- Didn't know that linden was something of a "last hope" for some bees to find nectar (where also the competition is tough). Seeing a handful of dead bees having found no food under such trees is discouraging. Learned about plants which could serve as valuable additions to their diet: snowdrop, crocus, daffodil, daisy, thyme, mint, borage, coriander, sage, chives, lemon balm, clover, lavender, ivy, Buddleia, artichoke, Calluna, globe thistle, viper's bugloss.
- Something I learned from a heavy visualization about the building ages in Amsterdam bit.ly/2ZaJU9w ↗ is that the more one approaches the center, the more heterogenous the construction years seem to become.
- Looked at premium flavor cakes by "Bobbette & Belle" bit.ly/2Hcve3A. If money was not of concern, I'd probably select the 10" version.
- Estimated number of trees, which can be planted on a site of known dimensions bit.ly/2Hc3EDq. Takes in account the space required for a small house and a vineyard. The case where slightly less than half of the tree radius remains in the plot of the neighbor has not been considered here.
- Only good payments allowed me to continue doing meaningful work. Work that I like and you like. Every time this wasn't possible, elements of that work were left on the sides, unrevealed.
- Learned that letting leaves fall on PV panels can descrease their output. It's not only dust/sand/particles which need to be cleaned. You could think of the cover area of a single leaf of average size to understand the problem. Wind may be able to both blow them away or bring them back over the panel.
- Same blocks in shift and palette transition bit.ly/2H9Zr30
- Can't even measure this thing bit.ly/2Z6pePL. Used the ruler on the monitor instead.
- Fairly simple to create yourself a page with all used books you have and the prices at which you seek to sell them. You may have collected them by the hundreds, while still rarely opening them. Why waste time to post them on a separate platform one by one?
- Tried to experiment with a mathematical definition of a polarization filter I saw in a paper, but instead I kept freezing buildings bit.ly/2Z6hXiR. The effect looks as if taken from a fairy tale.
- HBR Ideacast will soon reach 700 episodes bit.ly/2Z5vZS4 ↗. If you remember the demo from 01.07.2017, you have probably seen that it had 583 podcasts. This means that they seem to follow a relentless weekly schedule bit.ly/2Z8ZTEI
- Saw several schematics of rail stations in Germany today (e.g. Hamburg Hbf bit.ly/2Z3JWQo ↗). To be fair, it is hard to understand what is going on here. There are far too many pictograms and the diagram is so big that I can't possibly see both the signs on the left and their proper descriptions on the right at a readable scale. Also not sure when the diagram was created—it could be from several years ago since there is no timestamp. Perhaps it is intended for print, but would it then be easier to read? Reminds me of a quote I saw yesterday that the map reflects the ''culture" of its creator. If you could design it (or the entire series) differently, what would you change? Is it possible to place two diagrams next to each other and determine for sure which rail station has a larger physical area, a bigger gross area available to shoppers or a smaller number of seats available to the waiting? What is known about the reachability of these places by other travel means (metro, bus, tram, car, bike, pedestrian) and the walking distances between stops? Which rail stations were connected with the longest total average delays (across all destinations) and which destinations at each station with the longest individual delays?
- Simple idea: What is the ratio between the amount of water needed to grow a watermelon and the amount of water it manages to retain? Is there such a sort, which requires less water and retains more of it? Or could irrigation be random in the hope that anything grows? You might come across the term "precision agriculture".
- Suppose a person delivering the post travels a bike with a big bag full of letters on the back. Could you estimate how much that bag could possibly weigh, assuming an average number of letters in need to be delivered for that day, the bag surface area and material properties? The combined weight of bike and bag? How many calories could this person be burning in a day of delivering the mail over a given total route distance?
- Can you estimate how many people in your surroundings practice your profession? Could you gather enough of the right observations to support indirect inference? A useful skill to have, since it enables you to estimate how easy a client could switch to a competitive service. If you are in a broad market with many "me too" competitors, you likely cannot expect much until you find better ways to be different.
- If a thermos loses x degree (°C) in time y (s), does it mean it will lose n*x degrees in n*y seconds? Probably not. But getting an overview of several functions at once enables you to see which one has more favorable properties in this context. Perhaps there is a specific material which keeps the temperature high and relatively stable over long time intervals.
- If you are concerned with the living cost in another city, you can get in contact with potential employers there and ask them about what they do and their typical salary range in advance of traveling to this place. If they refuse to answer, are very vague or not polite at all, you'd be better by not making this transition. The idea "I'll go and see" is a sign that you don't know exactly what you are looking for, which makes you an easy target for manipulation or abuse by profit seekers.
- A game that asks for certain minimum system requirements expects that the performance score of each subsystem is above some threshold. Such a system can be quantified, which means that there is a way to compare games and analytically explore which of them are more playable relative to their entertainment factor and which instead push the hardware bar higher, attempting to reach a less constrained audience to which the game can be sold more easily.
- If you compare straight line distances and DB ticket prices for the pairs Frankfurt-Munich and Berlin-Hamburg, you may get the impression that northern travelers get ≈8.77% more kilometers for the same unit price. Similarly, if you pick the pairs Dresden-Leipzig and Cologne-Duisburg, you may get the impression that eastern travelers get ≈13.13% more kilometers for the same unit price. But do you think such spontaneous probes are sufficient to claim that an euro buys a traveler most kilometers on the east, then on the west, north and south?
- A photo of a excercising person could prompt you to imitate spontaneously. Work environment.
- Suppose you see the label "summer collection". Do you keep track of how it differs from the one available last year or you prefer to extend your wardrobe instead? The small details matter and being a good observer means that you understand them well, know why they exist and see concrete ways to improve them.
- Ever heard that you were replaceable anytime? Someone wants to exert power, but you deserve better. Time to cut those toxic connections.
- With web design it is fairly similar too. Plenty of people explain you what is right or wrong so you can choose their service and stick to it independent of whether it is good or bad for you. And if you fully believed the story they told you, you are unlikely to see the outcome from a more critical perspective. As a client you end with a service provider who rides on your beliefs.
- Think about it: if a laptop is a relatively expensive device, how many convincing photos or titles of the type "all perfect" can they allow themselves to include on a single page in order to make you buy? The bigger the seller's upside, the more striking the words and the more stunning the visualizations (for instance how airflow propagates through the case).
- Interesting how Lenovo wants to make you believe that by buying a laptop, you almost save the price of one bit.ly/2HbPSAF. Did a website inform you that as a teacher your schedule was "full" and in order to signal your availability to students again, you needed to pay a 3-month "abbonnement"? Did you go to a store to ask a question about smartphone acoustics, but left told that the tint is already scratched and the case has become bumpy? You can see the subtle ways in which people try to control your perception, because there is a lot of money to be made from that.
- Low payment usually can't get you to risk me.
- Saw a sewing machine yesterday and thought I wouldn't know how to use it. Or which properties distinguish a great one. Singer has computerized sewing machines, which theoretically sounds more interesting. However, how does one choose the right one among the 215 built-in stitches? The only things I have ever stitched together were small pieces of code. The bigger pieces were usually not worth the effort relative to the payment received.
- Unclear whether the ur-tables at "La Cave" have such blue slots to protect and prevent spillage of the sweetened brown beverages... (No need to tell me that the blinds don't work properly.)
- Ran a script on the tech specs of ASUS routers for which I was able to find prices. The top five models it liked were "Blue Cave", "ROG Rapture GT-AX11000", "RT-AX88U", "RT-AC5300", "RT-AC68U". "Blue Cave" has a beautiful design and very nice capabilities relative to the rest, especially considering its price of $180. It also has lots of positive reviews on Amazon (didn't know), where a user claimed that it offered connectivity over an area of 3500ft2. The "Rapture" is the most expensive ($415) and has the same highest Mbps speeds as "RT-AX88U" ($350), but supports connecting twice the devices on the 5Ghz band (if I understood correctly). "RT-AC5300" ($250) (not to be mistaken with "ROG Rapture GT-AC5300") also supports the same level of connectivity, yet at speeds comparable to the "Blue Cave". "RT-AC68U" ($150) starts to become more basic, with speeds of 600 and 1300Mbps on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, offering 3 channels on each.
- When you type "11.8 x 7.4 x 2.38 inch in cm" in Google, you might expect to see all three numbers automatically converted to cm, while keeping the "x" letters intact. But they get multiplied (despite "x" being different from "*") and then converted, resulting in "527.866864 centimeters". Not really saving you time.
- Can you list all expected conditions under which it might fail? A person going to the beach for a bath may not know the weather conditions prior to their traveling, so they could benefit from an infographic using real-time data, thus saving their time. For instance, it could rain or be very windy; the sea might be excited; it may be warm at the waterfront, but too cold in the water; it may be warm in the water, but too cold outside; the sunshine could be too strong and irritate sensitive skin when exposed over long hours. If someone had the exact contours of several beaches, using data from few carefully positioned sensors probing water and air on each coud enable them to render the areas in green, yellow and red so that everyone knows whether to travel on that day and rely on potentially false hopes. Simple idea that is so rarely implemented in practice.
- Roads, bike lanes, parks and libraries in New Orleans, Louisiana bit.ly/2H78l1p. As you can see, there are many libraries, which appear very close to bike lanes. You might think that this is a proof of good library accessibility by this travel mode, but this is not necessarily so. The problem is that the bike segments appear moderately fragmented and often not sustained over long distances. This is most visible at the south-west and north-east. Ideally, they could be extended and connected together. Only one library on the north-east seems to be located at a big park; one at the south is very close to another green area.
- Exploring the menu at "Pizza Peppino" bit.ly/2H6VL2b
- "Nussschnecken mit Mandeln" bit.ly/2H8a9Hb ↗ or products by "Schäfer's Bäckerei" bit.ly/2Z2NjXS ↗ could start you with your own demo.
- Total energy per unit price for products at one "Junge Bäckerei" branch bit.ly/2H83z3r. The script seems to like "Hanseatenbrot Nr. 1" most.
- Läderach chocolate has interesting choco peaks bit.ly/2Z9QNYI ↗ for people who climb high.
- Looked at the SPIEGEL list of book bestsellers bit.ly/2YZizH6 ↗
- "Noone trusts a skinny cook." Made me smile, thank you.
- Suppose a blind person comes across the packaging of a product you made. Can they "read" what it is supposed to contain only by touch? Accessibility for all.
- Could an organization attempting to work with a very high number of external partners have high communication and employee costs (to keep and nurture these connections)? If all these partners publish for it, do they have to be paid for this? Do they need to have a special equipment to be able to produce such research and who pays for it? Can they publish an infinite stream of ideas? All these questions have implications on the price of papers even when most people would prefer to see them free. Is it possible to have a book of papers at a bulk price, which discounts the effort of all individual contributors? Perhaps yes, but is this fair to them or stimulating their future effort? Such a book is a collection of inputs from potentially hundreds of people; should it then be priced as much as a book written from a singular mindset? Probably not. Before we seek to criticize an organization's pricing model, we have to look deeply and in detail what comprises it. Perhaps the model is connected with high aspirations which are harder to quantify.
- Want free software, free papers and free restaurant meals? Don't worry, none of these is likely to happen. The true question is where your priorities are.
- Haven't seen an apparel store which shows precise dimensions of clothing pieces. You could think of this as attention to detail. What the visitor sees instead is a piece with a certain "letter" size (at unclear scale), where it is really hard to tell from the image whether it could fit well someone's arms, waist or belly. This might help to sell more items in the short term, but is a form of disservice in the long term. Especially online stores allowing item returns could find this useful as a means to reduce their "sunk" shipping costs (and corresponding environmental impact). This assumes that every client has a meter and the means to determine the percentage of deviation from the truth.
- Someone creating embrodery or handmade pictures could also sell a publication showing images of their art and the corresponding prices. Serves both to promote and sell the work (if a website is not an option or appears too expensive).
- Time to start asking ourselves what percentage of the problems we have today were created by "fast" workers on "pay-per-output" contracts, leaving a trail of mess behind themselves. Because it is unrealistic to expect "slow" (and slowly paid workers) to come after and be willing to stand for their mistakes.
- If someone's goal was to create a publication of all artefacts they have produced so far (for instance to show a "portfolio" in front of a potential employer), this would simply take too long. And living in the past as opposed to in the now (creating more work) is not a good use of the time either. Whoever is interested, they are free to explore the artefacts one-by-one, exactly as they were created.
- Depending on the specifics of your project, I may choose to work on it or not. If you didn't ask, the response was clear.
- Perhaps the easiest way to monetize content today is to package it as a book. This is unfortunate since a book can take several years to write and still not bring you enough sales to justify the time loss. Additionally, if it would take a reader (say) 60 hours to read 800 pages priced at $40, this means they cannot expect to get high value on average per hour spent. Some materials are written merely to keep the mind busy, with no clear end goal or a "why" explanation. Now imagine a photographer creating a photo-book. They have high overall travel costs, but apart from that it is relatively cheap to put a photo on a sheet of paper and explain it in few words. A photo book does not require the same level of effort as (say) a scientific publication. It can be produced much faster, so selling such books becomes much more appealing, especially when the alternative is making the photos available online at zero cost. But can the sales of such photo book offset the travel costs when plenty of free photos already exist and plenty of travelers have already seen or have published the same?
- "50 of the world's best desserts" cnn.it/2YZo0WF ↗. Very nice photos and variety, especially when you have forgotten about most of these. My specific taste does not seem to like creme brulee and tiramisu that much.
- Transforming a triangle in two ways bit.ly/2H6Jpah. Didn't know the formula and hesitated to test it, but now I see that the worries were unfounded.
