn, Germany has published data on the number of visitors in categories opera, dance and spectacle. Unfortunately the data is spurious and it is simply missing for many months. For some months it was provided in bulk, which necessitates spreading the numbers across them by taking the averages. Tried to plot the data to see its pattern bit.ly/2BQyiR2.
- Migration saldos within Cologne for various parts of the city (2010 - 2015) bit.ly/2or3kqU. The densest area is between 0 and 200, indicating that most parts of the city saw a slightly positive internal migration. Yet, as you can see, some regions lost citizens during all six years, where even the best performing regions couldn't entirely compensate for that. This is interesting.
- Origin of the tourists in Graz as reported from accomodations (1996 - 2012) bit.ly/2ooEZC5. Didn't include all possible origins, but only the ones with the highest median values over time. Hopefully the figure looks cleaner this way. Austria without Vienna is where most people came from, with Germany and Vienna following. Italy appears before some Austrian' states, which is slightly surprising for me.
- Libraries in Graz, Austria bit.ly/2BOjrGs
- Hourly weather forecast for some cities in Norway bit.ly/2EPZ0fg
- Number of doctors per 10000 people in Hong Kong bit.ly/2BPuAXS. Had an idea for this unusual scale. But it could be that many other countries have even lower rates. It is worth trying to understand what the reasons behind such a development are, and it probably won't work unless we can "put ourselves in other people's shoes" to see what their true concerns are.
- Top 4 crime incident types by neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota bit.ly/2BLuTCU and when they tend to happend during the day bit.ly/2ongjKd
- Adopted revenue and expense amounts in some categories from the Saint Paul's budget (2014-2018) bit.ly/2EO5tHq. With the exception of 2017, when expenses for full time salaries and wages were very high, the two highest revenue sources seem to be able to cover some of the highest expenses.
- Knew what the directions SE, SW, NE and NW mean, but never heard about NEE, SEE, NWW, SWW, NNW, NNE, SSW and SSE before. Good that such a compass exists bit.ly/2EOJgcx. Saw GPS data from cars that had these directions in addition to the geocoordinates and speeds of the cars. Perhaps this is enough to create some visual vector field, but until I try and see how well it works, I cannot say for sure. Update: Although it seems to work bit.ly/2EO0BSP, it took more than an hour of computation. Additionally, I made two mistakes. I forgot to make the points smaller (they were left at 5 pixels each) and the vector length now seems suboptimal (which I couldn't know in advance of seeing the big picture). Most vectors are barely visible and the two regions have far too much overlapping. But at least it is possible. Fixing this would take too much time once again and likely won't add much value, so I'll spend time on something else instead. The data is periodically updated, so please think about this as a snapshot in time.
- Locations of the 311 (non-emergency) service requests in Cincinnati since 2012 bit.ly/2EKTfiI. Some darker spots are identifiable on the map. Metal/furniture, tall grass growing on private properties, trash/litter and potholes seem to be frequent complaints. Didn't spend time to fix the formatting.
- "London property is worth more than Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh combined." Not surprising if you looked at the figure with the relative populations of these cities that I made a while ago. London appeared almost shockingly bigger than the rest. So different, that I couldn't easily let go of the belief that I was having a mistake.
- Median avg. daily traffic at various locations in New Jersey (2009-2015) bit.ly/2CF8wf4. With lots of data, it is relatively slow to obtain results.
- Between 01.1985 and 11.2017, the passenger saldo of Adelaide airport is most negative with Auckland (New Zeland) and Denpasar (Indonesia), meaning that much more people left in these directions than came from them. On the other side, most people came from Singapore (Singapore), Hong Kong (Hong Kong, SAR) and to a much lesser extent from Tokyo (Japan), Bangkok (Thailand) and Los Angeles (USA). For Sydney airport, the situation looks different. Most people left it in direction Osaka (Japan), Tokyo (Japan), Dallas (USA), Auckland (New Zealand), Los Angeles (USA), Nagoya (Japan), San Francisco (USA), Fukuoka (Japan) and to a lesser extent in direction London (UK), Vancouver (Canada), Seoul (Korea), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and Beijing (China). Most passengers came from Singapore (Singapore), Bangkok (Thailand), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Honolulu (USA), Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Shanghai (China), Manila (Philippines), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Christchurch (New Zealand). At least this is what working with the dataset "International airlines - traffic by city pairs" bit.ly/2ELadxw suggests. Data is provided for many Australian airports, although there are some notes about it as well.
- Comparison of passenger movements with domestic airlines at the top 10 Australian airports bit.ly/2ELzaZM
- Learned the hard way that simply having files about routes, shapes, stops, transfers and trips might not be not sufficient to construct the lines corresponding to each route with the stops ordered in sequence, given their latitude and longitude (SVG-interactive). In the files I obtained, information about many stops was missing. But this data format seems to exist at many places, so it must be exported from some kind of software. Perhaps it is a matter of a setting to export data that is more cohesive.
- Median sea level rise by month at Fort Pulaski (01.07.1935 - 01.08.2016) bit.ly/2CDL029. The total sum of all rises and falls comes at -52.46, while the median of these medians is -0.062. This means that during the period, the place had a net loss in water resources.
- In November 2017, most flights at the Phoenix airport were served by American Airlines (14312), followed by Southwest Airlines (9828). American Airlines had its passengers wait at gates A1, B9 and A3 most often, while passengers of Southwest Airlines had to wait at gates C1, C3 and C9 most often. Both used terminal 4 for all their flights. Looking at a geometric model of the airport bit.ly/2CFhOaZ, we see that the locations of the gates at which the two companies served most often are almost opposing; the C gates are in a geometrically smaller area, which seems to have fewer dining opportunities/stores. In terms of number of flights registered, other airlines are much less represented. Delta Airlines had 1741 flights and United Airlines had 50 flights less than that. The data was provided by the City of Phoenix.
- Museums in Brussels bit.ly/2CDNaia. The name "Musee du Cacao et du Chocolat" immediately grabbed my attention. Hopefully, the building can withstand the summer temperatures.
- Bike availability in Brussels bit.ly/2CEbbpn
- Public art supported by the city of Brussels (29.03.2017) bit.ly/2EKcfOh. Wanted to also include geocoordinates, the titles of the works and their creators. Turns out that only half of the images had information attached to them and many titles were missing.
- Entry in the German Digital Bibliothek (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek) from the last month bit.ly/2sJMGHH when I registered. Then, after watching a very inspirational trailer about Australian animal life, I wondered why it took me so long. But Gandhi's thinking has frequently touched me in a positive sense, so at some point I decided that owning his autobiography "The story of my experiments with truth" would be worth it. That was indeed the case.
- Parks always seemed to help me in one way or another when I became overly emotional. For some they also serve as a source of inspiration during idea generation. So they've made the walks part of their daily routine.
- Recreation visits of some national parks in USA (1979 - 2018) bit.ly/2sLmH2D. Some nice periodicity here. Yellowstone visits seem to fluctuate most. In low-activity months, Yosemite seems to be visited slightly more often than Rocky Mountain, but in high-activity ones it is often the other way around.
- I have always been neutral regarding Brexit. Everyone has the right to decide after all and I think that this is great. What I am no longer neutral about is the degree to which some people think that they can serve Europeans any type of grass they like, whenever they like it. I mean the latest speech about postponing the event, given all the years dedicated to preparation—the almost one-year period given to organize the referendum itself and the years so far after that. I thought that everything about Brexit has been said before, but the theme returns indefinitely in the media. The consequences of this affect the lives of citizens like me across Europe who day after day live without knowing what to expect. In a sense, UK became the European "Trojan horse", because whether in or out, they can expect to use all advantages of that. It is hard to withstand such hypocrisy; I wonder if it would have been better if Britain left the EU immediately without even waiting for the referendum and without having time to prepare. The reason for this is simple: if someone told you you were a lesser person than they are, you probably wouldn't wait three years for them to change their mind. Such strong words once expressed cannot be forgotten and are sufficient to end any relationship no matter how strong it was in the past. On the spot. Because "saving face" is the smallest sign of any person with self-esteem. Currently I am not seeing the EU saving the face of its citizens. Instead, the EU is selling their patience by postponing and further discounts. Especially when you hear how at the back of the same people who ask about further postponement another group is still continuing to speak negatively about people from particular countries within the EU. What an arrogance! And if inaction about Brexit depends on another European country, be it Germany, France or any other where someone has interest in extending the conversation bis Sankt Nimmerleinstag, I would happily ask to see their exits as well. Because no decision can be final as long as the cousin of one arrogance remains within the Union...
- "Crowdsourcing is more effective, because many ideas are accumulated, cheaper, because you don't have to pay and more efficient, because it gives you an external point of view." Well, if the percentage of companies which crowdsourced work the last year has become that big, they should not be surprised for not getting the results they wished for. Good results that involve other people and their time have to be earned and there is no exception from this rule. By crowdsourcing, your company actively signals your people that they don't matter much, potentially hiding the need for contracts or other taxable activities. With so many insidiuos people, it's no surprise that crowdsourcing is growing.
- Have you noticed how locally-created, handcrafted data, limited only to the features you need in your application is much faster to compute with compared with the data you obtain from external sources, which have much more than you would ever need? The difference can be significant in terms of computation time: the first might take you only a couple of seconds, while the second enters the minutes category. (Working with lots of data is not fast in general and producing graphics is even slower.) It is also not hard to see some genius usage patterns based on this, where people define only a couple of variables and skillfully change their values within a loop, avoiding array pushes and still achieving their goal. Such high-quality work is a pure pleasure to see. Also reminds me of the pruning strategy described in the dictionary of techniques.
- An idea worth remembering: instead of placing long labels next to your data points, you could place numbers and indicate in the legend which number corresponds to which label. This may reduce label-label and label-point overlaps, making your graphic cleaner. But even this won't work with too many labels/label categories.
- I often read seemingly unrelated things, which some people would accuse me that they do not have a lot to do with programming or design. But it is hard for me to enoy the company of pure programmers, who beside reading and writing only code in some languages plus knowing some frameworks have neither time nor understanding or interest for much else. I wonder what such great programming skills are for when people have no understanding about the contexts in which they are good to apply. Or wait for someone else to explain how their skills should be translated into products. In my opinion, good programming is as much about working with clients as it is about being self-sufficient and still generating work (preferably that matters) when the clients aren't there. Many companies seem to be interested in creating "dedicated", one-sided people, since this allows them to gain some efficiencies. But I always felt that this interfered with my work and made me dumber over time. (Turns out what is good for companies is moslty bad for me.) So I force myself to read unrelated things, which is why you see the hundreds of bits on this page after all. The more multi-disciplinary I can make my own thinking, the better and more empowered I feel. Which then seeks the next form of expression, either here or elsewhere.
- If in the electronic age you find yourself filling 8-page formulars by hand, then something is ripe for innovation.
- How often do look at your access logs? All logs in their entirety, not just for the current month. Do you know how you can see a global graphic, related to the entire period and not just one related to the current month? Writing 20 lines of code to parse the logs and organize the information in a way you want to see it is not that difficult. And understanding who your customers are is more valuable that looking at the noise that most robots generate.
- Triangle overcomes an obstacle bit.ly/2EVmyhL. Would be harder on a full vertex stomach.
- As an author, would you charge both the transmitter and receiver of information shared by word-of-mouth? After all, this is another form of copying, which directly influences the sales numbers.
- Another option is showing fragments of the book online, including a nearby link to purchase the book in case the reader wants to know more. But this option won't work for everyone, because it requires a machine and experience in using it, Internet connection and the willingness to stay long hours in front of the screen. This is why the function and place of the libraries is so important even today. They ensure that any person—the socially excluded, the lonely, the homeless, the illiterate, the disabled, the ill—have access to knowledge that spans into new worlds, capable of positively impacting, perhaps even changing their lives. If an author believes that someone's last hope to change should be taken away from them, they are free to proceed. But raising the lowest bar instead of expanding the pool of available knowledge and intensifying its spreading seems counterintuitive to me.
- Sad to read about a new public movement against libraries with the goal to have them pay the author every time their book is borrowed by a reader. Some authors expressed concerns about readers not acknowledging their rights, copying their books after borrowing them. This is of course illegal and does true harm to the authors. But I cannot support a model that attempts to punish all readers, just because few were acting bad. I believe that the libraries have a social function and need to be as open as possible. Authors who give a book to the local library also express their agreement with this function (that is, beside other things they also choose to serve and contribute, which is of highest honor); if they disagree, noone could blame them if they took their work elsewhere. Or maybe even sell it online through their own channel. If the libraries were charged per book borrowed, this could transfer the costs to the readers, making reading itself accessible only to a more limiited audience. Having readers pay proportionally to the number of titles they borrow could reduce interest in reading overall. At the end, this would affect the authors, because fewer readers in general would mean fewer readers specifically for their books, fewer chances to spread the word and to get known. To get known through the quality of work and not through the loudness of voice.
- "NYC street trees by species" bit.ly/2EVDgOb ↗. Beautiful, scalable and interactive.
- Speaking of busses today, a person no longer among us used to say that it's important to ensure that the right people are on the bus and that they are on the right seats. Unclear how many drivers are actively thinking about this.
- When serving and deserving intersect, all sides can be happy. Some people call it a "win-win" situation.
- If you are waiting for someone to knock on your door, you aren't really looking for professionals.
- Daily bus ridership by route in Chicago (01.01.2001 - 30.11.2017) bit.ly/2BH8GGe. The sudden line that builds towards the end of the period might indicate that either the measurement methodology has changed or other bus lines which were previously missing have started to appear. We see that bus line number 79 has registered the highest median ridership, having almost 4000 travelers more per day than bus line number 9 (the second on the list). You can also see the special case of a line fit to the data points of bus number 79 bit.ly/2C94fEP
- Finding combinations of ingredients based on good pairs bit.ly/2C6E2a9
- Sometimes you need an entire process to apply the correct sequence of regular expressions to transform the data to a format for further processing (still at it). Although regexes can be hard to design and debug initially, you might find that the time investment is worth it once you consider how many hours of typing and editing this saves you.
- Some of the world's biggest libraries ranked by their catalog size bit.ly/2C6mScL
- Car auctions may have many car models on offer, which in case of no interest, start to take lots of physical space (there is a need to keep inventory low in general) and rust over time. The more cars potential buyers can see, the less interest they can show in each additional one. (Rust is scary too.) From the seller's point of view, the right application can make the sales process smoother, so that the time between the arrival and the sale of the car is minimized. From the client's point of view, it can be helpful to arrive with a good understanding of what one is looking for. For instance, if you look at the Kansas City monthly car auction, you can set your filtering criteria to see only more recent cars instead of going through the long list or hoping that your physical presence will help you decide bit.ly/2BAJUY3. As you can see, we still have no information about the mileage, but now there are only a dozen of cars we have to look at instead of hundreds. The more information you have upfront, the more informed your choice can be.
- An attempt to show some vehicle average speeds in five boroughs of New York bit.ly/2BA9yfq
- Nature of the police deparment phone calls in Jersey City (01.01.2014 - 31.03.2017) bit.ly/2ByO9n2. The streets from where most calls where registered were Bergen Ave (17047), Central Ave (14603) and 7th St. (12605).
- Parks in Vancouver by area in hectares bit.ly/2ByGvsJ. Looking at the points, I clicked on Stanley park first. You can also see a model of the parks in Jersey City bit.ly/2BwIT3n
- In the titles of works associated with Shakespeare, which were produced between 1564 and 1616 and kept in the British Library, the word "Denmark" appears 17 times. I think I only encountered it once while reading in my younger years.
- If you can get your function right, you can draw things from points bit.ly/2C4j0cg similarly to the beautiful, animated figures you saw in the sky at the Olympic Games opening ceremony. It won't look that good, but at least your overhead will be low compared to sending thousands of drones in the sky, controlling their behavior in real-time, accounting for wind fluctuations and ensuring that not a single one falls due to a depleted battery for the duration of the entire performance.
- A single loop iterates three times to compute variance, skewness and kurtosis for a given numeric sequence bit.ly/2C1wghD
- Gov.uk has published a report on smoking bit.ly/2o5lm21, containing the following infographics bit.ly/2C2FHNT about smoking prevalence among Europeans. As you can see not all Europeans are as lucky as UK and Sweden. But that well-intentioned friends beat strangers in how harmful their help could be to your child's health, this comes as a lightning strike. Sufficient to make you want to review your child's friends list.
- When adults over 40 were asked whether they had any near visual impairment, considering all responses across all US states, the median of the confirmation rate comes at 36% (Source: bit.ly/2Bxvyrs). Scary number and possibily implication-rich for many web and visual designers.
- Average kWh per customer per day for suburbs of Sydney (2009 - 2015) bit.ly/2BwfAh9, according to Ausgrid. The company changed the methodology significantly in 2016, so these results were not included in order to avoid playing with fire. Still, the trend towards reduction in the consumption of electricity look positive in the region.
- Air quality measurements in Port Augusta, Australia (03.01.2017 - 01.01.2018) bit.ly/2o2r2tz. I left a couple of quite extreme values out of view for the first two figures as I suspect that they might be due to incorrect measurements (in the first month the sensors seem to have needed some calibration time). If you look carefully, you'll see that some points are ordered almost as bars. This could means that some high values were not only quite similar, but they also occured close in time. The interval at which the measurements were made was one hour.
- Free Wi-Fi locations in Grenoble, France (15.01.2017) bit.ly/2BvN7YM. The author of this dataset said that they are open to improved localization. Perhaps (if you live in this city) you know what could be improved.
- Visitors by library in Grenoble (2008 - 2016) bit.ly/2sxdV8m. Two libraries were not included, since one was having a label, but no measurements and another one had measurements, but no label. We see that in more recent years, Bibliothèque Centre Ville had slightly more visitors than the Grand Place. As you have learned already, most libraries still continue to be worth visiting despite the claims that Internet has taken their place. And they are often very interesting places to lose yourself. Holding a printed book is quite different from reading on screen. If you have the chance, take a look at a place close to you.
- Parking places in Grenoble, France bit.ly/2C0olkJ. Expected to be able to fill some polygons to see areas, but only lines were provided. Attempting to construct polygons from two individual points (assuming they are top left and bottom right) resulted in a wrong visualization. But at least I learned not to attempt plotting the data as polygon unless its type has been explicitly specified so.
- Street light locations in Zürich bit.ly/2C2aZod
- Some subareas of the state Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France bit.ly/2o0279U
- Tourist bike paths in Jena, Germany bit.ly/2BxFHoe. Most subpaths seem to be accessible from a single, main path.
- Nice visualization of the current air quality in Hamburg bit.ly/2BwGJkl ↗
- Remember that if you need someone to work on your project, you can always visit my contact page.
- Coordinates of charging stations for electric cars in Hamburg, Germany bit.ly/2BZMAiW. This represents only the biggest cluster, but there are more stations on the periphery. Couldn't include them all, because this would make the individual points indistinguishable. Hopefully, you'll still find the updates useful.
- Air quality at air stations in Minsk, Belarus (2008 - 2015) bit.ly/2Buo8VQ. Approximate only as some values were given as "<0.5" or ">0.5".
- Landslides worldwide bit.ly/2BWH3tH. Avalanches also seem to fall in the same category. But sometimes you decide that you can't wait for hours for all historical data.
- Hub height and total height from some wind turbine proposals in Aberdeenshire, UK bit.ly/2BXEebH. As expected, the total height is slightly shifted to the right, but it was nice to see how the distributions overlap.
- Street lights in Dundee, UK bit.ly/2BXqWvF. We can see where the most consuming ones are. The lights labeled "INDO PLLS", "Designplan Quadrant LED" and "Urbis Albany LED" were not included in the graphic as they didn't have their wattage specified. Yet they make only 0.37% of all (25049) existing lights. In case all were turned on, this would consume ≈1.765264MWh.
- Comparison of the average number of underground journeys per passenger in London and Glasgow (1982 - 2016) and the average miles per passenger bit.ly/2BZB7QE
- Pharmacies and medical facilities in Prague bit.ly/2srZ7b9
- Average and projected forest fire danger bit.ly/2BYz6E8. Source: European Environment Agency (EEA).
- Average domestic electricity consumption in Kingston upon Hull, compared to England bit.ly/2stJOi3
- Green roofs by area in Amsterdam bit.ly/2BXOeBO
- Parking place utilization in Amsterdam bit.ly/2sr754l
- Merging data pieces from separate, fictive sensors into common observations bit.ly/2BT3XSs
- Found this nice CPU-GPU comparison of capabilities bit.ly/2BprvgH
- Element-wise multiplication of two 10000x10000 matrices (A[i,j] * B[i,j]) filled with random numbers from 10 to 100 ran in 3.176s in C# (best of 3), N/A in pure Python and 1.542s in Numpy (best of 3) on my machine. Ahtough Numpy is surprisingly fast, some libraries building on top of it still deliver N/A.
- Learning from UNESCO's Transparency Portal bit.ly/2Bpu7et
- Have you checked latest Chrome? Has a great new function for restoring accidentally closed tabs. Wanted to press Ctrl + T and type the address again, but pressed Ctrl + Shift + T and this made the closed tab reappear with its content again.
- Spirals in Vega20 (colors scheme) bit.ly/2Bnim8p. You can also see the math specifics used to create them.
- Mixing four types of coffee programmatically bit.ly/2BWoYf8 (some people like to drink mixes). "Java is a type of coffee from the island of Java, Indonesia". I knew about the island, but not about the coffee. And I neither drink coffee, nor have I found myself write in Java. But the elegance of C# code and the helpfulness of the compiler have started to speak to me. The long screens of cryptic and hard to read errors in C++ and Python mean that it takes a lot of time to simply decode what went wrong. Yet, I haven't found a way to scrape content from the web with C# so far—getting an error that a DLL is missing where my platform isn't Windows. But I noticed that C# tends to perform well with frequent compilations of relatively small programs, which is desirable when testing small algorithms and gradually scaling them to large input sizes.
- Gradient path in 8x8 matrix bit.ly/2BReRZ9
- Projected cancer prevalence by state and sex at all cancer sites, all ages in USA for 2017 bit.ly/2BjIlxE. The year has already passed, but the visualization could still be interesting.
- Married and never-married people by neighborhood in Vancouver bit.ly/2Bkkuho
- Chicago buildings energy performance (as of 08.02.2018) bit.ly/2BQehL3
- Chicago traffic congestion by region bit.ly/2BPvd4l. Note that this reflects my own understanding of the data.
- Enplanements at the top 50 U.S. airports in 2016 (comparison) bit.ly/2BN8LJ2. I was not able to zoom the map on the right so as to see all circles on it. At that scale it has many overlapping data points. The image on the left has fewer overlaps, but is not feature-rich (missing map, no color). You can also see a bar chart that gives another view bit.ly/2BQQY3T
- Europeans in risk of poverty and social exclusion (08.02.2018) bit.ly/2BjT4YQ
- HIV prevalence in selected countries (ages 15-49, 1990 - 2011) bit.ly/2BjfCc9
- Wind characteristics at three locations in San Francisco area (2009 - 2016) bit.ly/2BPDsxp. Selected Warnerville Switchyard (Oakdale), Pulgas Reservoir (San Mateo) and Pier 40 (Pier 40) out of the many options, because they had data for most years. Made the mistake to attempt converting the times to datetime objects after which my machine became too slow and then failed at that operation once the datetimes containing the "?" symbol started to appear. Since the goal probably was not to know the exact times, I decided to visualize the whole as a long time series sorted by year and the order in which the information was provided in the files. The data has been collected at five-minute intervals. I cannot compare with the rest of the stations, but it seems to me that Pier 40 has registered good wind velocities by relatively constant wind direction.
- Energy efficiency of some facilities by building category in San Francisco (as of 16.02.2016) bit.ly/2BhliUa. You can also see a visualization of newer data on the energy use intensity of some hotels, offices and retail stores in San Francisco (18.01.2018) bit.ly/2BmAOhk. Didn't expect that I would be creating buildings from buildings.
- Schools in San Francisco by grade range bit.ly/2BkBp3p
- Finding the inventors of selected inventions bit.ly/2BNnPpZ
- VBB routes in Berlin bit.ly/2skabXy. Said to be valid only for the last year. Quite noisy since every route received its own color. Took some time to compute.
- Phone calls to the 311 system regarding missed trash collection in Washington DC in the last 30 days (08.02.2018) bit.ly/2sjwBbq. You can also see the locations of all service requests during the last month bit.ly/2sbWrhq or of all requests since 2009 bit.ly/2EqPLRx (you may need to zoom).
- Loan modification seems to be a very frequent complaint customers have about some banks. Mortgage, debt collection, credit reporting and credit card are the top product categories where customers complained, to a slightly lesser extent about student and consumer loans. Source bit.ly/2EqhtxN
- It makes me happy to see small cities (like Buda, Texas and others) transmitting videos from their City Council meetings and other public events to inform everyone what's going on. In many big cities transparency is either often missing or an afterthought.
- t-SNE on DXOMark digital camera data bit.ly/2EopMdD
- Finding the routes of departing flights at LaGuardia airport at the morning of 07.02.2018 bit.ly/2EnBdSR
- Seeking information about the route from Frankfurt/Main to Berlin led me to this map on DB's website bit.ly/2EpY1Bm. At least I don't need to plot that path now (like I did once before), but it is surprising to see a map with so much noise. Should secondary routes appear in saturated red?
- The pushAll() method in JavaScript reminds me about array_push() in PHP, extend() in Python and emplace_back() in C++. I wouldn't even think about consistency.
- A dot-line plan for the week bit.ly/2sfHHhB
- Tetromino mapping between boxes bit.ly/2BHDZBr
- Do you set the "async" attribute on your "script" tags? This might be useful in certain cases. For instance, if you want to prevent users from accessing your "subscription only" content. When you send many megabytes to them and consult many third parties, your "until here" popup message may take a while to appear. During that time, anyone who has loaded the article content entirely (but waits for the ads), can press the Escape key. Now your script won't continue executing, so your popup message won't appear at all. These might seem minor things, but they make an impression.
- Do you read master theses now and then? If not, you probably missed things like this hive diagram bit.ly/2BdEdiw
- Center of mass for multiple masses bit.ly/2BJF0Jh. Beautiful formulas always deserve a demo. If we increase the mass of a point, it starts pulling the center towards itself.
- I like the idea of subtle gesture control more than voice control to manage devices in a home setting. Voice can irritate people like me who try to stay focused most of the time, repeated words lose their meaning or produce noise, which doesn't follow the least interference principle. Imagine someone is sleeping while the TV is running and you issue a voice command to turn it off. I hope that we'll find ways to decrease the noise rather than increasing it, but it very well could be that these technologies improve beyond recognition so this is no longer an issue.
- Wondering why someone would detect snowflakes in an image. Perhaps they installed a sensor to detect movements outside and they fear that the snowflake might pass through the box and fall on the processor... There must be some case for the kind of worry you associate with a snowflake when you choose to track it, be it visually or not. Otherwise it would be doing it, because it's cool.
- Still remembering from my short visit in Germany (because now I consider it this way) how I was trying to use Excel and Typo3, mostly failing and crying. Either I couldn't understand what the CEO wanted or he was incapable of explaining it. Most of the things I heard during my first two weeks had the nature of constant yelling. I wasn't alone there, but this behavior somehow seemed to impress me most. After two weeks I could no longer endure it and left. But it brings back these memories whenever I see that in 2018 German companies still hire for that thing called Typo3. I hoped to stop looking at its face, yet it insists advertising itself to me directly bit.ly/2nJ3R6l. Needless to say, you won't get the chance to hire me for Typo3 work anymore.
- "We are hiring" sends the specific signal that your company neither cares who they hire nor how. The only thing that matters is hiring cheaply, since you've let ten people come at the interview at the same time, asking them about their expectations, with the full knowledge that they'll have to underbid each other if they want to get the offer. Your job is to make as many people as possible willing to make themselves comparable (and cheap). Unfortunately, with this mindset, you'll never see me at your interview (I neither make myself comparable nor cheap). If your company can't prove that they need exactly me and not someone else, then being there is not worth my time and skills. If you aren't already chasing the star performers in your industry, this makes me seriously concerned about your future and the stability of your company. Who wants to work at a place that may not exist two years from now? And why should a random person even care about your company when the cost of sending you an additional CV has fallen below a cent? Continue to hire the way you do.
- CO2 emissions in 1000 tons from primary energy consumption (German provinces, 2014) bit.ly/2nIvqg5. Back then, Nordrhein-Westfalen seemed to need a lot of improvement, especially in the brown coal category.
- An attempt to understand the demographic picture in Munich bit.ly/2DYS8eW. Omitted the translations since these are not interesting to me (I understand German too).
- Gloucester City Council expenditure by expenditure type between February 2017 and December 2017 bit.ly/2nIy85l
- Comparison of daily electricity consumption at three different places in Glasgow (01.01.2013 - 12.05.2015) bit.ly/2nJ02OK
- Made another demo on parking place utilization, this time for car parks in Glasgow. Unfortunately, after the fact I noticed that it won't work on this server, so I recorded a video instead bit.ly/2E1hvNj. Currently "Concert Square Car Park" is busiest with 88.8% utilization.
- Looking at a contour plot and thinking how it could be useful to describe the extent at which an earthquake is felt at various distances from the origin, attaching a value to each bounded area. I associate this also with kernel density estimation.
- A picture could be: a yellow tape along the door frame with the black label "Keep it clean Keep it clean Keep it clean...". Above the door a big circular hole in the wall, an arrow pointing to it and its description "Throw junk here". Below the picture, the unique selling proposition: "Solving most of the household's problems at the entrance".
- Wrote a small script to see which graphics cards are good at memory bandwidth per watt-price (on the Kaggle dataset). Correction: I made the mistake to forget normalizing the values first. Now the various models of Radeon RX 480 8GB, each offering 256GB/s bandwidth, move to positions 4-8 instead of 11-14 as mentioned previously, while the 12GB "Titan" labeled cards, offering much higher bandwidth still appear almost at the end of the ranking. As before, see this criteria only as personal preference rather than recommendation.
- You can count how many people walked over a particular location at a store/event and then create a heatmap showing the places of highest interest. I suspect that central locations or common paths would be red most often, yet this can serve as a relative measure for the interestingness of other locations. Also nice is that no personal idenity data is collected this way.
- Amazon numbers from quarterly financial results (2014 - 2017) bit.ly/2nDZwBH
- Canon sales by region (2008 - 2017) bit.ly/2nEUrZD
- Learning from ships operating at the port of Hamburg bit.ly/2nCirwF
- The median time to resolve a 311 service request case in Boston between 01.07.2011 and 31.01.2018 computed to almost five hours. Most requests came from Dorchester (175193), Roxbury (105398) and Allston/Brighton (84986). The most frequent locations were 1 City Hall Plz in Boston (2037), various streets/intersections in Downtown/Financial District, 139 Tremont St in Boston (352), the intersections Berkeley St & E Berkeley St (301) and Columbus Ave & Dartmouth St (282) in South End, the intersection Brighton Ave & Harvard Ave in Allston/Brighton (300), the intersections Massachusetts Ave & Newbury St (298) and Massachusetts Ave & Huntington Ave (288) in Back Bay as well as 835 Huntington Ave in Mission Hill (274). Here you can see a map of all service requests during the period bit.ly/2nAeAjx (high-frequency areas are darker) or the median duration in hours by case type bit.ly/2nDTu42.
- Counting occurences after bin fitting of values bit.ly/2DSrp3P
- BogoMIPS/Mhz for some old CPUs bit.ly/2nz0n6o
- An attempt to detect the corners of a wind turbine in an image bit.ly/2nwmFFW. The FAST algorithm picks up noise to a varying degree and now we have to find another algorithm to remove it... Photo by Johny Goerend.
- When someone sends a GPS-trackable package, they can see the trajectory which it follows and identify any delivery inefficiencies which would increase the least squares deviation from the straight path and thus increase the delivery time. The receiver of the package has the right to know where it is and not just see when it arrives at given points (like post offices). If data is captured only there, any delay experienced between two stations would remain intransparent to the recipient.
- Tracking the trajectories of six Columba livia pigeons over time bit.ly/2DSSbJt. I expected to see more random movements, but it seems that the pigeons frequently returned to a place they preferred (possibly the location of release). Some lines seem to overlap, which means that they moved through the same route more than once, which is interesting. Also see the original description of this Movebank dataset, which contains data about 35 pigeons bit.ly/2nxMpll. What this attempted to illustrate is how we could map the trajectories of moving objects, animals or people.
- One advantage of sticking the code to the result is that when the browser updates and the result disappears, the code is still there, fail-safe and waiting for someone to be adapted. Expecting the creator to rework the same small demo repeatedly, independent of creation date, whenever needed, is asking too much. Every creation lives in its time and timeliness of appreciation is the only support it gets.
- Trying to make sense of the data found in the book "Scale" by Geoffrey West led me to create this plot "Equivalence between earthquake magnitude and tons of TNT (log scale)" bit.ly/2DRcjvs. Especially enjoyed the comparisons and how different scale exponents were assigned to different entities/organisms in life. Despite seeing only a fragment of the whole book, this alone is enough to recommend it if you haven't seen it.
- Notice that I never claimed that any of my work is error-free. Look at it with a degree of scepticism. It is just the type of work I could do at that particular moment, under some specific circumstances, given some specific knowledge/skills/understanding. I am sure that you would be able to pinpoint some of my mistakes if you looked carefully enough. Is this reason to stop trying and improving? I don't think so. Everyone makes mistakes, but we have to learn from them and still move on.
- Street segments pavement condition index scores in Palo Alto, California (2013) bit.ly/2DT8gOY. It would have been nice to learn how the condition has changed since then.
- Disc bit.ly/2nrTTq4
- Number of business days between two dates: print(np.busday_count('2018-02-02', '2018-02-14')) # 8. Looking at the calendar, this doesn't seem to include the end date. In cases you hear that something will happen "in fifteen business days", the current date is 05.02.2018, and you wonder when the end date will come, you can use print(np.busday_offset('2018-02-05', 15)) # 2018-02-26
- Weighted average to select a service provider based on past experience bit.ly/2npkJPy
- LED street lights by their wattage in Mountain View, California bit.ly/2npNUlp. Lights shining stronger are very often placed at road intersections.
- "You made it" from the new public art dataset by the city of Vancouver bit.ly/2DLbp3l. Although I never knew what "it" refered to. But it looks nice.
- Thank you for kernel 4.15, whoever and wherever you are.
- Using morphological operations to see further bit.ly/2nndZBN
- Observing sample image data in the form of a 3D cube bit.ly/2no5u9l. Some interesting "dotted lines" here.