- Opened the freely available operating manual for "ELAC Debut" speakers and saw a geometric description of the recommended configuration bit.ly/2Z2PCda
- The eukalyptus must grow faster than the koalas, otherwise there would be a problem. Heard that it was used in product design, because of its property to grow faster compared to other trees. As long as the koalas and other animals aren't threatened, this is probably fine.
- Some waterfalls with known relative drop height in Canada bit.ly/2Z5yp2N. Uses data from Wikipedia to obtain an approximate picture. It is neither complete (does not include all waterfalls), nor completely accurate (some may have wrong coordinates). Would you agree with the pattern that higher waterfalls are more frequently seen in West Canada?
- The rate of mishandled checked bags at US airports as of May 2019 was said to be slightly above half percent. Unclear whether "mishandled" could be interpreted as "lost" here (which I was interested in). Would also be nice to know how European airports compare to this.
- Do you find the search in online catalogs easy and does the product appear immediately after typing few letters?
- Are there stores which use signals to route people to the right waiting queue which has the most favorable combination of number of people waiting and total number of goods on the band? Could save shoppers from having to look through all queues each time.
- Sometimes the press is so careful not to include a possible truth that could spell trouble ahead, that they remove it shortly thereafter (likely forcing the author). The effect is that we may never learn it. Not what I understand under "freedom of expression". And it feels incorrect to hide things of general interest.
- The downside of looking into how expensive a ring can get is that everywhere you go on the web, you see ads of it. And because the assumed upside is big, they can allow themselves to tickle your senses an infinite number of times.
- Cranium-Geranium. Something living and thriving in stretching the elastic capacity.
- Data structure: a skiplist of companies.
- But enjoyed the mathematical ways of showing that the McDonals's statement "over 250 billion burgers served" was found plausible and the estimated number of killed aniamals per day to satisy meat desires and the number of trees cut to produce a single issue of a newspaper with very high circulation.
- Would you like to experience a tourist tour around the slaughterhouse to see how the burger patties are made? Not to worry about the red spills on your blouse—they can be treated with "Ariel" later.
- Do they keep the cleanliness at the local grocery store at the limit of what you would consinder inacceptable, having learned the preference of hundreds of people who were there before you? Could there be a difference in the cleanliness between stores in several cities due to varying customer preferences/lifestyles?
- Saw a seat plan of the National Opera & Ballett in Amsterdam bit.ly/2H48nai, but manual counting would be too slow and an estimate not easy. Yet, symmetry could help to avoid doing some work twice.
- Not sure, but I think the design of the Whole Foods website has changed since the last time I saw it. Now there is a nice product grid with professional photos depicting fresh-looking produce. Liked the two-level type hints of the search box, letting you type few letters, click on a city that shows up and then once again on a branch address of choice, keeping the menu in-place by changing only the context. My idea was to find out more about any price differences of the various types of berries bit.ly/2Z0OtTw ↗, but they were poorly represented in the list of fruits. Perhaps there is a better place where I should have looked instead. Saw that AmazonFresh has "berries" category, but it remains empty informing me that the service is not available in my country.
- Almost every country in Europe has its own language. Quite a barrier to the freedom of communication, people and knowledge exchange. Especially obvious when you find open data, which you can't even translate properly, so you have to forget about trying to make use of it.
- Things that went right and wrong during with detection of bicycles through the smart streetlights in San Diego bit.ly/2GYlUAc ↗
- Wouldn't attempt to rotate aminoacids in 3D for the same reason I wouldn't train a neural network. That said, don't come to me with heavy computational tasks. Prefer borrowing computing power from Amazon, for instance.
- Finished reading an interview with an ornithologist, where he explained why most birds must be fed more actively in summer. Many birds seem to have hard time finding food, especially with reduced insect populations (on.natgeo.com/2H0MXKV ↗). In winter they were said to stay mostly at one place, not wasting much energy, which means that by then they must have accumulated enough as storage. But in summer, to obtain their food, they may have to fly long distances, which was said to be physically exhausting (flight mode said to take 25x the energy of walk mode). So they must be able to find enough sources of food and in good quantity in order to survive. Many cities have a fine for feeding birds, but perhaps it is not wise to put the more common and assertive doves and the threatened arts under a common denominator. He recommended using feeders with grate (at your garden), where only the smaller birds can pass through. Was also surprised that most birds were said to be unable to digest whole grains, but would have been grateful to have their food smaller and softer.
- Didn't know an interesting relationship between the radius of a big circle r, inscribed in a triangle (touching its three sides) and the radii of three smaller circles (r1, r2 and r3) inscribed so as to touch two sides and a point on the big circle (not intersecting it):
r = sqrt(r1*r2) + sqrt(r2*r3) + sqrt(r3*r1). - CNN video has a nice one on the impressive Dubai's dancing fountain (900 feet long, fires water 500 feet in the sky), which I saw for the first time. Liked the idea of choreography of the water streams and the way they moved left and right. Noticed that "The Dubai Fountain" is present among the shops in the Dubai Mall, so the last might be somewhere close. My machine counted 966 unique brands present there.
- In case a dm-employee recommends you to use Ajax, you probably asked for a WC cleaning detergent.
- Do you buy face care cosmetics from "dm"? If so, do you think there could be a possible difference in the prices of products for facial cleansing, day cream, night cream, eyecare cream and anti-aging cream? According to your perception, how would you rank these from most to least expensive when they are all intended for face care? Exactly what I tried to find out bit.ly/2YVJiEo. As you can see, most products were in the "day cream" subcategory, but the median price here was equivalent to the one in the "night cream" subcategory (7.95€). Only anti-aging and serum have a higher median of 9.95€. Lipcare products were much cheaper than eyecare products. Face masks tended to be cheaper than facial cleansers.
- And if this is not enough, here is another brand with combined total weight of 3kg bit.ly/2GZq7mS ↗. Although the blocks are whole, I saw an image where the partition contained several piece sizes, some of which were a bit small bit.ly/2GWZOOw ↗. But even so, the crackpropagation may work fine.
- First time seeing a 1kg dark chocolate with hazelnuts from Piemont bit.ly/2YW4Il1 ↗. Appears much better than a tiny piece of "Schogetten".
- A mirror, which appears to have been broken into three pieces, could have three different magnification levels assigned to them. All-in-one functionality.
- The idea of selecting the 16 biggest cities in Germany, finding the distances and DB fares between each pair and highlighting from blue to red the directions having highest cost per kilometer traveled sounds nice and is certainly doable. But I'd have at minimum 16 x 3 (city + coords) and 120 x 4 (pair + dist + price) tables for a total of 528 entries excluding any other necessary code, the time it would take to retrieve the information from the DB site (HTTP requests) and plotting time. You probably understand that effort like this can't be free.
- This menu could use some spacing bit.ly/2YXvv02. Resist the temptation to put everything you could think of on a single row.
- Have you heard about PTH Group? Brands in their portfolio: Calvin Klein, Esprit, G-Star Raw, Levi's, Marc O' Polo, More & More, Tom Tailor, Tommy Hilfiger. Would have had a trouble to distinguish that these serve the same end.
- Distribution of the prices for shoes at "Blue Tomato" bit.ly/2GX6Wdv. Who said there aren't blue tomatoes?
- Curious about the benefits of integrating cocos inside a mattress. Would probably start "mining" it.
- Does your team use a food delivery service (bulk order) to save itself time?
- An article mentioned something about "mistaking beauty for truth".
- Easy, cheap, convenient, regrettable.
- You could plan the stepping stones, for instance. In chess, you place your figures on a supportive chain that allows you to get closer to the opponent's king and give it checkmate. You may have to start small by placing a pawn first and then noticing how it suggests placing another figure (supported by it) foward-left or -right to it. So if you can, you set a knight on the next stepping stone. Now that knight allows you to look further "unlocking" other possibilities to move ahead and place another figure on one of the fields it supports (see the "take foot, throw high" post as inspiration). And so on. As the chain expands, its power and impact grow and it can no longer be broken in a single move. The participating figures might also start to cover each other in strange ways—for instance, if an opponent seeks to attack one of the figures, they can't take it, because there is suddenly another one standing in the way. In a sense, we could see programming as attempting to connect several chains of stepping stones: you step over variables (not to be confused with debugging here) to obtain some end result (the return value of a function). But only you can decide how the chain of variables will be connected and where it will lead. It has to be constructed in a way that is meaningful and useful, in the big picture of all chains. But having several unrelated chains evolve in very different directions makes them harder to unite into a bigger whole. They need to have some common stepping stone (a cohesive concept) to be possible to merge them into a bigger network that has impact in all directions as opposed to only one or few.
- Noticed something in the latest IKEA catalog: the pages tend to have design optimized for overall harmony. For instance, when several photos are used on the same page, they often have either the same or very similar dominating color palettes. Additionally, you might see a case where a big picture is presented and below it two smaller ones (half its width), which appear to have "inherited" some colors from their parent and made them dominant. This looks close to using a color filter, but only for the backgrounds and not the main objects. Also interesting was the image with depth-ordered objects, where distant ones had more muted colors which became progressively richer as other ones approached the camera. Placing a red and yellow images next to one another probably helps only when one wants to be striking. The idea with standing in front of a mirror with "take time to reflect" made me smile.
- Wikipedia entry on "Global Financial Centers Index" bit.ly/2GVtOKF ↗
- As a kid used to crunch biscuits by "Gullón" bit.ly/2GU98m6 ↗ now and then, so I made a nutrient table bit.ly/2YX4kCQ. Tried only the galetta, fibra integral, and a tiny purple bag with cookies made from raisins. The last type was my favourite, but also much sweeter than the other two. The galetta is round, very thin and crisp, and had a mixed taste with some seeds. "Fibra integral" were thicker, rectangular and a bit sweet compared to the galetta. The health specialist at the local store explained that these were suitable for diabetics, which might give you an idea if you want to bring a smile on the face of an ill person you love.
- What makes you most alive? On your "last" day? Good reason to do more of it.
- Haven't seen LRDIMM modules, but the fact that one could have 1.3TB of such memory using only 127W is a very desirable property.
- The other day, I saw the following formula in a paper: predicted_wind_energy = -0.84 * temperature - 0.96 * air_pressure + 0.71 * wind_speed - 0.15 * wind_direction - 0.78 * precipitation - 1.02 * sunshine. The exact coefficients are not that important here, but the combination of variables used to describe an unknown, which illustrates well the beauty of mathematical modeling.
- Do you think most corporations have noise maps of their buildings and know where it is least likely to do meaningful work requiring deep concentration?
- You can learn a lot from associations even if unaware of it. Found SAE magazines recently and some curious details. Michelin's airless tire (50 patents) is made of aluminium, rubber and resin-impregnated fiberglass. Mercedes AMG made a four cyllinder engine having 421hp. The specific output of Ferrari SF90 Stradale is 192.27hp/l. The driving range of Nissan Leaf has increased to 321km. The software needs to account for material properties. Steering wheels can heat up left or right to inform the driver which maneuvers are risky. Speech recognition and AI in cars find increased usage. Also learned about Magna seats.
- "A bit late" is late. Can't cancel work-in-progress with other clients just to be able to serve you. In this case, you'll either have to wait until the current project is finished (in case you reach the point of approval) or seek another service to immediately initiate yours. For further detail, read the contact page carefully and understand it well before seeking contact.
- How much point pressure is needed to crack a laptop lid and display? Too little and it almost speaks about negligence in design. Is there anything that could be learned from the microstructure of the material?
- The National Association of Power Engineers (NAPE) has a very rich floorplan, which must have taken a lot of effort to design, given the large number of exhibitors.
- The shortest path you see on your map has been enabled by hundreds of thousands of data points about cities, road segments, real-time information about congestion, road maintenance and anything extra. But you could easily take this for granted and believe it wasn't anything special the next time you require service and forget about this. Just because something is already available doesn't necessarily make any subsequent effort on the same thematic easier or cheaper. Could you ask Google for their data?
- We heard about "providing not only the service, but also the infrastructure needed to scale access to it". Means that Aldi and Lidl have understood that building blocks at height brings them more clients (and keeps them close) when these have to take only an elevator to reach a store on the first floor. And I remember how long it took me to reach the Aldi in Ulm by walking. Does this mean someone is going to feel more alive by enabling a corporation to determine every aspect of how they live?
- Observing the approximate similarity surrounding the emblem on the front grill of a Huyndai Santa Fe bit.ly/2GSYiNn. Do you find that the numerous ovals (except emblem) could have been one idea smaller?
- Complex projects require payments involving complex numbers. No way-angle around this.
- Always felt that comments are a natural extension of an article. Why do I need to click on a link to make them appear (in case the infinite spinner ends)?
- Color transition cycle over square contours bit.ly/2GRMw5I. The chain of quadrats will have to wait.
- Upwards bit.ly/2GQQSdf
- Looking at a nice effect—a black box with transform: skew(-8deg) for its text, placed on top of a long green stripe, both in a wrapper having transform: skew(8deg). Since the box starts and ends slightly above the stripe, they both appear diagonally parallel with the text reading horizontally.
- "The yearly salary of an average programmer is now equivalent to running 1000 cores, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year." If humans are so expensive, you could fire everyone around you and buy yourself many thousands of cores. Would have been nice if one could bury incapability with cores. Whatever you use them for is completely irrelevant to me.
- An online store had promotional offers today. Goods on sale—memory cards. So let's see. The same 400GB card I wrote about is sold at 150€ today. Would have almost believed at the label "special offer" if I didn't trust only myself. Not that I ever planned to buy.
- "As the number of nodes increases, the work per node decreases." Would have been almost acceptable if it didn't lead to a linear decrease in payment per node.
- Made myself a simple plot of the download speeds in various countries as of June 2019. Visible that Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea have managed to set themselves apart from the rest.
- "The best landmarks are the ones that are prominent in all three categories—visual, cognitive, structural."
- Technically, it is possible to use images of fifteen different dimensions on the same website. But in the same way you don't use so many fonts or font sizes, it is probably not a good idea either. For instance, you could visit "China Daily" and count the number of visibly distinct image dimensions. You will see only few. Despite the large number of images, all of them adhere to strict sizing rules, likely described in a styleguide. Also notice how they try to balance, whenever possible, the areas that the images and their nearby descriptions occupy.
- Suppose you have placed different types of fish in a big aquarium or a small pond where they have plenty of space to move. Do all of them tolerate each other equally well? Which tended to move undisturbed most closely over time and which stayed apart during most of the experimental time? Was there a type which preferred swimming mostly at the center?
- Which opportunities do you see to apply machine learning to a volleyball game?
- If you preferred SanDisk memory cards and were only interested in read speeds, the 128GB ($19.99) or the 400GB ($62.99) versions of "SANDISK ULTRA microSD UHS-I CARD" could potentially serve you well (read: 100MB/s). If on the other hand you looked for fastest read and write speeds for the price, you could consider the 256GB or 512GB versions of "SANDISK EXTREME PRO CFAST 2.0 MEMORY CARD" (read: 525MB/s, write: 450MB/s), although these have corresponding prices of $399.99 and $599.99 (may vary in a store).
- Changed the data slightly to include Samsung's memory cards. Here, cards labeled only with "EVO" (as opposed to "EVO Select") did not have a write performance guarantee in their specifications. The first place took the 256GB version of "MicroSDXC EVO Select Memory Card w/ Adapter" as offering most (read: 100MB/s, write: 90MB/s) for the price ($36.99), whereas the 32GB version "EVO Plus" had the lowest score (write: 20MB/s). The "Endurance" series is water-resistent, but this comes paired with write speeds, which don't exceed 30MB/s.
- Looked at a diagram showing that April tends to be the least rainy month in Brussels, Belgium.
- New week calls for new challenges. If you have one and believe that speaking with me would benefit your project, feel free to propose it.
- How do you pick a radish among all existing types?
- BPIE quantified the effect of improved environment on the performance in schools and offices bit.ly/2GLaDDa, which I was able to organize in a table. We see that better daylight leads to a well-pronounced positive effect, yet overheating the office space by only 3℃ is capable of suppressing it.
- Ran a script on the specifications of Samsung's solid state drives (SSDs) as of today (04.08.2019) bit.ly/2YIkvUm, since I was confused about the naming scheme including numbers and labels like "EVO", "QVO" and "PRO" at the end. My idea was to look whether the numbers could tell how they differ. Unfortunately, the QVO models did not have power consumption and MTBF specified. Also, in the final ranking I did not consider idle power consumption (mW) as not all devices had such value assigned. Will not show it here, but only share some observations. At the top came all "SSD 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2" in order of decreasing capacity (2TB to 500GB). However, the difference between 2TB and 1TB was fairly small, suggesting the 1TB version ($229.99) as a sweet spot. After these alternated several "EVO" and "PRO" versions of the same, but without having the "Plus" label (good to have). At the end came all SATA III/mSATA devices (which were numerous) and they all had fairly similar performance, not differing significantly. A difference of 30MB/s in read speed is practically negligible considering speeds of up to 3500MB/s.
- Simple idea: You could use booking.com to capture hotel name, hotel address (allowing you to derive geocoordinates), hotel scores (on cleanliness, location, WLAN, breakfast, equipment, comfort, hotel personnel), number of reviews, room price for hotels in a city of your choice. Next, you create a 2D diagram, where instead of points you use hotel images (up to a certain, reasonable size depending on the context) and an index (allowing you, if needed, to uniquely identify the name) for each (lat, lon) pair. Bigger images could then correspond to hotels, which your script found to be more interesting choices. This way, you could see directly how the hotels you might prefer look from the inside (as a client) or seek specific details which make them stand out for customers (as a service provider). You could extend/adapt this as you see fit.
- Simple drawing of hexagon, squares and triangles bit.ly/2YEmlWh. You may notice that shapes like these could be 3D candidates. You could use a black pentagon surrounded by five white hexagons, for instance bit.ly/2GLw0US c
- A SIAM journal requests the right PDFs via Ajax (after capturing user data), effectively hiding their true URLs. While this practice is great for limited-access publications, it is bad for those with "FREE" access. Now I cannot visit all issues—usually having one free paper,—and programmatically extract only this small subset as this is made practically impossible. The only way is to move through each issue individually by making hundreds of clicks in total. This shows that putting several approaches under a common denominator rarely gives good results. If "free" works the same way as "paid", it might have been an afterthought.
- "The quality of the software is more important than the time it takes to achieve it." Not for me—time doesn't have rollback, only questionable software does. "Don't give the customer what they ask for; understand them and revolutionize their world." Sometimes the revolutions create more problems than they solve, so this too can't be generalized.
- Interesting that in the very early days, the founder of Delta Airlines brought home for dinner or sleep delayed customers the company had. This is called passionate customer service.
- Had an idea to plot the streets, buildings and contour of Orange County, California, but the enormous amount of data on building contours (&approx.674MB) defeated my machine. Willl leave this (and many other things) for the future, in case of having a faster one.
- Does your museum have a browsable online collection (accessible after paying a fee)? Most people can be physically only at a single place at given time. Museums that are more open to the international audience could see much more "visits" compared to the ones restricting themselves to a small area surrounding the museum.
- A very rough diagram of some cities in Denmark, according to their population bit.ly/2yBzHrz (Source: WorldPopulationReview). Made to serve as orientation aid only. Liked how Aalborg, Aarhus and Odense appear almost on a straight line, yet on the ground one has to make a small curve to reach the last one. The middle of the three has slightly higher population than the other two. Frederiksberg appears surrounded by Copenhagen, so I had to separate the overlapping labels.
- An EU flag which knows its code bit.ly/2Ztcy6L. Have a nice weekend!
- Saw a mountain on Etsy etsy.me/2ZrJpZn ↗ and experimented with my own bit.ly/2yxe6Az. Doesn't look even nearly as good. The peaks on both sides lying on gradually increasing/decreasing parabolas would have been nice to have.
- Median prices relative to population size and price distribution for real estate in several cities according to Zillow (02.08.2019) bit.ly/2ZsRoFx. Essentially took my day after data gathering, cleaning, writing scripts, looking at diagrams and getting the details right. The takeaway is that among the included 16 cities (considering ≈485 real estate offers for each), Seattle and Denver appear to have the highest median prices per unit area, whereas Houston seems to offer a good pool of affordable real estate and this still in a very big city, potentially offering lots of opportunities. Also liked how close Philadelphia and Phoenix appeared in the upper view.
- Interesting observation in an article at Citylab: "Prices are moving, but not people." Well, to a certain extent, opportunities determine whether people will move or not. If they don't move, it could mean that they don't find good opportunities, which enable them to cover at least their basic cost of living (ideally much more). The result affects both sides: the people don't advance their carreers and the opportunities aren't developed enough to appear more attractive.
- Building contours for Oakland, California bit.ly/2LUOCWv. There are two nearby circles to the south, perhaps you know exactly what they correspond to.
- Looked at some candle prices bit.ly/2LWURt0, but only the first few appeared to have the price range of a lightbulb. I don't need too much light at night (a good scent could be nice), but still some to see the keys and avoid the typos. The "Diptyque" was recommended twice, but at this price, one might prefer to visit the Frankfurt Opera instead. Was also thinking in terms of proportions: whether 10mins of flame burning, which reduce candle height by 2cm would mean that a candle height of 15cm has to last for 75mins. My assumption is that the more molten wax gathers at the top of the surface, the faster the candle would burn (so this may not hold), but without anything to measure with, this remains fiction. Perhaps you ran a chronometer and produced a plot of elapsed time (mins) vs. candle height (cm) for various models.
- Rarely coming to the idea of measuring the noodle-meters present on a plate as percentage of assumed total intestine length (m). Rarely consuming such food either.
- ~ Euro Meat(e). Unklar nur ob in der Form von Wurst, Schinken oder Speck. Von der Herkunft ganz zu schweigen.
- You might have seen the label "DLG-prämiert" on some foods in Germany. My assumption that they have an entire database of them turned out to be right bit.ly/317C4P3 ↗. You could look at the data and find potentially interesting brands in several categories of interest.
- Is there anything you want me to do to help you today?
- Liked the packaging of Chobani yogurts and the nutrition data next to each. Would take me too long to look at all of it, but if you want, you can.
- A hexagon from masked images of some animals bit.ly/2LTT7ka
- "In one day we had something which hasn't happened in Germany for 130 years." (last Thursday temperatures were higher than 40 degree at 20 different stations) Today: flood.
- Thankful to everyone who repeatedly visits this site and appreciates the information and services here. Takes me a lot of time to prepare everything properly and juggle between several browser tabs, files, formats and code modifications. The best I can hope for is that you find enough value in it.
- Took a brief look at the arrivals at the Heathrow Airport today bit.ly/2LUXr2v after finding that their website responded fairly quickly to requests (which enabled this). Among the 2334 flights, 139 arrived from New York, 92 from Edinburgh and 91 from Amsterdam. That Lisbon came before many other cities is quite interesting. British Airways was the most frequent airline, operating 17.78% of all arriving flights for the day. The distribution of flights by 5-min bins shows that the busiest times were 10:35 and 12:45, both registering 31 flights. Next closest were 07:45, 08:35, 09:00, 09:10, 10:00 and 10:20, all having 25 flights.
- How quickly could you come up with new items to sell, with the proper descriptions of each available item, with suitable blog posts and diagrams telling the stories you'd like to tell exactly in the way you want to tell them? How fast do you come up with the right code?
- Theaters, operas, cinemas, restaurants, concerts, sport events (football/basketball/volleyball etc.), travel companies (operating airplanes, trains, busses, ships), racing competions (starting grid), educational institutions (holding exams), hospitals (assigning beds to patients)—all need apps clearly indicating which seat is reserved for whom and when, avoiding the possibility of impersonation. Additionally, many of these reservation systems may need to issue tickets and inform about transferrability or conditions related to cancellation.
- Sometimes, adding all network requests, a website becomes the slowest thing that works, especially when it fails to attract sales. Keeping a browser and devtools open during development could make JS testing slow and error-prone (leaving aside the context switching with editor involved). Perhaps you could think of a better approach which still fulfills your goals.
- Reducing the required space while still getting the functionality you want may not only be due to good geometric planning, but also the ability to infuse objects with additional purposes depending on the situation. Yet, if this added flexibility is connected with significant costs, I would think twice.
- Would you think of practicing interior design as applying geometry and aesthetics in a closed space? The first has quantifiable dimensions we could compute with, but what is necessary in order to model aesthetics mathematically to be able to optimize it? Is it reasonable to assume that all pairs of shapes will fit well together or that the look of every object would be independent of the material, position relative to light source and color? How can we be mathematically sure that the curtains match well the blankets without ever having to look?
- Thinking whether transmitters/receivers can be nodes in a 3D communication graph (lat, lon, height). Perhaps there is a communication network in the air too (airplanes, control towers etc.), but I am not aware how exactly it works to be able to say that a 3D graph could represent it well. Yet, a 3D graph of distances between all flying airplanes is still possible. Exchange of resources between the organs in the human body is perhaps another case as is the communication between different neurons on different 2D layers of a neural network. Could you think of other good uses of 3D graphs, which are not simply beautiful?
- Doesn't matter that your big, international retail company is looking for a "Machine learning engineer". What career advancement, not connected with improving company sales could your company eventually offer? Is this supposed to be a monotonic, unpaid work, done at the pace typical for distribution and delivery of goods? Where are the engineers and programmers one would have to work with and exchange knowledge and skills? (A programmer doesn't go there to learn sales.) Why do you hire for knowledge of Java products, when this language is perhaps not the most suitable for machine learning/scientific analysis? Or you already have legacy software you seek someone to support? What could a machine learning engineer learn about your company from the fact that among 1772 comments made by present/former employees, very few were positive?
- If you care and pay for the work you like, you enable more of it; if not, perhaps it will diminish in importance, be forgotten or disappear.
- Being close to the ground means that we notice elevation differences much easier than those available at height. But there must be patterns in that space too and I wondered whether large-scale matrices of known heights could be used to capture them. At least for locations with dynamic skyscraper construction.
- If you take multiple pineapples, would the number of their "thorns" be the same? In other words, are they characteristic of the fruit or mostly dependent on the size and degree of maturity (and do they have other beside protective function)?
- Convenient at the start could become very inconvenient at the and, but at least you coul actively work to reverse the relationship. Especially so if you own the right instruments.
- Does your company do the things right the first time or does it first complete them and then seek to get them right? The first is the behavior of professionals, the second highlights an overreliance on convenient and cheap labor. But this may turn out to get expensive.
- Short-term is expensive: short-term loans are provided at very high interest rates.
- Except "Civic", can you come up with other palindromic car model names?
- "Perishable products have a short shelf life." The life of the shelf under pressure is shortened too.
- Looking at Belnder 2.80 features, where they have a title "What you see is what you need" and you can imagine how much I like it.
- Same could be valid about pharmaceutical products. Suppose you enter a pharmacy and seek a couple of medications. You get exposed to a view having hundreds, maybe thousands of immediately visible items that you may never need. Much better is to place them in carefully labeled drawers and only open one when a medication is truly needed. Keeps the view clean and unburdened and suggests that good order and care matter.
- A website for vehicle parts would be an impressive undertaking, quickly testing the scalability of the web platform (do you think it's ready?). The advantage: Saving on the need to aesthetically diminish open spaces by filling them with piles of metal junk in very visible ways, enabling people to identify their desired component from hundreds of meters.