- The tallest buildings in the world in a bar chart bit.ly/2DJZoLH
- Jobs by the city of Ottawa bit.ly/2DHpMpm
- The most common tree types in Ottawa, Canada bit.ly/2nnh9Wi. Still finding new types.
- Median apartment rents in different Singapore towns (Q2 2005 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2nn1tlU. It seems that the higher the number of rooms, the more the median rent varies. We can also see the distributions of the median rents for each town/region bit.ly/2nl5jvM. Now it becomes visible how much higher the median rents for instance in the central region were compared with the rest. Data about Lim Chu Kang was not available.
- Had a strange idea, but it didn't work out as expected. Generate 12 sequences of numbers that have similar within-sequence values, but very dissimilar between-sequence values. Shuffle the entire matrix to destroy the structure and apply Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to attempt separating the original sources. What this gave me was a block-matrix with most values negative and only some positive, slightly over zero. Not sure how to proceed from there and whether I used the right tool for the job. I expected to see some indices which tell me which values belong together. Here is what I did bit.ly/2nhWoep
- If reading a lot of data is often less time-consuming than writing it (I/O), would you say that receiving data via Wi-Fi would be less energy-consuming than transmitting it? Once you see the numbers, you start seeing the hints.
- Some time ago, an article mentioned that when trains arrive >6 mins late, DB considered them overdue. I was wondering why exactly this number. A recent reminder about the concept of a band and a given number of standard deviations around some mean led me to believe that 6 mins could be somehow connected to the mean of the data they have observed, placing the two dotted lines at mean+6 and mean-6 accordingly. This would mean, at least visually, that if a case is crossing the dotted line, it is considered extreme—with the observation having the nature of an outlier. But, of course, I can't really know, so this is only an assumption.
- Covariance between the individual channels of an image bit.ly/2DGkOt4
- Speaking of hygiene, someone mentioned that good payment is merely a hygienic factor for workers. They see it as the most basic requirement when deciding whether to stay in a company or leave. But too often, companies aren't keeping even this elementary hygiene level. The results should not surprise.
- Food hygiene ratings of restaurants, canteens and cafes in Brighton and Hove, UK bit.ly/2ni5ZBZ
- When someone recommends using Qt5 with a resource-constrained, embedded device, a picture of an elephant trying to walk-balance on a rope appears in my mind. Could be very well possible, but as always I never stop questioning.
- Didn't know that Paris was flooded. And yesterday I was plotting fountains.
- Comparison of specific attributes from the specifications of three models Phillips 4K TVs bit.ly/2DHVPFJ
- Water quality sampling locations in Austin, Texas bit.ly/2DEumVF
- Austin traffic cameras bit.ly/2nb0vJ2. Some of these may not work. Please, make sure that you load only the cameras you need to ensure that the page remains functional for everyone.
- Electricity consumption by end uses in residential/private housing segments in Hong Kong (2005-2015) bit.ly/2DCluQ1. Uses sheet 13 from this Excel file bit.ly/2DDPnQ9. From sheet 1, we can create this figure bit.ly/2ncKRNw, showing how energy end use per capita has slightly decreased over the period, which is in contrast with the demands at many other places in the world.
- Fountains in Paris by type bit.ly/2DDO43M
- A map of the buildings at the University of Southampton bit.ly/2nc4Dsl. Once you see something like this, you qucikly realize that universities with more than ten buildings perhaps need to have one too.
- One thing I find disturbing on some websites are the default counters which wait for my action to start spinning at high-speed.
- Having plants transmit Wi-Fi signal from their leaves? Not sure when this might happen. But an article on solar windows (in IEEE Spectrum) shows that some installations are already happening.
- Document entries about land units sold in the most popular UK locations (since 01.01.1995) bit.ly/2DzTmNA. I used the term "document entries" here, because due to four errors in the dataset, I was not able to properly include the information about the additions, changes or deletions that would give a more accurate number how many units were sold. Using the same data, we can see which years these entries refer to bit.ly/2DBRiVx. The period 1997-2007 seems to have been the most intensive regarding land sales. More recent years like 2017 reach only 62% of the peak values achieved in 2002. You can also see how the prices paid have varied in many of the UK cities over time bit.ly/2DEijHF and what the median prices were bit.ly/2DA6ySw (preserving the original order). As you can see, some cities registered less transactions, but the median price paid there was higher.
- Road network length per unit area in Denmark's provinces bit.ly/2n8FGOn. According to the data, Københavns omegn is the second-smallest province, but has a comparatively long network of roads.
- Someone animated a transformation of a doughnut into a cup bit.ly/2n7vI01
- Net price index in Denmark (1980-2017) bit.ly/2DE5jle
- Incidents by hour of the day in Minneapolis, 2017 bit.ly/2n4Ldpj. The data has been binned twice: An incident that occured, for instance at 15:18 was added to the bin 15:00. Then it was noticeable that most incidents happened after 17:00, but there seemed to be a small difference in the hours before and after 20:00. The total number of incidents between 17:00 and 20:00 was 8% lower than in the time between 20:00 and 00:00, which suggests that late hours are more incident-rich. You can also see the locations of the incidents, colored by type bit.ly/2DAYd1e. There seems to be a long street, a large and a small spot, all having above average incident concentrations.
- The property taxes of 114283 buildings in Durham for 2017 are known (see Durham open data site), which gives us the chance to see how strong the relationship between total asset value and tax bill is. The correlation coefficient came at 0.66295, which is fairly positive. At the same time the median tax bill was 1.3464% of the total asset value.
- On "owning your content" bit.ly/2Dxo2Pq, via @swissmiss
- My attempt to initialize a relatively large vector of tuples or structs in C++ didn't work. This caused close to 100% CPU usage for quite some time, while memory stayed at ≈55%. Not sure what the reason behind this was; reducing the tuples to a much smaller number worked. An old C array of strings (2D of size 47000 x 4items) also didn't work, which was slightly disappointing and forced me to temporarily switch to Python. Do you have an idea what I am missing in this case?
- Saw very interesting graphs on the divergence between corporate profits and wages, which makes me even more reluctant to work first and think second. Possibly explains the motivation behind the jobs page as well.
- Had the idea of computing betweenness centrality of New York's landmarks (pandas), but the number of combinations of more than 47000 items (itertools) together with storing the heap of the distances between them (heapq) with the goal of inserting edges only between the closest nodes (networkx) was still prohibitively expensive on my machine. Update: Made some small progress, though not to the extent I wished. Used random sampling to pick 2000 landmarks at random, constructed a graph and then computed the betweenness centrality in this case. To my surprise, most nodes had a value of zero, with only a single one having more than 0.99. By obtaining its id, I saw which latitude, longitude and address corresponded to it (40.665555, -73.974954, "95 Prospect Park West"). Then, viewing this location on a map revealed that it is almost at the middle of a very long street that is passing near a big park in Brooklyn. Even only with 2000 landmarks, the computation still took some time. Yet, using all landmarks would have been much more interesting... We can also do something else: find the landmark whose sum of distances to all other landmarks is minimum. This gives us the concrete address "464 Grand Street" at (40.715430, -73.983718), which is near the Williamsburg Bridge. (The next two locations are the numbers 513 and 511 on the same street.) This means that someone living nearby would be closest to a maximal number of landmarks, at least on a straight line. Finding places that are central in some sense has applications in store/facility location, investment decisions, customer acquisition and other areas.
- Had intention to move this idea bit.ly/2DwLXi4 forward, but realized that dealing with interfaces is perhaps not the best use of my time (see below).
- It's really hard to return to defining variables by preceding them by a dollar sign (PHP) once you have worked with Python. Shift + 4 is an awkward key combination just to define or refer to a variable. Additionally, if you still remember what I said about code bumps, it is fully applicable here as well. The more often we have to use such key combinations, the more tiring it becomes. Then the question arises whether we could have used our time better elsewhere. The speed of testing user interfaces is another critical point that can make writing code feel unnecessary slow. Especially when we consider that today's software has become so complex that using only a couple of input fields is no longer sufficient to capture its complexity. Using a form filler to generate fake data at scale means that the programmer himself will have to track long sequences of nonsensical values while trying to decipher which of them relates to which field. And the more values there are, the more likely it is that at least one will be missed and the script will break. The alternative is to rely on autocomplete in the browser, while typing all values manually, which while providing a better context is even slower.
- When working with/for other people, payment is the minimum viable thing that should excite me. If this condition evaluates to false, we may not even meet, let alone speak.
- Like most previous years, 2018 will be again the year of the people. Not the year of the processors, the Spectres and Meltdowns, the Bitcoin mining rigs, the 600+ watt GPUs, the huge data centers and the companies who spend their last cents in infrastructure, while wondering why they can't find people. The era of free workers came to its end. Without people, these companies and their processors will increasingly get irrelevant. In fact, to utilize the available processors, someone will have to come and write the code for them first. "Free programmers" just doesn't make business sense, especially at scale.
- Recently, I've read two different, independent studies on energy usage at homes and they both slightly surprised me with their findings that refrigerators tend to consume more energy on average than water heaters (I thought it was the other way around). So I decided to take another look, loading a dataset about refrigerators found on data.gov. It contained lab measured kWh/day and the volume (in cubic feet) of the tested models. Dividing both, I came to the following ranking bit.ly/2DrujMD. The only problem with this is that these models seem to be used in medical/scientific environments and are thus not very representative of what we find usually at homes. Clearly, more data will be needed.
- Found an interesting diagram about the health benefits of physical activity bit.ly/2DqpnHU, which was present in a freely available report assessing the needs of Oxfordshire citizens. The report also contained numbers on demographic picture, prevalence of different illnesses (cancer, diabetes, stroke...), blindness, stats on obesity and more.
- Street trees by condition in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2mSJhQK. It may be hard to see on this map, but 561 trees (5.21%) are in a poor condition, while 158 trees (1.46%) are no longer alive. Honeylocust, red maple, Norway maple, pin oak and green ash are most common, but there are also 240 lilacs, 197 pagoda trees, 103 flowering cherries, 2 maples and 1 snowbell, all Japanese. Wondering whether there is a historical reason behind this influence.
- I'd be more interested in seeing a router which uses a single antenna, still covering a wide perimeter rather than one having ten, however beautiful they might open up. I go from the assumption that there must be some cost to operate that many, but I might be wrong. It would be nice to see the antenna transparently embedded into the device rather than drawing attention. A separate antenna somehow suggests instability to me. What if I carelessly dropped the device? Would this stretched piece then break?
- Noticed that one of the demos—showing the screenshots from the landrover on Mars—is no longer working on this server. Not knowing the exact reason, since it used to work. Locally, I am still able to see the photos, but as before it takes some time.
- If the cost of signing in exceeds the potential gain from the use of the software, expect people to be unwilling to waste their time.
- Application: "rent vs. buy calculator" bit.ly/2mOdroc to decide which is one is better. Not sure why this is the first time I see something like this. You can use a similar computation to understand whether to be available full-time or only part-time to your employer.
- "Urban maths: The Betz you can do?" bit.ly/2mLSrOU shows some interesting math related to the energy generation by a wind turbine. A very well written and informative article.
- Abandoned properties can present a series problem for a city's landscape.
- Parking place utilization at different lots at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) bit.ly/2mNVF4t
- Tracking NBA game points over time bit.ly/2DoNAOY
- Finding nearby Michelin restaurants in the UK and Ireland (18.01.2018) bit.ly/2mHABwv. Still interested in seeing some answers to my question in the last bit though.
- Tried to list potential interests people could have. Can you identify something important that is missing? bit.ly/2DlYkNO. The checkboxes didn't fit on a single screen, so I hope you don't mind that I downscaled them a bit.
- Relying on external services to deliver your content could make error messages like "Connection timed out" more frequent or prevent people from being able to access your "award-winning" (because in that particular case it was) portfolio. When this happens, the site should strive to remain silent rather than reveal the entire chain of service providers and which link between them was broken. Visitors rarely want to be bothered with such details. Only you can decide how often you'd like people to see this information. Reminds me of the article "Dependencies rule our lives", which still seems true today.
- When the dimensions of web page elements are big and new ones are appearing on scroll, animated from the bottom-up, users may temporarily experience half of their screen filled before the other half joins it. This is unacceptable. Striving to update only a minimal area (see my post "Screen space waste") or (even better) avoiding animation for content (if possible) could lead to a better result.
- Triangles following a spiral path bit.ly/2DgYuGg
- Learning the names of Michigan-based animals from their descriptions bit.ly/2B4DCfq
- "Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, dies" nyti.ms/2DdwnYp. I had a short period when "The Cranberries" was one of my favourite bands. So saddened to read this. But her songs will continue to ring in my head. If you also feel bad, here is "Stars" bit.ly/2B37CZ0
- A, B and C grades from restaurant inspections in Las Vegas bit.ly/2Dcose5. Many locations had positive longitude instead of negative, but this was easy to fix.
- Real-time locations of some public vehicles in Phoenix bit.ly/2DdSk9T. It would have been nice to also draw the paths of the vehicles, but this was not given. Sometimes, vehicles that appear close together may serve the same route.
- Map of incident frequency in Tucson ("last 45 days") bit.ly/2B3qAim. The north-west part of the city shows a slightly higher concentration of incidents.
- Looking at a graphic by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, where they claim that until June 2017, 71953 solar projects contributed to 1699MW of installed power bit.ly/2DfUDck
- Please, try to understand that repositories aren't hangars where you dump content, without spending a second to think how it will be accessed later. The more metadata and the better descriptions you provide, the better. Think about whether your visitors would be able to tell quickly what the data is about. This is valid for anything we put online. Because being descriptive matters.
- Monthly unemployment claims by industry in Missouri (07.2011 - 12.2017, log scale) bit.ly/2B34cp3. Considering the number of claims, we can see that the sectors of utilities and mining seem to have the lowest unemployment. Source: bit.ly/2DbwGTL.
- Michigan vehicle production by month (04.1992 - 09.2017) bit.ly/2DbpwPn
- Unemployment rate by state in USA bit.ly/2B0CzgB as long as the published data is correct. Surprised to see New York so far behind.
- Single screen with the most common customer service request descriptions in Cincinatti bit.ly/2DbIGEL. Metal furniture seems to be a big problem, but also a lot of requests were connected with trash and buildings in one or another form.
- Places to recycle waste in Hong Kong bit.ly/2DcpTt2. Keeping the environment clean is every citizen's duty. Hong Kong shows how many places can be involved in waste collection to minimize pollution and to guarantee that the next generations will also find the city livable.
- When looking at the number of cancer cases as reported by the Maryland Cancer Registry, one could only wonder why the big difference. The number of cases in men were 2.008 times higher than those in women, which doesn't appear "by chance" to me. Could it be that one of the groups knows something that the other doesn't?
- Vehicle crashes in Maryland (Q1 2015 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2Db8XTL. Over 311 thousand in less than three years seems a lot. For instance, the intersection Capital Beltway - Connecticut Ave appears in 581 crash cases. Looking for a way to reduce the total number of crashes could help many people.
- Investing in some projects brought the highest returns on invested dollar for MEA, Maryland bit.ly/2D94Ib2. Hagerstown Light Department seems to have been a good choice for a grant.
- Maryland's electricity generation by source as percentage of the total (1990 - 2015, log scale) bit.ly/2Dd3prF. In 2015, for the first time nuclear has surpassed coal as percent of the total electricity generated. Petroleum declined fast since 2005, hydroelectric remained relatively constant, natural gas increased slightly in more recent years, while solar has grown slightly faster than wind.
- Maryland homes, partially financed by MEA's Home Performance Rebate Program to increase energy efficiency bit.ly/2AY9Jxd. Had to remove two points, whose coordinates seemed off. The concentration of the points looks interesting as if two clusters exist, where most homes were located.
- Projects in Maryland, partially financed with grants from the Clean Energy Awards Program bit.ly/2D8IbLA. Bigger points indicate higher awards. The grants were given for solar, geothermal and wind installations. So nice to see the scale at which some states are implementing renewable energy.
- The Maryland Open Data portal gives a fairly interesting view on the GDP per capita in various US states bit.ly/2D8GOfT
- Finding the position of a book on a bookshelf bit.ly/2AYiW8N
- According to the World Energy Council, Europe had the most installed solar capacity by 2016, with Germany being the leader bit.ly/2AUHQ9f. The country has shut down many nuclear power plants and reached the milestone of having over 85% of its energy come from renewable sources. This is something other European countries can only dream about. That the amount of sunshine in Germany is said to be similar to the one in Alaska leaves us wondering how under suboptimal conditions so much electricity can be produced.
- The "let" keyword in programming for some reason reminds me of the label "Open here". It tries to tell about something that should simply be there. I saw Rust code using it, which once again reminded me about its existence in JavaScript. But I rarely use it.
- A couple of lines to compare surface heat flux across three elements in a circuit bit.ly/2AVolgU
- Sensor data from Aarhus, Denmark bit.ly/2D4LIum (environmental). Hoperfully, this will get updated soon. There is also real-time traffic data bit.ly/2D5hiZ0, but the vehicle coordinates are unknown. The parking place utilization page also looks nice bit.ly/2D7bzC7.
- 3-4 days later my small brain still has trouble accepting the idea that UV light could potentially be used to purify water and air. Internally: "Is this true? Could it be? I saw a company claiming to be able to do it!" Oh, no.
- Two things that can be explained by SVG polygons over images and hover functionality: elements of a biological cell and elements of an electronic circuit. So far I have seen such polygons over maps only. Room for improvement.
- If a company is willing to hire programmers, it can assume that they will "compute" the job offer—dividing the announced salary by the number of required technologies. That number directly correlates with effort, where many nights outside work will have to be spent to acquire these skills. A highly paying job requiring knowledge of over 20 technologies with "interest" in 5 more might still not be that interesting relative to a slightly lower paying job where only 4-5 technolgies are listed with a clear perspective on how they will be used. When we consider that 4-5 technologies is perhaps a reasonable upper bound someone would be able to master, then the decision becomes clear. The first offer signals "we study every fancy new thing that appears", while the second says "we work focused and hard, but we also appreciate our personal life". Could you guess which offer would be more interesting to an applicant?
- Once you see how syntax highlighting is done under the hood bit.ly/2ASr7TW, you'll try to do everything to avoid it.
- "Shading is often the most expensive computation in a GPU pipeline" This sentence is enough to make one think about the cost of painting in most websites. Creating placeholders first (wireframe) and filling them later might be seen as slightly faster, but it is hard to become comfortable with the idea of doing things twice.
- A nice map of the streets in Cologne where construction is taking place bit.ly/2D30B0m ↗
- Whenever I see a carefully crafted recipe on a website, I think about how beautiful web design could be. The author provided a pleasing photo, listed all ingredients without stressing the reader to follow exact quantities, using phrases like "more or less" and "as you wish" to smoothly arrive at a very short, succinct description of the recipe that takes less than 10mins to follow. This person, whether they know it or not, is a web designer. If someone, who never intended to follow through the recipe, saw the simplicity it has been reduced to, and chose to do so, then the author has achieved its goal—to provide a new, different experience.
- It would have been nice if an SVG path element had the notion of betweenness centrality.
- The story of the 80-year old German patient who needed an operation, but turned away his head when the doctor came and his wife going the extra mile to ask in the doctor's absence whether he was a true one is particularly striking for me. It shows how far discrimination (due to race) can go. This happens in the middle of Europe, in a country which claims to be open to differences and feels proud of its integration efforts, where many people would claim that they don't discriminate, but then attempt to hire foreigners at below minimal market rates. Interestingly, the doctor accepted such a treatment, but a person having a greater degree of self-respect would have certainly refused to serve the patient, no matter that he is a German.
- Ten content-rich slides labeled "slicing web design" bit.ly/2AQu3AF ↗
- Saw a fairly creative drawing shown in a 45° perspective, where a monitor has been subdivided into areas that looked a lot like drawers, one drawer being opened outside the monitor, into the real space, full of documents inside. A miniaturized human being was looking to it from below. Big data.
- Superfoods, supercapacitors, superconductivity... looks like a trend to me.
- A quick overview of Munich's climate parameters bit.ly/2ALPLWw
- "Graphical models should allow unexpected values to present themselves" (John Tukey's idea). This is also an effect I seek in my own visualizations, to ensure no preconceived notion towards the visible and the latent. Before posting anything online, I often prepare multiple visualizations
- Some people believe that programming is like taking a cookbook and applying a recipe or simply pasting a snippet into the code they are working on. Work needs to be much better than that.
- Montreal traffic cameras bit.ly/2CWqLSf expands on the existing series. The streets seem to have a good amount of snow today. Here: not a single snowflake.
- Location of most litter bins in the center of Dublin, Ireland bit.ly/2CQQVWx. If you notice that the orientation of the map isn't accurate, please let me know. The City Council wants to reduce their count and replace them with smart bins, which can monitor their fill level and alert when they should be emptied while at the same time using solar energy to compact the litter and delay this event. Given that in Europe many litter bins are frequently overflowing, this might set a good example.
- Imagine that you hold a multimeter in your hands. If the device is bulky, looks ugly or the buttons don't work the way you expect, how often are you going to use it? The same is valid for websites. Spending time on designing the interface right from the start is usually time well spent. Saying this, because I still see devices appearing before their interface has been polished.
- The solar potential dataset bit.ly/2CQyGR7 is interesting, because it classifies locations for solar panel roof installations as "excellent suitable", "well suitable" or just "suitable". Since there were five features (insolation, unshaded roof area, PV generation, PV emission savings and PV system size), I wondered how this decision is actually made, so I computed the feature importances as seen here bit.ly/2ADsDtb and found that insolation came first by a wide margin (0.87 vs. 0.032 for the second most important feature). After this I ranked all locations by insolation and discovered that the threshold value separating "well suitable" from "excellent suitable" was exactly 1000kWh/m2 per year. Sharing this because it might help someone. The top location in Bristol had insolation of 1142.3kWh/m2 per year.
- Looking at a dataset about Bristol buildings energy consumption bit.ly/2ADMXdS by Open Data Bristol led me to discover the Avonmouth wind turbines bit.ly/2CSA9Gv by Thrive Renewables, whose average annual production covers the requirements of the biggest 38 energy consumers in the city. Not a small achievement, given that only four turbines were used.
- Nice to hear that integrating a water sensor in an umbrella can make it light up when it rains. I guess, this can be especially useful at night when you can't see easily whether you are stepping on a dry surface or in a puddle. Now thinking of lights having a surface that acts both as a solar cell and rain detector.
- IEEE Spectrum mentioned that most of the new streetlights in San Diego will be available in March 2018. They will come with many integrated sensors (temperature, humidity, vibration, magnetic field, vision and acoustics), will be dimmable (to reduce consumption), and will detect crashes by the sound they produce, while at the same time being able to self-evaluate the gathered data and send the result to a centralized place, possibly where it can be monitored bit.ly/2ACa60l. We can expect the upcoming dataset to be quite interesting. Update: Reading something else, now I see that a gas sensor sensor might also be nice to have.
- All-in-one devices may work well; all-in-one classes or functions are rarely bearable.
- Geometry is also important at home, not just in demos. Placing the router high, at a central place and with no nearby plants/obstacles is said to improve connectivity, since the distances to most devices would then be shorter. In my case I can't easily change that location and it's relatively far from me, but somehow link quality still comes at 70%. If I chose another OS (as I did before), this number would have been 40-50%. The next time I observe such a weak connectivity, I will have to check whether Homedale can help bit.ly/2CMacZl. Seeking ways to improve the network is also motivated by its speed relative to other components (from slowest to fastest): network -> hard disk -> RAM -> CPU. If the average page takes 10s to load and you visited 40 today, you've lost &approx.6.66mins of your time without being able to even check the content. That's enough time for lots of CPU cycles.
- Profiling Spiegel didn't end well. Content loaded fully after 75 seconds with high CPU utilization and plenty of long frames bit.ly/2Av98mG. The site made 391 HTTP requests (lots of third-party content) for a total weight of 4MB. Rendered plenty of large images which certainly contributed to the non-smooth scrolling. I'll stop here.
- Failure rates are said to grow almost linearly with system size. This means that there is a theoretical limit of the amount of work most organizations can handle, even when they aim for more. Going beyond this limit means risking more failures and making more customers unhappy.
- Design with no requirements is mostly wrong, except in the rare cases when the designer can prove they know what the client dreamed about last night without being able to remember it.
- What's the benefit releative to the cost of writing this software? Because when on the negative side, no company should hope to keep its workers. I could very well understand if they chose to become unavailable. One could think of this as a kind of metaprogramming.
- According to Fortune 500, the last year Apple was ≈3.35 times more profitable than Walmart and almost twice as profitable as the second company on the list - J.P. Morgan Chase. This is quite a difference.
- Good to see real-time fishing activity bit.ly/2AqCjao ↗
- An interesting article on using deep learning for cucumber sorting bit.ly/2ArafU4 ↗
- Are there actions that "push" the page multiple times after it has been rendered? Reflow and repaint can be seen as sources of inefficiency when it becomes obvious that they are used for eye candy rather than a meaningful purpose.
- A big-screen TV is much more than its screen, but we tend to forget that when we see that it takes a large percentage of the device area. We may not perceive this device as a system of components, because they remain skillfully hidden, accessible only through the remote control, which is acting as an interface. Yet, neglect in the quality in any of these components could introduce artefacts or noise in the picture. This means that how the picture appears is an effect, while the viewer who is living in an imaginary world believes that they are looking at the cause. Great design attempts to hide complexity (see Apple devices for instance) and this is also frequently the case with great software.
- Do you use the smallest number of variables that could possibly work for the task you want to tackle? Do you overwrite variables in some cases or do you always prefer to introduce new ones to avoid the possibility of conflict?
- Did you like PHP's double questionmark operator (??) ? Example: $val = isset($_POST['field_name']) ? $_POST['field_name'] : null; becomes $val = $_POST['field_name'] ?? null;. This has the potential to greatly simplify some existing pieces of code. Reminds me of JS or-chains (var val = a || b || c || d;), where if c is true, d would never evaluate. If you wanted to learn more, one way would be to start working with me, for instance.
- Back and still thinking how I might end. The new year doesn't start well for me, but at least my hope is that it could slowly develop into something more positive. I hope that this event would prompt me to work and serve more as opposed to work most of the time on things I find interesting, as in previous years. Yet, at the same time it shows that noone lives forever and to experience life fully, one's work has to be appreciated even when being far from perfect.
- Due to a sad reason I won't be able to reply to any emails in the next few days. I hope you'll understand.
- Saw a photo of a solar-powered stadium in Brazil that is said to be self-sufficient. Not only that, but it manages to power 2200 households in the neighborhood. This is not five or ten.
- Locations with acquired (or in the process of acquiring) solar permits in San Diego between 01.01.2017 and 22.12.2017 bit.ly/2zXA8el. According to the data, the average time from application to obtaining a permit is just 6.395 days, which seems suspiciously fast (maybe a mistake?). Interestingly, three people obtained the most permits, with the third person acquiring 11 times more permits than the next on the list. In 1381 cases (out of 6178) the project owners described scopes indicating a target wattage, which allows us to compute a planned capacity of ≈6.3945 gigawatts. Since this number doesn't describe all projects, but only ≈22% of them, it is not perfect, but at least it enables us to gauge the dimension at which solar generated electricity could be expanding in this city.
- An attempt to understand the nature of crime in London bit.ly/2ClD4ap
- Street lights in Sacramento and their total wattage bit.ly/2zYKyKy
- According to my code, the year-to-date earnigs from the San Diego parking system exceeded 6.5 million dollar bit.ly/2CnzeO4
- Average price of electricity to ultimate customers, broken down by type of use (residential, commercial, industrial) and by US state in October 2016 and October 2017 bit.ly/2zX4w8D
- Comparing fluctuations in the dollar prices of a ton of coal and a barrel of petroleum liquid between January 2015 and October 2017 in USA bit.ly/2Cl13Xn. Petrol seem to have reached its lowest price in March 2016, but its price varied a lot. Relative to that, coal price remains relatively stable, although it seems to slightly decline over time.
- Electricity generation from wind and solar by US state in the last two years bit.ly/2CjQ3cJ. California and Texas seem to switch places.
- Traffic counts on various streets in San Diego bit.ly/2Cii8kH. Each street has been color coded, although the whole looks like a mixture of confetti, which is not very useful. To find the streets with the most traffic bit.ly/2CjxvJS, I used a somewhat unconventional approach: taking the median of all measures for a given street regardless of the time they were made to ensure that each pair of streets appears exactly once, then splitting that pair to get the names of all inndividual streets and summing the median values across all occurences of each street. The result is a weight that isn't very meaningful by itself, but once these weights are sorted, busy streets can be found to have higher values relative to others. Since each street participates in various street intersections, this practically considers them all.
- Net electricity generation by energy source and net generation from renewable sources in USA (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2CibzPh. This paints a picture that the amount of energy produced by hydroelectric and nuclear has remained relatively constant. That produced by coal is declining rapidly (which is good) and the energy produced by natural gas has not only increased but now surpasses that of coal. Renewable sources excluding hydroelectric and solar are also on the rise. In the total energy generation of all types of sources, solar is still hardly noticeable. But if we observe only renewable sources, generation from solar, although at the bottom of the diagram, is increasing noticeably. But this still cannot be compared with the remarkable growth of wind electricity generation. Hydroelectric electricity generation seems somewhat inconsistent, because in some years it increased rapidly, but then decreased to previous levels.
- Happy New Year 2018! Frohes Neues Jahr! Happy, healthy and smiling! :)
- Do you remember that I compared the electricity usage in Boston's City Hall and the Central Library some time ago? bit.ly/2rZOnzD As you can see, the last day on the graphic is 06.06.2017. Now it looks like the data team behind this doesn't even know what rest is, since even on New Year they worked to update the dateset (yes, the last observation is from today, 12:30). To avoid lagging behind them, I updated my graphic correspondingly bit.ly/2Chvv4G. City Hall seems to prepare for something in December.
- Didn't know that windows could eventually act as solar panels one day, given the technology that NREL demonstrated go.nature.com/2zV3868. If that's possible and so many buildings already have windows (some of which are large), perhaps only their coatings could be changed. Seems a lighter touch to me than extending the roof areas to be able to accomodate more panels, using plenty of additional material. Currently, this technology is in an early stage and not very efficient (slightly above 11% versus slightly above 21% for LG solar panels), but it is nice to see it developing.
- I like the municipal energy report of the city of Providence, where almost all city-owned buildings were evaluated for energy-efficiency. Specifically, here is how the page describing the performance of the elementary schools looks like bit.ly/2zTnk8D. Always nice to see the level of detail in such efforts. Providence City Hall reached an Energy Star score of 96 in 2016, reducing its costs by $240000 since 2012.
- Nose levels at various locations in Dublin bit.ly/2zSN6cU. If you notice that the page no longer works, write me and I'll try to fix it if possible. Today is Sunday before New Year, so we can track now how loud this night is going to be. The last night was already loud at Bull Island, especially in the hours from 00:30 to 06:10, which you can easily see. While most places seemed to have noise levels around 46-50dB(A), Chancery Park was consistently louder than average (with peak that reached 68.07dB(A) this morning at 09:45).
- "Junk food: Why people can't control themselves and what to do about it" bit.ly/2CewX83. Discovered RAND and now can't stop reading on it. Other things I learned: stickers/labels on foods like "high in sugar", "high in salt" etc. helped to reduce obesity in Chile. Poor sleep is said to be linked with seven of the leading causes of death in the US; drivers who slept only 4-5 hours had 5x the crash rate of those who slept 7 hours. The cost of antimicrobial resistance is estimated to become 11-444 million by 2050 (depending on scenario), with each new drug taking a lot of time to develop, but eventually becoming ineffective due to the microbes becoming resistent to it or mutating into other forms. The estimated true cost of corruption in Europe is said to be 990 billion annually, or 8x higher than initially anticipated. Interesting numbers.
- Shenzhen electrified all its busses, which sets such a great example for the rest of the world.
- Does the design feel as part of the object to the point that it is not even noticeable?
- BAföG expenditures over time and average expenditure per person for all German states bit.ly/2CfAqTu. The increase in BAföG aid has been strongest in Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern and weakest in Saarland. All German states seem to have raised their average monthly assistance per person between 1991 and 2016. At the beginning, the aid was slightly less than 300€ in more recent years it climbed to ≈450€.
- Enterprise births and deaths by sector in Germany, 2015 (sorted by total number of enterprises) bit.ly/2zQqaLz. We see that sectors having less companies tend to have positive net company establishments, while some sectors, already having many companies are showing negative net company formation. Interestingly, the scientific sector (5th place out of 79) was on the negative side in 2015, while information and communication was relatively neural. But the latter is currently on place 20 in terms of total number of operating companies, which doesn't place it among the most important for the German economy. The sector of human health activities is interesting, because it is highly ranked, but remained neutral while creating only few new companies. Perhaps the barriers to entry there are too high. The industry and service sector lost more than 250000 companies this year, which is a very high number. In case you are interested, the dataset is available on the European data portal bit.ly/2zPIdkT.
- Track length of the rail network in Germany at the end of 2015 bit.ly/2zQ6ozD
- Historic demographics by sex in Germany bit.ly/2zOaTe5. The obvious question now is what happened between March and June 2011. Perhaps there is some reason or the measurement methodology was changed.
- Average milk yield per cow by state in Germany (2000-2016) bit.ly/2zPdZhV. Expected to see Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the first place, but milk production in Thüringen and Berlin looks even better. However, we should be aware of the price we pay for that production and whether it is sustainable. If the number of cows is shrinking and that of people demanding milk is growing, this raises the demands on the existing cows, which may force producers to feed them with stimulants to both satisfy the market and increase their profits. The end consumer will then be served with milk of lower quality, produced under unscrupulous conditions. As a parallel, we could think of employers acting similarly to milk their employees every single day until not much is left of them. The other dark side of milk production is seeing producers spill their milk on the streets in response to the low purchase prices that buyers were willing to pay. Then a long chain of milk sellers and resellers turns into play (making more money than the producers themselves), increasing the end prices (sometimes multiple times) for the end consumer.