- Have forgotten about cause-effect diagrams bit.ly/314zedF. But I knew other names like Ishikawa diagram, fishbine diagram etc.
- Propose your project and we will see what can be done. It may require expertise that I'm not having or don't plan to have. But you may not know until you start asking. You probably understand that making you satisfied requires that we have at least some degree of fit in the way we work.
- Found interesting data in a paper containing various parameters about several Chinese cities (citing China Statistical Yearbooks) and made a simple comparison using them bit.ly/2LSDObl. The data includes information about capital, labor, energy, GDP, CO2, three cumulative indices about green growth rate, environment and technological progress with an addition of geocoordinates. According to the diagram, Guangdong, Tianjin and Beijing appear most different. Noticeable is that several other cities like Shenzhen, Nanjing, Wuhan, Xiamen were not included. We could also look at a heatmap of correlations, showing that technological progress (BPG) and green growth rate (GGMI) have a strong positive relationship (0.89). This is quite interesting, but also somewhat close to intuition. Other strong relationships are capital-labor (0.88), capital-GDP (0.92) and labor-GDP (0.97). This means that in the case of these cities, labor affects GDP slightly more than capital. But capital can be used to attract labor, which could raise the GDP. Longitude-capital came at 0.49, which may hint about differences between the cities along the line east-west.
- Looked into whether a significant difference in the energy usage of cooking lentils on a cooktop (closed lid saucepan) and in medium-sized Instant Pot could exist bit.ly/318zCrx. If the data on the source website is correct, it could approximate ten times.
- Single cake slice or an entire cake? bit.ly/2Msr5f2
- It is hardly only the creative cost or only the end product you pay for. You also pay for everything from bouncing off ideas and relying on an extra pool of knowledge/experience to thinking and understanding your problem in-depth, feasibility analysis, concept formulation, design, implementation, testing, communication, changes, computation, even using a foreign machine for your big data store or possible, unexpected risks. The more things you want, the higher your bill becomes. But please, feel free to find another service if you believe that only the end result matters.
- If in year n rents were x, but in year n+10 rents are 2*x (Germany), someone working at the same salary receives much less for it. But good times for the companies seeking net sponsors.
- Always dreamed about a moment in which the number of software companies in Germany would reach the number of bakeries. Never happened, but showed me clearly what is most appreciated there (the locations offering the best taste).
- "We bake (bread) no longer like in 1688. But with 325 years of experience." bit.ly/315yHIG ↗. Was this statement made 6 years ago, still left unquestioned in the title of a subpage? 2019 - 1688 = 331 years.
- The rail route from New York, Penn Station to Washington DC, Union Station is said to take around 3h 35m with Amtrak, where distance on a straight line is ≈328km. In my country, a distance of 378km traveled by rail would take ≈8h 20m. So much about the complaints that Amtrak is slow.
- Would have been nice if a rail path between two points could be mapped as a double line with curves, realistically following the real rail contours, where stations are labeled in the middle of the track and an improvised building is placed next to it at that place.
- Wanted to make a demo with the idea "if you feel you can't afford a regular ring, perhaps it is better not to promise her the Saturn rings", but my planet came out to be deceptively unrealistic. Perhaps it's better this way too.
- Took sugar instead of salt from the local store and attempted to bring it back to exchange it (even ready to take the equivalent of packs in salt to come at the price of the sugar pack). The cashier refused, because the procedure was "overly complex" and they were unwilling to go through it. So I had to separately buy salt too. Away from the store, explaining the situation, people claimed that I was "blind" and what happened was entirely my own fault. Is there a chance that we speak again?
- Something more playful: seat price annotation for "Idomeneo", to be performed at 19:00 on 31.08.2019 in Frankfurt's opera bit.ly/30VAZtM (see bit.ly/2LKcCM1 ↗)
- Neighborhoods in Sacramento, California bit.ly/2LKbCrr. On a second look, there is no "Zerg Park". You can also see the districts in Raleigh, North Carolina (although the labels were missing) bit.ly/316lsqT. Interesting is that four of the five districts seem to meet at a point.
- Used a CNN article to plot some famous bridges in London bit.ly/318rsQh, assumption being they must connect at least two boroughs together, where I wanted to find out which. Such a relief for not having to look at overlapping labels of the close boroughs "Hammersmith and Fulham" and "Kensington and Chelsea". It looks as if 4 bridges connect "Westminster" and "Lambeth" (two of which carry their names as well). Another series of 4 bridges seems to connect "City of London" and "Southwark". "Tower Bridge" might be between "Tower Hamlets" and "Sotuhwark", while "Hammersmith Bridge" seems to connect "Hammersmith and Fulham" with "Richmond upon Thames". Perhaps there are other bridges along Thames which were not mentioned in the article.
- Liked this diagram on electric charger demand in the various boroughs of London bit.ly/2LMLNqu ↗ and also the idea of depicting a cable as a river. Came to it through "Mapping London", which is very diagram-rich.
- Another example is a clickable documentation that contains over hundred pages. All information has been made freely accessible and despite being potentially useful, it is not very usable as it creates the perception of being very slow to access. Each click is a disruption of the thought process, hence it creates the impression of promoting fragmented knowledge. Much better is to offer an ad-free, downloadable PDF document and enable anyone who wants to follow through, distraction-free.
- Pay attention to perceived performance. For instance, if a passenger has arrived with a flight having a duration of 90 mins, asking it to wait another 30 mins for luggage creates a subjective impression of a slow flight. Luggage wait time has been made 33% of the flight time. We easily see that it is the total experience which matters, often not the perfect execution on a single component of it. There is likely a process passengers walk through and its acceleration has the potential to improve the perception about the quality of service. In web design too, we have perceived performance and only on us depends to get it right.
- Of course, if you want me to think of your problems instead, you could always propose a project. Properly reflects that I can't give you acceptance guarantee.
- Roads, bike paths, parks and libraries in Florida bit.ly/31191gc. This time with slightly more information, not just libraries. But now we see clearly, that most libraries are located around Miami and more precisely on the line between Miami and West Palm Beach to the North. The previous diagram I had failed to capture this context. There seem to be many green areas between Gainesville and Orlando, although such presentation does not give information about their true size. Additionally, it is noticeable that exactly in this area the number of the libraries drops significantly. (Ideally parks and libraries would be close.) If someone were to connect Tampa-Orlando and Gainesville-Jacksonville with straight lines, they would be almost parallel, which is interesting, as if someone wanted to design for approximately equal spacing. The bike route network seems strong around Tampa and Miami, and we see how on the coastal lines it gets longer and more pronounced (which makes the majority of the libraries there bike-accessible). But the route Pensacola-Tallahassee-Jacksonville also deserves attention. If we were to explore FDOT's data about annual average daily traffic (AADT) on the road network, we would see SR-842 Broward Blvd - SR-838 Sunrise Blvd. come first, followed by plenty of bridges, which registered high traffic in 2018.
- Does the shipping price prevent your product from being sold? Consider a $7 product with a shipping price of $15 and a $500 product with a shipping price of $40. Sometimes, if shipped internationally, you might see ≈$200 instead of the $40. Will the client buy then or express preference for a locally available product?
- Simply not true that if platform A has millions of products, platform B can't have that many too. If you think so, your self-limiting beliefs stop you from even starting. But you have to be prepared for what it takes (the time and effort) to arrive there. Any large-scale undertaking is not a one-time event, but under constant making. Requires constancy of purpose and unwavering execution.
- If you own the platform, you can set your product price. If you don't, the platform might be able to set it for you without informing you so. What you give up in the process is yours to determine. Much better: developing your own platform where your brand name won't have to be under the cap of a powerful corporation.
- If you are not careful, the ads you place in the middle of the article could shift the entire page up and down every time an ad disappears and a new one takes its place. The reader does not deserve the reflows and is likely not interested in learning the true purpose of the page.
- Tried to compare the extensiveness of the bus and bike paths in Santa Clara, California bit.ly/2LNYD7N, based on open data from Santa Clara Valley Transportation. The image is likely distorted, but this is a small tradeoff to pay if you have to deal with high complexity (only the bus lines were over 200000). Over most of the area the blue (busses) and brown (bikes) seem to blend well, which is really nice. Only on the south side of the big spot do we see some small areas, which start to shine in brighter blue.
- Bus lines and stops in Santa Fe, New Mexico bit.ly/2LN1Zba
- Nice to see people using their wearables to observe progress in running performance over time. Gradually decreasing the running time from ten to eight minutes (on the same track) feels much better.
- Tried to hide among the stones, but couldn't mislead even a simple pointification script bit.ly/2LL7V4t. Original image comes from Pixabay.
- Looks as if made of nested stars, but is actually a continuous line bit.ly/2LKxSkH
- Distribution of the ring prices below £10000 at "Goldsmiths" bit.ly/2LKEUpQ
- The current median price of the 248 "Oakley" sunglasses computes to $179.5. Was also willing to stitch a grid of sunglasses as a single image, but looking through their source code quickly convinced me that I don't want to waste eyes on that. Seeing a "data-src", "data-backgroundImage" and "style" attributes, all attached to a link and all containing the same long URL (for each sunglass) was not only an unreadable mess, but also one that challenged the existing computational resources.
- Saw a musical notation (not sound) and thought whether there could be a way to use computer vision to extract notes into a representation that would allow the identification of patterns (also across several compositions by the same composer) and frequently repeated notes. Wikipedia has mentioned something about "musical analysis"... Do you know what exactly makes you like a given piece or not?
- The current median price of TUI last minute vacations announced on their website is 628€ per person, with most offers in Tenerife, Spain (9) and Fuerteventura, Canary Islands (7).
- Took a "Starbucks" coffee variant to estimate the yearly cost of drinking two coffees on average every day bit.ly/315nCaB. The result comes at slightly less than 140€, which is much cheaper than the previously obtained 210-285€ about smoking two cigarettes from "Dutch Tobacconist" every day. Even so, this is not a recommendation to engage in any of these. But it made me realize how convenient coffee selling has become when it can be made accessible and affordable to almost everyone without the need for protective labels.
- At least two shopping malls in London have listed Tesla stores, which seems unusual to me. Haven't seen another car maker selling in malls before, but fearing that someone might want to test-drive on the mall's floor area only to see whether they can arrive at the nearby "Snowflake Gelato" store.
- Frequently deriving inspiration from all kinds of businesses and the work they do. Even better is not only when this gives me hints about what to do next, but when it also unexpectedly leads more of them to consider a service I provide.
- Used refreshing data on "Beleaf juices" bit.ly/30Y3ZAV ↗ to try estimating the calories of a non-existing, thought-out variety, made of banana, cucumber, celery, mango and youghurt. Script output: ≈195 calories bit.ly/2LKXvCc. Two problems with this approach: 1) we don't know how much of each ingredient was used in each juice and 2) the number of juice varieties is too small to allow especially accurate predictions. To be seen as an (inaccurate) model only.
- A cookie recipe indirectly led me to a simple idea I haven't seen implemented so far. "Every meal is a choice", yet one of several ingredients (in this case eight), which must then be bought separately (total cost of ≈48$). Isn't there a way to offer all ingredients in the right quantities (not having people to keep unused items around) at some discount to enable a final recipe product (this or another) for maximal number of people without breaking their bank? Perhaps in a "cooking material" pack with the recipe instructions inside, an image of a tasty product and an extra fleuron? If several people like the result, they may seek more packs.
- Looked to find sample information on cost per seat for bus and metro and the number of tickets that have to be purchased to repay for the cost of each of these vehicles. Was not enough to feel satisfied.
- Optimize this travel route for: shortest path, highest speed, shortest travel time, lowest cost, highest on-the-go shareability, highest pavement quality and road condition safety, lowest utilization and congestion, ease of driving, lowest number of intersections and curves, highest attractiveness of the surroundings, availability of rest/petrol stations, ease and cost of parking at the destination, subjective value of being there.
- Tried to explore how fuel efficiency (per seat) might have changed over the years for various airplane models by Airbus and Boeing bit.ly/2LIjv0f. According to Wikipedia, there is a tendency in recent years towards using 2.0l/100km per passenger seat, which is much better than their initial 3.5l/100km from many years ago. Good to see both companies improving simultaneously.
- This week too is gone (for client work). Next week, you can try again.
- There are other ways to present a magazine, which do not ask the user to flip smoothly animated pages with the mouse (which return back in case of an incomplete travel path), click on tiny buttons, zoom into camera instability or into small areas, not giving a good sense of the context. Page preloading could eliminate the periodic waits, while a restrictive policy could limit the number of third-parties loading scripts in parallel.
- Probably a second time I see someone mentioning the benefit of keeping solar panels cool. Cannot validate this empirically due to lack of any hardware, but you may want to investigate if you have installations in areas with especially high ambient temperature. Otherwise there wouldn't be much reason to write about (heat-removing) nanofluids either. Yet, if the price of this is toxicity and some potential of having a weather storm break a solar panel and let its fluid spill on the ground, the idea may not be that great. Also troubling if such chemicals can vaporize.
- "Being against corporations does noone any good." So others should rather not have a voice compared to you?
- Another nonsense I've seen today: several corporations joining together to support startups. Can you imagine the extent of hypocrisy and back thoughts at play here?
- For years and years you hear how troubled their company truly is, how much they lose in operation, how they can't find enough money to actually pay their employees until one day they hit you with the truth: "We plan to rebuild 2000 bridges..." Sad for the employees who believed in the company drama, losing themselves under exploitative conditions (and glad not to be one of them). Time to send a clear sign to the corporations that we will no longer tolerate their lies, while they make trillions in the background and explain us how severe this new crisis really is.
- Expected to see many thousand colorful dots corresponding to road surface temperatures as measured via sensors in Seattle, but saw only seven. Apparently, most were close enough to these 7 clusters to be able to claim that the sensors do not cover the whole city. Mild disappointment about the lost CPU time.
- Quick diagram: "Locations of the Microcenters in USA" bit.ly/310hu3o. Some preference to settle on the East. Duluth-Marietta and Chicago-Westmont appear close. Tustin remains the only location on the West (somewhat hard to see).
- Learned about the importance of some railway stations in Tokyo —like Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya and Yokohama—from a diagram-rich paper by Tanaka, Furuta and Toriumi. Liked the way travel time and number of used railway lines were explored as distributions. If correctly interpreting the data, most people seem to be traveling 60-89 mins using two, sometimes three different lines. Also liked the approach of calculating total commercial area within a given radius around a station to gauge its economic importance (the first two stations ranking high here). And that despite registering much less traffic flow, stations like Ueno and Kita-Senju could still be important to people willing to switch lines (where many pass).
- Had another idea, but realized that, this one too needs at least two.
- Researchers found that the use of REST consumes more energy than the use of WebSocket. And that a continious connect-disconnect consumes more energy than a standing connection.
- Out of the top 500 supercomputers, 220 appear to be in China, 116 in USA, 28 in Japan, 20 in France, 13 in Germany, 13 in The Netherlands, 5 in Italy, 4 in Switzerland (Source: top500.org, June 2019). Currently, the median number of cores for these machines is 57600, but "Sunway TaihuLight" in Wuxi (China) has ≈10.65 million. "DGX SaturnV Volta" by NVIDIA (rank 469) is said to be the most energy-efficient one with 15.113 GFlops/W.
- Given enough data, can you predict the severity of a crash based on its geolocation, season and time of occurence, road condition and utilization level, driver alcohol intake?
- Interesting idea to present flow variations in a single diagram with different color for each day of the week bit.ly/30WoEW9. Thanks for sharing it openly.
- A dollar today is better than a dollar tomoroow. A client today may not necessarily be.
- If there is a book with 100 recipes, of which 17 contain a lemon, couldn't this be made more DRY? A single list of unique products and references to them could save a lot of space. Or a graph of products as fixed-position nodes (dimming those unused), having quantities attached and edges connecting related poducts, having a number corresponding to the right step in the recipe and a color assigned to one of the most common cooking operations (applied to the linked items). Maybe you could come with even better ideas.
- If vehicle emissions tend to be highest at high speeds and in traffic jams, do you know when your car achieves its highest ratio of speed to pollutant exhaustion? Can this rate be adapted to match the average traffic speed in the area?
- "Beyond a certain number, adding more busses does not decrease the passenger travel time." Interesting that waiting time isn't the only concern. Also liked the observation that frequent turns and start-stops are of great disadvantage for busses, since they either significantly reduce their speed or take a lot of time (and energy) to restore the initial level of mobility.
- Animation idea: using energy to pump water, which comes out in short-burst geysers and spread-falls over the power plant to cool it, so it can continue operation. Easy to see through the zero-sum hint.
- If everyone looks to visit the same event at the same time, they will probably look to park their cars close to vertex v. Not sure whether in all cases the infrastructure could meet such demand.
- Is the arrival rate of "recent grads" at your company lower than the departure rate of your existing, experienced programmers?
- Tried to "compensate" for browser functionality that is likely missing. Currently there is no way to indicate/mark whether a bookmark corresponds to a resource that is open, partially open or closed (available behind a paywall only). Since I had many such bookmarks, it was bothering me that I have no easy way to differentiate between them before the actual link following. (And I frequently forget which is open and which isn't since the labels are very similar.) So I started annotating all with these keywords at the end, which remain mostly invisible unless you hover on the label. An optional, more visual feedback would have been nicer.
- Suck, squeeze, bang and blow decsribe the stages through which the air flow goes in the "Rolls Royce" jet engine used in Airbus A350 XWB cnn.it/2XYUbK0 ↗
- Communications of the ACM has featured an article promoting the idea of being lazy until paid bit.ly/2K0yYpl. Expect the same this week too, if you are not paying more than enough.
- Worth highlighting the number of logos present on the header and footer of the IEEE page bit.ly/2K05KXs. Design.
- Reminds me of another good observation encountered yesterday: if you owned a warehouse and someone shipped refrigerated products for storage, it may not make much sense to refrigerate them at a lower temperature than the one they were delivered with, as this won't improve their initial quality. Instinctively choosing the lowest possible temperature would therefore be a waste and eventually one affecting the environment.
- Didn't expect to find a paper on washing machines interesting. It was about the degree of damaging textiles in addition to cleaning them. The authors came to the conclusion that "longer program duration and smaller load sizes increase the mechanical damage" of the textiles and they finish with "It is of major importance to wash with a fully loaded drum to avoid quality depletion to the textiles." In addition they make you think whether to prefer short cycles at high temperatures or long cycles at low temperatures.
- What's the total lettuce leaf area required to wrap a Whopper in order to pretend the result was cabbage?
- Not much value in luxury living if for its achievement you had to pay with all of your health.
- Design-wise, I cannot understand why some sinks must be rising in height over the basic surface. And the sharp edges.
- Bike availability in Lille, France (09:28 21.07.2019) bit.ly/2XX59ja. Good to see such data provided to everyone. I hope not to have reversed the colors. If I understood correctly, the central area has a lower percentage of available bikes than the suburbs. Is this interpretation correct?
- Tried to depict a nice flower whose name I forgot to ask about bit.ly/2XZIRxu. Entirely green, has no color. Always has 7 leaves, largest ones vary 5-7cm (as shown on the image), growing at approximately equally spaced angles. They could be of equal size, but I noticed that most commonly, the leaf facing the ground is slightly more elongated (7cm), while those at the top are least so (5cm). There is again regular spacing between the top two leaves, although this did not come across in the hand-drawn image well. Branches are also green, not very dense and no subbranching occurs. Any idea how it might be called? (for proper care)
- Circle intersections as in a Venn diagram bit.ly/2JVfmmh
- Attempting to improve pavement condition was much harder than anticipated bit.ly/2Y0nTP3. To prevent further precision-related problems, the placement of the last piece was postponed for after the inspection.
- Sometimes it's like this bit.ly/2JX2213 or when slightly better, you start drawing curves manually with the paintbrush and adding colors with an airbrush bit.ly/2JWQ6fp. No code.
- Not exactly the precision I wanted to achieve bit.ly/2XPM3eO. The idea was to show the "information" the sun is generating on a fluid canvas.
- Quick explanation regarding camera pinball bit.ly/2XUvpdT. Unfortunately, black and white only.
- It seems that different dining locations have developed their own "Book a table" functionality. However, now and then it could lead you to a third party website, which refuses to (re)serve (for) you if you didn't accept their data collection terms. You choose one service, yet another one tries to determine the rules.
- Looking at an app highlighting available theater seats bit.ly/2JQXgSw. Each color corresponds to a different price.
- How do you quantify the value of the software you create? By the number of users and average time they spend in it, by what customers are willing to pay for it or by intuitively assigning positive, zero or negative value to each functional unit?
- Can a slower service be made more stable, economically preferable, showing fewer side effects?
- Was the reduction in the product price from offering a product bundle justified, considering the change in the number of clients?
- Strange idea came yesterday, but was promptly rejected due to requiring too much time. It was about quantifying the mean and standard deviation of the same type of clothing piece across several apparel stores (Abercrombie & Fitch, END, Mango, H&M etc.) as an orientation. Surprising how many stores seem to offer the same and you hardly ever know the difference. Some statistics could have helped to see any small difference. But only the number of required network requests would have caused the midnight to arrive sooner than desired. But if you have the resources to deal with this, you could perhaps write a small article to share your findings.
- Plotting the shortest path over the edges of a 3D object (between two selected vertices) must also create beautiful scenery.
- Can't understand why "read more" has to be a button. while the article title has to be pure text. Can't we make the title a link and save the button (for each listed article)?
- Attempted to estimate the yearly cost of smoking 2 cigarettes/day if someone were to buy cartons of packs from "Dutch Tobacconist" bit.ly/2XU2VRv. This does not include any potential health-related costs arising from smoking. If Numbeo is correct about the price of a pack of 20 Marlboro cigarettes (Amsterdam), then there is almost no overcharge when someone is buying individual packs.
- Two long leaves and a spiral-spring color coming out between them suggests that the default is leaves closed.
- Didn't realize it, but letting three stars touch at two corners each forms a pentagon between them. At least what the hand-drawn picture tells me.
- What's the total length of the morning noodles on the plate?
- The realization that every important word we strive to preserve on paper could serve to increase the importance of a fire is troubling. Something in the "design" of such preservation is lacking, but we haven't found anything better yet. After reading two good recent articles on devastating fires, I have become more concerned what this means about the safety of large libraries, for instance.
- Plastic forks and knives... unbreakable.
- Compared rechargeable and regular alkaline AA battery unit prices by AmazonBasics after reading an article claiming that the higher cost of the rechargeables (3-4x) was well considering that the number of discharge cycles could be much geater than this factor. But for the popular units I checked today, this factor came out to be 6.81x, without including the cost of the adapter enabling the enhanced functionality. When we account for that, a rechargeable battery becomes 11.4x more expensive than regular one, considering only the first packs of both. While this is still in favor of the rechargeables, the difference is very different. If someone plans to use more than a dozen batteries (or wants to reduce environmental pollution) over a reasonable time period (say six months or a year), they could consider switching to rechargeables.
- The four nested divs for a simple box with a product image, label and price could use some simplification.
- A racing cyclist using ≈55 calories/mile would need ≈2.2 carrots/mile to keep the energy in balance. If the numbers in the video were correct.
- Subtle idea, but I haven't seen it implemented all too often: placing a small, tiny flower on top of the dish. Immediately changes the feeling and sends the message that not everything in life is about food.
- Learning about the various businesses present at Oxford Street, London (shopping center). Many shops, wide variety, ideas and inspiration. (Perhaps it could help for the next idea.) Unintentionally learned how to eat a lobster, although I'm afraid the image looked too scary for my nature. Still exploring. Meanwhile, if you have a better idea, feel free to reach me.
- Saw 199 special offer deals at "Virgin Holidays" and looked at the median price, which come to be £1105. As the page says, this is total price divided by number of travelers (exlucding infants). The current most common destinations on offer were "Barbados, Caribbean" (20), "International Drive, Orlando" (16), "Strip, Las Vegas" (12), "Midtown, New York" (8), "Boston, USA" (7). 6 offers were available at "St. Lucia, Caribbean", "Kissimmee, Orlando" and "Maldives, Indian Ocean".
- Cocktails available at "Hotel Chocolat" bit.ly/2XQvlw3 ↗
- If someone told you "BT48 6PE", you would immediately know which city they refer to, right? Otherwise the city name would have appeared in the address.
- The practice of spreading copyrighted papers will always remain illegal no matter what you say/think/write or how many "lawyers" you consulted with. Claim something similar in front of me and your conversation word limit will have expired. Unwilling to associate with anyone who has no sense of justice or supports its deteriroration.
- Plenty of companies seek people, but few pay, therefore very few (will) find.
- Almost all light bulbs I've seen online were presented "heads-up", but now observed the idea of pointing some of them heads-down and placing a red label reading "sold out" on top. When several are next to each other, you could very easily notice the difference. But does this mean it is a good practice?
- Starting your day with a sinusoidal tiling bit.ly/2JQSh4f. From there, simple steps suffice to obtain a small variation bit.ly/2XTbSL5
- Capsules bit.ly/2JNnC87. Almost as if in 3D.
- Quick, yet imperfect sand path through a 20-circle hourglass bit.ly/2XPNZE1 (3.4kB)
- 9 net pieces joined bit.ly/2XRcaCb
- Touching squares bit.ly/2JKtoaq
- Real-time traffic speeds in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (07:46 18.07.2019) bit.ly/2JSaDC3. Also possible to make it an SVG, which would always resemble the latest existing data.
- Net power vs. weight for Caterpillar wheel loaders bit.ly/2XTyueA. Can you find a relationship here? The model "994K" appears significantly different than the rest. Perhaps you want me to look more deeply at another piece of equipment? bit.ly/2JPueCF
- Selling items containing football player stickers is a very unique business, and one that got me occupied for a while as a kid. Good to learn that it still exists today, despite no longer being a client. Case in point: make it unique, high-margin and hard to copy.
- Someone at the store bought pet food, indirectly making me realize that I knew nothing about it. Which brand and flavour could be good and when? Found some foods online by Purina now, but they are so many that walking over the ingredients would take too much CPU time. Think I've heard about glucosamine before, but not sure what it does or where it comes from.
- To what extent does the package design influence the desire to consume? Which etiquettes (of flavours) appear to work better? Is this knowledge used in a responsible way?
- According to this article about average electricity and gas costs in Germany bit.ly/2XQ879h ↗, the costs of electricity in Pforzheim and Heidelberg appear 48.9% and 42.6% higher than the ones in Munich or Berlin (both approximately equal). Gas price differences are much smaller, but Hamburg and Stuttgart appear among the most expensive, whereas Düsseldorf among the least expensive, the difference being ≈165€.
- Adjusted close stock price of some companies in the last 3 years (10.07.2016 - 16.07.2019) bit.ly/2XINhIK. Not the most beautiful diagram; done mainly for reference. Back then bit.ly/2JMmQYP, Amazon stock has started to trade higher than that of Google; today the difference is very well pronounced. At the end of 2013, Amazon stock was trading at ≈400$, while today (almost 6 years later) it is slightly over 2000$. However, we know that other companies like Microsoft also have high market capitalization, but somehow manage to keep their stock price low. This highlights that we are not obtaining a good picture of the situation. We could take this stock price, multiply it by stock volume (at that point in time), take a logarithm of that and present each company in a separate box for more clarity bit.ly/2JJXZVE. Taking this view allows us to estimate that Amazon, Alibaba and Microsoft appear to have used the period to grow most.