- 2017 was also the year in which I learned to write less JavaScript. In my opinion, the language developed in the wrong direction, which I can no longer support or want to be part of. There is now reliance on promises, async/await, for...of loops, destructuring, arrow functions and much more. Some of these are nice, but all introduced additional complexity. The minimum requirement for JS developers has shifted towards being proficient with things like Babel, yarn & npm, React, Vue, Angular, Backbone, perhaps JQuery, other project-specific libraries dealing with SVG, gradients, scrolls, tap delays on mobile, animations etc., finishing with WebAssembly as culmination. Clearly, JavaScript has become a language in which young people are forced to burn out, which in my opinion isn't sustainable. Being produced only in a short time, this complexity would be hard to handle even in the next five years. There are certain characteristics in a language that I expect it to have before committing to spending years in learning and using it. Currently these characteristics are slowly disappearing in JavaScript, so my plan is to stick to my knowledge up to v1.5, which has most of the things I need and nothing more. I also didn't like the more recent uses of the language (which is a very important aspect), integrating it in places it was never available before. Once I saw the developments, I switched my focus to C++ and although it also took me quite some time to adjust to it, starting from null, I found that this time was well spent. I looked inside interesting projects and learned about project structure and more complex object interaction patterns. I found the language very expressive, which you might be able to observe in some of my attempts to use it. I also liked the elegance of C# before, but at one point or another I had trouble even compiling the simplest code, while one of the IDEs kept crashing for no obvious reason. I never found enough content on Java to keep me interested for long, which is unfortunate. As always, Python continues to excite me, but I frequently find that in my context it is not sufficiently fast for what I need (which became obvious with a neural network). For instance, whenever I want to filter high-dimensional data like an image, I have to make many small adjustments and run the computation each time to observe what changed and determine whether this was my intended result. The effect is that I can easily spend half a day (for computational, not creative reasons) on code that wasn't achieving much. Sometimes Python feels like combining mosaics to me or the learning how to make the best use of what is already available. Although there are some definitions that creativity is combinatory play, it didn't feel this way to me, where focusing too much on the individual components frequently caused me to miss important aspects on the big picture and the end goal. I also felt that the language is hiding too much, not knowing at any point in time what is truly happening or why in a certain way. When an internal error appeared in an external library due to some assumption about the type of an input parameter, it was mostly too late for corrections and the entire screen was filled with a long stack trace. Many people use Python mainly for scientific purposes or data analysis. I also use it to design for the web, where it helps to do the job in a fast and efficient way. Unfortunately, I cannot control which Python to have installed, so I am still stuck to v2.6.6, which is quite limited. External libraries like numpy, scipy, matplotlib and others are simply unavailabe, so I can only run the code locally, paste it on a page and show a graphic that it produced, but not execute it in real time in the way I wished. Having latest Python on a cheap custom device means that I would be unable to have the same reliability should something go wrong—reason enough to shy away from this option. More recently I started refreshing my PHP, since it is the only language working unconditionally in my hosting environment. But as always, we shouldn't blindly speak about the languages, but what they enable us to achieve. This could be anything important: an ecommerce site for selling products at scale; seeking insights from existing data to improve business operations or evaluate investment decisions; controlling devices; using AI to learn from the vast pool of information or to drive vehicles; reduction of inefficient car maneuvers; providing public APIs to enable more interesting applications; data collection via sensors (IoT) to improve understanding on issues related to the environment or to observe air and water quality or smart cities and homes; speech recognition; onlne communication; reservation systems for hotels, restaurants, events or even dentist hours; soil composition analysis to understand the observed agricultural efficiency; microbiome analysis to understand the complex networks of bacteria in our bodies; seeking patterns in protein-protein interactions in a graph; applications in the context of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal etc.); network packet analysis for intrusion detection; real-time maps of critical resource usage or emissions; vehicle sharing; LIDAR distance estimation; mathematical modeling of processes and function optimization; advertisement attributes optimization; golf stick, tennis racquet, racer bike, car, airplane design optimization; interior design mood analysis; material property analysis, improvement and development of enhanced materials (Kevlar) or item weight reduction by preserving durability; nanotechnology and automation; HPC system design; code introspection and analysis; optimizing available product quantities according to muri, mura and muda (e.g. in warehouses); reducing power consumption for better device battery life; solar panel relative-to-sun angle auto-adjustment; photographic sensors working similar to the eye; self-healing and self-optimization (like turning off unused parts/areas once noticed); monitoring dashboards; seeking multiple-purposes for each thing produced; few-part devices; understanding how people learn and the brain's function; developing micro-awareness for animal behavior (goats are claimed to be useful as early detectors of volcano activity) as well as systems for early warning; disease understanding and healing; analysis of natural phenomena like hurricanes, but also wind and water streams, ocean levels; shipping cost and delivery time reduction; route optimization; sound absorption and cancellation; signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement; geometric design and optimization of physical dimensions; building insulation; regression (for prediction), clustering and classification; before-after comparisons; reduction of line intersections (in tube/road network design); automated lighting at music events; reactive and robotic toys; habit and progress analysis; prioritization according to the probability and severity of events; tumor detection in medical images; risk estimation and reduction; real-time price optimization based on supply and demand; automated auction participation; clickstream analysis and others. The language is rarely more important than the cause.
- Another thing to remember this year would be the return of paywalls, especially in online magazines and newspapers. What this could lead to is a restricted, limited-access, monopolized, advertisement-based web, being of less and less use to the average person. It doesn't help much if the only free resources someone can find date back from the year 1984 or when a single paper costs as much as an entire new book. Although the drive towards content monetization is understandable, publishing only short fragments in the way it is accepted today leads to nothing more than readers with fragmented attention. There will always be more fragments to concentrate on, just not enough context / substance to fully comprehend what they mean. The advertisers are actively using this, since the more disoriented / helpless you feel, the more easily they can serve their ends.
- Programmers, who get used to reading only bite-sized snippets of code, having trouble when they encounter a more verbose language or developing a fragmented way of thinking, being unable to comprehend a sequence of long, complex sentences, choose to become easy to manipulate by the people who spend the time to read in full.
- A framework isn't a product, so if you choose to develop one, how would you justify your effort/time spent? If you seek popularity instead of monetization, given the extensive palette of existing frameworks, you are unlikely to achieve it. And if you learn from other frameworks before creating your own, you will adopt the same low quality of work. Always create products that sell, serving concrete customer needs, not frameworks serving might haves.
- Once again evaluated other payment platforms to see that most of them still don't support all countries. I don't consider Bitcoin as a payment alternative despite it's growth this year, because for some reason I tend to associate it with criminal activity (and you should too). But it gives employers more means to "optimize" their workforce salaries, enabling them to pay employees with "thin air" instead, which is arguably a dream come true. (A company in Japan switched to paying in Bitcoin, so eventually more will express the same desire). My initial hope was that GoCardless could change something by enabling the same payment options across Europe the way that PayPal has provided them elsewhere. Unfortunately, GoCardless seems to have reduced the list of supported countries. Also tested Due, which despite the beautiful interface, claimed that direct payments are "US only", although it mentioned few selected countries. Stripe too, lists only 25 supported countries. Two other previously independent companies like BrainTree and (I forgot its name) were acquired by PayPal, further monopolizing the way online payments are made. Ecwid is also a nice alternative, although I always find it bad when someone makes assumptions on my side in which currency I want to sell my products (even when this might require only setting an option). At the same time, some international payment gateways have started to publish the full costs of using their solutions to the point that it now becomes obvious that they are unaffordable for the large majority of small businesses in Europe or elsewhere. This is how, once again, we come to the end of 2017, not having a payment method that works universally across Europe. The same Europe, whose future seems so important in words, with people constantly speaking about integration, values and economic prosperity, while at the same time letting thoughts in the back, discrimination and unequal treatment play in full and eat at the roots of the original idea behind the union. Eventually, everything will come back to bite Brussels, so we'll see how much longer this will take. To sum up in one sentence: "In 2018 Europe still doesn't have a payment method." Fortunately, PayPal is always available, but the more I'll have to use it, the less open I'll become to working with other (non-paying) Europeans.
- dummerAugust acceps PayPal as a payment method in case you wonder how you could pay for my services. However, I tend to select my clients carefully, so you cannot expect to be able to work with me by default if you don't truly understand the way I work or what I can deliver for you. This page and the blog have been made with the goal to clarify this and to let you know what you can expect after we start working together on a project. Notice that anything demonstrated here does not necessarily describe how I work with clients or what the full spectrum of my capabilities looks like. I never demonstrate them in context until I agree with the terms of the payment (which very likely won't happen at all). But a payment method is still available to those who deserve it. Not seeing anything wrong in saying it this way.
- Had two simple ideas today: finding recipes matching a given list of ingredients and learning from the big Open Food Facts dataset. While working on the first, I noticed that the links the external service was providing were no longer accurate and the imagery was too small to be useful, which made my demo obsolete. Then I moved on to work on the second idea, but the dataset was malformed and I couldn't easily spot where. By attempting to do so, my machine crashed twice, so this idea was abandoned as well.
- If you prefer using operators over function calls whenever possible, it is very likely that your code will be faster bit.ly/2zEvL7u. Calling the function here is almost 4.3 times slower than using an operator, at least on my machine. If you find that your functions can accept arrays as arguments, pass the arrays to a single function call rather than calling the same function repeatedly, each time with different arguments of length one.
- Ratios of travel time in the peak period to travel time at free-flow for some cities in California, Texas and Florida between 1982 and 2014 plus relative increase in the ratio for most measured cities bit.ly/2zCL4h0 as seen in the data bit.ly/2BZSv88 by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. From the first diagram we see that over time the traffic in San Jose has slown down quite a bit, quickly approaching the same travel time index that San Francisco-Oakland had. San Diego and Sacramento have almost the same indices year-by-year as if they are connected in some way, which is quite interesting. If we look at the text after the third diagram, we see that traffic in Bridgeport-Stamford (never heard of it) has increased stronger than traffic in Las Vegas during the period, while traffic in San Juan has increased even more than that in San Jose.
- This time it's not about ice, but ICE high-speed trains: an attempt to check for a relationship between speed and WiFi quality (in terms of badnwidth and latency) on some ICE trains bit.ly/2zDaCut using a 2.1GB dataset provided by Deutsche Bahn AG on 14.12.2017 bit.ly/2BYgIf3. The graphic gives the false impression that the receive rate is approx. twice as fast as the send rate, but the medians give another picture: speed of 20.3 m/s, receive rate of 589156 bytes/s (0.5618MB/s), send rate of 85016bytes/s (0.0810MB/s) and latency of 77.0ms. If we compare the medians, then the receive rate is almost 7 times faster than the send rate, but even then the speed of 560kB/s is slightly low for today's standards and demanding frequent travelers. As the diagram shows, in rare cases the latency can reach 12s, which is quite bad if it happens in 2017. Most requests seem to be initiated within 5s or not at all (if we look at the latency graphic, there seems to be an upper bound). Any latency over 100ms could introduce a noticeable delay, which directly affects people's willingness to browse. Interestingly, DB seems to use multiple on-train devices and Internet providers, so there might be switching times involved, which depending on the current conditions, can affect the overall WiFi speed and availability. Due to my hardware limitations, I cannot provide a more exhaustive analysis, but I am providing the link here so that anyone who wants it, can do it on their own. But one thing is sure: investment in faster Internet is rarely a one-time event, but an ongoing concern, which affects all travelers.
- Still remembering the case when electricity was unavailable for hours at the Atlanta International Airport, when passengers couldn't travel further. That was the time when I learned that this was the biggest airport in USA, having more than 2500 flights scheduled on a daily basis. In my perception I always thought that the airport in New York must be the biggest, but it turned out that this perception was wrong. So I decided to explore more to see what else I don't know about US airports and also to gain some insight on the number of passengers served. What I could find was data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics about the state in 2013, so I visualized it bit.ly/2BZ5mY8. As you can see, the airport in Atlanta was by far the biggest one in 2013. Dallas Love Field also sounds nice and I see that they celebrated their 100th anniversary this year. The airport was built in 1917 and operates since then—such an inspiring durability. Perhaps there are even older airports I don't know about yet.
- Wikipedia: "The U.S. state of Texas is divided into 254 counties, more than any other U.S. state." It's a relief to read about this after getting some numbers bit.ly/2BTyCPT. Few states at the bottom are missing, because I decided that the extra effort wasn't worth it (stitching together multiple screens). But you can assume that District of Columbia and Guam had only one county each, followed by Delaware and U.S. Virgin Islands with 3 counties each. A complete bar chart bit.ly/2zzqn5H. If we had the areas of each state, we could find out the states with the largest average county areas. But even so, it is interesting to see how fragmented some states are.
- Average new car fuel consumption bit.ly/2BTTkzp
- Finding the durations of flights bit.ly/2BSc5Dp
- Results from a sample football league round (animated) bit.ly/2BPaA8X. The idea is generic enough as to be applicable to any competition where two sides are involved. Variations on the theme are also possible.
- Separating concerns into n dishes means that should a single dish not be cooked perfectly or contain an overdose of red peppers, it is impossible to ruin the holiday. Merry Christmas, everyone!
- Disheartened to hear how a bean stew in South Sudan costs the equivalent of spending 161 Euro in Berlin, according to the director of the World Food Program. There's so much hunger in this world.
- Imagine that you shipped a product million times and suddenly realize that not everything in it is as perfect as you initially thought. Car makers frequently have this problem: malfunctioning brakes or airbags for instance can be the cause of human injuries or death. So they take the cars back from the market with the goal of fixing them. As you can imagine this operation is extremely costly and can easily bankrupt the company. By the time they encounter the problem, their car models might have reached very distant parts of the world, being very far from the factory where they were initially produced. How easy would be then to correct this mistake? As we know, the later a problem is detected, the more costly it becomes to fix it. So the severity and the probability of occurence of the problem are usually evaluated first to see whether such costs are justified. In some cases mistakes can be corrected by applying a software update. If I remember correctly from "The Toyota way", one element of the Toyota Production System (TPS) was the seeking of balance. In software and hardware too, almost anything is about making tradeoffs. One can integrate a very fast CPU in a mobile device while having the battery last only for a very short time or one can have a slow CPU with battery that lasts longer. But even then it's not that simple. While the CPU performance remains constant over time, battery performance doesn't—the battery wears out (sometimes quickly) over time. If it isn't replaced with a new one, the balance would shift away from the way the manufacturer originally imagined it. So what can one do in this case? You guessed it correctly, shipping a software update that adjust the CPU performance relative to the current battery (wear out) level. Is this meant in some way to make people upgrade their devices? I don't think so. It is meant to improve the longevity of the product, to allow it to be useful for a longer time and possibly to still have it working in a critical moment. Does the manufacturer need to inform users that their device has slown down a bit in response to the update, explaining the reasoning behind the tradeoffs? Maybe yes, maybe not. The manufacturer needs to ensure the quality of the product at any single time, nothing more, nothing less. Please, remember that many manufacturers don't even maintain their products once shipped, resulting in a track record of useless or unused devices. This has already made device pollution a severe problem in some countries. If a user didn't like the fact that someone intervened to improve their device, and tried to directly tell the manufacturer how the CPU frequency on their device should have been handled, then this sounds more as an attempt to tell the manufacturer how they should be doing their work. It is very unlikely that a client knows that better, otherwise they would have made the devices themselves. One thing that this could achieve is decreasing the rate of updates/innovation or directing them only towards newer, more shiny devices where not much is to be criticized at all. But this would do disservice to both sides, which is why I am mentioning the issue here after seeing how quick some people were to criticize some companies. It is often forgotten that the very first users of a device usually come from within the company where it is produced, so if they did something wrong, they would be hurting themselves first. Real people there spend a lot of time on programming, testing and quality assurance to ensure that the end client is always happy as well. But a company cannot do much if clients have a different, distorted opinion on what constitutes great quality. In that case it is probably better not to serve them (especially when they cannot be possibly satisfied), but to choose clients wisely. Clients that aren't open to discuss their issues calmly, but reach for the megaphone anytime they experience a small bug perhaps cost the company more than they bring. Which explains why everything mentioned above has also implications on the way I work as well.
- The last sentence reminds me of two possible ways to add value: one is through creation while ensuring that another party is hurt during the production process (which is surprisingly common like in a zero-sum game) and another is through creation that introduces something innovative that builds and expands on top of what already exists without necessarily seeking creative destruction, without thoughts on competitior crushing or assertiveness with the goal of self-service. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing too many examples of the last.
- Didn't know that ≈40% of Jakarta is now said to be under water, making the city "the fastest sinking city in the world" nyti.ms/2BFyQdj. This is such a tragedy. It only partially surprises me, because someone mentioned before that when ice is melting, distant regions from it are affected first (remembered this since it sounded so counterintuitive). So I had a blind spot for a while that made me uneasy: I've heard where ice was melting (Greenland), but was unaware of distant areas (like these in Asia for instance) which have felt or were affected by that. This New York Times article casts some light on that and at the same time underlines the dimensions of the problem. Perhaps Indonesia won't remain the only affected country. This also illustrates the "butterfly effect"—that whatever we do isn't just a local event or an isolated case, but something that always finds different incarnations or seeks to spread elsewhere, affecting seemingly unrelated people and things. But everything is interconnected. Whatever we do, whether we want it or not, is a form of setting an example—one that will be discussed, evaluated, eventually copied. My hope is that more of us can at least internally feel proud of what we do (always striving, never showing off), with a minimal negative impact on the happiness of others. Possibly a good wish for 2018.
- As an European, I knew almost nothing about the geography of Bangladesh—a country whose population is said to be approximately twice that of Germany. I decided to fill my curiosity gap by making a small, tidy map of the locations and relative population sizes of some of the biggest cities in this country. This is the information I found, although I realize that it may not be the most accurate. Interesting topology and point sizes, given that the populations are on a log scale bit.ly/2BGNBNg. Dhaka has 2.65x more people than the second largest city and is located almost at the center of the country, which makes it easily accessible from anywhere.
- Mind: "Use MinMaxScaler((from_voltage, to_voltage)).fit(voltages) to cause devices designed to work at different voltage ranges to adhere to a single voltage range across..." Me: "Please, stop. That you are seeing the keyword 'output power' doesn't make you a circuit designer."
- Some rent prices for one-room apartments in Berlin (wg-gesucht.de, 23.12.2017) bit.ly/2zk0J4I. Somehow a non-linear model found its way into the diagram. Linear regression produced the same line as ridge regression, so I didn't show it. Wanted to include more data, but then this caused more traffic than usual and got noticed by the site. My initial idea was to produce all regression lines for the top 30 cities and see how they relate to each other (comparing slopes and intercepts). Just the data for Berlin was over 800 pages, full with offers, so it's understandable that only a very small fraction has been included here. If you see rent prices close to zero, these are for a single night only (and should have been omitted).
- Finished reading another article on image optimization, full of advice. Then continued with where I left the "Reminiscences of a stock operator" to come to this slightly amusing piece bit.ly/2zcskF4 that made me think for a while about what I was doing.
- The last days in which we could work together this year are slowly approaching. But don't worry, you will have the same opportunity in 2018. Only you know whether you have an issue that has become important to solve and whether working together would be the right fit. As always, plenty of services exist elsewhere.
- It is easy to believe that 100ms is a very high bar for good performance in web design, until you hear that to reduce the chance of echo perceived due to reflections from walls (where the perception of the original signal is changed), a sound wave must reach the listener within 50-80ms, at most. Strange that such a simple medium as air can beat high-tech cable. But air doesn't have the notion of a "hop". Staying at maximal distance from the sound source means that the wave would take longest to arrive, enabling one to gauge how the echo could develop in the worst case. With websites, it is similar: Ensure that your customers are at the other half of the hemisphere, accessing your website at a peak time and let them measure the response time. If they report 5s, while you hoped for 1.5s at most, then something needs to change.
- If you saw a web page comparing Apple and Google maps in certain locations, you probably loaded ≈70MB of content.
- The authors of a newly published article on energy efficiency in CACM bit.ly/2z6BuCJ refer to a study which found that 3G can consume 1.7x more energy than WiFi, whereas 4G can consume about 1.3x more energy than 3G. On an Android device, sending HTTP requests was among the most energy-consuming operations (bad news for mobile web browsing). Third-party advertisement modules can be responsible for up to 75% of the energy consumption of a mobile app (which we already intuitively knew). Displays can drain the battery fast (also not new). On some devices, system calls can be used to estimate the energy consumption (which brings back the memory about strace in me). Blindly downscaling CPU frequency was said to lead to increased energy consumption in some cases, which is rather surprising. That said, we need to try writing applications that don't turn off the device while our website/application is used.
- Box office total gross amount per theater for the top 40 Disney movies bit.ly/2z4sHkU. It looks like "The lion king", "Frozen" and "The sixth sense" did relatively well.
- Just by connecting carefully positioned parallel lines and selectively shading the space between them, one can arrive at some nice 3D figures from simple 2D lines. Looks so easy and elegant at first sight.
- Research titles funded (grants) in the last three years by the Science Foundation Ireland in decreasing order of commitment bit.ly/2z4q8zf. Thanks to the data, learned about many interesting projects and research centers like Lero, for instance.
- Didn't know that workers at container docks have an injury rate 3x that of construction work and 8x that in manufacturing. In the past, many people died while being at work. Not surprising when you read how they need to load and unload tons of goods every single day, all the time, no matter the weather conditions, for a low pay. Or how they need to handle both delicate fruits and very long copper bars that don't fit in a barge, so they have to bend them with bare hands, "going home like orangutans". Surprised to hear that in many cases muscle was said to be more important than machinery. If I understood correctly, containers can hold anything, from cars to illegal migrants, every container weighting tons. Tightly packed ones may need to be unloaded directly at the dock, where many stakeholders can appear in place: customs inspectors, buyer's representatives, produce dealers and others, each willing to ensure that the orders have arrived, are valid and in good condition. Can't even imagine what this looks like. The more we approach the busiest time of the year, the more we need to pay attention to the sacrifices these people make, so that others can receive their things on time for the holidays. And the more patience we need once we hear that the post is overloaded with work and delivery delays are possible. If a small delay can prevent injuries elsewhere, then it is perhaps a good one.
- Where the thread ends bit.ly/2Bg0Cx0
- The sky produced its first tiny fractals today. Still not serious though.
- Annual glacier ice volumes (1977 - 2016) bit.ly/2jbEcl5. It hurts to see that according to this study, reaching far into the past, almost 25% of the total volume of all inspected glaciers has been lost.
- Coastal sea level rise at some measurement stations in New Zealand (1986 - 2015) bit.ly/2zlwUEf as seen in this dataset bit.ly/2zlncBJ.
- Rainfall intensity at different places in New Zealand (1960-2016) bit.ly/2zl5Iph. The values here are given in mm. It seems that Milford Sound had the highest rainfall intensity in this time frame.
- Mean maximum ozone hole area and mean minimum ozone concentration in New Zealand (1979 - 2016) bit.ly/2j9odUq
- Another important problem is the decrease of bee populations. Yesterday, I saw an article which mentioned that neonicotinoids may be linked with that. I don't know what this means, how it can be measured or how and when data can be made available.
- Ocean acidification in New Zealand bit.ly/2zjUKQP using the following data bit.ly/2jdJsor. Not sure what these measurements mean; probably an expert knows better how they affect the ocean acidity. I heard that too much acidity can be deadly for fish and maybe other microorganisms. Someone said that fish population worldwide is decreasing and if this is true, we need to understand our impact on the oceans.
- Average daily peak UV index value across all regions in New Zealand (1981 - 2017) bit.ly/2zkedR7. This data by the Ministry for the Environment of New Zealand comprises of over 35 years of daily measurements. Averaging on a daily basis across all regions where measurements were made reveals this nice periodic pattern. We can even try to count whether the number of years correspond to the number of peaks/valleys in the diagram. The description of the dataset bit.ly/2zkerYK says that an UV index of 11 is considered extreme, but in several cases the index reaches higher values than that. When we examine the top 10 days with the highest index values, ranging from 13.73 to 12.6 (25.12.1998, 03.01.1997, 23.01.1997, 02.01.1998, 28.12.1998, 15.01.1997, 23.12.2010, 20.01.1996, 24.12.1998, 28.12.1993), we see that most of them were at the end of December or at the beginning of January. The dates with the lowest values, ranging from 0.1 to 0.2 (18.05.1983, 28.07.1992, 03.06.1992, 29.05.1993, 23.07.1983, 07.06.1986, 03.06.1982, 29.06.1985, 28.06.1995, 20.07.1984) were in May, June (mostly) and July.
- Median total sun hours by region in New Zealand (1972 - 2016) bit.ly/2jbBbB5
- A short video showing interactive function exploration bit.ly/2jdm6PP. Sometimes it is nice to be able to avoid reloading a big plotting library each time a small change is needed (which is usually quite often). If the cursor seems to move slow, it's partially due to recording itself.
- Black-and-white street map of Orlando bit.ly/2jb5CHT. Not properly labeled, since the computation took already enough time and I am reluctant to run it again.
- Circle packings can be so beautiful, especially with varying radii.
- If you have a large collection of songs, it shouldn't be too hard to make your own application to manage them from within the browser. Perhaps you could find a song you like with 4-5 key presses and play it with a single click. Or create a simple native application.
- Noticed that this website works well even on a relatively old mobile phone. Then visited some popular pages through it and the warnings started: "Would you accept this cookie? This one? Maybe this one too? Once or permanently?". Each time a popup appeared, effectively canceling the browsing experience. "Could have been better", I thought.
- Tree species with more than 500 exemplars in Rostock bit.ly/2ja14RK. Took longer than I thought it would—there were over 82000 points to plot.
- Nice to see that for clothes dryers the removed moisture was given next to the comparative energy consumption. This enabled the moist_CEC index, where the V-ZUG 12006 dryer reaches a value of almost 172 (the lower the better). A model with the worst moist_CEC had an index value slightly over 1014. You can see the best 40 models for which measurements were made bit.ly/2j8PpTh. Once again, the dataset comes from the Australian department of environment and energy.
- For the washing machines, I slightly changed the scoring criteria to match electricity_cost_weight * electricity_usage_normalized + water_cost_weight * water_usage_normalized. The electricity cost weight used was 0.1330 (source: bit.ly/2zhzTxy) and water cost weight used was 0.1857 (source: bit.ly/2zhT2PN). If the calculations were correct, a liter water in USA is slightly more expensive on average than a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Since consumption of electricity was in kWh and of water in litres, using the weights would allow to estimate relative operational cost, which is what the score attempts to describe. The highest value reached was 0.282618 (lower is better), meaning that according to this criteria, the most inefficient washing machine is ≈5.8x more expensive to operate than the most efficient one(s). The full list bit.ly/2zhnCcf.
- Dishwasher models by their water and electricity consumption bit.ly/2jbfGQR. Note that the first 60 dishwashers on the list were from Fisher & Paykel, which were not shown here in order to include more brands on the list. While the number on the right is a normalized value (in range 0.072594 - 0.859375), it doesn't say anything about the quality of washing, which may be the deciding factor for a buyer.
- NetVol to CEC for some fridge/freezer brands bit.ly/2zglrWk
- Cooling and heating efficiencies of air conditioners according to the department of the environment and energy, Australia bit.ly/2j77fX1. Highlighted some models that have the highest efficiencies in both categories and then noticed that the top model costs almost 2000 euro. Interesting that many devices tend to be more efficient with heating than with cooling, which I thought was their primary use.
- Screen size vs. comparative energy consumption for 1821 computer monitors bit.ly/2j4UeNE. More data could have been even better.
- It seems that mining for metals/coal causes the most air pollution in Australia bit.ly/2j7R0ss, at least according to the National Pollutant Inventory bit.ly/2j8BU6l
- GDP at current market prices in Singapore (Q1 1975 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2zgFZOI
- I was slightly sceptical what the CyberLink's YouCam software could add to the capabilities of an existing machine. Since CHIP made it available for free as part of their advent calendar bit.ly/2zeEwbE, decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised. It can take images and videos (in my case MP4, up to 1280 x 720, with zoom), which can then be saved to a directory or uploaded to an external service like YouTube. The video quality was good and it captured fast-moving hands well. The interface became simpler once the effects section was closed. If you find youself in a need to record something, present a physical object/product, send a video message to a friend etc., it might be interesting to you. Works on Windows (but download size is ≈380MB). OnlineTV, which allows streaming of most German TV channels, was also a nice addition to the calendar (used an older version that worked nicely before), but the antivirus program prevented me from installing it. As always, if you choose to install anything, you have to ensure that your machine is properly protected.
- One disadvantage of some Java projects is that they have code that is hard to browse even after being made public on GitHub. People are expected to look within seven nested directories until they reach a file. It could be that a tool is able to automatically extract the files once loaded, but then every developer is expected to know about it and to be using it. I don't know, I'm not a Java developer, but sometimes I might seek somethink like "machine learning library" where one or more results appear to be implementations in Java. Once I look into the directory structure, it simply defeats me. I think that the term "information architecture" exists for a good reason—the structure of the code and how it is delivered matters exactly as much as the code itself. But this is still not always recognized.
- Whether something is built on top of certain technologies (like Kafka, OpenShift and Kubernetes) is rarely of importance to the average person. What they want to know is what the product does, and whether it was created to fix their current pain. Such keywords are foreign language to them; product developers must speak the language of the user. Surprisingly often, product descriptions are either missing/incomplete or made hardly accessible. It is unclear what the unique selling proposition of the product is and why people should buy it. Something that can be fixed.
- Interesting to see data that WordPress sites could be slightly slower than websites not relying on a particular platform. But if a requirement sounds like a firm "I need a WordPress website" and no further details are given, then would the designer be happy to engage in work that would make the web slower? Possibly not.
- Whenever a client/employer showed no willingness to pay, my willingness to work quickly evaporated. I frequently quit working with others when my interests are hurt and will continue to do so also in 2018. Can't predict what others want in advance, so I cannot serve them effectively unless they took the time to explain it in detail without telling me how I should be doing my work. But if they didn't, it meant that whenever my attention shifted to my next demo, there wouldn't be anyone to disturb me, which is nice too. For this reason, I try to keep my contact list short and question and double-check every addition to it. Facebook and Twitter as platforms already lost their chance to see me again some 5-6 years ago and because of that, you may not be able too. If someone shows no interest to work with me, they can easily find the same quality of service elsewhere, at a much higher price. This doesn't mean that my rates are low. For further details, see the contact page bit.ly/2zebSHF.
- Sample plot: "Seeking a relationship between revenue/expenses and outside temperature in a calendar year" bit.ly/2ze4ZpT
- Two variants of a four-level grid inspired by seasonal colors bit.ly/2j31fyo. They can be enhanced by populating some of the boxes with low-opacity photos or by other means.
- Fatigue takes many forms bit.ly/2j1vntZ
- Libraries in Vermont by total operating expense in 2012 bit.ly/2AAaC3Y
- Renewable energy generation by source in Hawaii bit.ly/2ylZUIh. Uses this dataset bit.ly/2ylmjp9.
- Three quick ideas for C++ code bit.ly/2jGjuKL
- "Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings" - Richard Feynman
- Visualization of monthly retail sales in two categories (1992 - present) bit.ly/2keKj8f. Updates automatically as soon as Census Bureau updates the data. No actual numbers are displayed, but they stay in relative comparison.
- The last sentence in the previous bit is partially a reason why AI, at least in its current flavor, does not excite me much. It uses—mildly said,—more computational resources than I'd like to assign. I cannot support a view, which places "software above everything", does not consider the hardware cost or the importance of the problem. If I needed 12 GPUs to run in parallel for a couple of days to update billion weights, I would be terrified that I am doing something extremely inefficient.
- Realized that a small amount of SRAM might be a good idea for a gift to a programmer for the holidays. Consider what this means. It teaches one about the need to keep program size small, to think about efficiency and well-defined output before code ever gets written. It highlights that being more efficient with RAM might scale better than being more efficient with the CPU. It shows that small-sized RAM can be extremely fast (tens of nanoseconds or less). It teaches about not wasting resources (e.g. caused by memory leaks), using the smallest thing that could possibly work. It teaches that working within tight constraints stimulates creativity. It teaches about power-efficiency, since this setup uses less gates, which need less power. It teaches about modularity, since the memory of an entire machine can be assembled from many such parts (a person hosted their website on a self-made device). And that modularity on a breadboard has surprisingly much in common with modularity of code. It teaches about communication complexity, seeing the number of pins that seek to connect with other components. That's also a reminder to think about the component interactions in our programs. It also teaches about bit operations (shifts, masks) used to address resources given a pin identification. It teaches combinatorics, since an effect could be achieved by combining different ideas in different ways, leading to similar results of varying efficiency. It teaches a more holistic view, since with a large number of components, looking at the structure becomes more important than looking at minor details, e.g. treating components in clusters. It teaches that hardware in itself is worthless if not controlled by great software (e.g. device drivers, CPU microcode), but also that software is worthless if it cannot coexist with the reality around us or if the hardware is not available. It teaches about tradeoffs (SRAM vs. DRAM). It teaches about the importance of designing clean interfaces—a box with the device hidden inside looks much better than the look of the chips. It teaches that with a bit more creativity, miniaturization can also happen in code. It teaches that sometimes precise craft can require careful design and simulation, minimization of path lengths and crossings, continuous voltage/current measurements, per-component operational range validation and soldering. A chip can be a part of a plan—a plan to surprise now and then after successful projects and see whether people will be quick to solder (maybe even damage) their chips or will wait to get more to be able to build something bigger. They might even cooperate exchanging chips in order to meet their goals. At last, this might help them see their software from the lens of the hardware that will work with it. In my opinion, an invaluable perspective.
- Pre-proceedings from NIPS 2017 are available bit.ly/2AYhkjn. This year once again my abilty to digest that much content will be limited.
- Found a dataset of museum visits by year and month. My initial idea was to visualize the changes over time, but then I saw the overwhelming number of museums included. If I included all, the graphic wouldn't be nice to look at and if I included few (which ones?), I'd risk to promote them at the expense of the many. Not surprising that internally something stops me to continue. But at the start everything looked interesting and promising.
- Christmas seems already well-planned in Berlin bit.ly/2Bc8cbB. Here are the locations of the markets once again as dots bit.ly/2Ajh1jC. Personally, I can't see myself celebrating it, because to me the entire year is 365x more important than a single day. Year, in which I once again created things I care about, which make me alive and which hopefully touched some of you in a positive sense. I cannot ask for more than this and cannot expect miracles from a single day that is like all others.
- Didn't know of the refrigerator quality check: if you put half of a banknote inside and half outside it and pull the banknote towards you, it should tear in half. Nowadays greed is expected even at device level.
- Having extensive experience in a field and believing that if you can't fix an issue, noone else should be able to is a classic fallacy. The ability to look beyond yourself is crucial.
- Some air conditioners make so much noise. If you disregard the vibrations. Not exactly a good stimulus to mind.