- Haven't thought whether concrete means exist to reduce truck load/unload time. But it looks as a very practical problem, which many stores potentially have And if a truck is not enough, you could think of a container.
- Make your app the 10001st in the category and expect a different result.
- Wouldn't agree to sell personal data (for the equivalent of free). Part of our collective misery roots in how easily we allow this to happen and how inaccurately we estimate the potential losses of our willingness to be as cool and platform-present as everyone else.
- Make a simple test: visit a page on your site you would otherwise rarely visit. Then check your logs. Did another entity visit the same one literally seconds after you did? If so, this tells you a lot how "open" the web truly is. Possible implications of the observer effect: less or no online innovation. Also be aware how fast they know when you uploaded something new before you could even validate whether it's truly there.
- If you were excited that the asking price for a m2 of an apartment at a place neither too close nor too far from a big city is 35% cheaer, you could invest in it and reevaluate its value a couple of years later.
- Think about continuity. If your paper is text-only and the reader expects it to continue so, but you load a giant image instead, taking more than 5 seconds to render, continuity has been broken.
- Another thing people often forget (as an author properly noticed) is to include the cost of the failed attempts and tests during the creation of the product in its final price. Charging only based on value (completely discounting effort) will only bring you so far.
- What's the opportunity cost of taking a low-paid first job? Make it count.
- Sometimes when you don't appreciate a service, you have to travel hundreds or more kilometers to find a comparable one.
- The mistake in the last bit came from the assumption that higher-density solar panels must be better. But an installator would prefer exactly the opposite, willing to cover maximal area with minimum weight to carry around. Despite having slightly bigger dimensions, the LG panels were more lightweight, so the top two panels changed to reflect this.
- Please, understand that among some of the latest bits there may be typos, inaccuracies or mistakes, which may still need correction. If you notice them, you can also signal about them. Despite working to prevent their occurrence, they may still show. dummerAugust is never too proud to admit a mistake.
- Wrote a script which went through 41 solar panels from Trina Solar and LG Solar to look at their characteristics. Interestingly, it showed preference for some panels from LG (like the 360W LG360Q1C-A5 or the 405W LG405N2W-A5). The highest ranked Trina solar panel came to be the 355W TSM-PE15H. But it would have been better to include panels from as many manufacturers as possible. Yet, the criteria selected says nothing about attributes unrelated to performance.
- Library accessibility by bus and bike in San Mateo County, California bit.ly/2lK1YsX. There were so many bus stops that if a building is close to a line, it is likely easy to access. If the data is current, of the 12 library branches, only "Woodside" is somewhat distant from a bus stop. The existing trails could possibly be extended. The "Pacifica Sanchez" branch seems to have the longest nearby trail path.
- Sometimes you encounter code which mentions many CPUs of the Arm Cortex A, R and M series and you realize how much you have missed. Only to find that even this list was likely incomplete bit.ly/2lJTli4. With so much choice, it can be confusing which model to pick for a given task.
- Total net position of some airports (according to annual reports for 2018) bit.ly/2lJn2jj. Interesting that the airport in Los Angeles reported slightly higher numbers than that in Atlanta.
- Do you find the services here useful? If so, consider proposing your project.
- Net income of some banks (according to their annual reports for 2018) bit.ly/2xQWFKW
- As long as we only add roads, but almost never remove, is it realistic to expect having networks with small number of intersections? A software to which I could only add functionality would defeat me very soon.
- Thinking that the probability of picking the "wrong" m&m type from a bag of mixed content would be sufficiently small may not help you much if you consider that it will have to be multiplied by a factor corresponding to 40% saturated fat.
- Idea: Leave three small gaps on the edges of each visible face of a cube. Then rotate clockwise the gaps and the three gradients passing from start to end of the disconnected contours (on each face) and observe the effect.
- You only need 20 circles to make your luck bit.ly/2Sebb8U (1.8kB)
- Often more than clear who you are bit.ly/2SgQxVM. The one they least expect.
- Used the annual reports of several pharmaceutical corporations to plot net sales vs. gross profit bit.ly/2Sen2ny. Where the currency was dollar, it was converted to euro (since most reported in euro). This is mainly to get an approximate impression of their sizes and learn more about an unrelated industry I rarely hear about. Was also willing to include GlaxoSmithKline, but couldn't find the relevant information. If the sata is correct, Novartis, Sanofi and Bayer Group appear to be especially big.
- Many companies believe that placing one or several "brochure"-polished pages online, containing high-quality photos, counters showing the number of their locations or clients and the use of corporate language would be sufficient to achieve impressive results. If you are not ready to invest in the continuous improvement of your website, it is perhaps better not to start it.
- From a paper, I learned that there are over 5000 different flavonoids, which led me to discover two databases (unfortunately provided as PDFs)—one on flavonoids and one on isoflavones bit.ly/2xQcH81 ↗. That berries were found rich in flavonoids was not surprising, but that almond nuts would have at least three of them was. Raw capers were found to have ≈2x the flavonoids contained in canned ones. Oregano had a lot of luteolin, parsley—a lot of apigenin (especially when dried). Red cabbage had a lot of cyanidin, but still less than elderberries, plums or black raspberries. Raw red onions were found to have ≈2x the quercetin content (39.21) found in normal raw onions (20.30), which is slightly less than the amount found in watercress (29.99) and on par with raw okra (20.97). Soybeans were having the highest total values in the isoflavones category, where six varieties were inspected. The US variety had the second-highest values only after the Korean, but still 54% higher than those observed in the variety from Europe.
- Suppose that in the summer you are selling souvenirs to tourists passing by. Small items, but relatively unique, beautiful and slightly more expensive than usual (have to be remembered). Do you only sell or do you seek to have good time with the people coming to you? Do you learn where they come from, what type of interests they might have? Do you listen and exchange stories? Meet them for conversations outside working hours? Could this enable you to find other customers too or adjust the product palette based on what they might want? Could you predict the future demand for souvenirs or the average amount tourists might be willing to spend? What attributes in a souvenir make it special for a particular person? Is it sufficient to rely on its beauty or does it also have to be functional?
- Monthly total merchandise exports by country according to the World Trade Organization (WTO) bit.ly/2xL9hTW. The first diagram tells us that the volume of Chinese exports has no equivalent (which becomes imports for other nations). Notice that the second diagram does not have the same meaning as the first. But it we were to use PCA again, many countries would have remained less visible. It would then reflect the importance of economies like Italy, UK, France, Japan, Netherlands, Hong Kong (China). This lets us understand to some extent why the EU is currently somewhat concerned about the Italian economy. Also looked at the correlations in the export output among each pair of countries and found some interesting results. Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong, China comes most positive with 0.637, followed by Austria - Portugal (0.59), Romania - UK (0.570), Belarus - Colombia (0.565), France - Italy (0.545), Croatia - Spain (0.532), Estonia - Hungary (0.521), Belgium - Sweden (0.520), China - Hong Kong (China) (0.515), Portugal - Spain (0.503), Czech Republic - Sweden (0.501), Italy - UK (0.500), Germany - Slovenia (0.490), Hungary - Turkey (0.489), Bulgaria - Greece (0.484), Italy - Spain (0.462) and so on. That not all countries in each pair are close illustrates the complexity of world trade. The top 2 correlations in which USA participates are with Thailand (0.445) and Canada (0.415), whereas for Russia these appear to be Greece (0.455) and Sweden (0.376).
- Net sales vs. gross profit for Adidas (2009 - 2018) bit.ly/2ljPDeP. Looks like they were in some kind of loop between 2012 and 2014, but then did especially well in 2015 and 2017.
- Do you handle images with the same care you handle your texts/code/data, cleaning the details you don't need (for instance after screenshots) or do you prefer not to look at them, moving them to a less visible place?
- Oftentimes you have the problem of being unable to quickly find the proper label for the fresh produce you are putting on a scale at the local store. You have to select whether it is a fruit or vegetable and then click "next" several times to switch screens until you see the relevant item. This means that per item you have to make several clicks (at least two) and this only if you don't make mistakes that require you to go back/forth. If you are having 10 items, this can take considerable time, making everyone who waits for the same (in queue in front of the device) nervous and impatient. (This will take their time as well.) Much easier would be if the device could recognize the product immediately and set the right sticker to avoid the search time and the possibility to make a mistake (e.g. frequently selecting the wrong apple type) (including the time to get rid of a wrong sticker left on your fingers). Sample classification bit.ly/2lkGv9O. I was thinking of a version, which puts the machines at the center of each row (currently they are set at the sides) and eliminates the need for manual separation of nylon bags in order to put a product inside and bring all of them to the scale/the queue. Instead, the scale itself could span one such bag, allowing insertions on one side, stamping a sticker from below as soon as it identified the product and its weight (when price is known or can be updated). This way, there seems to be very little wait time. As soon as someone picks another product, they put it on the scale inside the bag and take it with it. Noone has to come with the whole row of products to the scale at once as they also can't pick everything at once.
- Still programming primarily in Excel? Nothing wrong about this; using a general-purpose programming language offers you a lot more flexibility. And the speed is independent of the time required to discover and use UI-enabled functionality...
- There is a cost associated with keeping a spinner which has already loaded once, but on each click of the "Back" button has to spin once again. Doesn't make the site feel slower, but perhaps several times slower.
- If possible, refrain from using a unique 36-char identifier as a value of the property "contentitemid", which you attach to each product on the page. Other ways will enable you to keep your page much cleaner.
- class="dynamicColumn" is nice, but it doesn't describe what this column is about. Are you using dynamic, automated software to generate poor code with good defaults? Much better to work with a real web designer instead.
- Late in life learning a different term for breakfast—brunch. Do you brunch before lunch?
- First time seeing a menu having a $27 pizza, but my guess is that in New York such things are not isolated cases.
- What's your "hashrate"? Are you seeking to earn money without work and pay other people for their hard work from this non-existent money? Good luck.
- Most common stop locations in the 1000 Mahnattan taxi trajectories collected over a year bit.ly/2lj5la7. The location order in each trajectory allows us to differentiate between traveling from A to B or from B to A. So I looked at common segments, where the neighborhood source and destimation didn't change. This way, we can compute that people most rarely left "Midtown" (1387620 trips inside), "Upper East Side", "Outside Manhattan", "Upper West Side", "Chelsea", "Hell's Kitchen", "West Village" (242196 trips inside). And we could examine in which directions people traveled. For instance, the route "Upper East Side" → "Midtown" was sligthly more popular than "Midtown" → "Upper East Side" (507014 vs. 483892 trips). Also "Midtown" → "Chelsea" was slightly more popular among travelers than "Chelsea" → "Midtown" (277810 vs. 260111 trips). "Midtown" → "Outside Manhattan" appeared more frequently than "Outside Manhattan" → "Midtown" (220581 vs. 191072 trips). If we require that "Midtown" does not appear, then "Upper East Side" → "Upper West Side" and "Upper West Side" → "Upper East Side" trips were very close (194622 vs. 193067). This was also seen in the case "Chelsea" → "Hell's Kitchen" and in the opposite direction (143623 vs. 140147 trips). Outside Manhattan" → "Upper East Side" made impression, since in the other direction much fewer trips were registered.
- Tomorrow is a Prime day, but not for me. Here the entire year is prime despite not being asked about an address.
- Can you plot the sun path on the horizon or would this "simple" task require more data that you expect to collect?
- Next demo: equally-spaced, colorful SVG-oval balloons having sine-determined heights, each taking a slightly rotated letter of "Sunday" and slowly moving up and down with their strings. Bronto-Bluff.
- These days a single component of size 1.6 x 1.6mm bit.ly/2lddr42 ↗ has higher luminous flux than the entire 48-LEDs array as seen in the desk lamp I described. An efficiency miracle. Imagine replacing a loop of 48 iterations with a single reference to an object.
- Is it possible to combine the ideas in the last two bits to visualize where a pipe network "radiates"?
- You might have seen an image of a sample building inspected for its radiative behavior to the environment, with stronger reds indicating the locations in the construction where more heat is being lost. But you may not have seen the technological term descibing the method by which such study was conducted. Might be called infrared thermography, also producing visualizations.
- Do you know the percentage of the water lost due to pipe leaks across your city? You are paying not only for the water, but also for any arising distribution-related losses.
- "Error 1016: Origin DNS error". Headwind towards someone's "cloud".
- Can you create a form in which each field is filled one-by-one in sequence, informing the user how many are left in advance? A stack, where the top field is popped either on pressing Tab or clicking an arrow and pushed back should a user return to it. Where rhe next field below is smaller by default, but zooms in once its turn comes. Would it then make sense to enable scroll functionality to switch between the layers? How would validation work if the correctness of the content in one field depends on a value in another, invisible one (will there be "on-time" validation)?
- Quite amazing to learn about the progress Shenzhen has made in the last 40 years, starting small and growing to a big, modern city. Very long-term vision and the willingness to follow through.
- Noise complaints received via different channels in San Francisco, California (30.11.2008 - 12.07.2019) bit.ly/2xMLOBI. Created mainly for orientation.
- Coded three image patterns today bit.ly/2xIJP1k (zoom to see original). As expected, a lot of fun. They could have been 300 on a more powerful machine.
- Even such a simple-looking product as a LOCTITE instant adhesive has a technical specification. They even recommend one based on whether someone is looking for flexibility, high strength, high temperature, high toughness, light cure, low odor/bloom or surface insensitivity. But it is always so that each and every specification is unique and allows you to peek over what someone else with an expertise in a different domain is considering important and then ask yourself why exactly these properties (and not other ones) were chosen. Allows you to learn a lot in a short time. But making decisions based on (missing/optional/heterogenous/potentially erroneous) data is not always easy. If in doubt, you could ask the domain experts, who have knowledge of the entire product palette.
- The tractors page is also rich in information, in case you seek to analyze this one.
- PCA on John Deere wheel loader models bit.ly/2Si5Nlq as seen on the company's model list bit.ly/2xI8wLn ↗. Models with numbers equal or below "344L" do not appear too different. "444K" appears to be a transient model between two clusters, so it could be meaningful to examine whether it provides any advantages present in both worlds. Liked the way "744K-II" and "824K-II" have started to separate themselves from the crowd (being close means they may have some technological similarities). But it is fairly easy to see how different "944K" from the rest is, as if playing in entirely another league. The diagram reflects information about 20 different attributes about each model (would be too long to list here).
- If you celebrated well in the past, but didn't invite me to the party, you'd have a much harder time to start a conversation talking about your rests. As a matter of principle.
- Google says that an icecream cone has a radius of 3cm and height of 19cm. This means the cone surface area must be ≈181.29cm2. (This is only if no overlap occurs, but the sides have to be attached well, so that no content leaks through). 1m2 material must otherwise be enough to make 55.16 cones (if also no cutting losses occur). If the icecream has 4 spherical scoops with radius of 2.5cm each (must be smaller than cone radius to pass through hole), then scoop volume becomes ≈261.80cm3. If the icecream costs 6$, the ratio (icecream volume / cone radius) / price comes at ≈0.24.
- I'd be interested in the latest technologies if they could improve my life a tad bit. But they can't.
- It's ok if you couldn't pay for the service. No service next time.
- Do you care about news that the economy performs good/bad or do you care only about what you receive as compensation for your work? There could be a total disconnect between the two.
- Didn't know that InstantPot has so many functions, but pressure/slow cooking are especially useful. Amazon currently reduced the prices of the 7-in-1 model to 60$ (40%) and the 9-in-1 to 69$ (46%). Many people seem to like them a lot.
- While hiring/firing, do you track which departments have the highest employee churn rate and the duration people tend to stay there? Can you find which measures tend to make a workplace in these departments more attractive?
- Are you using a digital drawing tool like a pen tablet? Tried a numerical comparison of all Wacom pen tablet models bit.ly/2SgGvEg to identify interesting patterns or possibly good models for the price. Interestingly, despite being cheapest, most small models were having significantly lower scores than the rest. If we accept that the best model has a score of 1.23, then medium models should have been at ≈0.615 (but are at 0.72 and 0.76) if small ones were around zero (not a perfect balance). This favors medium models over small ones, which means that if you have a choice, it is better to consider at least a medium model to get more value per unit price. Another detail is the slightly lower scores of "Paper" versions (yet they may have advantages on other attributes).
- Suppose you see the following product box at "Bed, bad & Beyond" bit.ly/2S9txIc, showing one of the many items on the site (removed price due to geolocation). Could you identify a potential problem with it (apart from the script errors on the page in Chrome)? Five UI elements are presented on separate lines, extending the box vertically. The product image is 175x175 pixels, while the box is 235x574px. This means that the former takes only 22.7% of the space provided by the latter. The rest is price, a two-line product description and plenty of UI elements (of which two act as buttons, but one appears as link). If you look at other nearby boxes, you will notice that not all of them include the same details. Since not every detail has a fixed position and the available ones are stacked vertically, all boxes have inconsistent detail alignment, which increases perceived jitter. It is unclear whether labels like "Clearance", "Best Seller" and "Exclusively Ours" must all be included in some boxes, since they sound like filter criteria. But these cocerns can all be fixed to significantly improve the use of screen space on the page.
- In a team of programmers, do you constantly communicate with everyone or do you know who to engage when for the greatest benefit of the project? (about passing the ball according to situation and expertise)
- Simple idea: Even time spacing between meals bit.ly/2S7IaMj
- Do you like fruit juices? CNN published a study according to which drinking only 100ml of sugary beverages per day could increase the risk of cancer by 18% cnn.it/2xH7r6v ↗
- You read that the start of a vacation has increased highway congestion.
- Fine to ask me to meet you in winter too. The absence of cheap flights then will increase your costs should the case arise that you need those skills.
- A less than perfect thinking attempting to estimate the time to break-even for an investment in a sample coworking space bit.ly/2S9pN9w. At least with these numbers, it does not seem to take too long. No wonder WeWork is now available at 750 locations.
- Always having fun to discover two titles on the same news site, where one claims one thing, the other—the opposite. Authors publishing on the same site (especially if on the same topic) must finally learn to work together rather than against each other, sending confusing messages to the readers.
- Which do you prefer: 1) mass-reaching free software not serving your needs well, but using you as a product to boost an ad platform for marketers or 2) paid software, which you requested, with concrete requirements, goals, inputs and outputs, which wasn't selling your feelings to third parties, binding you to closed groups or segmenting you into predefined categories? If you chose the second, has your thinking changed to you-product, me-market fit?
- Dsgining with proportions often produces visually appealing results. But you have to be aware of "optional" elements, which may or may not be available, especially if they serve as middle states in the proportion hierarchy. You probably don't want users to see a very small element next to a very big one.
- Remember that there is no such thing as "better" on worse terms. The past, numerics and current market capitalization give you more than a full picture to know why.
- An area may have a lot of relatively expensive real estate units, where the owners have chosen not to spend much time there. For an area of interest, what is the median ratio between normalized property value to yearly occupancy (days present / 365)? Lower is better. Don't let properties, buildings and machines stay unused.
- Is this branch attracting a sufficint number of clients to still be self-sustainable despite the countless new convenience alternatives clients have?
- Saw few photos from beautiful and inspiring coworking spaces in Melbourne, Australia. My understanding is that there are two components in such spaces—fixed and variable. The fixed is the desk that is reserved for your work and the atmosphere and amenities you can enjoy, while the variable component depends on the number of people currently working there (paying for stay like you) and how open they are to discuss themes or collaborate on topics/projects that may interest you (they may be more interested in theirs). Additionally, you may not know in advance who might be around tomorrow or when they may choose to work from that office. This means you have a lower degree of certainty about presence than you would have on a regular job. But you are also not bound to the clock or paid on time and can work as much as you find reasonable. However, if there are large groups of people engaged in lively discussions you are not part of, an open space may interefere with your ability to concentrate on the task. There are also private rooms too, but as far as I have seen, their monthly rent reaches 7-8 times the amount needed to reserve a "hot desk". Which probably makes operating at such spaces unsustainable. The increased cost of working from there may have to be propagated to the clients you work with, which could make you less competitive relative to someone who doesn't have all these conveniences. Having them also goes slightly against the nature of the "scrappy" entrepreneur, who by definition achieves something out of nothing (thus "arriving" at the convenience by personal means rather than "departing" to it) and for whom accepting things for granted could be detrimental to ambition.
- If you move a cursor over a toolset, you expect the zoom to be detailed enough to let you see the nuances of each tool. Instead the zoom shows you a slow to move square with a copy of the same image in another layer above the original. Not ideal.
- First time seeing advanced tool chests, containing hundreds of tools. Skinny me wondered how easy they are to carry around in a metal case weighting 47.4kg. The long-term weight of software tools is also not negligible as every maintainer knows.
- If you can't hear your voice in a loud room (at school), have you tried to whisper and see whether they hear you loudly?
- When you start, also be aware of the level of respect you receive. If you are not respected, leave as early as possible, since it is very unlikely that it will come in the future. Is your opinion seen as valuable or is it one of the many voices remaining unheard most of the time? Also be willing to "burn bridges"—if a single person from that companiy is consistently and repeatedly disrespectful to you, many other people knowing and being passive about it, consider striking contacts with all of them at once.
- Another sign I look at is whether a company seeks (or have seeked in the past) to hire/fire a lump amount of employees at once. It tells me that they seek convenience, cost reduction and quantity rather than quality, where there is a good probability that the compensation would be a function of the number of employees they have to pay. Away from such places.
- The decision which jobs to apply at and at which companies must also be approached from both a scientific and personal perspective. I have always considered it a bad warning sign if the company doesn't have salary range specified (plenty of them exist) or where during the interview process candidates see a bulk amount and hear "we don't discuss salaries here". In the first case they refuse to take responsibility and in the second they arrogantly assumed that what appears to work for them should also necessarily work for you. Both approaches (and all companies practicing them, without exception) fail in front of me, of course.
- When you click twice on a checkbox designed to filter out content and the result is every time a separate page with "Tell us how we can improve", you widen your eyes. Then you realize: There were no results returned and the routine form they usually put at the bottom of each page, has arrived at the top, causing you to believe you requested a different functionality. Always say clearly/indicate appropriately "No results have been found." to avoid such confusion.
- There is a danger that by trying to fit 100 news stories on the screen, the title text of each would become practically unreadable. Being unaware of the tradeoff between content size and readability is a neglect of design.
- If you had a need and you naturally went to discuss it with someone who could help, in the same way you went to the store when you were hungry, that's fine. You knew that it was something important, which could no longer be postponed, done in ineffective ways or with low quality. And you were ready to pay more for it, now, because you knew it will work, with a low chance of being a pure promise. If on the other hand you were ready to think through it several times, were unsure, postponed your decision, asked other people for opinion or permission, looked for the lowest price or couldn't appreciate the time of the person serving you, you were not necessarily looking for quality, and your project intention was likely important only to you.
- Energy usage (in kWh) every couple of hours of some buildings in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2JCSMyI. It seems that the value capturing did not occur at regular intervals. "100 Temple Stret" appears to be the location of Bristol City Council. "City Museum and Art Gallery" seems to be using slightly more energy than the "Central Library" building. The data was collected over 10 years, between 29.03.2009 and 30.03.2019.
- When you visit on the 10th of July and the top of the main page still has a special offer referring to the 4th of July, this sends a message that noone has touched this website for about a week.
- Seems that something with the Mazda photo gallery is wrong bit.ly/2JA3ia8 ↗. The photos in what is supposed to be a slideshow are missing bit.ly/2JzjeJM. Still hunting around for specifications.
- Another idea (in words only): a car travels against and hits an obstacle having the shape of 1/4 of a sliced circle. The hit "integrates" the obstacle into the tire, while displacing 1/4 of it, sending it with increased speed towards the second tire. There, the part emitted from the first tire breaks the second similarly, causing it to lose 1/4 of its geometry. Despite two patch losses, at the end the car continues traveling as if nothing happened.
- Simple idea: triangles to flower bit.ly/2Jy6rau
- Not very easy to find regularities in the postal codes of various locations in France bit.ly/2XAv9k7. Random sampled only 250 due to all of them exceeding capacity. (Source: data.gouv.fr, "Base officielle des codes postaux", bit.ly/2XwYFHE)
- Thinking about number of walkways kids need to cross to reach their schools (starting from home) and to what extent a higher number could be associated with greater danger.
- Library accessibility via bike paths in Amsterdam, The Netherlands bit.ly/2XzJVIa. Took longer than the hopes. Unsure why three libraries appear outside the administrative areas. If this is correct, the city district "Westpoort" has zero libraries (somewhat understandable), while "West" has five, which is the most. We see a slight tendency of the libraries towards west/south-west. Most or all of them aappear very accessible to cyclists. As we move towards the east/north-east, the density of the bike paths decreases.
- heap, lerp, leap
- Changes in the top 20 most bike-friendly cities in the Copenhagenize index (2011 - 2019) bit.ly/2XxzjcF. Antwerp has improved its best positioning; Paris has advanced from 19th position in 2013 to 8th position in 2019; Munich fell out of the index. Bremen, Bogota, Taipei and Vancouver seem to make debuts this year.
- Bike path with highest median bike counts in Montréal, Canada in 2018 bit.ly/2JuJPaO
- Path through some castles and palaces of Salzburg, Austria bit.ly/2JANNyH. Didn't expect them to be so many, so I focused only on the most dense area between "Benediktschlössl" and "Schloss Mattsee". As indicated, the path covers only 63 out of 104 locations, but could be useful to someone seeking more experiences per distance traveled.
- Saw a photo of someone trying to utilize their SUV to swim on the beach.
- Library accessibility via bike facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2XzEQPM. The timestamp of the last update of the bike facilities data is from 11.01.2019. If it is still complete, then only the "Cambridge Public Library" and the "Collins" and "Valente" branches can be considered directly lying on a bike path. The other four branches are either close to or surrounded by them. The "O'Neill" branch to the north is perhaps the hardest to reach via bike.
- Similar with web design: If it takes you a lot of time to read large segments of code to approximately understand how things work, and then as much time to type several screens of CSS and several of JavaScript, only to produce an effect, which (in front of you) appears small, insignificant, not useful or impactful enough, how many times would you feel internally comfortable to engage in an unfruitful activity? You'll likely seek ways to reduce your waste instead, including your conversations with people unable to understand this.
- Similar with data analysis: If it costs you a lot of I/O operations and manual reading time to select relevant information from a large dataset, while your machine remains completely unresponsive for extended period of time, how sustainable could this mode of operation be if no client is willing to pay for such service? You will likely do your calculations differently the next time, including making decisions not to analyze certain datasets with a high probability of causing system restart.
- A more subtle form of waste is computational waste. Suppose you are creating beautiful animations, but financially these do not work very well. Your clients don't want to pay for them. Animation is CPU and GPU intensive and causes your mobile machine to get temperature and use 5x more power (W) than usual. This means your cost of creation has increased 5x (not considering the extra debugging time to work on a busy machine) while your earnings have remained almost the same. How many times would you make animations?