- A short list of photovoltaic panel producers according to the "Go Solar California Initiative" bit.ly/2AiH22Q. It's surprising how in a relatively short time many organizations have built their own installations for more sustainable operations. The Queensland University installation looked especially beautiful on a photo.
- The difference between gyroscope and accelerometer bit.ly/2AcVj0G somehow reminds me of the beauty of vector fields. And of a funny quote by Steve Jobs.
- Estimating printing cost of RFC documents bit.ly/2Ac0Uo3
- Interactive map of the air quality index in Europe bit.ly/2zQqBXe ↗
- Remember to make everything... bit.ly/2zO9FjQ
- Found another interesting CPU related formula: capacity(%) = utilization at CPU base frequency * (current frequency / CPU base frequency). The statement: "A 100% utilized CPU at 1.5Ghz and a 50% utilized CPU at 3.0Ghz have identical capacity."
- Advent calendar value estimation bit.ly/2zJ7LAY
- Visitors of Chicago public library branches (January - September 2017, log scale) bit.ly/2npQuv2
- A visualization of the current sources of interrupts on my machine bit.ly/2nlEOJC. The USB devices could be my keyboard and mouse; ath9k is the network card. Not sure about the meaning of the rest. Timers seem to be connected with lots of interrupts.
- Rarely working to satisfy tools. If a tool gives me a certain score, I don't panic but ask myself first whether the scoring criteria reflect the opinion and the thinking of the tool maker. This is surprisingly often the case. But I cannot exclude the possibility that such an opinion could be wrong. Which is why I don't automatically tune my work to the highest score possible. But I have seen people who do it and then say: "Your site scores lower than it could". They immediately assume that I need their website services. The perceived importance of the various checked criteria can matter more than the final score. Sometimes a design recommendation is weighted equally to a usability recommendation, which is questionable. Behind every single word or line of code on this website a decision has been made. A decision unlikely to be seen elsewhere.
- Availability is limited, but the moves which lead to it are even more so as risk can be really expensive. Here is the moment to congratulate Canadians for their decision (they know which). I think it sets a great base for more open conversation in the future. One that will hopefully lead to better exchange of know-how, new connections and opportunities. It is not that important whether people will choose to risk or not, but that whenever they do it, they can rely that their decision will be acknowledged. Seeing more countries following this example would make me even more positive about the future.
- Most processors are quite intelligent: when not utilized, they enter power-down mode and stay there for as long as needed before entering normal mode for a short time once again. We could learn from that and integrate this idea in our work as well. There is no reason to work at 100% all the time when we are not appreciated at 100%, personally and monetarily. And we can scale down our effort to self-preserving 0% (with processors the current could be in the microamper range) in case we notice forms of disrespect or discrimination. A similar idea was introduced in an article some time ago, which stated that the right way to respond to low payment offers at an interview is by saying: "Well, with that remuneration I won't be able to provide you with (list of functions). Would you then still agree hiring me?". This might sound rude, until you realize that the role of scaling down potential future long-term effort is to ensure self-preservation. It demonstrates a thinking, self-respecting individual who isn't mechanically accepting offers and who understands that only good resources enable them to do good work. What I would like to observe from first hand now is whether a processor truly draws exponentially more current until it reaches 100% utilization. If that's true then we should be asking ourselves whether our "always 100%" lifestyle isn't a high physical tax we pay.
- Significant effort that didn't lead anywhere is a wasted effort. Operation under such conditions is simply not sustainable.
- With incomplete requirements or unclear goals even the best execution might be seen as "broken" at the end. Can the customer be made happy by providing this solution to them? If not, we are probably working on the wrong project. Requirements elicitation helps to spot problems early and prevent both the developer and the client from wasting time on a bad project. And since it helps both parties keep their face, it is not optional, but rather detailed. If a client insists otherwise and shows that they don't appreciate their own project highly enough, then there is no reason why the designer should do it. Working while the requirements are unknown/unclear is always a mistake.
- MySQL utilizes "hero" functions of several screens. Possibly explains why it doesn't work for me.
- Root mean square error (RMSE) can be defined on a single line bit.ly/2ngfvbX
- Average speeds and car parks occupancy in Birmingham bit.ly/2zAkfLb
- Streets in Birmingham on which more than 90000 motor vehicles passed each year from 2000 to 2015 bit.ly/2zz5YhP. There seem to be only two meeting the criteria: A38(M) and M6.
- I heard that inspecting streaming data should happen in real-time (single-pass, no-store), but did not know that aircraft engines could have so many monitoring systems which send information to ground stations at high sample rates. A clear case for the need of efficient algorithms on streaming data, because learning something late might be too late.
- "More than 480 web firms record 'every keystroke'" bbc.in/2neHlpf. Some even record your entire life, but that's another story.
- Trying to understand the meaning of the sentence "We are less us than us" directed me towards this table bit.ly/2nfrXsD in "The microbiome solution" book. After reading that there are about 100 trillion organisms living in the gut (separate article), I was wondering whether there was some smaller dataset available at least to learn about some of the more common types. This is not a small-world graph.
- Saw a radar chart presenting multi-dimensional information and reminded myself about the one I created a while ago. Still surprised how succinct, space-efficient and data-rich these diagrams can be.
- An attempt to isolate objects in an image bit.ly/2iYv6sc. After the thresholding, some color came through. Fiddling with the details started to take too much time on my machine, so I left it.
- A device with good technical characteristics and great design, but bad usability may still not find acceptance once in the hands of the end user.
- Path through sightseeings in Paris bit.ly/2iXppe1
- Never heard of the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset. Here I tested some classifiers on it to see whether they can recognize the tumors bit.ly/2BgmGTG. Noticed that if the data was not pre-scaled, the accuracy of the SVC classifier could fall to 0.70. Used the StandardScaler, but then remembered that RobustScaler might also be beneficial (it was). The performance of logistic regression (for classification) was slightly surprising for me here (first time using it after hearing only good things about it all the time). But this is a relatively small dataset, where with more data the results may vary. Update: The ROC curves of four of the classifiers are also available bit.ly/2iWXHy9.
- A while ago I had the idea to compress an image and compare the output to the input to visualize which pixels were touched. The result was not very informative, since with very few exceptions almost all pixels were affected. But I guess this depends on many factors and likely on the particular characteristics of the image itself as is often the case with image-related algorithms. Anyway, if you find this interesting and have the time for it, you could easily do the same.
- While returning a number to take something back, my eyes unintentionally saw an employee working at a nearby monitor. One would think that a big, international retail company would have the resources to improve the interface on which employees work every single day. Surprisingly, not so.
- Interesting how many noise complaints in San Francisco were reported over the web (almost as many as by phone). The web system must be very useful since the reports over mobile/open311 are 1.7x less. Not sure why vehicle maintenance noise is so common. "Amplified sound electronics" noise appears on the 5th place, but is more common than noise from traffic, entertainment or public construction, at least in the data provided by the city.
- Finding the strength of pairwise relationships among features in the FIFA dataset bit.ly/2iTlG0Y
- Measuring variation with z-score bit.ly/2BbPigL
- 30 seconds of code execution on a fresh Vim installation bit.ly/2iPR6Wc. Does not seem to play well with video recording. But Netrw has a great feature allowing you to open images, papers etc. with a single keystroke. Not sure why, but the papers seem to load slightly faster this way than through the regular file manager on my OS. The few images I opened did not render at their original dimensions, but were for some reason scaled to either be too small or exceed the screen size. As a result, scrollbars appeared and I had to manually resize the pane and use Ctrl + +/-. I noticed that the images were not opened in ImageMagick, but in the PDF viewer too. So there is perhaps an option somewhere that fixes this.
- "Our company is an equal opportunity employer and doesn't discriminate based on x, y and z." Can't trust such marketing statements. Discrimination starts from a very young age (by saying you want the Haribo and not the Kinder), so I see no reason why at the workplace it should be non-existent. It even flourishes there. A company with a similar statement will find it hard to involve me in a conversation.
- "In order to grow, private companies need to attract and retain high-performing employees which can be a difficult proposition, given that the base salaries within public companies are generally higher than those at private companies." It's easy to suggest this. But low payment (at the publc company), zero respect, zero support in learning, lack of advancement options, lack of clarity about priorities/goals, daily meetings, rumour spreading, internal politics and others have all contributed to making the choice much easier for the high-performing entrepreneur. "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." - African proverb. Plenty of big companies, where many people worked together, have gone so far that they don't exist anymore. When words like this are used in front of you, be aware of the intentions behind them. Possibly to make you share what you know with your team for free. Because of the inability of many employees to recognize such subtle practices, many companies today continue to operate on their back.
- Robots/crawlers seem to be cheap and easy to manipulate. Just mention a keyword that has nothing to do with what you intend and see them looking around for more nonsense. This site is made primarily for you, because you are much more valuable than the average robot. And you can much more easily sense what these robots can't understand.
- Whenever I find myself in a state "willing to impress", I pause and ask myself whether my current work really matters. Very often, this isn't the case. "Willing to impress" has never worked for me.
- Multiple cursors are nice, but I'd like to have them across applications. For instance, keeping one editor on the left side of the screen and one on the right side. Whenever I press a key and hold it down, I'd like to see both editors rendering the changes at their native speeds to be able to gauge which editor has a smaller overhead while typing (again, on a slow machine, to make this more visible). This is because many editors aren't reacting in a very smooth way to feedback and the cursor frequently pauses for some unknown reason. Reminds me of a janky web page, but where the jank has moved at the cursor level. What happened with the 16.6ms requirement? This is of course only horizontal movement, where the speed of the vertical one is also important, the longer our code and documents become. Comparing vertical scrolling needs to be possible as well, because it greatly affects the speed at which we can access new information. Some editors become noticeably slower with longer text. Just adding the line number then can take a lot of time, which severely interferes with typing. Or they use spell checkers, code style checkers, inefficient autocompletion (taking lots of screen space where maybe only few options are important) and others that make the editors unresponsive. Some people have chosen to work on many small documents, but this only circumvents the problem without really solving it. Now the complexity is handed to the individual, who will have to select the right file among the hundreds available. I would also like to know which translates into less I/O operations: working on one large file or on 20 smaller ones, opened simultaneously. And the switching costs of both. Also the time required for search within the document and whether it is connected with a new window that is hard to close...
- That said, my configuration also isn't secret amzn.to/2AZFJ4t. This laptop and what I learned have enabled the hundreds of demos on this website. On such a slow, single-core machine you can quickly see any inefficiencies your code might have. You can also easily evaluate the quality of the software pushed online or see that the stars on GitHub may not guarantee it. In case the code monopolizes the CPU, it wouldn't matter much that AI techniques were used or that a beautiful animation was rendered, for instance. Wasting CPU cycles to be able to speak in a modern language, or compute for the sake of computation, is not a good use of machine resources. Being slow, the laptop also produces less heat and noise and wastes less electricity (a peak of 16W, according to CHIP). It is lightweight and likely suitable for traveling (new battery could last ≈7-8 hours). Has 3GB RAM (expandable to 4GB, maybe more) and 320GB Hitachi disk (could be eventually replaced with SSD), which were enough to me in most cases, except when trying to learn from really big datasets. An external monitor like LG 2361V (TN matrix, not IPS) allows me to read at 1920x1080, which for long texts/specifications/documentations is not only convenient, but necessary. But working on it is not completely strain-free, especially after long hours. Needed to attach a keyboard (a relatively cheap, but not bad Cherry KC1000), since the "e" key stopped working (then I started seeing how often this letter appeared everywhere). Bought the laptop second-hand with Win7 preinstalled and had to wait for it a month. Then it came with a broken USB port and a missing latch connecting the body to the display (so that the cable there is visible). The BIOS was also inaccessible. Yet, somehow I learned to live with these defects which were not disclosed in advance. Found that it worked really slow in Win7, especially when copying large amounts of files (could easily take many hours). After switching to Mint and latest kernel, I was amazed about the file transfer speeds. HD video watching on Win7 was almost impossible; now there are cases when a video runs smooth at 70-80% CPU utilization. Although this configuration has served me well, it has also constrained me in being unable to achieve more. As they say, first you own it, then it owns you.
- It is worth reminding that having a 10x faster machine than someone else isn't a sufficient reason to claim that they have suddenly become 10x less productive or that they deserve to be paid 10x less for their work. This is a very fast way to end a conversation before it has even started. Worth mentioning it since some people continue to seek significance through the hardware they obtain. This can be seen in various forums, where instead of simply saying their name, they are listing their entire configuration in the smallest detail as if it mattered more than who they are. If the goal is to make others feel inferior, there will always be some quick way like this to do it.
- Observing the SPEC CPU2017 performance results in 3D bit.ly/2B02tS7. What I learned from manual rotations locally is that a Xeon Platinum 8180 @ 2500Mhz with ≈220 cores and slightly more than 3TB RAM almost reaches the performance of Xeon E7-8890 @ 2200Mhz with ≈400 cores and slightly less than 4TB RAM. Unfortunately, stopped changing azimuth and elevation early, mainly due to the performance of my integrated graphics.
- You can also turn off some devices in your laptop that you use very rarely or not at all. Touchpad? Having a mouse. Network interface for cable Internet? Using WLAN (another interface). In need to be constantly connected to the router while reading locally stored papers or reading/writing code? Turn off WLAN. Bluetooth enabled all the time? Off. Print spooler, SD card and/or other services? Careful. Browser having 20 tabs left open? Can be CPU and memory hungry. Sound card? Rarely used. The blinking LED in the monitor? Annoying. Is the monitor shining brighter than needed? Probably more so in darker months, adjust. (Intel: At maximal brightness setting, the monitor could draw 2x the power needed at the minimal.) Having a sound volume option showing in the OSD? Not needed, volume off. Could you use one bigger RAM module instead of two smaller ones? Letting the machine sleep after being inactive for 30mins, while turning off the monitor earlier? Would you choose suspend (to RAM) or hibernate (to disk) at night? You probably have a lot more ideas than me, but they will be specific to your machine.
- Sorted the lightbulbs by efficacy on the EnergyStar website, which allowed me to see exactly the result I wanted without having to obtain all the data and spend time analyzing it myself. The best ones achieved ≈133.3 lumens/watt, which is up to 3.3x better than anything I have seen so far (cannot speak of the quality of the light itself). This means that 2 newer lightbulbs taken together will shine stronger than a chandelier having 5 "energy-efficient" lightbulbs from a couple of years ago, not to speak about a chandelier with 3 classic 100W lightbulbs. So it is not only important to have all sockets filled, but also see how they are filled. There may be an opportunity to remove extraneous lights and only keep as much luminous flux as needed.
- Cost savings as a result of EnergyStar certifications in US cities bit.ly/2izQgwx. Even when Washington, D.C. has the most certified buildings, according to EnergyStar, the cost savings in three other cities are now higher.
- Seeking volunteers? No. Many companies have been grown by volunteers, since they weren't paying their employees. Not participating in their plans, because it would mean that I support those. Also not freelancing, since I don't believe that skills which were obtained very slowly over a period of many years should be available to anyone at a burger price. The price at which the client wants to be served is also not interesting to me.
- Went out of the store, barely able to breathe. Too many people, all cashiers busy. Spent 15mins waiting. Thought: "All these people can pay the store, but can't pay for my web design or programming skills. Really?" Explains why similarly to how I worked in 2009, I continue not to serve those who show even the slightest signs of disrespect. (Non-payment is a form of disrespect.) I prefer to see them only once then. And that behavior I will keep in any situation, any circumstance, in any company or country. Unconditionally. Explains why the contact page hasn't changed since 2009 and why I still continue the appreciate the same basics.
- Strange thought added to my diary/ideary: "After classifying mushrooms as edible or poisonous, you must be willing to taste them in order to (empirically) verify your result." Not sure from where this one came. Reminds me of the ancient architects who built arcs and then spent time below them to ensure that their construction wasn't life-threatening.
- Learning about electricity from wind bit.ly/2ASF4li. At least in Europe some numbers seem to have changed since 2013 bit.ly/2itDdNi.
- Sometimes the result of your code surprises you just to find out that the initial data you started with is spurious or hasn't been collected consistently across all observations. For instance, how is it possible to compare CO2 emissions between cities, when one city reported measurements from 2010, another from 2012 and when the measurements have been made by likely different instrumentation? This makes the data incomparable and limits its usefulness. Or how can we find which cities have a similar electricity generation profile (mix of coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydro, biomass, wind, geothermal, solar, fossil and non-fossil), when it is unclear whether zeros are true zeros or stay for missing data. Then cosine similarity would not work as expected, placing Paris, France next to Vitória, Brazil and Caracas, Venezuela. Garbage in, garbage out.
- "I'll be in Phoenix tomorrow and would like to prepare something with jam and (crushed) nuts, but don't know whether there's a farmer's market that offers them both. Could you help by pointing me at a concrete website?" (Head scratching, dataset load, script execution). Only result: http://www.uptownmarketaz.com.
- One restriction of the web that still hasn't been removed many years later: million items. When I started with web design, I wanted to see a color picker that shows each individual color (you can still see how it looked on the main page). You might say that my initial idea was stupid and that "in no way" should I have attempted to render million items on a page. Or that the web simply hasn't been made for this. I have a different opinion and see it as a restriction of the web platform. Because I cannot exclude the possibility that valuable problems with size larger than a million exist, whose solving deserves to be possible on the web. (For now, suppose someone wanted to show you an interactive version of the genetic code that determined your illness.) So I am not simply speaking about rendering million splines, million polygons with 10 vertices each, million images and so on. This wasn't my goal. I wanted million simple DOM elements with background color mainly to see the maximal problem complexity that the browser can work with. Or at least a canvas element that would enable the equivalent. You can imagine that nothing worked. Today the problem sizes are even bigger than the ones from ten years ago. Datasets of terabytes are available for donwload and they likely contain a lot more instances than a million. I remember that back then, rendering 60000-80000 elements took 30-40 seconds; yesterday I found that a simple addition to an accumulating variable billion times (or 1000 millions) in C took me around 3-4 seconds. The number of iterations is 12500x bigger while the time is 10x less. I understand that C didn't have to concatenate or parse the string as HTML and render it or show a browser interface, but sometimes I wonder where all the speed invisibly disappears.
- If the web continues to become slower over time, the big winner from this will be fast native applications, new operating systems and updates that make them faster. It becomes cheaper to donwload 20 papers at once and read them offline in a fast native PDF reader than to pay the cost of waiting for the Arxiv to load 20 times and to download a single paper for viewing in the browser. People will also start spending less time on the web when it no longer matches well what they are looking for. Linux and Chrome, for instance, appear to take a different approach—they have become slightly faster with each new version. But even so, this cannot reduce the overall site delivery time, when the size of the content has grown much faster.
- If you gave me your 4MB web page, I would probably reduce its size ten times and still believe it was too big. Unfortunately, 3-4MB is on the way to become an accepted reality with expectations that "users find videos more engaging, so we need to have them". Personally, I don't watch videos as I find that my time is not well spent on them. The last full-time movie I watched was many years ago. In addition to the multiple JavaScript frameworks found on many sites, what happened with the content? It became a filler, saying mostly nothing, lacking substance. To find a valuable sentence means to spend an entire afternoon reading content of questionable value (which is likely why videos become increasingly popular). "Page size isn't the right metric to track, but perceived performance". Please, do not say this in front of me. As if the browser won't have more work to do once it registers an interaction. As if it won't have to download these chunks of now increased size. As if it won't need more parse and execution time. As if it won't waste more battery during the interaction process. As if it won't need more storage to cache the content (have you tried to clean your browser cache recently?). 4MB are 4MB when downloaded fully, no matter how we look at it. It is not that this single website will determine how the web "feels like" or how fast it is to browse, but each site will contribute. Especially on slow networks and devices people will feel the difference if they intended to learn and found that this can start 20 seconds later, for each website they visit. Can't imagine the cost of this on a world scale.
- Disliking datasets with potentially lots of content, but with screenfuls of missing data. A waste of storage and CPU cycles. bit.ly/2ijlRma. Heard something about mechanically replacing the missing data with the average...
- Wheat, rice, maize and soybean production by country over time bit.ly/2AKwTHL. Original data: bit.ly/2ihIQhu. Seems like some countries are capable of projecting 10 years in advance.
- Checking nearby stations bit.ly/2AHo7ui
- Currently available bikes and docks at bike stations in Barcelona bit.ly/2igdOpU. Learned that I shouldn't try to open unexpectedly big XML files in the browser (machine became unresponsive for ≈10 mins). Interest for the city came after I saw a publication, which ranked the city at the second place among the most open ones. The article mentioned that it used data to adjust the intensity of city sprinklers based on the predicted precipitation. I expected most of the information to be available only in Spanish, but was pleasantly surprised that English text was available too.
- 88 million trips since 2010 bit.ly/2icvcMt ↗. Single graphic (stacked bars) showing the cities where biking is most developed (also could help to look for more data). It is interesting that in 2012, New York was almost non-present, while in 2016 it reached the largest ridership base. The cyclist on the left is a nice addition to the chart, which tells me what it is about. I like it.
- Annual wasted fuel due to congestion bit.ly/2icF2Oc ↗
- Saw a photo of the giant screen on which Alibaba tracked the number of sales in real time (on its last big event).
- Current bike and dock availability at various bike stations in Toronto bit.ly/2Ayni6U. Updated: Fetchng the data asynchronously reduced the load time from approx. 3.42s to 1.62s (measured only once).
- Median electricity usage/day at various council buildings in Bath & North East Somerset bit.ly/2i8dAB8. You can see the distributions for the top3 buildings by the hour. Original dataset: bit.ly/2i9LQMT contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Libraries, fitness centers and parks in Huntsville, Alabama bit.ly/2i9udwo (via the city of Huntsville open data portal)
- Actual travel speed in Adelaide, Australia (1994-2014) bit.ly/2i7meQw. Somewhere I saw mentioned that the average travel speed is very important performance indicator for roads. This dataset shows that it isn't static, but changes during the day. If it decreases too much, this may indicate congestion or a newly arising need to modernize the road network. Economies which can transport people and goods faster, have an advantage. This means that we can compare data across several cities to explore if there are opportunities for improvement. You can also explore how the travel speed changes by route bit.ly/2i8hdqM.
- Beer consumption per capita, grape yield per hectar, wine production per capita, wine consumption per capita by country between 2000 and 2009 bit.ly/2i7Zn7k. The dataset is provided by the Wine Economics Research Center at the University of Adelaide. Grape yield per hectar shows that there is probably some unused potential in some countries. Wondered who drinks all these bottles of alcohol in the stores.
- Locations of the litter bins in Adelaide, Austrlia bit.ly/2AxReQp. Also enjoyed the historic images of the city, made available by the city council.
- Tourism expenditure in South Australia over time bit.ly/2i6KQsx
- Features of the parks in South Australia bit.ly/2i6oJT7
- Hourly measurements at Civic, Florey and Monash air stations in South Australia (near Canberra, 2012-2017) bit.ly/2i59QQW (data source: bit.ly/2AvNJtK). Did not include all air quality variables (excludes NO2 and CO). Initially wanted to make an interactive demo (showing the graph only when over a station point), but then decided that I would need too many line elements. Transforming a big dataset each time it has been downloaded didn't seem to support what I wanted: fast real-time usage.
- Passengers served by year at different airports in London (2004-2014) bit.ly/2AxDGEB. Via a dataset from the London data store. The numbers give the impression that Southend was growing quite fast. When we put the numbers in context, we see that in absolute numbers Heathrow has grown more, but relatively to the starting period, 2004, it grew only 1.093x, while Southend grew from 3224 to 1102260 passengers, or the equivalent of 341.89x. Really impressive.
- According to this dataset bit.ly/2Av4ncS, in 2010, actual energy electricity usage/unit area at Wyndley Leisure Centre was more than three times higher than that of the Leeds City Council. Aqua Vale, which is a swimming and fitness center ranked third. In 2008, Birmingham City Council was first.
- Libraries in Birmingham bit.ly/2i1qqBm ↗
- Nights at accomodation establishments by region in Steiermark, Austria bit.ly/2i2bIKq
- Weather conditions in Salzburg, Austria at 30-minute intervals bit.ly/2hZfZhK
- Au Bon Pain lists the ingredients, serving size and calories of each soup. Brain: "Predict the calories based on...". Internal voice: "Small training set? General enough? Don't think so."
- Used data from Wikipedia, a contour map and canvas to plot the 50 biggest cities in India bit.ly/2hWCC6b. Some labels have been hidden to avoid overlapping text (if you look at the code, you can see which ones). Learned that Howrah is a twin city to Kolkata and that there are many big cities near Mumbai (including Navi Mumbai, which I never heard about). The same is valid around the area of Delhi, where I needed to hide three more labels. Without interactive elements, the total size has become 15.8kB. Drawing on canvas requires JavaScript; the same could have been achieved if through a server-side language we generated an SVG. However, an SVG would use 100 elements only for the points and labels and a single path element describing the contour map, weighting 99kB. With canvas, we use a single element.
- Street trees with more than 1000 exemplars in Waterloo, Canada bit.ly/2AnSmpJ. The grey areas indicate other tree types. This time I didn't include the concrete counts.
- San Francisco Airport monthly utility consumption for natural gas, water, and electricity bit.ly/2AmKa9m. The periods when the data was captured range from 01.2010 to 09.2017.
- San Francisco beaches water quality, total coli concentration (14.08.2017 - 07.11.2017, weekly) bit.ly/2AmUyxI. The source dataset was said to be "not updated", but actually contains some recent sampling dates. This allows us to show a page with the latest measurements if we knew the thresholds that separated the categories "good", "fair", "bad" and so on. Perhaps you have an idea how to make an app from it rather than a simple visualization.
- Average weekly wage by sector in Virginia (Q1, 2017) bit.ly/2AnMBbR
- Libraries in Virginia Beach, Virginia bit.ly/2hWl7TJ
- Trying to understand some tabular results obtained from the Swiss food composition database bit.ly/2An6PSK. A following on my two other tables from USDA and matvaretabellen. Each result says something and in the unity of all current and future sources we might start seeing patterns which appear more frequently. But we'll see.
- Types of street trees with more than 1000 exemplars in Belfast bit.ly/2AkbtRE
- According to a study of some trams, covering their wheels to make them invisible could reduce noise by 6-9 dB, which I found interesting. But saw many trams in Germany, which followed this design.
- It's very hard to concentrate on an article when things like this bit.ly/2hSVbs7 always find their place. Some people still believe that the web must be exclusively for ads. The web designer should have said: "No, this distracts from the content".
- Top50 IT companies in Austria for 2014 by revenue/employee bit.ly/2hReSRb. The picture for 2017 might look different in case it becomes available. Learned about some companies whose existence is new to me.
- Current air quality at air stations in Zürich, Switzerland bit.ly/2hQhejh
- Nice to see that some places update the information which streets are closed every ten minutes. Some small applications could be built this way (but they probably shouldn't).
- Schneckenförmig bit.ly/2hPy4yv
- Very often, once you start labeling all variables and functions descriptively and not just as placeholders, you see that the new code starts to come naturally into its place. So whenever you want to make it work fast and now, check whether you are reaching for the placeholders.
- Computing the profits of a bakery on a given day bit.ly/2AfgtqM
- PM2.5 air quality at air stations in Singapore bit.ly/2hLCab8
- Interesting that container and cargo transport are two different things bit.ly/2AdaD97. A sample graphic how their throughput changes over time.
- Learning which interesting features water has bit.ly/2hKzrOT
- Utilization and vacant places of parkings in Singapore bit.ly/2AdBC4x. It is not easy to tell whether all parkings report accurate data, so please be aware that I have no way to verify it. I would prefer to have the names of the parkings and their locations as well, but since it isn't available, it limits the usefulness of the page. But if you know the initials of your parking place of interest, you can search for it with with Ctrl+F. May take a while to load.
- 4-day weather forecast for Singapore bit.ly/2hMHxXE
- Waking up/warming up with floor-covering teracotta pieces bit.ly/2AcYwJ5
- Climb/fall bit.ly/2hImJQZ
- Discovering good hotels in the Los Angeles area on the Orbitz website bit.ly/2hJNVin
- House spotting, Memphis @ Zillow bit.ly/2hF9dgO. You could also use the pieces of available data to construct normalized vectors and seek which houses are most similar and which are different. Perhaps the addresses can serve as names of the nodes and the distance as weight in the generation of a graph.
- A minor contribution about the problem of domestic violence bit.ly/2hG1krz. What is still missing is a scatterplot of the medians of the two variables for each county.
- Water usage in Santa Rosa, Calfornia over time bit.ly/2A6CWpD
- Although you can, I wouldn't recommend omitting big commented HTML chunks in the code for every item you include. Plenty of kilobytes for nothing to show.
- Had the idea of trying to produce a small map of the parcels in a given region, but so far I am not finding enough data. Yet, I found a sample cadastral data bit.ly/2hCTNK2, which produced this nice image bit.ly/2hCUPpo (could have been eventually an interactive SVG)
- Converting bytes into other units bit.ly/2A6eQvd. Uses an idea found in Trillinos, where bit shifts are applied.
- Looks like I am missing something in the formatting of grid-template-areas bit.ly/2A4F3dy
- "(W)ego: The future city is flexible" by MVRDV bit.ly/2A2efL6. Looks very self-contained to me. Staircases either to the solar top or the bright future. No blue legs.
- Frequent items in transaction sets bit.ly/2A06e9A. Mainly as an illustration of an idea. A timestamp next to each transaction would normally also be available, enabling us to explore how people's tastes change over time.
- Location and type of the noise sources in New York bit.ly/2zY7b24. The graphic looks slightly distorted, but hopefully the legend is readable. Darker regions indicate more cases that on such a small map overlap. Most people complained from loud music/parties, banging/pounding and loud talking. However, I was looking for concrete dB numbers as a base to determine which is loudest. In this dataset, this information was not available. Also, I was interested to find something about rail noise, but don't know in which category to look for it (probably "Other"?). I was reading something about it (and remembering the reportage on "Deutsche Welle" about the trains which passed too close to the houses of some people), which prompted me to look for more.
- Which catalogs have you seen that you found most inspiring? Is there something you can do about them to create a beautiful demo/application with the information they contain?
- Simple border effect bit.ly/2hti6tQ. Like in the convolution demo, the image was taken by Andre Benz and uploaded on Unsplash.
- Visualizing the weight of transported goods bit.ly/2zWNo30
- Convolution of a detail-rich photo bit.ly/2z9fon1. The kernel used was [[-2, 1, -2], [1, 4, 1], [-2, 1, -2]]. The result has been inverted.
- I also realize that I cannot possibly serve everyone or work on any project. My time is limited, which means that my work is too.
- "Qualified" people aren't free. Not sure why employers continue to expect them to be. In general, I could give anyone only a single chance to pay well, according to what I consider a good/great payment. If they waste it, no future work with me. They are free to look for the same service elsewhere. If you doubt my words, look around to speak with the people who already wasted their chance.
- Traffic incidents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2016) bit.ly/2z2HtfM. Also a hexbin view is available bit.ly/2yXP0Kx.
- Public art in Tempe arcg.is/2yXhcgz ↗. Always nice to see things like this.
- Crime in Orlando, Florida bit.ly/2yYUwNh
- Annual crime per 100000 citizens by type and frequency of occurence in Henderson, Nevada (2010 - 2016) bit.ly/2yXlcOg
- An attempt to show the locations, names, websites and phones of the libraries in Dallas bit.ly/2z1XYsu. The right column became less readable than I wanted. A better alternative would be SVG + JavaScript events, but that requires much more time.
- Dallas animal inventory bit.ly/2yZkMHm as seen here bit.ly/2yX57Io
- Picture of the "total" traffic counts on three streets in San Diego bit.ly/2z2asQG. "Total", because traffic may have been measured in any of the north-, south-, east- or westbound directions and this number would refer to the sum of all of these where available. This distorts the results quickly and makes them incomparable. The measurement days were also not sequential, but spread over time. Sorting by total count showed highest numbers for the streets "N Harbor Dr.", "Fairmount Av.", "Mira Mesa Bl.", in that order. If we were quick, we could conclude that "N Harbor Dr." is the most loaded street. But once we plot all spurious data we have, making ourselves only an incomplete picture, we notice that most of the time "Mira Mesa Bl." has registered higher traffic counts than the other two streets despite the fact that many measurements were made for them too. The spikes for the other two streets were relatively rare, considering the range where most observations about them fell. Still, we cannot say that one street is definitely more loaded than another, but the picture gives us some hints.
- The data about the properties owned by San Diego bit.ly/2z26jMC shows it has only four whose area is over 10km2: Ocean Lands (144.35km2), SD-LJ Underwater Park (24.18km2), San Pasqual Valley (13.26km2) and Mission Bay Park (11.59km2). Still, these are huge areas.
- Street light locations and wattage in San Diego bit.ly/2yXWc9s. Exluding the lights whose wattage was not given, the total electricity consumption was ≈4.79MWh.
- Tree species with more than 1000 exemplars in San Francisco bit.ly/2yXQDbp
- Historic daily solar photovoltaic generation at different properties in Leeds bit.ly/2z2Q0zh. Uses the following dataset bit.ly/2z2KxZ1.
- Tree counts for Denver bit.ly/2yWZsSJ. The coordinates of the trees were not given, so no graphic this time.
- Tree species with more than 500 exemplars in Cupertino, California bit.ly/2z24lfq
- Locations with the highest wattage savings from street lights in Elk Grove, California bit.ly/2yVbVpO
- Can't possibly show all public art images from Baltimore, but this one looks as if the chair would fall off the building bit.ly/2z28C2c. Do you think it would look differently if you changed your viewing angle?
- Customer waiting times at different service centers in Queensland (01.12.2009 - 12.09.2017) bit.ly/2z2dVyP
- Total visits of the Adelaide library between 20.06.2015 and 17.06.2016 bit.ly/2z01xiN. Didn't expect to see so much variability. Especially interesing were the days which registered one visitor in total. Perhaps this person cares too much to miss a single day.
- Most common street tree types and their locations in Adelaide bit.ly/2yW1IJX
- Residential per capita consumption of water by district/city in San Mateo county (2008-2012) bit.ly/2yVk79D
- Median household income and percentage of families with income below poverty level in San Mateo county bit.ly/2yZFOHy
- Air quality at Hong Kong measurement stations bit.ly/2z0SaiM. Now that the data is available, we can create simple visualizations like this one bit.ly/2z09Bjt. Knowing the measurement units helps further.
- Traffic cameras in Hong Kong bit.ly/2yTjTjt
- Current beach water quality in Hong Kong bit.ly/2yXDLUE
- Labor productivity index in various sectors in Hong Kong, relative to the year 2000 bit.ly/2z0odiG. According to the data bit.ly/2yUkmlo and the graphic, five sectors exhibit faster labor productivity growth than the information and communications sector.
- Government IT expenditure in Hong Kong bit.ly/2z0PUZ3
- Parking place utilization in San Jose, California bit.ly/2yZO4HR
- Common names and locations of the trees with more than 500 exemplars in Santa Monica, California bit.ly/2yU05fP. The sort order in the legend is columnwise: most common tree is Mexican fan palm, then Indian laurel fig and so on until Queen palm. Loving the attempt to make entire streets follow a common theme (look at the long orange, yellow and green lines). Grey shows trees of other types. Among the street lights, some of which possibly illuminate the trees bit.ly/2yTRKst, we see that the median of those with a given consumption is 100W, but the average comes at ≈208W, perhaps driven up by the 1500W (MH, likely metal halide) units.
- Murders in the last 90 days in Oakland, CA bit.ly/2yWNg6m (static image, won't update)
- Seating capacity at arts spaces in Barcelona bit.ly/2yS1tPW. The biggest four seem to be Teatre Tivoli (442691 seats), Gran Teatre del Liceu (285030 seats), Teatre Poliorama (245096 seats) and Teatre Victoria (201181 seats). Still can't imagine how ≈450000 seats look like. Given the number of big theatres, the city certainly has a long-term tradition, which is new for me.
- A nice feature of the Luxembourg airport site is that you can type your email and be notified when a particular flight has arrived. The flight radar where you can see the realtime positions of the airplanes is also nice.
- Magma-plasma stripes drawn with PIL bit.ly/2yWZlbN. Nice that I could directly use the precomputed data from pyplot without having to import it bit.ly/2yQXZND. Preferring numerics over imports.
- Birthday. And a tiny notebook with a small zebra on it.
- EU funded projects (as of 26.10.2017) bit.ly/2yQvhMI
- Consumer expenditure by category as percentage of total annual expenditures (Source: Bureau of labor statistics, 2015) bit.ly/2y5dPY0. Although you can't see it on the chart, according to the survey people spent the least on reading (only 0.2%), where they spent 0.6% on tobacco products & smoking supplies and 0.9% on alcoholic beverages. Even when education in general comes at 2.3%, it is somewhat saddening to see that 5.1% is spent on entertainment. This shows that most people don't see their education as a priority. Interestingly a large percentage of the expenditures goes for social security and preparation for retirement which I think stays in stark contrast to the priorities in many other countries.
- Understanding color palette abbreviations bit.ly/2lhqjWy
- Map of the Texas counties (125kB) bit.ly/2leTpFJ. Traced from an image; may contain incorrect labels.
- "The chart will appear within this DIV" (but it doesn't) bit.ly/2ld97Bb. Missing content enables the teaching of terminology.
- Someone made this nice visualization of the Wuppertal's budget for 2018 bit.ly/2launYg, which reminds me how very often data tends to be hierarchical.
- Visits by month of the Newcastle library branches (04.2008 - 07.2017) bit.ly/2y2eDNi. Some libraries noticed a strong decrease in the number of visitors since the middle of 2016. If you see a disconnected line, it means that no measurements exist for that period. You can also see heatmaps of the resource consumption of the City branch bit.ly/2lbGJj8, where the data comes from GitHub bit.ly/2lcIX1E.
- Traffic news from Frankfurt/Main bit.ly/2y2cHnI
- Current parking facilities occupancy in Frankfurt/Main bit.ly/2y0P4fk
- An attempt to combine metro lines with stops data for Vienna bit.ly/2xZPjHA. My expectation was that the points (metro stations) would be positioned exactly on the lines. But it seems that the data is incomplete. The lines are disconnected at several places and there is a strange offset between the elements. Both datasets come from the same source bit.ly/2l9qyTf.
- Renewable energy production by type in Vienna (2005-2014) bit.ly/2y1cMYT. Unfortunately, it doesn't look convincing to me until it can be backed by several other sources.
- Borrowed books by library branch in Vienna for 2014 bit.ly/2xZEpBN
- Locations of the public toilets in Melbourne bit.ly/2laj6Yf
- Median house price and number of transactions in Melbourne (2000-2016) bit.ly/2lbd8Go
- Soil composition at different depth levels (0-400m, 400-700m and 700-1000m) at various locations in Melbourne bit.ly/2l9qDGz (data: bit.ly/2l9DGrr). Not sure that this is the best visualization I could have made. Vertical labels are hard to read and for some reason GIMP renders some of them slightly bolder even when the font is the same. Learned that there is a difference between sandy loam and loamy sand, because if careless I would have made the mistake to merge the values. Good that small errors in the dataset allowed me to reduce the labels from 17 to 14.
- After the prevalence of green ashes in Boulder, Colorado, it's once again nice to see slightly more variety of tree types in Melbourne bit.ly/2l8YNub. The number of trees by year planted bit.ly/2laNSjp indicates that the top 5 years when most trees were planted were 1998, 1997, 1900, 2015 and 2012.
- Public art in Albuquerque bit.ly/2xWVxYN
- Brisbane live events bit.ly/2xY85yX
- Statistics for the library in Cologne, Germany (2010-2013) bit.ly/2xZisCC
- PM2.5 particle measures at air stations in Florida bit.ly/2xWyYU5. Medians for some stations in the last year: Azalea Park 6.9µg/m3, Tallahassee Community College 8.3µg/m3, Fort Lauderdale Near Road 9.3µg/m3. Surprised to see that Florida has small cities called Melbourne and Sydney.
- Between 01.09.2017 and 22.10.2017, the city of Winnipeg, Canada utilized ten units to measure air quality, each of which made 300 measurements spread across the three categories temperature, humidity and PM2.5 particulates. Among the 1000 measures of PM2.5 particulates, we compute a median value of 9µg/m3 and a maximum of 58µg/m3. As you can see in the distribution bit.ly/2l7thfT, most values are exactly 0µg/m3, but this may also be a sign that the measurement unit was turned off, for instance. Even if we exclude the zeros, we still come at a median of 14µg/m3, with most observations being less 20µg/m3. According to the previous air quality table, this means that most of the time, the air quality is good to moderate, at most.
- Color Brewer palettes as hex colors bit.ly/2l6HREG, preformatted for easy pasting into brackets.
- NAAQS air quality index bit.ly/2xXqhZR
- By switching 181872 street lights from high pressure sodium to LED, Los Angeles reported annual energy savings of ≈$9.7 million, which is an average of $53.29/streetlight annually. The cost of the average LED was not given to see when the investment will fully pay off.
- Traffic cameras in Vancouver bit.ly/2xWbfUd
- Number of employees in the manufacturing sector in Munich bit.ly/2xWMw1U
- Libraries in Oklahoma, USA bit.ly/2xWa1Z0 and Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2l7Ri6v
- US cities ParkScore bit.ly/2l68PfB. If you don't know, the two distant spots are Anchorage and Honolulu.
- Photos from traffic cameras in Austin bit.ly/2l5TOKD
- Public art in Charlotte bit.ly/2xWp193, Nashville bit.ly/2xWsO6h, Seattle bit.ly/2xWFD0F and Austin bit.ly/2l4E7TX. Resources were extracted from datasets.
- Photovoltaic projects by expected KWh annual production in the New York area bit.ly/2l4sI6F. I used this dataset once, but didn't plot the locations. I could count only 11 red dots for all top 30 locations, which means that they can be seen as point clusters, potentially hosting multiple projects. The top project expects 6737.27 MWh/year.
- Number of registered electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in Washington, D.C., according to the deparment of transportation bit.ly/2l6ZUKM
- Street light locations, wattage and installments by year in Boise bit.ly/2xVZ6yz. Cooler areas correspond to lower wattage, warmer areas to higher wattage. Although it is hard to see, two lights were supposed to be installed in year 2020, one in year 2024 and one in year 8150 (not shown). No dataset is without its quirks.
- Crash incidents in Idaho since 2005 by their severity bit.ly/2l3ZbtP. Data source: bit.ly/2xV8lPr
- Found a dataset of the City of Boulder fire unit response times bit.ly/2xUVIUq. Computed median response times of 326, 301 and 294 seconds for the years 2015-2017 of which 75.46%, 81.06% and 82.31% were spent in traveling. Responding in under five minutes irrespective of the event location is really fast.
- A heatmap of daily temperatures (23kB) bit.ly/2xUTyEc. You can also add a legend as a gradient between the two colors, where you write the corresponding temperature at certain steps.
- Parks in Phoenix bit.ly/2l1WngG
- Boston buildings energy efficiency, 2017 bit.ly/2l4MIX0
- Utah libraries performance, 2013 bit.ly/2l46D87
- Budgets by department resulting from all funds, according to the Philadelphia's proposed budget for 2018 bit.ly/2xTHHGM. Many funds want to direct resources towards two departments. Whether other departments will receive enough funds, you can decide for youself.
- Finding cities with high walkability scores bit.ly/2xT4uSO
- Nice how you can select a bus, train or trolley in Philadephia and see their location and route in real time bit.ly/2kZlAZb
- Locations of various trees (20 different types) in Portland bit.ly/2kZo89L. Saw a photo of a beautiful tree near river, said to be taken in Portland. So I wanted to see which other tree types they could have except that one. Didn't suppose it would be better to ask which ones are still not available bit.ly/2l1q819. Maple (Norway and red), cherry, pear, plum, ash, dogwood are among the most common in this city. Nature can be so beautiful.
- Bits from various articles this year: Gulfstream effect has weakened, 3-4 very strong hurricanes have flooded regions in USA, Greenland glacier crack, big glacier hole from the past that reappeared after iceberg rotate, rising sea levels (see NOAAs graph reaching far into the past to understand potential severity), coastal cities becoming more susceptible to threats from the ocean, New York reportedly having zones in danger of flooding. Strange that so many events happened in such a close proximity.
- Some notes from "Introduction to epidemiology" bit.ly/2xRpl9h
- An article mentioned that after a hurricane, the number of mosquitos in the affected area grows. And we know that mosquitos can spread malaria.
- Top 30 buildings with the highest energy cost intensity in Pittsburgh bit.ly/2l09z5J
- Most common end stations in the Hubway bike system for September 2017 bit.ly/2kYInVb. The name "MIT" appears in four of the 15 most popular destinations, which is interesting. The median trip duration for that month is 11 minutes and 8 seconds, while the median age among the subscribers of the service is 30 years.
- Approved building permits with certificate of occupancy in Boston bit.ly/2xQbMH4
- Palo Alto library checkouts and linear regression bit.ly/2l2EPBp. Always interesting to observe how far expectations are from reality. To adjust and improve the predictions the next time.
- Observing industrial production and capacity utilization in various branches of the US economy, with the help of the Federal Reserve data download program bit.ly/2xQu1wc. Data is available only for the last seven periods, so the visualizations of the transitions from one period to the next are not very smooth.
- GPU comparison bit.ly/2xOVTk6
- Covariance matrix for obesity and diabetes type 2 (US states, 2016) bit.ly/2kVqExM. Index 20, corresponding to the yellow spot, refers to Alaska. The data has been preprocessed with sklearn's StandardScaler.
- Oftentimes we might type (a > b) ? -c : c, which is subtle code duplication. Now, if c changes, we'll have to change it twice. ((a > b) ? -1 : 1) * c removes this need and makes the direction and the amount in that direction more explicit.
- Exponentiation when the powers come from an array: from numpy import array; print(3**array([1, 2, 3, 4])) # [ 3 9 27 81]
- What should this program/code do? If the output is meaningless, it doesn't matter that the data has been transformed n times before it became available. Code isn't here to demonstrate that "we can", but to create something which is truly needed.
- Not everything that can be made interactive, eventually should be, especially when the cost of the conversion is not justified.
- Adult obesity rate by state (USA, 2016) bit.ly/2xHQET9
- Very quick plot of the airport locations (with the help of OpenFlights) bit.ly/2xFcWVA
- Exhausted my time budget for today, by ending with similar pixels within threshold bit.ly/2kJULs4. Similar to the pixel at position 0,0 (top left). Idea was to try segmenting the image in regions manually.
- Are programmers inside a company automatically teachers? Do they need to teach their colleagues everything they know about just because learning and staying up-to-date is an ongoing challenge? What if they were qualified as programmers, but not interested in becomming teachers? Or thinking that as teachers they aren't good enough? Teaching is quite different from programming and we have to realize that it's a separate profession. Not everyone is automatically qualified to be a teacher. Once a programmer becomes one, this takes away time that they could have used to learn new programming languages or write more code. It also requires a somewhat different form of thinking, which focuses mostly on theory and less on practice, even though the goal may still be to express concepts clearly. Programmers might become unhappy if the improvement in their teaching skills comes at the cost of neglecting their programming skills. If they are burdened with teaching requirements, then this must be reflected and well-visible in their compensation. Yet, some companies might prefer to leave the teaching requirement unspecified and after the need arises, to explain, that this was part of the programming job even when not explicitly mentioned. With this practice, neither programmers, nor teachers can be expected to stay.
- Imagine that a client has a carpet store and they want a website to present their carpets with beautiful shapes and colors. If they were to provide the photos, this would simplify the design process, allowing them to evaluate a potential layout sooner. It would also be cheaper since the designer would not need to spend extra time on studying and practicing photography. But if the client wants the web designer to take the photos so that the viewing angles, exposure and other parameters remain as consistent as possible across all 300 photos, this would slow down the designer and make their work much harder. Additionally, the designer might not have developed a strong appreciation of carpets yet, which may come through in their own photos, making them less personal. In the rush to make the photos, the designer might also drop the client's camera and break it. Now, by accepting to do work with the client's equipment, the designer would need to be charged. It is always better when clients come prepared, know exactly what they want and remain approachable throughout the design process. Such clients will have an advantage over people who care less, hope for any result or cannot articulate how they intend to evaluate it.
- When placed on the desktop, widgets may enhance its look or add functionality, but we have to be aware of their memory cost (and if we dislike it, turn them off). In the same way, if our designs focus too much on beauty, while neglecting performance, we cannot realistically expect that people would become repeat users. Sometimes individual elements on a website may look as if they are widgets: for instance blocks reserved for images which load progressively and after small initial "thinking and blinking" time. While the end result are still many loaded images, the attempt to present each block as a "living thing" has made access to the main content on the page much slower. How well a website responds is usually seen when moving across the pages: if the total time sums to a period of unacceptable length, then people would leave only after visiting a few pages. What we want instead is to show them a world and ensure that they can move freely, smoothly and without fear of making a wrong choice. Maximizing the total percentage that can be seen within the world in a reasonable time is more important than providing anchors to speak about.
- Remembering a great book I've read a long time ago (can't recall its title), where the author claimed that many attempts to actively motivate people in the workplace/within the company actually demotivate them. To see examples that seem convincing is one thing, but when you experience a similar reality and you know how you felt, the meaning and depth of this seemingly artificial work become apparent.
- Do you have an upload limit on your website? I remember having a case where I wrote a piece of code just to find out that the uploads I expected would be slightly bigger than the size limit. Makes me cautious whenever I think of projects that may require uploads.
- Agree with a programmer's statement that LLVM has a very nice code. Will have to review the other recommended libraries as well.
- Single-page <picture> element as seen in WordPress bit.ly/2xAHRCo
- "But where else would you go?" If you heard this sentence, it was possibly an attempt to condition your thinking to believe that you have no other true options. Demonstrates the hierarchic nature of the relationship and strives to exert control.
- Nonpayment isn't a problem that is restricted to a single country. In Germany, for instance, many employers aren't paying well too, primarily exploiting people from the rest of Europe to work for them cheaply. They made this a national sport, which is supported and fed by the government, defending the interests of the countless millionaires, while the rest of Europe is suffering. The austerity measures further contributed to the emigration of many skilled workers to Germany, where they are seen as a gold mine for exploitation. Not only employers, but also landlords are heavily profiting from these trends. "You make more money by exploiting people, not by selling drugs" could be the culprit. German greed testaments through the willingness to pay the lowest possible wages, so that the claim "the economy is growing like never before" can be backed once again. But what does it mean to earn millions and pay dimes? Would you say that this is legal and if not, where do you see the line? Is it acceptable, just because "everyone else does it"? Why should former millionaires suddenly be allowed to suppress wages, speaking of a "financial crisis"? Since when did this nonpayment become a social norm? And since when do we need "full employment" under conditions generating classes and classes of "working poor"? Even if 99.99% of all people were employed, working under unbearable conditions, it doesn't mean that being like them should be our goal. That "we should work" simply because that's the accepted norm and everyone around us does it for free or wants to influence us in the direction that benefits them most. There's no such thing. Work shouldn't be allowed to become a means of exerting control over us. Recently there was an article where someone complained of the quality of multiple employers in Germany that went viral and got a couple of hundred comments on a German website. In my opinion, illustrates an unsolved, large-scale problem in the German economy, about which many were previously silent.
- Average sold housing prices in different areas of London bit.ly/2kILxvW. The average over all areas (the average for London) comes at 480761 pounds, according to primelocation. So if someone is earning 40000 pounds/year netto on a full-time job, they would need to work exactly 12 years before they are able to acquire a home of an average price. Meanwhile they have to be cutting costs for rent, food, transportation, communication etc. to avoid prolonging this period. Recently read an article which mentioned how a person earning 40000 pounds (likely brutto) was priced out of the city, being unable to afford even rent (after the rent increased). And that many teachers who were commuting from Luton to London decided to stop going to work for being unable to cover their costs (which exacerbated the situation with the lack of teachers in the city, at least according to the article). I saw somewhere before that it is planned to start social aid when someone is earning less than 32000 pounds (or was it 34000?) and wondered how it is even possible that so many people work at conditions very near to the social minimum. What happens if inflation grows, an injury disables them, something unexpected happens (like an illness of a relative) or if they grow old and the marketplace starts to discriminate them? First and foremost, work should be economical and the companies whose positions don't fit this criteria, do not necessarily deserve to appear on a CV.
- After crashing my machine four times, spending hours debugging segfaults and doing endless computation, I decided that it is time to let go of the idea of attempting to see where people check-in most often on Foursquare as a way to identify interesting places. Slowest thing I did in a long, long time. If you are interested, see the global scale checkin dataset bit.ly/2xzi6T6. It contains three files totaling ≈2.5GB, where data from one file can be used as a key to learn more from another file. I could also eventually share my .cpp file with you, in case you need a quick starting point or just wanted to see the idea. One day if I have a 1000 times faster machine I may try again.
- Wondering what software most people use to keep track of their inventory. And whether they find that their time was well spent.
- A path between the street intersections with the highest pedestrian counts in San Francisco bit.ly/2xxa39o
- Watched football on YouTube for a couple of minutes yesterday. But only to convince myself that I have identified a very fast sprinter according to the data from the FIFA's game, released on Kaggle. Never heard the name before, but on several occasions, this person almost went together with the ball inside the opposite gate after jumping at it. Had to replay to understand what happened.
- Object-oriented HTML article generation bit.ly/2kF57Jy. We could use this model to add videos, figures, tables, styles and other elements to a the page. They all can be seen as objects of which an article is comprised. Composing of well-described objects creates a representation that is quite easy to understand.
- Selectively disabling parts of an image bit.ly/2fYJX3Y. The background can be any color, most likely determined by the context.
- Simple check of the cardinality of a union of three sets bit.ly/2fXVf8r
- Plotting national expenditure for cancer care in USA bit.ly/2fUYkGg as seen from the National Cancer Institute bit.ly/2yAcAzQ. Earlier today I've read a blog post by this organization, which contained the words: "Cancer is not one disease. It's about 300 different diseases" which immediately invoked a sentence from my memory: "Approximately 33% of the people you know will develop some form of cancer throughout their lives". So "some form of cancer" must be one of those 300. For instance, you can see what are the challenges with metastasic cancer bit.ly/2yBh1ua. They also have a large data catalog bit.ly/2fWqOQd, which they encourage more researchers to use. Another great initiative I was not aware of.
- Cannot recommend binding CSS styles containing vendor prefixes to a publish button. Creates lots of duplicate code on the page.
- Indicating reserved/unreserved seats for a given theater performance bit.ly/2fVgZBP. You could potentially apply the same concept to seats on an airplane, seats in a cinema, maybe even seats on a stadium.
- Highlighting a small mistake in a book, where the topic is list operations in Python bit.ly/2fVgTKu
- Indicating empty and occupied parking places bit.ly/2fVFGym
- Idea: Automated, fixed-speed page scrolling on a big screen showcasing various real layout designs randomly without the need for manual scrolling, clicks, keypresses, website visits. (Like dynamic, visual layout advertisements without the actual call to action; just stay-and-watch on a big screen) Reminds me of letting my machine probe for the names of the US states in an input field (showing their full names below) without pressing a single key. Still didn't help me memorize them.
- I heard that Rohingya people were persecuted, but knew almost nothing and was completely unaware of the dimensions at which this happens. Can you guess approximately how many people were affected and escaped to Bangladesh? You can find the answer in this article nyti.ms/2fQTMAI. My mind simply refuses to believe that this is happening in the 21st century.
- Current IC Bus offers by Deutsche Bahn bit.ly/2fS7jYZ. Again something small. Should this page stop working, write me a short message to see whether it is something that can be fixed.
- Dorm room accessibility in German cities bit.ly/2fTDQ0W
- The price of a bus ticket in a given city says a lot about the potential vitality of communities and businesses in it. If the prices are set too high and traveling by car is too expensive, this may cause people to travel less and lose their contacts. Noone wants to feel that by going to work they are actually losing money instead of earning it (saying it, because very often I felt this way and actually left jobs that weren't paying relative to my daily expenses!). Recently I've read an article that said "because people in that province earn more, we can also charge them more" (bus ticket price). This seems like a poor argument, unless the quality of the service provided is that many times better. Otherwise it's an unfounded attempt to extract from people and it should be questioned. Additionally, when you say, "we can't fix the zone pricing", because it was established back in time and changing it now is too hard... seems like an excuse. Can't imagine how many potential partnerships didn't happen, how many workers didn't even apply to jobs, how many employers couldn't find people to drive their business due to such governance. In fact bus ticket prices should be so affordable, that even a poor person can travel in an attempt to change their situation. Otherwise they will be trapped and progressively excluded from society over time.
- Without knowing what to expect, clicked on the store locations page on the ALDI's website (for Australia). The map that I saw bit.ly/2yujRRK looks very similar to the one I created yesterday (yet the latter had only a couple of points and no detailed contours).
- Noticed that few websites offer their content for free (given that you are a responsible citizen, which is fine) with the binding rule that if you try to create something competitive, they might disable your account at any given time. Strange that talking about an opportunity and a threat in a single sentence is seen as normal. This is not truly open and I always avoided using such accounts where without my knowledge I might do something (now or later) that clashes with the company identity. I can never know what others already are, while they might be constantly changing their field of operation. Having a service whose existence they determine on a daily basis seems quite unstable. To me this looks as an attempt to exert power, somehow reminding me of the book "The Wallmart effect". A truly open service doesn't fear competitors: it invites them, appreciates them, supports them. We never know: our today's competitors might be our friends tomorrow. Or do something unique that grows the entire industry, figuratively known as "lifting all boats". And if they choose to harm us, we should still accept that, trusting them to create a future that works best for them and everyone else.
- On the last map I noticed that the distances between Manchester and Liverpool and between Manchester and Sheffield are almost the same, so my eyes were wondering which one is shorter. A small snippet shows that the first is slightly shorter than the second bit.ly/2ys2NMb (partial code only). Indeed, checking with distancecalculator.net shows 50km for the first, and 52km for the second, both on a straight line. Now you know why gathering data is important—now only to draw maps, but to be able to answer queries or use interesting algorithms.
- A problem can too be partially in the eye of the beholder. What someone describes as a problem may not necessarily be a universal problem—it may not be perceived as a problem at all. Especially when it is abstract, in a very specific domain and experienced only by very few individuals having that domain knowledge.
- Have you read the last issue of the Max Planck magazine? bit.ly/2yssZX5 Did this give you an actionable idea you could implement?
- After using Processing for a while, it became clear to me that my initial idea to use the web as an art platform was likely not the best use of it. "The best tool for the job" hints that art could be done most effectively outside the browser (also with dedicated 3D software), while the web could remain what it is—a plaform for sharing, serving and meaning generation. Art is to create beauty; design is to solve problems. And if you can solve problems by art on the web, that probably makes you an artistic web designer.
- Very much liked the words of a wise person: "If you do it wrong, you'll be left with the code..." Code always has a cost, but sometimes clients aren't willing to accept that. "Being left with the code" is something we need to avoid, otherwise our initial effort easily turns into waste. Questions that I like to ask myself are "Can I finish what I start?" and "Will this be used and make a difference?"
- Similar maps for the cities in Japan bit.ly/2fMw8p8, in Russia bit.ly/2fOln5U, in Australia bit.ly/2yrFd22 and in the UK bit.ly/2fP58FI.
- Monthly personal consumption expenditure by major type of product bit.ly/2yqkgVi. Since this data comes from the Bureau of economic analysis, it means that it is US only. Using it to make conclusion for other markets would be a mistake.
- Labour force participation in Japan by age group (1968-2016) bit.ly/2ypeTFZ. Index values are as measured on 31th December each year. Date and month were omitted, since they would only repeat without adding to the graphic. Interestingly, in recent years very young people (15-24 years) have decreased their participation, while very old people (65+) have increased it (their lines crossing at the bottom). The group 25-34 years has also become less active in comparison with the group 45-54 years (their lines also cross).
- Cities in China by relative population bit.ly/2yphVdb. If you see any mistakes, please correct me. The data I used can be wrong and my Chinese geography is lacking. Interesting to see that most of the biggest cities are located on the east side of the country.
- Cities in the Netherlands by population bit.ly/2fJ90b3. Learned again something new.
- States and cities in USA ranked by their population density bit.ly/2ynUb9t or cities ranked by the factor of their population density relative to the state's population density bit.ly/2fIQmAd. A city with a very high factor may indicate high population concentration and uneven distribution of the people in that state. The data comes from Wikipedia.
- Los Angeles street lights and their wattage bit.ly/2ymXgq3. Each light can have up to 6 lamps—their wattage is given separately. As you can see, there are 3-4 zones that look especially interesting in terms of wattage consumption. Blues are low-wattage lights, reds are high-wattage, greens are somewhere in the middle. 16 lights have lamps whose total wattage equals 6kW, 2 lights measure as 4kW and the ones that follow are less than 1.8kW each. The total power consumption equals to 21.604 megawatt, considering that most lights are relatively efficient 70W LEDs. 873 lights are given as 0W, so it is questionable whether they are in service at all. Took me half a day to figure out how to plot the points corresponding to all 215150 lights without making my slow machine unresponsive. The plotting library I used initially peaked at ≈30000 points before it became too slow. Switching for a short time to a more powerful machine didn't resolve the problem—it showed very low CPU and RAM utilization, yet somehow the plotting time was unreasonably long. Even so, the result doesn't look pretty (color palette, transparency), but considering the constraints, still happy to see the picture.
- Continued fractions via matrices bit.ly/2wtlzOH
- Comparing image quality with the structural similarity index (SSIM) bit.ly/2wsLPsk
- 3D Peano curve and a staircase from it bit.ly/2wsDMfj
- Exponential decay with fill-between bit.ly/2wskhDw
- Hilbert curves in 3D bit.ly/2wrqAXR via simple code
- If you saw that the concentration of bad particles in the atmosphere spiked almost twice than the usual level mostly at particular hours in particular days, would you think of a possible explanation?
- Map of crime in Austin, Texas, 2016 bit.ly/2wrCrW2. Uses this publicly avalable dataset bit.ly/2fB6Z0r (be aware of its limitations). 26152 cases were described as theft (most common), while murders were the least common. If the data is accurate, we can see a couple of spots with higher than usual crime density for relatively rare events.
- Simple planner bit.ly/2fBrpGK. An attempt to highlight what's next at any given moment.
- Quick subcategory budgets bit.ly/2wqKaTZ
- Sudden realization: getting the * and + characters is possible with a single keystroke from the numeric block. Until now I always used Shift + 8 for multiplication and Shift + = for addition and wondered why constructs like 5*x**4 + 4*x**3 + 3*x**2 + x quickly exhausted me.
- An interesting tradeoff: you can have cheap sensors, producing many relatively inaccurate measurements quickly or more expensive sensors producing fewer, but more useful measurements. The choice will likely depend on the application.
- A mistake every company could make is to "export" its team's shared knowledge as a requirement towards the next job applicant, thinking that this person should somehow add more value than the team or compensate for its inefficiencies. They start looking for a better team, dressed as an individual and meeting an unrealistic number of requirements. Therefore, unbounded knowledge sharing could have a negative side—serving as a barrier for future applications until it eventually eliminates them. People from minorities who were never able to experience the same network effects will be the first to feel that they can't possibly fulfill the requirements. If you see a job offer that mentions something like "our team uses (long list of technologies)", check again carefully whether they are looking for a better team or an individual. You might be surprised.
- The first five Tschebyschev polynomials bit.ly/2wkfjsr
- If it is true that an energy use intensity (EUI) is the total energy consumed in a year divided by the total gross area of the building, then comparing different buildings approximately is also possible with a few lines of code. "Approximately" means that many variables like climate, occupancy level etc. cannot be taken into account, but it is still said that EUIs can give a useful orientation. As you have already seen from the last bit, the thinking and planning—careful choice of materials, functions and their relationships, component positioning, compliance with environmental constraints, delivery of output to partners, where it serves as input, tradeoff making etc.,—are just as important as the construction itself. A system is rarely just the end result.
- Took a brief look at some of the engineering decisions that went into the creation of the Bullitt Center building in Seattle and learned many new things bit.ly/2wheEry. Wondering whether the used chemicals are depletable and if so how easy it is to restore them.
- Park plans with few zones and clear boundaries could potentially be made interactive (SVG contours), where on hover a description of each zone is revealed. However, a complex map with hundreds of places, where the boundaries aren't as clear may still look better in print. We can't rely on a mobile device to be always available or a big sign at the entrance to be always remembered; perhaps it is better to hand (especially paying visitors) a miniature printed version of what they could expect to see, also serving as keepsake long after they have forgotten that they've been there. Constantly having to look at a device is not a sign of being truly present.
- Moving lines over image bit.ly/2fmSnSs
- Youth hostels in Germany / Jugendherbergen in Deutschland bit.ly/2wgukLK
- Sometimes you press a number at the bottom of a page and expect to be sent to another page. What happens instead is that you are left on the same page, but the content at the top updates without you being able to even see/notice it. Quite confusing from a user perspective.
- Hospital beds per 100000 inhabitants (2004-2015), according to Eurostat bit.ly/2wespHy. The number of available beds in most EU countries seems to be decreasing over time. Countries that have reduced their beds the most are Finland (709 -> 435), Norway (525 -> 376), Ireland (564 -> 260), Luxembourg (639 -> 482). Countries increasing their bed base are Bulgaria (613 -> 723), now only after Germany and Austria and Turkey (212 -> 268), which grows slowly but steady over time.
- Performance of Brussels hotels by region bit.ly/2weWTZO
- Some online systems tend to disappear for a couple of seconds after you click their download button and wait to establish a connection to the resource you requested. Until the download completes, you see a blank page, effectively making the system unusable.
- Found an interesting dataset about available income to each individual (verfügbares Einkommen je Einwohner) in different regions of Germany between 2000 and 2014 (source: "Statistischen Ämter des Bundes und der Länder, Deutschland, 2017"). The result bit.ly/2wcXMCc is quite interesting, because we can see that Heilbronn, Stadtkreis has grown quite fast, surpassing all other cities/regions to come to a result of 41751€/person. Second is Starnberg, Landkreis with 34915€/person. In comparison, the highest result that Berlin achieves is 18594€/person. Do you think that there could be a plausible explanation for that?
- Cannot provide three links on my site and say "this is what I do". While it would be more recognizable, clean and beautiful, it's just not me. I cannot easily let my work be limited in such a narrow scope. I like to do many things in many areas, to stretch my knowledge and skills, to come up with new ideas and implement them as good as I can. If this is what makes me alive—learning, growing and implementing more/better, seeking ways to contribute,—then I could happily let go of the idea "to be known for something".
- There are two ways to present a chart with a company's stock price over time. One way is to draw a directed line from the maximum to the current minimum, starting the y-axis slightly lower than the minimum, which may give the impression of a very steep decline and another is to start the y axis from 0, which would result in a very small decline. By choosing the first option and trying to manipulate the reader's perception, this bit was born.
- A highly annoying parameter list bit.ly/2fhA6pL. When you see how most of the code is written, you start asking yourself whether the lines of code is the only thing that matters. When one uses only single-letter variables, they can jump to the next line much more quckly, producing plenty of more lines and looking "more productive". And before they know it, the problem has multiplied across entire screens and systems. Time to ask your company CTO to give you a sample code they would appreciate most. And if it doesn't meet your criteria for good code, it's probably better to apply your skills elsewhere.
- Do you like flowers? Search the rareseeds catalog bit.ly/2wae0fo to discover which plants you can grow from seeds.
- Employee utilization on a project bit.ly/2f1Nuy2
- Easings primer bit.ly/2f2c1Tx. With the help of TinyAnimate.
- Rotating lines around points bit.ly/2f21vLU
- Perfume preferences as a bipartite graph bit.ly/2f1gZjg
- If your business has a problem for which you think that dummerAugust could provide a decent solution once you consider the existing alternatives, and you agree with the way I work, which is already described on the contact page, feel free to connect. Being aware of what is on offer increases your chance to be served, whereas asking randomly or seeking immediate service decreases it. The longer we have worked together, the better and more frequent you can expect the responses to be.
- After another update, the HTML rendering plugin of the email client I use stopped working. I was wondering why there was no fallback option for reading HTML emails when this is such a common use case. Tried switching to another client. After two hours of downloading emails I must have clicked somewhere that stopped the download; the messages arrived only partially. Then I clicked the receive button once again and the client went to recreate the entire mailbox structure (overwriting the old one and all received emails so far), starting again the download from message one. Uninstalled immediately (the most starred software in the category). Not how I expect software to work.
- "Time is measured in clocks..." reads quite tangible to me.
- Describing connections between people (with triples) bit.ly/2h4BlfQ
- Found this beautiful visualization in a dissertation bit.ly/2h3S7M5. Saw something similar before (perhaps D3.js), but didn't know that it is called chord diagram.
- I thought that smaller companies tend to be more innovative than larger companies, but a dataset is now trying to convince me otherwise. It doesn't matter much, since payment is the only criteria by which innovation can happen. If most big companies don't want to pay, no innovation for them. It's that simple.
- Investments in software (as % of GDP) in some European countries (1995-2010) bit.ly/2h3B9xq. Germany has kept its investments most steady over time (0.75%), while UK has reached 1.80% in 2010. Still, these are very very low percentages. One might wonder how software even gets created when noone wants to spend for it.
- Total R&D expenditure in some European countries bit.ly/2h4lCO3. Initially I also included the data for Euro area 19 and Europe 28, but then removed them, because I think it is not quite correct to compare an individual country against all others, especially when the same data will be included once again in the total data.
- Brussels has announced 132 locations with free Wi-Fi bit.ly/2y1aZii. Now you see the problem—they are clustered in only 9 points, which means that they may not cover the entire city. Especially the north-eastern region needs more attention.
- Find recommended restaurants by relative importance of 3 criteria bit.ly/2h4N5yU
- Star rating with SVG bit.ly/2xZxh3P
- "Switzerland was the top performer in terms of both the number of Nobel laureates and chocolate consumption". Never thought that such a link could potentially exist, so I had to check the existing datasets for this country. But the sugar in chocolate is still a sufficient reason for me to stay away from it (even if there would be only a remote possibility that heated forms of sugar in foods might be linked with cancer).
- GDP by sector for Zurich, Switzerland (Q1 1997 - Q3 2012) bit.ly/2h27Zie. Interesting by how much the financial sector is dominating the rest. In Q3 2012 we see how the "Real estate, computer science" sector has become a stronger motor for the Swiss economy than the sector "Health and social services". The current state would be even more interesting to observe.
- Median bike trip duration in the Oslo City Bike system (April-August, 2017) bit.ly/2xZ54dc. The maximum of 563 seconds is slightly less than 10 minutes. If there aren't weather or economical reasons for cycling only so much, then this may say something about physical preparedness. But the same person might be biking multiple times a day, and since no person identification is included, it may turn out that their combined cycling time was much higher than this 10 minute interval. Additionally, if they used the same route very frequently, this would push the median value further to the left.
- Wondering whether this map of the fountains in Salzburg, Austria is correct bit.ly/2xYL9eJ
- Areas with Internet connection speed of over 50mbit/s in Switzerland bit.ly/2h10gRz
- Placing markers on European capitals bit.ly/2xXlUcG
- Can you easily recognize the breed of a dog once you see it? If not, you can learn from sample images bit.ly/2h1x8d7
- Comparing the price:size ratio of SSD drives on Amazon bit.ly/2wXTEr0
- Extracting keyword-related data from Wikipedia bit.ly/2xXbv0n
- 10 hashes of 16 symbols in 4 lines of code bit.ly/2xX951Q
- Summarizing a short article with Gensim bit.ly/2wWwzVJ
- Active infrastructure projects in New York bit.ly/2wVyDNJ. Contains the most recently updated data.
- Not particularly exciting, fixed-width-font diagonal text bit.ly/2wV3PMV
- Fake news is a problem, but fake content is even a bigger, more general one. If someone created a page to allow people to say where they bought expired products and when (to protect other consumers from doing the same), then there will always be an opportunity that someone will try to use it for their own reasons, e.g. to try making their competitors look bad. It would be then hard to say who is claiming the truth and who is lying, without personally validating the claim, which is often infeasible. Simply inserting both types of data in a database and pretending that nothing happened is wrong. Today not just news, but entire accounts are faked. The problem is exacerbated by bots, which aggressively send data, looking as if a human being wrote it. In the long term, this has the potential to push people outside the web or at least significantly harm online communication when it can no longer be trusted. Even with good intentions, it never feels good to be with tied hands.
- After an update, a portion of the screen dedicated to Chrome has started to blink in black & white. Went into settings and disabled hardware acceleration to fix this temporarily. Update: This made animations slow, so I had to go back and turn it on. Unclear, when and how the issue could potentially reappear.
- Innovative startups in Dublin by sector bit.ly/2xUED8O
- Similarly to Arlington County, found an old dataset (must be from 2011) about building electricity usage in Dublin. Interestingly, 4 pumping stations, 3 waterworks, 1 water tower, a boiler house, 2 swimming pools and 2 fire brigade contol centers appeared quite high on the list. The common theme among all of them is the use of water in one way or another. Most consuming was Pigeon House Road pumping station, followed by Wood Quay civic offices. The pumping station at the 3rd place consumed almost 2.7x less energy. Not sure about the current situation, since no current data is available.
- Not sure how useful the automated text extraction from PDFs is. If the document contains only simple text, then reading it would be possible and the result will likely be almost identical to the original. But if the document contains specific notations or compex formulas, as is the case in most scientific papers, then there is a potential that the reader will produce garbage by trying to convert the hand-written formulas to text. Personally, I still open PDF files.
- Temperature, rain and sun hours at the Heathrow airport (January 1948 - August 2017) bit.ly/2wU5WAS
- Finding the names and phones of interesting businesses bit.ly/2xTXUqH. Here I searched for pancakes in San Francisco, but you could choose anything. Pleasantly surprised to see that finding plumbers and electricians works in exactly the same way. Love how XPath makes the code both simple and fast. The drawback is that if the external result page changes, you'll need to rewrite the rules.
- "Do not store utensils in stagnant water. Provide employee hair restraints. Maintan storage of raw shelled eggs below any ready to eat product. Provide working internal thermometers for all refrigeration. Properly label all food storage bins in kitchen area. Remove all outdated foods. Clean interior of ice machine, clean popcorn machine. High temp dishwasher not reaching 180F (only 140F). Salmon holding on top of oven at 96-100F. Clean all shelving, mounted ceiling fan and debris. Repair broken door handle. Be sure all hand sinks have paper towels and soap at all times. Large amounts of fruit flies in prep area—provide pest control." Reading diverse comments from food inspections is quite instructive in what it takes to achieve good hygiene.
- "Big Belly trash receptacles are solar powered, internet connected, compacting trash receptacles that can collect up to five times as much waste as traditional bins and help the city more efficiently manage the waste collection process." Boston shows that embedding technology is possible even in seemingly boring things like trash cans.
- Buildings with high carbon footprint in Arlington County, Virginia bit.ly/2xTNbfZ
- The average consumption of a streetlight in San Diego is about 88.9% of the average consumption of a streetlight in Sacramento, according to the data both cities have published. In San Diego some streetlights were given without their wattage and were not considered. Otherwise this city has 3.71x the area of Sacramento, but only 2.63x the population (both according to Wikipedia) and 1.51x the streetlights. Perhaps they shine brighter, cover a larger area or are positioned more effectively.
- Vancouver also updated its tree dataset recently, but their composition is slightly different bit.ly/2xTD3UK. A specific cherry type is still at the top.
- Love the Edmonton City's idea to plant a variety of fruit trees across the city and to share publicly how they are developing. Currently they seem to have these unique tree types: 7 cherries, 3 pears, 5 plums and 5 apples bit.ly/2wRjWv7 (with many trees of each type, bit.ly/2wR05MF). Wondering how hard it is to maintain all 22320 trees and whether there is a particular reason why the cherry types are more frequent. Here are the counts by type bit.ly/2xTvVHI. As you can see ≈40% of all trees are crabapples. Learned that saskatoon looks like a blueberry, but has a taste similar to an apple—quite interesting. These seem to be only the edible fruit trees, because the meta description of an extended "trees" dataset mentions something about 320 thousand rows...
- Programming an image circle bit.ly/2wRDsrg. Noticed the nice symmetry and used vertical stripes to try dividing the image into parts of distinct opacity. Left and right are slightly brighter, while central left and right use brighter horizontal modulo 4 stripes. Pixel colors were accessed via matrices. Styles like this could be repeatable across many images in a given directory (although "burning" pixels is always possible), provided they have the same dimensions.
- Contour plots could have been used in the storms graphic if enough data was available to draw the exact functions bit.ly/2xSAaDC. The screenshot is from the freely available book "Bayesian reasoning and machine learning" by David Barber.
- Even with a magic lamp in your hands, you can have at most three wishes, so you need to know what's most important and think carefully, like web designers do. In case you wished everything you touch to convert immediately into gold, you might have found out that you are unable to eat (life-threatening). What symbols teach us is that nothing is as it looks (reason enough to also check the Aesop's fables) and there is always something hidden behind the surface ("... and in the abyss lives the truth" - Confucius). Be careful and choose wisely what you wish for.
- The Paint Timing API has once again highlighted the importance of percentiles (50th, 95th, 99th, 99.9th etc.), computable via the Numpy's percentile function and trackable over time with the Pandas' rolling_quantile function. (Rolling functions consider the last n-items in a window. As the Boost library shows there can also be rolling sum, rolling mean, rolling moment, rolling variance...) Both are easy to use once you have a stream of data bit.ly/2wQ8TlX
- Some storms in USA which happened between March and May 2017, given by their location and range bit.ly/2xRxRR8, as seen in the last storms dataset by NOAA. I was not sure how to depict the range of a potentially non-linearly moving, variable-range storm, but even as a simple circle the graphic still looks interesting.
- Points in rectangles (range selections) bit.ly/2wQtre4
- A newsletter informed me about the new AListApart bit.ly/2wOA9RC. The message resonates with me, especially the one at the end, because every content creator is also a web designer. I hope that the new approach will inspire even more participation and collaboration among people from all possible areas and backgrounds.
- The "Proportion of urban population at year-end by region in China" bit.ly/2wMf9Lt uses data from this survey bit.ly/2xQu6LT.
- Horizontal, vertical and diagonal difference for a 4x4 matrix bit.ly/2xboBuN
- Well, the image bit.ly/2wIzUYg could have been a sequence of images combined into a three-minute 720p video (1280 * 720 * 16bits * 3mins * 60sec * 30fps / 56000 = 1421897sec / 3600 = ≈395h). Probably explains why this site is using images so sparingly. Saddened that some people do not seem to understand that loading all kinds of media in a bulk on a single page effectively makes their content inaccessible. Start by using fewer, optimized images and finish with economy of words by staying focused and on topic. Let other people feel that you do not accept empty words as a sign of expertise.
- Good visualization showing the credits taken the last year to finance first-time housing projects in different German provinces bit.ly/2x9SMTe (first figure, article in German). The authors came to an average of ≈257795€, which would be equivalent to earning ≈2150€/month for 10 years or ≈4300€/month netto for 5 years. Not exactly small amounts. To compensate for this, the rest of Europe must save on spending and living.
- Had a dream of creating a polygonal pie, "slicing" it into pieces upon clicking a "Slice!" button (replacing the polygon with many nicely colored individual paths) and then animating how each one is taken away at various timepoints and speeds upon clicking the "Take!" button. Then woke up to reality with the thought "For what?". Brainless dream.
- While attempting to generate a fractal as suggested in a resource, I got the unorderable types error, telling me that it is impossible to compare complex with int values. So I tried to convert the second int to a complex value and compare again. Now the message states that I am attempting to compare an int with a complex (even when both should be complex). Not sure what is causing it, so the fractal is put on hold.
- Radial gradient effect bit.ly/2xMqUBu
- "Using water as a launch platform" (3D surface) bit.ly/2x8dbIb
- Multi-criteria bike selection bit.ly/2x5pzIW
- Knew almost nothing about apartment rents in USA, but the Zumper national report provided some interesting data bit.ly/2xI3flA, which allowed me to visualize the current rent levels and the price changes for one and two bed apartments compared to the previous month bit.ly/2xHTV1e. The most expensive city to rent an apartment is San Francisco CA (3390$ for one bed aparment, 4560$ for two bed apartment), while the least expensive one which was still ranked was Fort Wayne IN (480$ for one bed aparment, 580$ for two bed apartment). Regarding one bed apartments, Providence RI has the highest monthly rent increase (5.1%), while Rochester NY has the highest monthly rent decrease (-5.5%). Families might be interested in the premium they have to pay for a two bed apartment. After the last increase of the rent of one bed apartments in Providence RI, the premium there has fallen to a factor of only ≈1.028, which is also the lowest. Currently, Scottsdale AZ is the city with the highest premium of 1.75. According to Zumper, the data comes from over one million active rental listings.
- dummerAugust does not advertise and does not strive for more publicity or popularity. None of these have been found to be useful or linked with the personal goal of providing better service, seeking better ways of self-expression, learning more, developing better ideas or being happier in general. Trying to enforce undeserved effects is like attempting to drive a car backwards—although possible, it is not quite efficient as moving forwards. In the past, it has been widely accepted that every new platform—be it TV, newspaper, search engine, web site, mobile device, virtual reality—is an advertising platform, which led to a certain degree of saturation with this concept. That plenty of companies still have a high portion of their revenue coming from ads isn't a sufficient reason for everyone else to seek to integrate advertising into every new idea, every new website or every new video on the web. Few people like to be bothered with advertisements (which is why they shouldn't advertise), yet these are imposed on us in a variety of ways every single day, where we have little or no choice but to watch/listen. This creates a lot of noise, inteferes with our regular days, distracts us from what is important, wastes a lot of money, prevents us from seeing content on our screens. dummerAugust wants to stay away from advertising to avoid this beautifully stunning, hard dependency. Overreliance on it is probably one reason why so many companies are in so weak positions today.
- Still remembering how a manager of a well-known tech company, a public person I admired highly, suddenly wrote on the company page how the work outside regular workhours should belong to the company, which should be made explicit in the contract of each employee. (I guess some companies fear that on your own time you penalize them by sharing your know-how with competitors.) I thought that I am misinterpreting something, rereading the words again and again. But I couldn't find a gap. Schocked, my internal voice said "No!". I can forgive certain things, but not lack of trust, infinite greed and extension of your own rights by shrinking those of others. After that point, the company ceised to exist for me. But I wouldn't be surprised if other managers also tried to introduce the same policy. Always carefully read what you sign up for, because you might give up on other income sources (in exchange for what?). Know that the time outside work is your own and no employer has the right to address it in a "default" contract(!). Ask them if they would agree to pay a lot for this extra and if not—leave. Your time is your most precious resource, so never waste it (or allow others to do the same).
- Worked only once for a manager that constantly screamed at me and made me cry (just learned of other people being mistreated similarly). Do you think that these people would be willing to take on open positions later in their life? If the price for becoming a highly successful US company goes through tramping on your people, their lives and rights, then I don't want to hear your name, the name of your company or how successful you've become. Bothering is that such bad examples compound over time and survive under new forms, in new places. Tomorrow another person will start to mistreat people far away from your view, because they themselves were, and suddenly you've created a chain of events. There are also plenty of good managers; what reputation is this behavior creating for their role? Understand whether people work for you or whether you own their lives, because you might be seeking a legal form of modern slavery. Being aware of that, only two weeks later it was clear to me that I cannot thrive at such a place, where silence and fear of spoken word was the norm. A case which later encouraged me to create the jobs page.
- Do you store user data which you don't understand, don't know what to do with or which you cannot tie to an action? Then it might be better to speak directly with the client to see which pieces matter in order to avoid collecting things you shouldn't or collecting the same things more than once. If we hold everything in a database we might end with plenty of "just-in-case" data, which is both costly to store and unlikely to be used. If every case is different and calls for different variables, then adding such data manually in a database means that many columns will need to have NULL values, which is far from optimal. This is why storing data in a "default" way has its disadvantages—reason enough to avoid rendering generic forms. If you were my client, does your data matter? If not, I don't want to see it in my database. To find out, I like to ask questions and listen for the answers. Perhaps one day a bot would do the same.
- A tool reports that some websites have started including 4 different web analytics packages. Wouldn't be surprised to learn that they all need access to the same data to provide a slightly different perspective on it (wasteful). But the user might think that their data is accessed only once, being unaware that at the end 4 different, external entities learn about it. dummerAugust avoids practices which hurt the user's privacy. You can check with any tool if you doubt that.
- Extracted some information about the China's population bit.ly/2xG2Osh
- Single-polygon shapes bit.ly/2x0RCcp
- Visits of the Los Angeles public library (July 2013 - February 2017) bit.ly/2xFrsck
- Detecting circle collisions bit.ly/2xF2Mkr
- Thinking about 6-ominoes bit.ly/2xEbHCA
- C/F slider without styling, but with affinity for JavaScript (1.4kB) bit.ly/2wXEUuY
- All hex colors as a single ZIP file, if you need them bit.ly/2xCIYhC (17.7MB). After you uncompress it, the file will grow to 134.2MB (7.58 times bigger).
- Cities in India by their population bit.ly/2xDbpM7 (only bigger ones). Could there be a geological reason why in the central-east region there are fewer big cities? According to my code the two closest big cities are Kirari Suleman Nagar and Nangloi Jat, while the two farthest cities are Srinagar and Nagarcoil. The last two are located on the North and South of the country.
- New tendency: hosting companies crawling lots of pages on your website frequently and repeatedly, so that their name can be seen (which is free advertising of their services). Given that the pages are static and haven't changed for a long time, it is quite strange why they are requested so often from the same place. Because I saw three hosting companies using this practice, I may need to introduce some restrictions, especially for one of them if this practice continues.
- The problem with applications that remain unused is that every time you have to recreate the same components like login forms, stylesheets, validation, logging, statistics, database access etc. slightly differently. At a certain point this becomes tiring and you start appreciating your time even when your user gets nothing.
- Had the idea of balancing water usage over time, so that warm water could be available every day without having to keep the boiler on all the time (I learned that it can be relatively electricity-hungry), but heat the water at predefined times every night. This would potentially reduce the time it is on from 24hours to 2hours, but other people dislike the idea of having to plan in advance.
- Do you like birds? Here you can see how the wild bird population in the UK has changed between 1970 and 2015 bit.ly/2vp8NE5 (original dataset: bit.ly/2vpo8EX). According to the data, between 1980 and 1995 wintering water birds have increased their count, but then they saw around 10% decline. The group of the farmland birds seems to have lost around 50% for the entire period, while the numbers of most other bird types have decreased less dramatically. All these declines speak about trouble in the future.
- Trace properties of square matrices bit.ly/2vGq8Un
- Comparing pizza prices at pizzerias bit.ly/2vCPvXh
- Overlapping circles bit.ly/2vC9Vjh
- Pure CSS text motion blur bit.ly/2wNXq8p
- Energy beams bit.ly/2wNDSAP
- Connected rhombi bit.ly/2wMo55j
- Maximizing attained talks per event bit.ly/2vm0XXK
- Chattanooga, Tennessee is another city with a real-time feed on bike usage, which you can use in many interesting ways bit.ly/2viHnf1. Most bike trips seem to be on Saturday, Sunday and Friday (in that order), so you may want to check whether there are many stations which report zero available bikes then, because this might indicate that some cyclists can't be served.
- An example how icons can be used to explain the language bit.ly/2wAKUc8
- It's not clear what the concerns are when they are separated into 3000 files of 400 bytes each.
- There is a new trend: "You've already reached your daily article limit on this site (usually after 1-3 articles). Please, subscribe to read more." Only that I didn't knew that some big corporations have started to collaborate with (much smaller) news companies sharing your reading patterns with them so they can charge you accordingly. This clearly deviates from my definition of openness. The fact that user data is now shared openly beyond sector boundaries, where any company can pretend to be in any sector, is truly worrisome. Creating more closed silos is an attempt to reverse the years of effort by multiple people to make the Internet more open and accessible to everyone.
- Parks in Belfast, Northern Ireland bit.ly/2va9vRJ
- Good to see some people speaking about coral reef health. I am almost sure that everything we do on Earth is felt by such sensitive "detector objects" (pollution, global warming etc.). Now you wouldn't be surprised if you hear that lettuce can be very sensitive to radiation.
- Visitors per day at the biggest railway stations in Germany bit.ly/2v7WhVC. Uses data from an article in Spiegel bit.ly/2wxqxNc.
- Even a heart bit.ly/2v4Au0X can be described by sine and cosine functions as seen here bit.ly/2wuxXRb
- An interesting magazine on computer vision I was not aware about bit.ly/2v4Hmew
- If during the transition between each two pages you start a spinner animation, check whether the background has loaded before the spinner overlay has been removed (the improvement in usability may increase the response time). For reading long books online, response time is critical.
- "NYC bus performance" is a great idea that could be equally interesting at many other places bit.ly/2wt85Fq
- Find resistance by the resistors' stripe colors bit.ly/2wt4qYi
- Body mass index (BMI) for adults bit.ly/2v1WFos
- Flower with curves (2kB) bit.ly/2v1z33b
- Drawing with bit operations bit.ly/2uZqlm4
- Added the Smith-Volterra-Cantor set (if the name is correct) to the series convergence tests. The test passes for 1000 iterations, at which point both Python and C++ start to fail on my machine.
- Back with "Upcoming events in Helsinki" bit.ly/2uUNgyS
- Need to switch place for 1-2 days, which will prevent me from creating more. Will respond to messages when I come back. Meanwhile think about any projects you might have for me.
- The busiest parking places bit.ly/2uPeffl and the places with the most pedestrians bit.ly/2wiXDjK in Melbourne, Australia.
- The cross product of two vectors in 3D bit.ly/2wbLFse. It would have been nice to see the 3D arrows with the quiver function, but I failed at that in the time alloted.
- Showing the React code within one switch case bit.ly/2w9lT7O, where 'tag ===' was repeated 11 times and '||' — 10 times. Don't repeat yourself, Facebook.
- There is a large number of older people in hospitals lying in their beds while receiving medications. Without the ability to stay up or go to a toilet. Why is then so hard to have a simple system that accepts input like "patient is thirsty", "room needs more/less light" (electronic control of the blinds), "need to insert token in the TV" (when tokens are paid and bought from token machines), "healing substance empty" etc. On the receiving end, when someone from the support staff sees the message, they can act accordingly, instead of constantly running full circle to ensure that everyone's needs are met. Such a system cannot possibly prevent patients from sending too many messages at a time or sending them at regular intervals just to have constantly a helping person around them. But they can eventually still be helpful.
- "We offer cheap international phone calls. When you are already in country X, you need to keep in touch with your friends and loved ones." Really? Not sure how many people lives such ads have ruined. Possibly explains why at some railway stations in Germany there were more phone call booths than places to eat. I never kept contacts (for the sake of keeping them), so this didn't affect me. My willingness to connect with someone was always inversely proportional to the distance and to the time difference since we spoke last. Once I find that one of the two sides shows insufficient interest, I slowly start increasing the time difference until eventually I no longer want to see that person. To me this seems preferable over making myself unhappy in a bad connection. Also removes the need to own a phone that would constantly keep me busy with meaningless conversations.
- total_calories_burned = (floors - 0.5) * stairs_between_floors * calories_burned_per_stair. Maybe it's not that simple.
- Choosing how to spend the days bit.ly/2w8VSWc
- Bicycle lanes in Zurich bit.ly/2w7zjRI
- Labeled data points in 3D bit.ly/2uHFUPd
- 3D functions once again (after a long time) bit.ly/2uHUTIO
- The bigger your program, the bigger the parse time. That's before execution has even started.
- Using CSS grid to indicate apartment availability bit.ly/2w30XPG
- We could also use SVG to explain what type of flowers the different areas of a botanical garden contain (possibly showing simple images in each region next to the flower labels). A visitor may want to see only flowers of a particular type, if they have limited time, the park is too big or if there is too much variety. Having a quick overview that they carry in their pocket and can easily refer to is always helpful.
- Small memory size in context bit.ly/2w0uEkC. These values may only be approximations. The duplication in some parts of the code was intentional.
- Finding equivalent resistance in a simple circuit bit.ly/2vYbagh. KiCad seems to work well here, but I have omitted the power flags. You can assume that the current flows from left to right.
- We need to have a custom-defined setting for the max duration of allowed time to load content in a tab. If the time has passed, the tab should be closed automatically, not continue to load. Having a predictable experience is important. Currently when loading a website, we don't know what to expect. One site might load in 2s, another in 30s, a third one in 1min. I suspect that this big variability is frustrating and tiresome for many users. Sites that fully monopolize resources like CPU, RAM, GPU, disk or network for long periods shouldn't have the chance to continue doing so.
- Wi-Fi hotspots in Washington DC bit.ly/2vKoaGb
- Forgot to mention that the opposite way of looking at things is also valid: seeking the simple within the complex bit.ly/2vJXBBe
- Created a small class about company metrics based on some interesting articles I found today bit.ly/2uiwGIU
- "The income stream from capital is everywhere increasing faster than that of labor." Well, the consequences then will be that people will stop providing their labor if it is valued less than the gains obtained by activities that were disconnected from adding value to the economy.
- The streets with the highest cumulative crash injuries in New York (2009-2017) bit.ly/2ueQQDL
- Physical density of most Seattle fire calls bit.ly/2vDwvvj
- Open the folder to see its contents bit.ly/2uet7Dz
- Does anyone know why Chrome switches to computing forever if I mistakenly type a large number for the element's scale factor (CSS transform)? What happens internally—does the browser attempt to render the content needed to fill 10 screens or does it have some logic that prevents it from drawing too much? Not sure whether this is a frontface-visibility issue, but (if it is a memory leak) it takes inconvenient 15mins to recover from it.
- Adobe, the entire company, became 20% cheaper according to Netmag bit.ly/2vCZ3oV. If I see correctly, it has something to do with mobile.
- For component dependencies bit.ly/2udCOlN you need only rect, line, circle and path.
- Interference bit.ly/2udVEtd. If we swap black for green, we get yellow bit.ly/2vCuvDO
- Found a nice 5x5 Gaussian kernel and decided to share it in context bit.ly/2vzZZtV
- Didn't notice that I left float values untruncated and that some properties were repeated. The demo has now reduced its size from 5.5kB to 3.9kB.
- Still remembering Steve Wozniak's excitement about "building things from three parts" which I think he described in a book from the "... at work" series. Words that deeply affected my own approach to things. It is not sufficient to build from more parts, when we can do with less. Removing parts until nothing else can be removed is at the core of great design and of Apple's products. If we can't simplify it to the essential, do we really understand it that well? Can we build it from fewer parts? Fewer/simpler?
- Polygon in equilateral triangle bit.ly/2ualzC4. Always seek the gems in the mundane things. Uses three points for the triangle, six points for the polygon and some symmetry for the coordinates.
- Looking at Intel processor specifications bit.ly/2vxZXDd
- Building from very sturdy materials doesn't mean that the whole construction will remain stable and survive more harsch events. A bridge made of such materials was functional for a couple of months, before people have started to notice that it has started to shake back and forth. The reason was that the material was efficiently absorbing the strong winds, but inefficiently dissipating them. As a result the vibrations in the bridge gradually increased over time until it eventually collapsed. The engineers learned from the experience and re-created the bridge without its original issue. But it's a great lesson that we can't expect things to work if we aren't considering the wider context in which they will be placed.
- A project in Boston was initially cheap, but then became billions of dollars over budget. Lightning (it might have been a bridge or tunnel) started to fail after initial exploitation, the glue didn't hold well at the top and in an unfortunate moment, a woman driving her car was killed by a part that fell. This is cheap. The next time you hear "It's the cheapest project that usually wins", think about the possible consequences.
- Although I lost the link, someone wrote a blog post why they enjoy working with freelancers. The reasons cited were: it is cheap, you have the full freedom to test people without fully committing, you only have to pay after you are happy with the final result etc. Strange, I thought, since these were almost all of my reasons not to be on such platforms. Once again, not served.
- You cannot control whether people will like your work or not. But you can at least keep creating small things to quickly test your assumptions. One day, if you are lucky, you might even get feedback on how you are doing. And if you don't, accept it as a sign of disrespect rather than incapability on your side and quickly move to the next thing. If it isn't appreciated, don't stick working on it and don't waste hours on it, trying to improve it.
- In addition, be aware of the difference between creating a framework and creating a business. The second is much more rare and valuable; anyone could be proud that they helped finish ten frameworks, but the true question is whether they were needed at all.
- Like everything else, skills expire. Today they need React, tomorrow something more interesting. Do you want to work for the framework? Do you want to be left with the code? If not, learn to disqualify companies that hire for framework knowledge.
- If your payment wasn't, why do you think my work will be? Not served.
- 100ms is not only ten times less than a minute.
- Innovate UK has a visualization "Top 100 companies by funding allocated", which they say is using collaboration bubbles bit.ly/2vrXXfD
- Computer price index in Canada for desktop, laptop, server and tablet computers bit.ly/2u1pPnd. Server prices remain the most stable over time.
- Total human resources in science and technology in EU countries as percentage of the active population bit.ly/2vqdOuX. According to Eurostat, all countries seem to gradually grow their percentage, which is a small reason for optimism.
- Scheduling tasks among multiple processors bit.ly/2tZW6Ly. Try clicking fast as well.
- Explaining the stories behind ten random movies from the past bit.ly/2tYHVpR
- Persist and shine bit.ly/2tWTxJZ
- I fear that one day I might want to open a datasheet of some custom, non-standard processor, see how its connections are labeled and codify them as addresses in C. Then send the compiled code to the board to see whether something is blinking (on the web blinking is undesirable). Embedded sounds interesting, but I fear a fully embedded life as a result of it. Currently I have neither the processor/board, nor the mental resources/capability to deal with any potential problems in that direction. But being aware that the tosters, coffee machines, clocks etc. are programmed as well is a good thing. They just use less powerful processors and the idea that you need to be only as powerful as your use case requires. I think that this useful way of thinking transfers well to almost all kinds of software development.
- Is there a way to disable the "What's new" functionality in your browser once it is updated? (since you are showing me "news" where the title mentions a concrete software product).
- JavaScript seems to be losing places in the list of most desirable languages bit.ly/2viT7RR. Not sure whether place 7 was for ES7 or ES8. I've read somewhere that the current plan is to bump the versions every year, so I expect that after ES10 people might start forgetting what was this thing called JavaScript. I'm saying this because I've spent 3-4 years trying to learn the language just to see it completely overhauled in a week after introducing a new version (ES6). It suddenly felt like a completely different language with new paradigms and philosophy. Since then I said myself that I won't start learning it again until I see it in a fully settled state. Unfortunately, this state likely won't come soon, because I still hear statements like "This will finally fix the language..." Continue introducing your fixes then and closely follow this ranking to see their effect.
- What do you think works better: technologists trying to write or writers trying to explain technology? Now send your answer to W3C.
- Austin restaurant inspection scores bit.ly/2tQLsGK
- Trying to find out which NY cities are most heavily invested in photovoltaics from a historical perspective bit.ly/2tJZ8mV. In terms of investment efficiency, this still leaves me wondering bit.ly/2tJPb97. Here are also individual projects with highest expected output bit.ly/2tJZxWu.
- New York farmer's markets bit.ly/2tJpC7Y
- Visualizing the results of park inspections in New York bit.ly/2v5HLQY
- Current City Bike station usage in New York bit.ly/2v3xWCZ. The historic data seems more interesting, but a single month can take up to 200MB space. With many months since launch, you can imagine that this requires an HDD with lots of free space.
- Parks bit.ly/2v1VuIm, art galleries bit.ly/2v2OriR and libraries bit.ly/2v4TS0u in New York
- Jobs in selected industries in New York City, New York (2012-2015) bit.ly/2v22uVB. Here is another graphic if you wish to see the same for all other regions bit.ly/2tFK1Lh. While the upper bound for the number of jobs across all industries was ≈550000 in New York City, other regions had at most 200000 jobs, at least for the industries of interest. In many regions outside the City, the information sector seems to have been less developed than manufacturing—somewhat surprising.
- Los Angeles airport flight operations (01.2006-05.2017) bit.ly/2tFuues. There is an almost complete overlap between the number of departures and arrivals for commuter and scheduled flights. We see a moderate growth in the number of scheduled flights over time.
- Out of the 1385894 incidents with motocyclists in NY (2012-2014), 1741 ended tragically (0.00125%), for 78.8% men and 21.1% women, both having an average age of 41.46. Other states with many registered motorcycle crashes were NJ (26357), PA (13380), CT (11332), FL (9503), MA (4623) and MD (3227). The data comes from this 374.1MB heavy dataset bit.ly/2tEdaGD.
- Unemployment in USA (1948-2017) bit.ly/2tDM3eM
- Total fertilizer consumption in China (1951-2010) bit.ly/2tDbuNC
- An attempt to isolate the clouds in an image bit.ly/2tCLtOA. I used the per-channel mask channel < median * (1 + ((mean-std)**0.5/std**1.5)), but that such masks can only be image-specific is quite annoying.
- Chebyshev polynomial fit bit.ly/2tCNGcy. Reminds me of the colorful Bezier curves (for each metro line), all joined at a single center and having almost equally spaced points on them (the metro stations). That we could draw metro lines this way instead of with the usual horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines was not immediately obvious to me.
- Simple gradient with mgrid and sqrt in 3 lines of code (< 5kB) bit.ly/2uYk6li. Or a finer grid with transparency bit.ly/2tBSjUc. Now you know that gradients are matrices too.
- Historic development of E.coli on various beaches in Toronto (03.06.2007 - 24.07.2017) bit.ly/2tA46Ti. 3-4 beaches often had high E.coli count.
- Didn't realize how informative HAR files are. You can load a page, save the performance data in this format (essentially JSON) and parse the file outside the browser. This is what I did with Spiegel's main page bit.ly/2tzLgLI. Note that my experience will be different from yours. I also didn't average the result over multiple runs (that would give me more files), so only a single load is shown. But the granularity at which we can work with the results is amazing. Even if a page loads thousands of resources (and it shouldn't), we can still quickly discover which ones are problematic for the performance of the website.
- Comparing revenue on bar charts plotted in 3D bit.ly/2tznEqy
- Upcoming events and festivals in Toronto bit.ly/2uVto1s
- Green areas in Toronto bit.ly/2tyUW9A
- Public libraries in Toronto bit.ly/2tyZ759
- Toronto traffic cameras bit.ly/2uVgQHh
- Toronto traffic data bit.ly/2tvQcBf. Currently travel time and vehicles passing seem not to be updated, but I will keep them just in case they are in the future.
- Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) on Jane Austen's "Persuasion" bit.ly/2uQI0PE. It's hard to distinguish possible topics from such a result. Reading a small part of the book didn't help me either, so I gave up on it early.
- Merging tuples on common items bit.ly/2ttGW0R
- Finally found an answer to a problem I had: being unable to plot in 3D in Matplotlib for a while and getting the "No module named matplotlib.externals" error. Once I removed an existing package installed through the OS, it worked (as described in bit.ly/2uNuOLB). Yet, my other pain remains: being unable to export data from MySQL, while getting a strange error message from Workbench, for which I couldn't find help online.
- This result of applying the median filter slightly surprised me bit.ly/2uM9w0E. Farbenverlust?
- Finding recipes by a given criteria bit.ly/2uLWEaM
- Short lines of varying width bit.ly/2tpSfad
- Picking vector elements with a bitset bit.ly/2uKZYTO
- Lemon slices traced with bezier curves (GIMP, no SVG) bit.ly/2uKOhMO
- Persistent objects are called flies. Always returning to the same spot no matter what.
- Querying Numpy as if it were a database bit.ly/2vJjNZ1
- A website that is very slow on load but instant on unload is new to me. "But why do you want to leave?"
- Exploring car emissions data bit.ly/2vInYUX
- When your data has 127 columns, you start wondering whether you are truly accessing column 55 or column 56, as splitting on the common delimiter doesn't seem to produce homogenous results across all observations. Perhaps a single character has been omitted somewhere, but it is virtually impossible to say where. This is what happened to me when I tried to look at the car emissions dataset from Albuquerque. Anyway, I found that lots of columns had missing values, so I quickly lost interest in the dataset. If you need the names of all columns, here is what I found bit.ly/2uHSK2R
- A-graded restaurants in New York (by borough) with highest scores from hygiene inspection bit.ly/2uFbi3B
- Reading Wired bit.ly/2uJOFfb
- Men and women clothing brands on Nordstrom (19.07.2017) bit.ly/2uIdTLb
- Gaussian blur on a 30x30 matrix bit.ly/2uFHtRB
- Masking an image to highlight the main object bit.ly/2vecfxD. I saw a brochure where they were selling multiple objects (blankets, pillows etc.) and thought that perhaps we could highlight just the nice pillows, without the blanket. A single photo could be sufficient to present multiple products, but still without having to bother the viewer with them all at once. Initially only a single mask could be shown and as the viewer is moving their mouse towards areas of interest, other masks of objects along with their manually input descriptions and prices could be activated. There is no need to slice the photo into ten images of different dimensions and position them individually. Instead of taking multiple photos of single objects, we take only one photo of multiple objects and vary the shapes and positions of the masks.
- Countries by income level, according to the World Bank bit.ly/2uBH0zC
- ackermann(3,7) -> maximum recursion levels reached (Python); ackermann(3,14) = 131069 (C++, took some time)
- Search among 1.9 million articles, powered by "The Guardian" bit.ly/2uu09n7. Reduced it to ≈10kB and added caching to avoid needless requests.
- SVG gradients meeting at the edges of quadratic curves bit.ly/2v97TI8. Always a useful exercise to think in terms of point coordinates. Three paths with partially reused point coordinates and one gradient with two orientations.
- Sadly, what I find in sites like Dribbble isn't inspiration, but depression. Every service that instills such feelings in me has no place in my life.
- Updated the script about Wimbledon's tennis results bit.ly/2uzBv4G
- "Things to keep in mind when designing a transportation map" bit.ly/2uxXAjQ
- Aggravated assaults in Chicago (2001-2017) bit.ly/2v6VioR
- Seattle traffic cameras bit.ly/2uxiOi0
- Tech companies in Seattle bit.ly/2v43TbX. Microsoft and Google are on the list as well.
- Made a simple app to search for articles that appeared in "The Guardian". Good to see an open platform like this that provides so much content to mix and use in novel ways. I am waiting to see whether my app is conforming to the rules. Before that I reviewed New York Times policies as well, but it wasn't clear to me how I could possibly meet the requirements, so I decided to stay away from potential trouble. One advantage of news platforms is that they give us potential access to data we could link: for instance, if one article says that the obesity rate in Chicago is relatively high and another one is praising the many options you have for dining in the same city, there may be some correlation. But then to be able to fully explore such relationships, we need to have a lot of computational power, understanding of natural language and things like n-grams, stop words, stemming, lemmatization, Zipf's law, TF-IDF...
- US cities with the most Starbucks facility locations bit.ly/2uv1udi
- Regression coefficients on the Boston housing dataset bit.ly/2v0W2Mn
- Never heard of the password sharing practice before, but it doesn't just look as an impersonation attempt to me. It is a direct attack at the core of software development and will negatively impact developer's willingness to release new software in the future. If the creator can't tell whether a login is truly coming from a paying customer or one that is pretending so (both having and using the same authentication data), then why should software construction still make sense? Perhaps we have reached the point of "Don't trust any user input", which makes the app model obsolete. It is unfair to ask any software developer to spend years of their time writing code, when at the end they will be paid 30$, at best, from a single person, who can sell copies of their data to 30 of their friends for 1$ each. Everyone happy, except the developer, who now also has to maintain that.
- Mutual information example bit.ly/2ur88RF
- Although data visualization helps to understand the context in many cases, it doesn't come for free. When I want to obtain some result quickly, I prefer to have it as a numeric output. This doesn't interrupt my work, since I don't need to manually close a graphic window to return control to the main thread.
- Installed an Android update on a phone that wasn't mine. It took perhaps the same amount of time that would take a fast PC to install five operating systems (the phone is quad-core). Not surprising, when the entire appvalanche of the Facebooks, Googles, Twitters and Pinterests needed to be updated (and still there weren't many applications installed that don't come by default). Made me happy once again that I am not having or using a mobile phone (and hence not designing for mobile by default). Also, whoever wants to reach me, knows that they must work harder than the social networks imply.
- One idea for Python 4 would be to reduce error crypticality through shorter/more optimized stack traces. It is extremely tedious to have to look at A4-size error list every time when an error appears somewhere. This fills my entire console, irritates me as of where my last result was and generally slows me down quite a lot. If I am the client of a library, I don't want to know that it explodes on line 4326 once I start using it. What matters to me is that my own code works and that I am not bothered with useless details about software I am not immediately responsible for. By that definition, Python fails here for me.
- "Two decades of recommender systems at Amazon.com" bit.ly/2uYCg3R. One of the most useful articles that I have seen recently.
- As a client, if you seek bright instead of right, plenty of other designer options are available to you.
- Climb up in constant time bit.ly/2uWUbIs
- Connecting only points whose in-between distance is smaller than the 25th percentile bit.ly/2uX5tMW
- Quick low-fi diagram of the traffic accidents in Denver bit.ly/2uVYuDG. Darker areas are indicating increased frequency of accidents. Also available: "Location and area size of the parks in Denver" bit.ly/2unD8SQ
- Images with reduced-opacity blocks bit.ly/2um3owG. Could you still understand what is on the image if some blocks are taken away? bit.ly/2umya8X
- Comparing deque maintaining sorted order and a heap bit.ly/2ulzyIY
- Colinearity test for three points bit.ly/2uSxjtG
- Some tennis results from Wimbledon 2017 bit.ly/2uis8Gm
- Why can't the browser update SVG element position to give real-time feedback in the same way CSS adjustments work? Currently, updates happen only on "blur" of a property value, while on "change" would have been much nicer.
- Wondering whether there is an upper bound for the number of parameters a function can accept. A working function with million labeled default parameters of which I want to change just one would quickly illustrate how hard finding the right parameter could be.
- CSS parquet bit.ly/2udL35d. Forgot its m2 price.
- Obtained an R2 score of 0.848 on the Boston housing dataset while using Elastic Net with very low alpha and l1_ratio of 1. But the covariance matrix didn't look very informative.
- Choosing where to refuel bit.ly/2uHEJQa
- Common chemicals in cosmetics, California 2007-2014 bit.ly/2u8eOnL. I try to avoid cosmetics whenever possible, but many people prefer to use them every day, ignoring the contaminants. Who can go against a widely accepted practice that has become an expectation?
- Top Texas arts grants for 2017 bit.ly/2u7fda2
- Weather probability with Markov chain bit.ly/2u72fJo
- Filtering an image with different filters and and kernel sizes bit.ly/2uFYk3s
- Illusion with horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines bit.ly/2uEMlTv
- Cell magazine has demonstrated steamlines bit.ly/2uEyqg6
- Upcoming films in Chicago parks (until 07.09.2017) bit.ly/2u4qZC8
- Visits of the Newcastle library branches bit.ly/2uD3ltm. It looks as if at some branches they have stopped measuring. In April 2017, the biggest library registered 54.2% less visits compared to the peak in September 2009. Sometimes, for a given branch, multiple months have the same number of visits, which is strange and perhaps resembles an average number over some period. But this flattens the curves and distorts the results. You can check the following dataset bit.ly/2uCYbxw.
- Are there any data-capturing devices you would recommend to a friend? And if so what is your impression of using them so far? Have they helped you to finish a project you were interested in?
- Trying to study how this is made bit.ly/2uCxbhO
- Resistivity vs. conductivity for some materials bit.ly/2u3Fg1W. Had to divide it into two graphics to make it more readable. After mercury (bottom right, first graphic) follows nichrome (top left, second graphic). The log function refused to compute the values for PET and teflon, but these must appear somewhere at the bottom right in the second graphic.
- Connecting nearby sides bit.ly/2u2K0F8
- Canvas figure from triangles bit.ly/2u16oP2
- Comparing two primes functions bit.ly/2tZw0M2
- Summarizing the 1GB New York Times corpus in 1hour on a 1.3Ghz laptop bit.ly/2utRtdc
- Interesting to see that it may not matter whether the duration of a trip between 2 cities with ICE is 2:19 hours or 4:01 hours as the ticket price will be the same (according to DB's app).
- Decided to check which US magazines have the highest circulation. Learned that I have completely forgotten about "Reader's Digest" and "Time", whose websites seem to be full of ideas.
- Knowing the bill before the waiter bit.ly/2uqtBqC
- Reducing the size of file access logs bit.ly/2tR11lm
- Simulating communication between nodes bit.ly/2tNknrL. Longer distances take more time (as seen on the web).
- Gradienteerie bit.ly/2tMQgk4
- Visualizing vector fields bit.ly/2uiWLbg
- Tour de France 2017 stages bit.ly/2tJ5E0P
- Libraries in Leeds bit.ly/2tIwO8f
- Wi-Fi hotspots in Barcelona (by district) bit.ly/2ugLecv. Most of them seem to be in Eixample and Sant Martí.
- Negative bobbles bit.ly/2uf5nQg
- Never thought about traffic flow in terms of fluid dynamics. Thank you for that parallel.
- Visualizing forward, backward and central difference bit.ly/2uehYD9
- Interesting diagonal stripes made at Stripe bit.ly/2tE9PuC
- "A summertime tour of public art" nyti.ms/2tDAwjc
- Hidden surface removal and useless action removal have something in common.
- It must have come to me while I was sleeping. But Daily Dilbert seems ideal for computer vision tasks and specifically extracting text from images and assigning it to the proper participants. Only that sometimes it is unclear who screams something from another room. Oh, my mind, what's the business case for that?
- MoMA artists and their work bit.ly/2tCzeoS
- "HBR Ideacast" - full list of interviews (as of 01.07.2017) bit.ly/2tBUE5e. Requires a subscription, but I remember listening to some great interviews while this was still free.
- Learning about smartphones from rankings (01.07.2017) bit.ly/2tBc3ee
- SVG polygons can be used to highlight a given area on a map. However, many instances have the problem that the polygon doesn't look as an integral part of the map, but as a separate patch. Perhaps there is a way to fix this that works universally on all maps, but if the fill isn't fully transparent or have very low opacity, where the border is more pronounced, I am not aware of it.
- Would be interesting to see which component determines the price of a hotel room to a greater extent - its location, its furnishing cost, its number of stars, the positive feedback received or something else. Sound like an opportunity for an interesting article if you can find relevant data.
- Interesting to see the results from the KDD cup 2017 bit.ly/2twPyHv and more specifically that "Longing for a teammate" (an individual) did better than the "Warriors" (a team of twenty) and the other 3500+ participating teams...
- Extending an article from today with the graphic that was missing in it bit.ly/2u6ktHP
- Some websites can't load in two minutes now. So I go for a walk and return when I expect them to be done. There aren't just modal windows, mouse tracking features, ad loading, web analytics, maps, 50 images, clickbait sections, comment areas, boilerplate articles...
- Find the nearest cities around a given city in Germany bit.ly/2u334jf. "Neuenkirchen" gives a particularly interesting result. Using animated results gives the impression that the page is slower than it really is. But in this case it can help us show the order of increasing distances while keeping the number of UI elements minimal. The demo was finished in 2.5 days.
- Are lattice and lettuce two separate things or the the lettuce has a lattice graph sleeping in it? Lattuce?
- Obtaining the HTTP status codes from Wikipedia bit.ly/2teE0bQ
- Three ways to group data bit.ly/2teos7S
- Used the gradient boosting regressor on stock price data and the result surprised me in a positive way. Couldn't make logistic regression work due to a strange error message. But if thousands of people are using the same widely available techniques, what is then so interesting about them?
- Random CSS grid bit.ly/2tJZJW2
- Average time to traverse a directory bit.ly/2tam4Po
- Noticed that someone visited the tube map of London on this site and remembered the article I came across today, which mentioned the problem that inside the tube the temperature increases over time if no sufficient ventilation is provided. An interesting problem, which underlines the importance of careful infrastructure planning.
- Increasingly excited bit.ly/2t6mA0R. That the start of each line looks as if it is the head of a snake is an unintended effect.
- Value accumulation at the bottom right of a matrix bit.ly/2tEYiIr
- Interpolation of matrix interpolations bit.ly/2tDwHYc. We could adjust the 0.5 factor to anything we like.
- This code doesn't look as if it was written by hand bit.ly/2t3KVo9. Due to its repetitive nature it is of limited value to a reader. Can we say then that programming the programming eliminates the reader?
- Libraries by square feet in Calgary bit.ly/2tCS2Rr
- Brisbane library checkouts on selected days in 2017 bit.ly/2tC5jto
- Electric vehicle chargepoints in Bristol - in light scheme (labeled) bit.ly/2tC3ooM and in watercolor (unlabeled) bit.ly/2t2sobK
- What would be nice to see: A "Who made this?" page, where some people show us things we take for granted today and another group of people shares what they know about the creator and the circumstances that defined their work. If we think about it, most of the work has been done when we didn't exist and will be done when we are no longer. Could be an attempt to highlight and bring back to memory the names and the characters of the people which helped to shape the world the way we see it today.
- Bikeways in Brisbane, Australia bit.ly/2t1PTla. Sometimes biking can be a great way to relax in nature. But driving next to cars and breathing in their pollutants is not an option for most health-conscious people. The bikeways have to be far from regular streets to have any effect on the willingness to bike. Yesterday, I saw how the bikeways in many EU countries look like (bit.ly/2tBu2y0). The dense networks in Belgium and the Netherlands are quite impressive.
- Cafes and restaurants in Melbourne by total seating capacity bit.ly/2tBqUCf
- Interesting to see at least one city in the UK, whose public expenditure info points to a heavy investment in a website. Perhaps there are more cases like this, but seeing such a preference over the many other things that the city could have done is entirely new to me. At least some people still appreciate modern web design.
- Road traffic images from Singapore bit.ly/2sYMtQb. I noticed that some cities have started to provide such visual data allowing everyone to observe the degree of traffic congestion. To reduce the load time, only images from 12 randomly selected cameras are shown. You can also see the current positions of the taxi cars bit.ly/2tyonbY. Some streets are being used be many taxi drivers.
- Paying people for "results only" has always been a questionable practice. If effort frequently leads to no results (and it does), then why should people willingly waste theirs when there's no reward for it? The consequence of this can be seen at many places and levels: neither effort, nor results. We are more than our output can show at any given time. If only 10-20% of our work leads to results and are rewarded for, how could we have the resource to power through the rest, the 80-90% of the time? How often can we afford to spend countless, invisible hours which lead nowhere? Why is code "worthy", but the brain and eye damage needed to produce it aren't? Be sceptical when someone mentions the word "productivity" in front of you and seek whether they are attempting something by speaking your work small.
- It is often said that the complexity of the solution should match the complexity of the problem. But what if potential usage would be small? Does this justify years of development then? Adjusting the complexity of the solution to the expected usage may shorten the time to feedback. Big solutions demand enthusiastic users.
- If someone claims on their CV that they are proficient in 15 different programming languages, what is your chance to be chosen and why should you even apply? The market deserves what it values most and it's pointless to try changing that. Instead of spending years of looking for jobs and going at the wrong interviews for the wrong companies, you could create something valuable immediately and use it as your selling point. And if after seeing your public work, people still expect you to show them your CV, then politely explain them that they are seeing you for the last time. Appreciate yourself and use your work as your CV.
- It is up to you to say "no" to application components which overwhelm your system. Very often such components have something to do with payment in one form or another. "You just need to use our eight-step workflow to..." No, thanks. I am working on my system, not yours. Who sends a message to whom at step 6 is not something I am deeply interested in. If I sense that your system is heavy-weight and support is time-consuming, forget about integration and expect to see no product on the market. Principles are principles, even if you have to choose not to get paid.
- "Body, soul, intelligence: To the body belong sensations, to the soul appetites, to the intelligence principles." - Marcus Aurelius. Another interesting idea in his work is that all things happen by change, also life itself. Change has been described as a stream of soon to be forgotten things. This means that if we are not thinking of our work as a continuous stream, we may be experiencing sporadic satisfaction from finishing an individual piece. We may feel that this work wasn't appreciated or worth our effort, where meanwhile the universe is only interested in its flowing. Perhaps we need to generate streams of things that flow in certain direction.
- If you use link shortening frequently, you can write yourself a small script to automate it, instead of logging in and out of a web service regularly.
- Travel connections in Switzerland bit.ly/2tu8fbA
- DailyMeals - update your restaurant's meal offers to keep your clients informed every day bit.ly/2tMBDt3
- Prefer published and working code/product over a published paper. Theory has its place, but not when it is spread at scale without being validated yet (plenty of such theory exists). If you find that the authors of a paper say: "Our code will be released soon", then this means that practice doesn't come first for them. They work with words, definitions and citations and this is their definition of a product. Normally, only if something has worked as expected, and is truly novel, do we earn the right to speak about it in front of an interested audience. Otherwise, we are just adding noise. Capture the idea, build the demo/product and then describe what worked well and what didn't. Otherwise it's not a paper.
- Adjustable shape bit.ly/2tBioT3. Slow, since it communicates with the server. The code responsible for the shape generation is also shown.
- The formula for the harmonic mean of two quantities H = 2ab/(a+b) reminds me very much of the formula for the F1-score, where instead of a and b we have precision and recall. This necessarily implies that the two must have equal weight, which may not always be desirable.
- "Inside Personal Growth" - full list of interviews (as of 17.06.2017) bit.ly/2rBMlpp
- "Design Matters" - full list of interviews (as of 16.06.2017) bit.ly/2syJflh
- Find nearby dentists in Phoenix bit.ly/2taxCyS
- A 3D object from five points (and some lines) bit.ly/2rmVgal
- Connecting points on a circle bit.ly/2t9uAey
- "Find the multiplicity of the eigenvalue 1 in the right stochastic matrix and check whether the number of communities in a sample graph is equal to that multiplicity. If so plot the eigenvector values for each eigenvalue of 1 and check whether they form stairs." Didn't work out. Having only a single such eigenvalue in a graph of five communities is mothing else but an angry factor. Perhaps there's something more to this description that I am missing.
- Animating ten different sections on the same page, even when following the same style, is not a great idea, especially when the motion vectors point at all possible directions. Surprised to see in some instances lately that we still haven't developed a good sense for what is a responsible and viewer-friendly animation. It is very difficult to synchronize multiple animations so that at every time point their combined effect adds to the design of the page rather than makes it chaotic. Could you concentrate on the topic midst chaos? Would you watch three movies at the same time?
- Found an interesting code in a library and pasted it in Google Search. This refered me to the book "Physically-based rendering", where it was defined one-by-one. Good to know, because the author didn't provide a citation or at least bother to give the variables more meaningful names to make the code self-explanatory. What looks like original may actually not be.
- Activation functions in neural networks bit.ly/2sbI7Ca
- Comparing determinant and product of eigenvalues of a matrix bit.ly/2rxfqNX
- A simplified way to check whether an action had a positive effect on a single variable of interest, assuming that higher is better: mean(measurements_before_action) < mean(measurements_after_action)
- Unemployed people and number of jobs in Munich (01.2006-02.2017) bit.ly/2sYBAL9. Uses open data from Statistisches Amt München.
- A peek at the position and elevation of some peaks bit.ly/2sxtqvy. In my opinion, this looks terrible, where I cannot exclude the possibility that I have gathered the wrong coordinates for many points.
- Some highly rated sushi bars and their location (US only) bit.ly/2svgXbQ
- Restaurants in Pittsburgh, having a happy clientele bit.ly/2sV9jF0
- Find the number of connected components in a graph bit.ly/2rRVXLp
- Equivalence of Pearson correlation and cosine similarity of centered vectors bit.ly/2rkX42D
- Lindstrom's snowflake bit.ly/2r5PTw5
- Getting the error message "max_df corresponds to < documents than min_df" in scikit-learn when attempting to extract topics with NMF and LDA from manual text (not an integrated dataset). Exposing the guts of the software to the client is not something I like to see.
- Overlapping parabolas, creating an unexpected effect bit.ly/2smey38
- Two-component PCA and t-SNE applied to each channel of an image bit.ly/2rGAwNq
- A quick look at the libraries in Vancouver bit.ly/2r750Jw. Central Branch, Carnegie and Strathcona seem to be close, but otherwise the spacing between the branches is very close to being uniform.
- Comparing different classifiers on the digits dataset bit.ly/2raeNK9
- Country contours bit.ly/2r6JP5C. Some countries are missing. Right click to open an image in a new tab if you want to see it enlarged.
- Comparison of street lights power usage and cost (02.2014-09.2014) bit.ly/2sQ2DqR
- Comparison of electricity usage in the City Hall and the central branch of the Public Library in Boston bit.ly/2rZOnzD. City Hall started measuring precisely on my birthday.
- Free Wi-Fi hotspots in the Boston area bit.ly/2sN3ybO
- Educational institutions in the Boston area bit.ly/2syTkwp
- Daily active users of the Boston Public Library (28.10.2014 - 01.03.2016) bit.ly/2syT8x2
- Museums and acquariums in Los Angeles bit.ly/2sMcLBh
- A nested for-loops construct that I discovered in a codebase bit.ly/2rWWnBg. Not to serve as a positive example.
- A short chronology of terrorism in Europe (2004-2017) bit.ly/2s8sYUy, using data from an article. Not all events during that period are listed here (incomplete), but it still paints an interesting picture.
- Circles moving in circle bit.ly/2s7eCDQ
- Easy matrix operations with Armadillo bit.ly/2rlf407
- Credit card transaction classification with Bernoulli Naive Bayes bit.ly/2rk947J
- Functional art bit.ly/2rMTtPE
- Zooming in on the bus stops in the center of Vienna bit.ly/2ssWQaN
- House price index by county bit.ly/2qHidDM (overview). A more detailed article
may follow bit.ly/2qFoRzu - It seems that detrending can not only by applied to time series data, but also to image data bit.ly/2qFbBGe
- Winnow algorithm bit.ly/2qz2fMR
- "Load balancing in supercomputers often uses space-filling curves." One creative use I would never even think of.
- A spiral ending in a circle bit.ly/2rwAtVq
- A balancing act bit.ly/2rMuYl3
- Cantor's observation without words bit.ly/2raRMsc
- Parks in Chicago bit.ly/2saL04W
- Parks in Salt Lake City, whose area is bigger than one acre bit.ly/2s3pGPv
- Adjust the number of clusters in an image to observe the cluster boundaries bit.ly/2rtLJ53
- All parks in Atlanta, ordered by area bit.ly/2qpTwfR. Which one is your favourite?
- Crop acres by crop type and year, Alberta bit.ly/2r8K2Jk. Since this is discrete data, with measurements every five years, the points do not appear connected. Durum wheat adds the most acres in recent years. According to this data, the top 5 producers are "Forty Mile County No. 8", "Warner County No. 5", "Special Area No. 3", "Vulcan County" and "Taber, M.D.", where the most acres have added "Newell County" (x7.45), "Rocky View County" (x7.05), "Lacombe County" (x6.90), "Red Deer County" (x3.87), "Cardston County" (x2.67).
- Month-by-month consumer price changes in Alberta, relative to Canada (2007-2017) bit.ly/2s6oBWq. Energy, transportation and partially shelter prices seem to fluctuate the most. If we sum all percentage changes over time for each category and location, we come to -63.69 and -16.90 for "clothing and footwear" in Alberta and Canada, which likely means that the prices in this category have fallen over time (where zero would indicate no change). But this is the only minus sign we can observe. On the opposite side are "alcoholic beverages and tobacco products" with 379.80 and 302.90, "food" with 303.50 and 305.80, "shelter" with 271.19 and 215.40, "health and personal care" with 257.9 and 173.80, "furnishings and equipment" with 195.60 and 211.69. Although it deviates most, energy comes to a combined 74.40 for Alberta and 188.19 for Canada as a whole. In the case of "furnishing and equipment" we can see how strong the combined effect of many small (or hardly noticeable) price increases can become.
- Traveling dots bit.ly/2qoaxHk (problematic in Firefox)
- Dividing a medium with Fibonacci-powered boxes bit.ly/2rExVUQ
- Wurm bit.ly/2r1uMxv
- Broken bit.ly/2r0T37d
- Piecewise linear distribution with selected parameters bit.ly/2qfNqma
- Morphological gradient, followed by sharpen filter bit.ly/2rY0KYK. The gradient is said to be equivalent to the difference between dilation, which thickens the shapes and erosion, which makes them slim, so we are left with a contour.
- Check the vertex type between two adjacent edges bit.ly/2qiXzdZ. Based on a formula I saw in a paper, so be sceptical about whether this is correct.
- Detecting strong corners in an image bit.ly/2qja4pE
- Compute region area in an image bit.ly/2rXMWgO
- Deep initialization of structs bit.ly/2rBqzSa
- Memebership checks in C++ containers bit.ly/2qktp99. Not perfect. My initial thought was to write a single function with a single template, so that most containers can work with it (like the "in" operator in Python). This turned out to be hard and then a voice in my head started asking: "Why don't you know your container in advance?"
- "Here is your portion of animated digit-al macaroni" bit.ly/2qbhfVf
- The beta function bit.ly/2qVDmfv
- Work that is not appreciated or rewarded, is never seen again.
- Determine the number of eigenvectors needed to capture 96% of the variance in an image bit.ly/2rulY3Y
- Comparing machine output quality bit.ly/2r96LWo
- Relativistic mass of a particle bit.ly/2qLKlcv
- US cities air quality check bit.ly/2r8cJXz. The tomorrow's forecast for one city was given as "unhealthy for sensitive groups".
- Sample spectrogram of a song bit.ly/2rF7QC3. It is said that music from the same genre may lead to similar patterns in the spectrograms, which is interesting.
- Two ways to insert items in sorted order bit.ly/2qJ10eU
- Locations and relative size of the parks in San Francisco bit.ly/2roN8sV. Can you confirm that the figure is correct?
- Using the function from the daffodil lemma bit.ly/2qBtbOj
- Validating convergence of series bit.ly/2pU5rqc
- Top 40 artists by number of artworks in the Tate gallery bit.ly/2rzGai8
- Understanding product profits bit.ly/2qAODnf
- Guide the postman bit.ly/2rloOYW
- Matrix multiplication with the Strassen method (JS only) bit.ly/2pRrNZv
- Reuters RCV1 defeated my machine, so comparing classifiers on this dataset will be left for another time.
- Finding the most common colors in an image (fast, minimum dependencies) bit.ly/2rfPDOo. Updated to include approximately similar colors.
- "Batch normalization enables higher learning rates" And I wondered why so many people mentioned it.
- Venue plan and exhibitors bit.ly/2pU4SIQ
- A word w, for which w==w[::-1], is a palindrome. In the works of Jane Austen, such are "madam", "noon", "refer", "sees", "level", "deed".
- Reshaping data without external libraries bit.ly/2qoTDL0
- It would be nice to see a statistic how many web apps were canceled for security reasons.
- Interpolate from one range to another bit.ly/2qNOXjj
- A cashier, serving bit.ly/2pSLR8S
- "If you write CSS, you probably already write SASS as well." This may be the case, but the way you voice your assumption, takes my breath away, so you may not hear my voice.
- It's surprising how fast my opinion forms about non-paying companies/individuals (and how hard it is to change then). Once this happens, I won't care about you or your company name.
- A look at the digital camera reviews at dpreview.com bit.ly/2rikk1v. Update: eliminated the duplicate emplace_back function calls.
- Relative budgeting (JS only) bit.ly/2qktWKd
- A numeric look at Porsche car models bit.ly/2rd482C
- Highlight instance with max sum of weghted attributes bit.ly/2qctzmO
- For the first time I see an attempt to access elements with arr[dx*dx + dy*dy], where computing a distance between two points is a matter of taking the square root of the key. Unfortunately, this way doesn't preserve locality of reference, which means that we will be accessing our memory in strides—exactly the case that a good book on high-perf computing would advise us to avoid.
- A dataset consisting exlusively of numeric values doesn't tell me what they are about, especially when the meaning of the column labels is unclear or there is no documentation about them. Wanted to explore a dataset about car crashes to seek out places with higher incident rate, but this is what stopped me.
- An approximate, low-fidelity map of the world bit.ly/2q9aL7R
- US GDP by state (Q4 2016, seasonably adjusted) as a choropleth bit.ly/2q9Nbra
- Bokeh's beautiful function about equally spaced colors seems to work as advertised bit.ly/2poEWZJ
- Weather forecast by Yahoo for a city of your choice bit.ly/2q5TKvq
- Find the centroid in a cluster bit.ly/2q8y9jL
- Using Brent's method to find the root of a polynomial bit.ly/2pmY4HC
- Deaths caused by air pollutants within the EU bit.ly/2qTQap5
- Terse easings in kute.js bit.ly/2qYIYnP, blend modes in paper.js bit.ly/2qqFZZa
- Running latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with scikit-learn on Seth Godin's blog posts to identify the topics he is most often talking about seemed an interesting idea, but my inner voices rejected it. If you are interested, you can find an application of LDA on a sample dataset bit.ly/2puN5a2.
- Find images of cichlides bit.ly/2qoz82u (uses The Aquarium Wiki)
- Using SVG paths to indicate the internals of a lemon bit.ly/2pshx4I
- With a quick look at a newsletter, I learned the following about media queries: @media (min-width: 600px) and (max-width: 1000px) {...} can now be shortened to @media (600px =< width <= 1000px) {...}. If this has a wide support now, it is great news for keeping sites more maintainable.
- Declaring hundreds of variables and having the time to do something meaningful with most of them are two different things.
- If the ratio comment lines:code lines in your files is more than 5:1, you should be carefully reviewing your comment auto-generation practices. Pulling things out in a separate documentation may be more appropriate. This is very common to see in PHP code, which for every function containing a single line has ten comment lines. Such code is extremely hard to read. Something which is intended to be read by people must also be written by people only.
- Minimax and maximin bit.ly/2qKs2Fm
- Character codes bit.ly/2pspesq
- Some technologies/software for which I can't be hired include: Java and Scala, C# (couldn't find adequate resources about it), Go, Node.js, ES6+, many JS frameworks, CSS preprocessors (LESS, SASS etc.), Git, Vim & Emacs, functional languages (Haskell, OCaml etc.), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Julia, R, Neo4J, Processing, Photoshop, Excel and others. Using any of these in your technology stack or asking me to adopt them will make our collaboration impossible. If you come with a problem to me, be prepared that I pick my own tools.
- Everyone complains that the jobs are missing, which is great as a newspaper story, but noone is willing to admit in which contests they participated. If you contributed to the contestization of the jobs, sharing your knowledge with others for free, you have no right to complain about disappearing jobs.
- A simple application to make people more aware of when your business is having happy hours and what you are offering then bit.ly/2qPsQFY. A screenshot is also available bit.ly/2qGKWwJ. Contains a thumbnail of a nice butterfly photo from Pixabay (as a spacer for your interior/exterior photo). Especially liked the speed of the search-as-you-type in latest Chrome. If you encounter problems, feel free to share information about them.
- Making screenshots of popular websites bit.ly/2qHbBqc
- An idea I learned about yesterday, represented in code, even when this may be only approximately accurate. I called it "calorie development during running" bit.ly/2pcefCE.
- Visualizing pairwise cosine similarities (height) between two vectors (width and depth) seems like another great example for values in 3D.
- Cumulative sum of the reciprocals up to 1 million bit.ly/2pZLzl9
- Do you know exactly how much memory a modal window is adding to your website? If someone has ten open tabs, they are likely to notice it.
- After trying to fix this strange label issue for more than three hours, I finally gave up bit.ly/2pI1PGv. On the web, JavaScript never bothered me with a similar problem.
- Angles on the unit circle as fractions of π bit.ly/2pvwQN2
- Purple shape (not very smooth) bit.ly/2pt5fMF
- Values in a cube bit.ly/2qoj4gR
- "We are company Y now." No. You are still company X, trying to lie the same customers under another, more trustworthy name. A truly new beginning doesn't coincide with the yesterday's ending. Once you say this, expect no trust from me.
- Find quotes bit.ly/2oYL5qx
- Another view of the US national parks bit.ly/2oY85pu
- Analyzing food composition (Source: matvaretabellen.no) bit.ly/2qsG3DB
- Seat utilization in different libraries at the University of Karlsruhe bit.ly/2pxeOuh
- Experimenting with SVG polygons bit.ly/2qqEN3M
- NASA images of the last week bit.ly/2oGi0EU, near-Earth asteroids last week bit.ly/2prFR8j or photos from Mars: the last six from each camera of the "Curiosity" land rover (very slow, need to wait 35-40s) bit.ly/2prUt7G
- A small change in an external API effectively disabled the weather application, where it was previously showing the weather in Seattle. Fixed this and added a simple form to make it work for any city. Here is the old link in case you missed it bit.ly/2gyei8E.
- One way to avoid Counter(responses).most_common(1)[0][0] is to use mode(responses) if we know that the highest frequency exists only for a single response.
- Mean, median, mode, standard deviation and variance in a few lines of code bit.ly/2ptiPQA.
- Sample PyCNN edge detection bit.ly/2pFXkNr. Can produce too many edges that start to draw attention from the actual objects in the image.
- I used to believe that the temperature difference between two cities that are ≈300km apart can not be more than a couple of degrees. 15 degrees is what it was yesterday. Left my eyes wide open.
- Tried to extract the HTTP status codes from sample HTML with regexes, which almost worked, but it was not possible to predict the many special cases where the regex would fail. But it gave me an interesting thought. If we could control the formatting of the data with an upfront thought of how we will match against specific pieces of it, we could write simple regexes that will work most of the time. This could reduce our needs for an external library like an HTML parser, for example, which depending on the environment, may be unavailable. However, real-world data doesn't like to follow established formats, so it won't like our regexes.
- Learning about San Jose bit.ly/2oPMyQt
- Convert between some weight, length, area and volume units bit.ly/2poRkHK. "3 cups are equivalent to 48 tablespoons or 709.76 cubic centimeters.". Always wondered how much to fill the tablespoons.
- A simple animation with JQuery bit.ly/2q20rMy
- Sliders with JQuery bit.ly/2p0TRY8. Using a library to create something as simple is this is not the right way to do it. Notice that all resources are minified and the demo is still 142kB. This is equivalent to loading a mid-size dataset having a lot of variability and giving the chance to tell an interesting story. By default the sliders disappear if the "slider" class is set on a div element (as shown in the JQueryUI docs) and we disable JS. But we can use the replaceWith method to change a native slider to one that is JQuery-enhanced.
- Wondering whether left-handed people would prefer a mouse cursor pointing to the right. Can't explain how this thought came to me.
- Stitching hexagons to the same vertex bit.ly/2orJ22K
- "Teamwork sophistication is generally lacking in emerging market countries. People see no benefit in teamwork because others may be able to recognize their lack of competencies and mistakes. They have not been trained to work properly in teams and are not rewarded for their contributions to the team." Very well said. But in general, people are not rewarded at all, not just for their contributions. And teamwork mostly fails due to the lack of mutual trust.
- Momentum for convergence in fewer iterations #distill. Especially liked how connectivity was explained in terms of the ratio between the second and the last eigenvalue of the graph's Laplacian matrix.
- Faster BBC front page bit.ly/2oY3hDz. DevTools showed 624kB, 128 requests, DOMContentLoaded 5.50s, finish ≈18.17s. Compared to the current main page (1.7MB, 219 requests, DOMContentLoaded 6.64s, finish ≈23.65s) this one seems be faster. The warnings were touched as well bit.ly/2oDMv9D.
- Observing frequent items bit.ly/2q7352L
- Checker pattern from matrix bit.ly/2oBmKr6
- While creating the previous demo, I noticed an interesting effect in relation with multiplying a number by 0.01 bit.ly/2q2yRxS. I thought that some of the frames in my animation were "jumping" due to these small inaccuracies, but the actual cause was that ImageMagick was adding them in a different order. To fix this, I padded the file names with zeros—001.png, 002.png until 100.png. Might help someone.
- Linear interpolation between a and b: a*(1-k) + b*k. Linear interpolation between two matrices A and B: A*(1-k) + B*k, demonstrated in short demo bit.ly/2oggZTE. The two matrices have their values sorted on different axes.
- Image stitching bit.ly/2ox9q7a
- People traits and Jaccard similarity bit.ly/2q1DWqi
- Decoloring an image bit.ly/2ouP6Ua. The top image is the original, the bottom one is decolored. Notice how the colors are muted, which leads to a perceptually pleasing and more uniform visual result.
- Histogram of the RGB channels of an image bit.ly/2pMxaoQ (≈10 LOC)
- My app was working nice locally, but getting the warnings once online bit.ly/2obtMHb. Then I found the following sentence: "Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we'll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure." Invalidating the web is now someone's main goal. Only that we carry the costs everytime big changes are introduced, where being unapologetic to the masses seems to be common now. Even when things don't work as expected, the least we can do is to ensure that our app is fail-safe and still operational, albeit having a reduced feature set. In my case I was at least pleasantly surprised to see that. However, it is pointless to release something whose features can't be guaranteed.
- Consistency matters (otherwise you see the effects) bit.ly/2opllE6
- A bug in my OS didn't allow me to export any data from MySQL. I hoped that re-install would fix this, but it didn't work. The error message mentioned something incomprehensible to me (__getattr__ missing or something like this) and advised me to look at the DB error log. There I saw clearly that the cause was in an OS component, so I didn't know how to fix it. Complete uninstall of MySQL and Workbench quickly followed.
- Representing and visualizing disjoint sets bit.ly/2oQ9bHv
- Distances of possible paths in a concert tour bit.ly/2oncWQP
- Comparing company offerings on multiple dimensions bit.ly/2plGF13. The first time I learned about this useful way to compare alternatives was in "Blue ocean strategy" some years ago, yet for the first time I am able to visualize it on something else than paper. Still, it would be even nicer if we could create non-contiguous lines just by using None within our list of values. Currently, the plotting function avoids dealing with uncertainty.
- Andrews curves bit.ly/2oCE1CL, reusing the temperature data from a previous demo.
- NBA leaders having more than 75% of the highest efficiency (2017) bit.ly/2od3r7g
- Easter is approaching bit.ly/2ozwOUg. Ready to paint?
- Rolling mean & roll-rotate bit.ly/2nJMmFX
- Paths from source to target in a graph bit.ly/2pbucdj
- "We use cookies on this page. We rely on JavaScript for our content. Please, accept both."
- You can't make graph cuts without graph scissors.
- Aim for at least v3.0 of your software. v1.0 will be filled with terminology, paradigm shifts, patterns and styleguides that won't make any sense to you. It is also possible to skim content you find hard to understand or relate to. v2.0 is when you start understanding a little bit, but have trouble imagining how the things work in combination or in their entirety. You see the components, but not the connections. You can't see, imagine or draw a diagram of the whole. You are still sceptical that things don't work the way they are explained. You mix component responsibilities. v3.0 is when you start to understand the context of a problem on which you worked for a while, where you return to evaluate your previous knowledge/experience from a fresh perspective. Now you know why things matter and how you could go about choosing your own ingredients, the sequence in which you mix them and the exact proportions in which this needs to happen. You care about the added value of the whole system and are wary of anything that has just a supporting function and an unbalanced weight. You simplify the system to find the most accurately describing model of your current reality. You hear the word "opinionated" for the first time.
- Compare the distance:price ratio of different flights bit.ly/2omZVsa. If you were to set the ticket prices for the flights Boston-Dallas, Houston-San Diego and Chicago-Austin to $364, $405 and $310 respectively, then the flight Houston-San Diego would appear with the highest ratio, although not by a large margin.
- Top100 cities by population bit.ly/2opsDKQ. Had a hard time seeing more than three European cities on this list.
- Seeking promotions bit.ly/2nW9Hk0. Includes offers from multiple websites.
- Operating with masked matrices bit.ly/2nVonzS. If one of the values in an operation between two masked matrices is masked, the result at that position will be masked as well.
- Each letter in your name can be represented by a color depending on its position in the alphabet bit.ly/2o8KTpN
- Sortsome bit.ly/2oMWtdt. Create a simple matrix, sort the values on both axes, sum the results and plot.
- Diagonal stripes over an image with in-place, paw-over description bit.ly/2oSyia2
- Animal face detected bit.ly/2oRO5Gb (manually, 1LOC). im[40:140:3,180] = im[40:140:3,280] = im[40,180:280:3] = im[140,180:280:3] = 255.
- Tasks and priorities bit.ly/2oJnePV
- If someone claims that a website has been translated into multiple languages, then that needs to be true with no exceptions. We may then find that the translation happens in real-time, where the browser shows the original language (and we wonder what's going on), spending two seconds to replace the text with the English version. This is not a properly translated website. And if the resources it hosts continue to exist only in the original language, despite our ability to see their meta descriptions translated, then they are still exactly inaccessible as if no translation was available. By the way, this website was ranked first place in its category for promoting open data and making it accessible to everyone.
- Type the name of a US city to see the websites of colleges in it bit.ly/2og2pdG. It seems that New York, Chicago and Houston have the greatest number of colleges.
- Electricity prices for domestic consumers in European countries bit.ly/2oOCNm7
- Germans and foreigners bit.ly/2o78itf. In 1996 the foreigners were 10.05% of all Germans. In 2013-2015 they were 9.51%, 10.23% and 11.76% respectively, at least according to Destatis.
- Population by state in Germany bit.ly/2oFl4Rj
- Demographic picture in Kiel, Germany bit.ly/2o1qVwQ
- Circulation, attendance and three programs at the New York Public Library (NYPL) bit.ly/2nfVeDc
- Public libraries in Nottingham bit.ly/2o4OAOR
- One small difference between PDF pages and web pages is that the latter are more susceptible to jank. Once you notice it, you start asking yourself why you aren't reading the longer pieces of content in PDF format, where it excels. Since most websites now publish articles spanning over multiple screens, it is unavoidable that PDF may once again become their primary competitor. To understand why, it is sufficient to compare the speed of reading a website to the speed of reading a PDF of comparable length. Alternative ways to consume the content must always be provided and where this is neglected, accessibility suffers. This is only one reason to say that a software without PDF documentation (not a website documentation!) has not reached its 1.0 version yet, no matter what the developers say. If you force your readers to click ten thousand times to read your documentation, then you don't understand usability as well.
- Between 08.10.2014 and 13.10.2016, the city of Las Vegas measured the energy usage of 15 street lights on a 15-minute intervals and documented the results in a dataset. The total energy usage sums to whole 315827.6kWh, while the total cost sums to just $8222.7 (or an average of $0.026/kWh). This looks amazingly efficient, especially when we consider that oftentimes the cost for using 0.967kWh over 15mins was given to be less than a cent. Many cities can only dream about such efficiency, where they are spending considerably more on street lightning. Yet, one night, at 19h, one of the lights at 1008 N Bruce St Sls consumed $0.56—the highest measured per allocated time period in the entire dataset. A separate list of solar plants might explain why the energy cost is so low.
- Company establishments and employment by sector and state, USA 2013 bit.ly/2nb6ctA
- Another batch of images generated by functions bit.ly/2n8Bd1j
- There are resources aimed at developers which can easily trigger your internal doubt voices. The question is whether the code organization supports your understanding or not. If the code has been written in a convoluted way just to alter your thinking, without solving any new or existing problems, it is best to leave this resource aside, no matter which modern framework it uses or describes. That someone can type text in a way they understand is not a prerequisite for writing good code. If three levels of indirection are introduced for no apparent reason, this solution is probably not deserving to serve as an official example for the broad public. It seems that many people have realized that it is much easier to invalidate other people's knowledge simply by pushing out enough junk than it is to build on it, creating strong businesses out of the available technology. The introduction of new thought paradigms requires people to spend years trying to grasp them, which intoroduces a high cost for everyone. If we look around, we'll see that the number of "me-cool" framework creators far exceeds the number of successful tech businesses, so it's probably time to stop worshipping (and hiring for) any new framework or programming language that appears. Creating the framework to sell the teaching also doesn't feel right.
- Random forests, L-BFGS and conjugate gradient, DBSCAN, k-means, kernel-based filtering, matrix manipulation, PCA, SVD and many others belong to the category "should have used at least once".
- Polynomial multiplication and its effect on signals bit.ly/2ouHX9N
- Determine sales price and assets (not precise) bit.ly/2ouGQa0
- Single Python loop vs multiple list comprehensions bit.ly/2nKJ2qI
- Podcasts by Insight Meditation Society bit.ly/2ooJeik
- The latest additions to the Python package index(PyPI) bit.ly/2ouAWCC
- Comparing nearest, bilinear and bicubic interpolation when some pixel information is not available bit.ly/2nKLOOv
- Three ways to multiply matrices bit.ly/2nVpQJj. Attempting to go through the pain of restoring at least some common files that I had.
- I prefer discussing maximum support products rather than minimum viable products. I have seen enough abandonware.
- The indirect proof that advertising kills can be seen on websites where the ad scripts slow down the machine to the point where the browser begs you to kill the corresponding tab.
- Collecting user data without knowing what it will be used for can be a waste of storage capacity, which is not free. We have to know whether the user would be willing to spend sufficient time in our application before we decide whether it is feasible to store and protect their data. Different people have different storage requirements, which should also be reflected in our price points. Just because it is possible to collect data in any form, doesn't mean that we should. Once the data is stored, we have to guarantee constant, low-latency access to it even when the product is very rarely used—not a good position to be in. In the absence of enough users, this leads quickly to a net loss. Collect big data that you don't know how to analyze or which can't give you important insights to see yourself losing faster. Rightfully, there is no reason to be too excited about this.
- Saw an interesting image created with networkx, where the nodes of the graph were missing (or at least made so small that they were hard to see), the connections were as usual lines, but very thin and with low opacity. The result was that we could observe the concentration of lines in certain areas—something that I see for the first time in such context.
- "Python couldn't be that much slower (than language Y) or at least if it is, it will be by a small constant factor, which is perfectly acceptable." Statements like this would irritate me to the point of asking: "Why is Python allowing up to 1600 recursion levels and C++ up to 262000 (at least on my machine)? Isn't that difference a small constant factor as well? How dramatically constant is the difference between their memory behaviors observed on large sequences?"
- If someone asked me what Java and JavaScript have in common, the answer would be: "addEventListener". A Java-like camel-case method name which found its way into JavaScript (being W3C-compliant). That you can attach multiple listeners to a single node isn't a sufficient reason to mix two very different notations and reduce the readability of your code. Using addEventListener would mean that in order to stay consistent, your entire codebase has to switch to camel case, using sampleVariableName and sampleMethodName, which is ugly. In Java camel case is ok (why?), but in JavaScript it is one more thing to avoid. If you disagree on this point, you will once again have to work with another developer.
- If someone came and said "I'd like to have our company logo on each internal page where it belongs", why would someone avoid mechanically doing that? Imagine a visitor coming from a search engine, looking for a particular piece of content. Would you like them to know your company name before they found something valuable? Would you accept if your company name was associated with something they couldn't find, reducing the perceived value of your brand? You can be consistently wrong (placing the logo always top left) or you can be inconsistently right (placing the company name in the footer on less important pages). On this site, you can frequently see the latter; about the former you must insist (and be clear about the consequences).
- Left Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn a long time ago, never looking back. I remember how painful that was. Had to go through every single written bit on Facebook and individually click a delete button, because they didn't gave me the option to delete my entire feed with a single click. Took me more than 3 hours with several "almost on target" clicks (the feed was small). For some reason I couldn't remove my profile image, so I can still log into my account. Similarly, LinkedIn required me to give them a "good reason" why I leave. To me this appeared as if someone spoke from the height of a hill, so suddenly I was even happier for my initial decision. Remember, if a website instills in you the feeling that you are not among the appreciated/chosen ones, effectively making you unhappy, you are free to leave it anytime. I don't like to make myself easy to contact if either me or my work are not appreciated. Everyone who seeks convenient/empty/meaningless conversations with me is at the wrong place. If so, feel free to network with other people.
- If you don't use WordPress, you are not a web designer, they say, while offering you a website.
- It's not too hard to lose most of what you created as a result of your learning in the past 5+ years simply by using the wrong backup format (in my case tar.gz). It will fail once, but that will be exactly the difference between "great" and "shitty". That said, never trusting tar.gz once again. If for some reason you participated in the invention of this format or pushed it forward to its current level of acceptance, do not appear in front of me.
- The worst thing you can do is present your code in a box having black background. Insufficient contrast was and still is the main reason why so many websites aren't looking professional. As soon as someone decreases their monitor brightness, most of the code becomes immediately unreadable for them. Companies making this mistake include Codepen, plenty of blogs focusing on code, some O'Reilly book pages... Editors making this mistake include Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code... Not hard to discard any service based on that single reason.
- Solve first order linear systems with 2-3 unknowns bit.ly/2nhOr8C. Uses no external libraries; validated with Numpy.
- Groups bit.ly/2nPUuUH
- Monitoring system usage bit.ly/2ndJZJB
- Historic monthly average temperatures in some cities bit.ly/2n4MIDJ. The data comes from a large dataset provided on Kaggle. If you see a white vertical stripe, it means that in this period no measurements were made. To enlarge an image, open it in a new tab. With the first created plot, the initial idea was to try to fit a Gaussian mixture model to the data points, but this took too long to compute.
- Six ways to generate hex colors bit.ly/2nWPiuw. One more way could be by using token_hex from the new secrets module.
- Detecting a flower bit.ly/2mZIFrZ, food bit.ly/2nrqnTh and buildings bit.ly/2mZZ6Vd
- Price shift for product feature bit.ly/2mJjsRN
- Parsing some YouTube channels for the latest episodes bit.ly/2nzkrYG
- CSS grid from Pixabay images bit.ly/2mUXFaV. No external libraries used.
- On my test image, Guetzli achieved 18% smaller file size, but it took a long time (over 10 mins), which makes it less than ideal for photo collections. The memory usage frequently spiked over 500MB, where the image was 786kB. Personally, I don't find this acceptable.
- I like how similar the query and the response look in GraphQL. Having only minimal changes between them fully adheres to the "Don't make me think" rule.
- Four variants of line animations bit.ly/2mWy5nz, bit.ly/2mWwOwp, bit.ly/2mzhhQ4, bit.ly/2mPYfXe
- Image compression with singular value decomposition (SVD) bit.ly/2mQc1ut
- Tourist attractions in Cologne, Germany bit.ly/2mtx03B (slow). If you know how I could create only a single map, then clone it and just vary the marker position on it n times as opposed to creating n individual maps and making countless calls and requests, I will be glad to hear from you.
- Workforce jobs in the UK by region (1996-2016) bit.ly/2mrUy8j
- I think I just saw the lerp function defined twice in a popular library. The definitons were the same, but there was a "distance" of a couple of hundreds of lines between them. A person which focused only on a single piece of the code would therefore hardly notice such code duplication.
- A tiny bit mask checker bit.ly/2mFu30Q or all results on combinations of two simple masks (513Kb zip file, 3.4MB uncompressed) bit.ly/2nDOhrb
- Impressions from the Roman's surface bit.ly/2ml1aWb
- Impressions from the hyperhelicoidal bit.ly/2mkQ3wk
- Impressions from the Kuen's surface bit.ly/2mkxyrR
- CSS filters animated on a sample image bit.ly/2mkl0k5
- Some consumer trends in UK by category (1985-2016) bit.ly/2lSNYw0
- First Processing sketch from a long time bit.ly/2mPSieO
- "Color smoke" by Isura bit.ly/2mg3DSi
- Bessel functions as seen in the Sage documentation bit.ly/2ncwVFO
- Compiled some programs that I tend to use more frequently from source and noticed some small, yet unexpected difference in how they perform. Since this is a slow process, it's better to do it either on a fast machine or with a relatively small codebase.
- Looking at a large 250MB text file from NCBI Genbank (gbbct106.seq) for genes containing "ttacctag" took less than 10 seconds on a slow single core machine bit.ly/2mv52qT. Please, note that some of the files listed there may be copyright protected as stated in the "Genbank data usage" section bit.ly/2neCU9F.
- Sometimes improving a database query allows you to delete a good chunk of code dedicated solely for the transformation of the data in the right form.
- Know of an upcoming performance (theater, opera, operette) near you? Let more people know about it bit.ly/2mmM9WX. Here is the list: bit.ly/2lELYru
- Taking multiple results from a database randomly at once bit.ly/2my4WQb
- Total public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP bit.ly/2maJQ7x. Data about Greece and Luxembourg was not available.
- Satisfaction with the functioning of democracy in early 2015, according to Eurobarometer bit.ly/2lO1Z9z
- Children born in each federal state of Germany (2013) bit.ly/2mLBtT4
- Asset inequality within individual countries bit.ly/2mWsDPm. Lower scores are better. You can read more about the Gini coefficient as well bit.ly/2mLpwgo.
- Brutto salaries per month by sector in Germany (2014) bit.ly/2n58iGD
- Brutto salaries per hour in the federal states of Germany (2014) bit.ly/2mdaRJj. Since these are averages, it means than if you earned much less than the lowest level on the chart, you were practically in long-term danger of having to ask for social help.
- Population density in Germany (2014) bit.ly/2m8TjMD. The y-axis describes people/km2, which I forgot to indicate.
- Unit labor costs in Germany between 2007 and 2016, separated by industry, according to Destatis bit.ly/2mbLxn6
- An attempt to illustrate the central limit theorem bit.ly/2lsPDIL. Used to infer about the population at large based on a small number of samples.
- A side effect of putting 250 slides online is that clicking the next button takes three seconds each time until content appears. Minimal total presentation preview time becomes ≈12.5 minutes. In terms of time spent, loading a heavy website, which takes nine seconds would be equivalent to loading three slides.
- Convolution, activation and pooling, when repeated n times in the code do seem to conflict with the DRY principle. We still have for loops and upfront variable definitions.
- Box blur bit.ly/2mSwDAl. Do not worry about your eyesight yet.
- Making sense of sequences of values in code bit.ly/2mZqqSs. We could have changed the alpha parameter of the plot function as well.
- Selecting a discount rate bit.ly/2lKn5qj
- Breather surface bit.ly/2m3V3a9. Not sure, but I might have seen it somewhere before. Looks beautiful and has a nice parametrization, but it may require a fast machine to create it at such level of detail.
- Can't remember the name of a company whose payment I liked. No work then.
- "The entire history of Kickstarter projects, broken down by city" bit.ly/2mkLwhm has many beautiful (and interactive) bubble charts
- Association rule mining bit.ly/2mx83YK
- Came across the wonderful "Visual bibliography of tree visualization" bit.ly/2moMl9j
- Detail-rich flamechart from a recently visited website bit.ly/2lYG1Vh
- A smooth line passing through points bit.ly/2m2H46Z. Using the same idea to visualize China's GDP over time bit.ly/2l4KiqZ
- Font preview and comparison bit.ly/2mCnfjq
- Sample histogram in R bit.ly/2lMOMzl
- A quick, subtle pattern bit.ly/2mich6I
- "Scrolling has become widely accepted, even expected" This is problematic since endless pages rarely provide endless value. Putting too much noise and then asking the user to find the 10% relevant to them ignores the fact that they have to work very hard to do this filtering (a reader is not a machine). In the long term, no user can sustain such an effort. Longer pages tend to collect lots of prerequisites, so that reaching a point that was poorly explained (or improperly understood) could mean that the rest of the page that relies on it will suddenly be perceived of low or no value.
- Pre-generating SVG point coordinates with C++ bit.ly/2moO6Qx
- Many-sets intersection bit.ly/2mveyqW
- Deeply nested if-statements bit.ly/2mg2YnA
- Simple color changes as shapes are moving bit.ly/2mfnept
- Find which of the numbers don't play well with the others bit.ly/2l58BjF (uses D3.js)
- Reactive biathlon targets bit.ly/2kRhmCm
- If you animate just two properties on an element, why write transition: all 1s? Do you need to select all columns from a large database table (wasting lots of memory) when only two of them are of interest? Whenever you can, be more explicit.
- Finger-style multiplication by 9: print([int(str(i - 1) + str(10 - i)) for i in range(1,11)])
- Sector representation in the S&P 500 index bit.ly/2m8YQ5s
- Hint: If your company is failing with its "A" team of highly paid individuals, there is no reason to believe that every outsider should be willing to accept the penny rate.
- Contains the word "transform", but is not animatable bit.ly/2l0ykKB
- It seems that mogrify is not the best option for optimizing images coming from very heterogenous sources. Some will be left with disproportionately large sizes compared to other alternatives.
- Test if a matrix has an inverse bit.ly/2lXqeGY
- Test for projection and reflection matrices bit.ly/2l94INF
- Quick CSS image effects bit.ly/2kApKGj
- Dimming all other elements but the hovered one can be visually irritating when a big part of the screen needs to be repainted. The alternative is to apply the effect only to the hovered element (as usual), which reduces both the number of elements touched and the area that needs the repaint. Remember that in many cases good design may seem boring.
- Possibly one of the most important CSS files I have ever seen bit.ly/2m8xpb4. The levels of depth are majestic.
- Changes in colors and shape bit.ly/2kz63im. Light and dark shades are used here instead of different hues, which would have been more obvious.
- Another way to see population by country bit.ly/2kHqYed
- Yield from different crops in Romania between 2007 and 2014, according to FaoStat bit.ly/2lSp9Ae (log scale, cropped from top and bottom). A fairly interesting plot with lots of variability (and unfortunately overlapping labels). Maize yield was slightly problematic in 2012, but recovered since then. Between 2011 and 2012 there was a dramatic reduction in hazelnut yield, which persisted until 2014. Yield from anise, badel, fennel & corriander (combined category) as well as sugar beet is slightly growing whereas the yield from blueberries remains steady over time. The plots for other countries are different depending on what they grow, but the yields in well-developed ones (like Germany, the Netherland etc.) vary much less over time. Another interesting observation is that sugar beet is very often high-yielding relative to the other crops, which may partially explain why sugar is so ubiquitous in our food.
- Public libraries in Chicago bit.ly/2lQSsTD
- speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesisUtterance('Thank you for using this website!'))
- The University of California has a beautifully designed, responsive website (bit.ly/2kqXar0, 2.9MB), although some images could have been smaller in dimension and/or size. When new content appears, the boxes get rearranged, which may not be what the visitor expects. Using animation to fix layout is rarely preferable over remembering the last know state and following the established order. When the new content is first shown, some time is needed to calculate the new box positions. Meanwhile the reader may see partial content overlap (bit.ly/2lQlsYD).
- Math processing error bit.ly/2kKRqV9
- Castles in Germany bit.ly/2lFZkTL (2.6MB). The source of the images is again Wikipedia. There are many castles without description, which means that this list is incomplete. Many photos have been taken with old cameras (some are still from 2003, almost 15 years later).
- Castles in France bit.ly/2kl3i3R (Warning: 3.4MB!). Usually I don't do this.
- Forgot to mention that it seems to be true that reading a dictionary can help us discover some new ideas when exposed to a large variety of things/concepts.
- After a month of work I must admit that I have failed to complete the dictionary in a reasonable amount of time. I greatly overestimated the speed at which I can read, understand and re-type a given text. So I labeled this last version 0.62 to indicate the percentage of work done (and in need of further doing). Currently 19008 words and their meanings are included in a 3.2MB of written text (bit.ly/2lDs1g7). Despite my best effort, if I continued, another two weeks would be needed to finish, which is far too much time to allocate (and psychically exhausting). But the main takeaway is the same as before: we can retrieve the meaning of any word, practically instantly, on a very slow machine even from a large dictionary (see the video). This was the point that excited me initially to try to gather as much data as possible to demonstrate how scalable this idea could be.
- Having to look up words in a dictionary by turning pages can be quite slow. Fortunately, in 2017 the response can be instant bit.ly/2jjseYn. Since the content is copyright protected, creating your own application means that it is for personal use only.
- Gaussian blur of a photo bit.ly/2j4uUqa
- The window of opportunity is now closed.
- I will be available in #dummerAugust on chat.freenode.net in the next one hour to answer any questions you might have.
- A beautiful book on fractals by Jeffrey Ventrella (freely available) bit.ly/2iBG0C8. Could give you many visualization ideas.
- Minimum transportation cost bit.ly/2iacsPy
- Price index and total household expenditure on alcohol in the UK bit.ly/2j1c84R. In the last 20 years total expenditure grew almost 6 times, while price grew over 3 times. Drinking is not only bad for your health, but also for your wealth.
- Anno 1440 bit.ly/2jyLvFG
- Different types of means of two numbers bit.ly/2iX59do
- Klein bottle bit.ly/2i3Qwpj
- Waves bit.ly/2i69CpQ
- Cissoids bit.ly/2jidnto
- Another interesting 3D function bit.ly/2jhUFSF
- Comparing the overhead of storing strings separately vs. in a vector (C++) bit.ly/2iWCQvR. This difference seems to be even more pronounced than the one I observed in PHP.
- Test if matrix is a sudoku bit.ly/2jqfQpE
- Differentiating a matrix holding functions bit.ly/2joG0te
- Spiral-like shape using modified Fresnel integral bit.ly/2jfFYQj
- Hollow markers interrupting a line bit.ly/2ioz4rD. I saw this style in a presentation and decided to recreate it.
- Plot of the function sin((x/16)*y) * cos((y/16)*x) bit.ly/2i2xZER
- Almost every time I think about showing multidimensional data, the radar chart pops up in my mind. Fairly constrained thinking.
- Predicting user-item ratings based on data from friends bit.ly/2iPAbBI
- Explore function outputs for a given input bit.ly/2i1zSFb
- Checking whether a number is prime with Wilson's theorem bit.ly/2hZYC0K
- Correlation and covariance bit.ly/2iXRfoP
- Variants of Airy functions (as seen in the GSL docs) bit.ly/2hXCDEr
- Not touching Visual Studio Code anymore. Reason: configuratorial complexity.
- The lower envelope of multiple functions bit.ly/2hQFHGU
- The binary representation of a number bit.ly/2hQ63cl
- Joining two matrices on a common column vector bit.ly/2iFwqkB
- The sinc and the comb function bit.ly/2iwuydu
- Calendar of web conferences 2017 bit.ly/2iL0Jnb is another view of the post "A guide to 2017 conferences" by Sarah Drasner bit.ly/2hNe4ig. For the most up-to-date information, visit the last link.
- A sample layout generator output bit.ly/2j0jTsF. The box alignment isn't perfect, since there is no way to know in advance how many boxes would fit in a row. Depending on that number, the box width must be different to achieve perfect alignment, which would require additional styles. Here the boxes on each line are restricted to be of equal height. Doesn't use CSS grid.
- Material densities bit.ly/2iSTqJH
- Happy New Year with some arc mosaics bit.ly/2ij5s1Q
- Hue-lightness by maximal, constant saturation bit.ly/2iiCteu
- An interesting edge detection method bit.ly/2hD4kXN
- Wondering how many people see the content they have created for the web from a tf-idf perspective. The results bit.ly/2igk2XO may not be what we expect even if we knew that repeat keywords receive lower weights.
- US Federal Holidays 2017 bit.ly/2iprdxk
- Visually confirming that the number of possible triangulations of a convex n-gon follows the Catalan numbers bit.ly/2hvKbhv. Here n varies from 2 to 14.
- Publishing online-only documentation of your software product consisting of hundreds of individual links waiting to be clicked reveals that your understanding of the web platform is lacking. Skip the work with the web designer once and see people losing interest in your product.
- Generated first audio noise with matrices. Great to see this possible.
- Estimated capacities of some minerals by country (2014) bit.ly/2hwM4O7. Our resources are finite, which is why we shouldn't produce irresponsibly just because we can. This figure shows that we are depending on each other to have access to them since they are not universally available. The depletion of a resource at one place isn't just a problem of that particular country, but something that concerns us all.
- Items switching hands bit.ly/2itwxNf
- R2 score for evaluating regression bit.ly/2irJPtG
- Watched Rio (2011) by Blue Sky animation studios, featuring two blue parrots in love, one of which couldn't fly. The number of people who worked on this movie was quite impressive.
- 2016 NBA player performance according to the dimensions minutes played, total rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, personal fouls and points bit.ly/2huMTbC. The best scoring players of each team are labeled. The cluster at the top seems to include players who were active only for a short duration. Visualized using t-SNE with subsequent standard scaling of the data, obtained from basketball-reference.com.
- Incremental PCA for large datasets bit.ly/2hpyYC3
- Extract patches from an image bit.ly/2ian2TA
- Growing your own Christmas tree bit.ly/2hqozrv
- Split-sort-merge bit.ly/2hWVEKA
- Periodic function execution bit.ly/2hEPYlA
- Cold December nights require elves and lights bit.ly/2hoTl3V
- Querying named tuples bit.ly/2i6X99L
- It takes only three lines bit.ly/2i5ju7n
- I never knew that a Gaussian mixture model can be a powerful data generator once trained on existing data (handwritten digits) bit.ly/2i0YmN3. Had to switch the GMM class for the GaussianMixture class because of the warnings. Then the sample method no longer accepts random_state as argument and returns two values (X, y) instead of one (data_new). Once fixed, everything works nicely.
- Between the notes bit.ly/2inThgT
- An attempt to classify butterflies bit.ly/2ifMycR
- Fast data retrieval by key bit.ly/2hVsedx that should work well with very large datasets.
- Another time seeing an entire page with "math processing error" statements coming from MathJax. Not a beautiful view.
- Image filter kernels as defined in PIL bit.ly/2gUWLX4
- Is there anything you would wish to see on this website in 2017? Would be nice to hear about that.
- Backlog of transactions bit.ly/2i1baWL
- System throughput and average normalized turnaround time bit.ly/2gP4pao
- Enneper's minimal surface bit.ly/2hR3zWN. Possibly not the smoothest one you could find.
- The error function, also known as "erf" bit.ly/2huGm00
- The symbols of all playing cards bit.ly/2gKCKpd
- Had to use one of those touch-screen systems with 14 different options to choose from. After standing in front of it for a couple of minutes and reading through them, I couldn't assign my case clearly to one of them, so I went back to information and before I finished my ques... "it's number two!". I was grateful to hear that, but at the same time I was wondering why a well-developed electronic system would need to have constant human support when potentially millions have been poured into it. If my question was to be expected, then imagine how many other people have wasted their time trying to understand this system and at the end interrupting other people's workflow. It was nice to have a waiting queue with a number assigned to your case, but the numbers were appearing on a big screen randomly all over the place, so I didn't knew in advance in which segment of the board my number could appear. The result was that I needed to constantly compare my number against the entire set of shown numbers, which after a while has started to exhaust me. The additional blinking of the lights could have contributed to that as well. My point here is that we can always do better.
- Comparing matrix decomposition times of various methods on a 1000x1000 matrix bit.ly/2gCV1Vw. Cholesky decomposition is not always available (matrix needs to be positive definite).
- Example of finding the median node with the highest closeness centrality bit.ly/2hjp4mw
- Which day of the week was it? bit.ly/2hBzUAE
- Adjusted close stock price of some companies in the last 3 years bit.ly/2hd3nnF
- Exploring San Francisco's data on crime bit.ly/2gqdXIz
- Progressively increasing scrolling speed seems like a nice idea until your users find out that they can't easily reach selected parts on the page without sufficient Fingerspitzengefühl.
- Check the battery charge level on a mobile device bit.ly/2h4tafc. Our software must act responsibly when the user's machine is tired. We need to be able to scale down computation if we notice that it is not desirable at the moment.
- Eartquakes last month bit.ly/2gDhHm9. Works fine locally, but not on this website, so I made a short video.
- Pairwise distances in 7D on a heatmap bit.ly/2gRXITC
- In-place manipulation of matrix elements to simulate broadcasting without external librarie