- An integrated device may look as being beautifully simple, single piece, until you look at the internals and start asking "Does this have to be here?". If it is known that a single component for a specific purpose exists and you hear that a device is great for the same purpose, perhaps you are looking at a bulky packaging with enhanced usability and extended functionalty to account for the "just in cases".
- Imagine several thin canvas stripes with different decorative patterns, positioned at different sections of a website. You could have beautiful result with no images and no need to pollute the page with hundreds of elements.
- Also consider replacing the word "prompt" with "probe". Happens more often than you think.
- Suppose you found a hotel room at reduced price of 43$ (from 131$). Then you start thinking of finding a cheap flight to exactly the same destination for exactly the same date. You start thinking of local traveling time and cost from airport to the hotel. You start thinking what you'll be doing there and who you will be speaking with. You start thinking how needed and how meaningful your actions will be. You start thinking whether you and other people will have enough time. And so you quickly realize that nothing is as cheap as it seems. But it's easy to design "signals" as distractions, which prompt people to spend more.
- The page titled "The 50 best {product} in {product category}" contains the 100 best ads. Is this acceptable?
- Another simple thing to remind you of the services on offer here—rotated rectangles with changing border colors bit.ly/2JrYraS
- Acoustic behavior and maximum AC power of three Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 switches bit.ly/2Xwpsnh. No day of rest.
- Update of the diagram with the bicycle hires in London (30.07.2010 - 31.05.2019) bit.ly/2Js3vMA. Visible how at the periodic minimums there is a slight tendency for a gradual increase. Few strange spikes between 2015 and 2016.
- Liked the Focusrite product specifications and noticed that there is a difference of 7dB in the dynamic range of microphone input and headphone output for at least two devices. Wondered whether this could be seen as a form of conversion loss, but not an expert to know for sure.
- All insects are threatened. Bees are insects, hence they are threatened. Birds eat insects, hence they are likely more threatened than before. Sunday logic.
- Photos of fast bikes used at Tour de France 2019 bit.ly/2Js9r85 ↗. Learned about the minimum weight limit of 6.8kg, already preventing the use of some components. Perhaps the race is already a solid source of streaming data, but only "static" people like me have the time to think about it. Everyone else prefers to pedal-generate it.
- Library accessibility (with metro and bus) in Cologne, Germany bit.ly/2XxNQ88. If correct, most libraries are very close to a metro line, which is good. Only one library on the east remains in the middle between two metro lines, but seems not too close to them. (The one on the north is reachable via a line colored in yellow, which is slightly less visible.) Looking closely, many libraries seem to be surrounded by at least one park, which also enables reading outside the buildings.
- Cost per square foot for road segment resurfacing in Tempe, Arizona bit.ly/2XAqmzu. Liked a lot the regularity of the streets in this city. You could also look at the building contours (total of 55697), but it seems that this data is an excerpt, since a lot of space has not been included. Seen this way, most buildings appear relatively small, where one on the west is an exception.
- Interesting design. Radio, MP3 player, recorder, headphone jack, mini screen (to show song metadata) and controls can also fit on a USB-stick-like device bit.ly/2JxoL3z
- Estimating screen visibility at a conference bit.ly/2XsBVbC. Was the initial idea, when I did some research.
- "The JSConf & CSSconf EU finances" bit.ly/2JqyA3d ↗. Interesting to see what is involved in organizing an event and glad that it has been shared transparently. The numbers appear impressive, but this is mostly due to the fact that the organizers were looking to create big events, at great locations & buildings, with great equipment, paying for great speakers, travel costs and hotels, video coverage, food, chairs/tables, scaffolding and so on. I agree that this adds quickly. Yet, the cost of this "glamour" event is in this way exported to all attendees, with an average ticket price of over 500€ (considering the two events). Charging such amounts and writing "we are not for profit" almost sounds fun. The partnerships also do not seem to be clearly defined as well. There could be a lot more organizations involved (not just two), each asking for their slice of the pie. How could a participant then know what they are paying for? 100€ for a day of food is nice. "You can do it on a much smaller budget with a lot fewer features." No thanks, I'd prefer not to visit the event instead. We could look at it from another perspective, asking what is truly valuable to a participant at the conference? Is it the food? Perhaps this is available elsewhere at a fraction of the cost, where many could drag some food for a day or two. Is it the video coverage? Does not make one more knowledgeable, but serves promotional purposes, popularizes the event and the speakers. Yet, that this promotional cost is budgeted means that every conference attendee pays for that promotion, even passively. Is it the scaffolding and the related logistics? Bringing and removing things is a waste for which I'd be unwilling to pay. But this points back to the other problem of selecting a venue, which could have served for presenting cars, for instance. Is it the signage? May signal of a problem that plausible conference size has been exceeded (what about increasing frequency instead?). Is it the badges? Needless self-assertion. Not sure what the outside tent was for. Making people pay for all this stuff around the conference wouldn't have worked if the event was for cooking, for instance. In short: Most attendees are there to learn at least a couple of useful things in a short time and meet many interesting people (otherwise the investment in a ticket is not justified). The second point means that a conference having restrictive nature is not that useful. Such events would be great if they kept to their main value.
- If an inspecting organization claims that the background work of many retailers is connected with "suffering, exploitation and discrimination", would you buy the cheapest product the next time when someone else will have to pay the price? How sustainable do you expect this to be? Have you considered paying more to support these people so they are able to do more and better work while also enjoying it?
- Multi-room audio (DTS Play-Fi) sounds an interesting concept. Renting a couple of rooms in a single apartment and then offering consistent music-as-a-service (lounge before sleep) to all tenants.
- Idea: Can the layout of a large apartment be designed in such a way that someone has to cross a minimal number of other rooms in order to reach a given one (attach a number to each)? Imagine that three individuals have their guests in three of the rooms and you need to pass through each one to proceed to your own. Would you feel comfortable to meet everyone you don't know along the path?
- Looked at four routers and their theoretical speed and price characteristics bit.ly/2XuSNhX, ranking them by Mbps/$ to validate my intuition. The cheapest model preceded the most expensive one, although it may not win design contests, support as many simultaneous streams or cover such a wide area.
- You want to design your page to have ≈10% white space (including the one between the lines of text). Obviously, has to be responsive. But apart from this, what would be the most sensible way to approach such constraint? Is there a browser which tells you the ratio of covered to uncovered visible area?
- Sometimes you realize that your editor seems to have a natural understanding of what's important bit.ly/2JqMZMz
- In which months of the year, for which events and times, with which performers and scenic arrangements did you manage to sell the most tickets or the tickets with the highest median price? Could you use this information to adjust future offers, generate more interest and increase demand?
- Would be nice to have data about a pipeline network with coordinates, approximate pipe diameter and flow rate (in m3/s). Could enable a beautiful diagram with variable-width lines (pipe diameter) and blue-to-red colors (flow rate).
- Library accessibility for cyclists in Melbourne, Australia bit.ly/2Jw8E6f. Route availability does not seem to be a reason for concern. Perhaps each segment could have a safety score assigned (are they equally safe to use?). Also liked the relatively regular spacing between the libraries, but found only six (are there more to the south?).
- Do not design tests for people to show your own intelligence. Noone cares what the result of some convoluted piece of code (which does nothing meaningful) is. What matters is real software with concrete users and functionality. Claiming that someone does "not know the language" when they don't pass the test of gauging the output of one long line full of code bumps (see my definition) is a little bit harsh. If they were to engage the tester in a complex project, it could be that the claim switches the other way around. Useless to engage in a conversation of the type "who knows more".
- Simple idea: If non-payment is independent of the times, why shouldn't high charges be independent of the times?
- Library accessibility via bike paths in Winnipeg, Canada bit.ly/2JpERfm
- A look at the traffic disruptions in Edmonton, Canada bit.ly/2XtfOSl. Highlighted some projects with the longest expected duration (in days). As you can see, the street "87 Avenue NW" appears in four of them.
- According to Statistics Canada bit.ly/2Jpsujz ↗, total of all merchandise imports has increased from 10000 million in 1988 to slightly over 50000 million dollar as of 01.05.2019. I also checked which categories account for the highest relative percentage of imports. The result came out to be: consumer goods (20.28%); motor vehicles and parts (18.68%); electronic and electrical equipment and parts (11.76%); industrial machinery, equipment and parts (11.50%); tires, motor vehicle engines and motor vehicle parts (8.32%); passenger cars and light trucks (8.01%); energy products (6.30%); metals and metallic mineral products (6.03%). Unfortunately, some (of these and the rest of the) categories likely overlap, which makes it less clear for a non-expert to understand where the differences are.
- Origin of olive oils bit.ly/2JoHyOh as seen on bestoliveoils.com. You may already use some of the products on the list. The initial expectation to see Spain slightly before Italy did not hold here. The presentation uses a JavaScript object, which you probably recognized.
- Do blue cellos exist? bit.ly/2XuQZWr ↗. Same as black swans.
- Interesting. Ran a script on some specification parameters of Sony headphones (price ($), weight (oz), impedance (Ohm), frequency low (Hz), frequency high (Hz), sensitivities (dB/mW)) to look which headphones might be worth of attention (after seeing two sources recommending WH-1000XM3 and one WH-XB900N). I assumed that higher frequency spread and higher sensitivity are better, while higher impedance and weight are worse, constructing the ranking criteria accordingly. While the 300$ WH-1000XM3 appear quite high on the list, they are behind the much more expensive Z1R Premium (listed at 2000$) and MDR-Z7M2 (listed at 900$). Since I said "interesting", the first place was taken by MDR-1AM2, also at 300$, although these come at slightly lower sensitivity of only 98dB (compared to 104.5 for WH-1000XM3). But they have lower weight and impedance and an expanded frequency range (100kHz compared to 40kHz). Has someone tried these too and what was the initial impression?
- Suppose you can choose in which city you rent your apartment, but feel lonely and want to maximize contact with other people (which you hope will improve your projects and work). You can choose from 25 cities where you know the median rent and population sizes. So you rank them by potential population reached per median rent paid, getting the number of people per dollar spent (unfortunately aprtment sizes across cities could vary, but we neglect this here). In which of these cities would you experience the most beneficial networking effect? bit.ly/2JoMVNt. As you can see despite having the highest rents, Los Angeles still provides better networking per dollar spent than many other cities, while Phoenix comes second. Yet, you also have to acknowledge that reaching more people may require more distant/longer traveling.
- Learned about the forcing function of a future press release. In other words, about writing in advance what you achieved n months into the future (with concrete goals and numbers) before it actually happens. Reminds me that I also heard a weird speech or two in which the actions were explained for "done" before anything has been initiated or where the doing was described as something secondary and negligible.
- A great article giving an overview of some US retail powers and their problems bit.ly/2JlI8fI ↗. Interesting decision to scale back on jet.com. But compared to what Amazon has, it doesn't look nearly as good. Still, if the projected losses exceed $1 billion, what fraction of them could have been invested in improving the website and to what effect? But yes, saving from infrastructure and not having enough warehouses when you want to scale the number of items sold could become a real bottleneck. If Amazon has 110 fulfillment centers and Walmart only ≈20, then something is at play here (you recognized correctly). But these warehouses aren't the only factor in operations where Amazon has an edge. It also has strong computing centers, which it likely uses to compute optimal warehouse-internal operations, delivery routes/times, dynamic prices, product recommendations, order quantity prediction, need elicitation, subscription services by interest, discount moments, etc. Would be impossible without good scientists and programmers. But I agree that working with plenty of other partners can slow things down. Imagine if Amazon had to ask for the permission of every book author to offer their book on the site. It would take them forever; much easier is to buy their copies, promote their work and see whether it will find good acceptance, covering potential losses from the revenue. Adding 1 million books * 50$ average book price is still a lot less than these $1 billion. Yet, one thing that even Amazon knows is that you can't offer everything and still have it perfectly findable. Doesn't work. The other day I was disappointed that a page full of items I didn't ask for appeared after entering a keyword (Amazon). Which means that Walmart could improve on that by offering a better selection of items and (due to having to store less of them) perhaps save on some new warehouses. But if the company continues to pretend that retail has nothing to do with computing, it would be hard to hope for better times. Yet, projecting this rivalry as "only one must survive" is self-defeating. Both companies will likely need strong partners to survive long-term and beating the smaller competitors out of the market (instead of engaging them in cooperation) may work against them. Which brands could they feature if their scale helped eliminate them?
- Glad that I haven't received emails asking about "free" in exchange for "exposure" (of the "experience"). Could be because the "something" is not as easy to define as people expect, which naturally keeps them away as a form of protection. If they can't understand what you do, they don't bother you. And when they don't have the intention to spend some time and learn about it, what is left to say? The good thing about email is that you don't have to respond when you disagree.
- Haven't seen a good comparison of median train ticket prices and arrival times with DB and SNCF on comparable distances. Would be interesting to observe, but requires lots of data.
- When you have no plan how to respond to the threat from multi-billion dollar corporations (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Paypal, Ebay, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Slack etc.) and when you continuously sell not just few businesses, but an entire sequence of powerful brands, you are selling the economy of an entire continent. Both are inexcusable.
- As long as Germany keeps repeating that its future is in its car industry, the country as a whole is not interesting/attractive to me. If it fails to realize the value of programming/software or doesn't compensate right for such skills, then it is perhaps the wrong place to be.
- "Kurzarbeit ist ein Mittel der Wahl, wenn Unternehmen trotz wirtschaftlich schwieriger Zeiten ihre Fachkräfte halten wollen." Unhaltbar. I can't work only part time and expect to do quality work. I must either be fully engaged or not and this is also what has to find expression in my compensation—either salary or zero. There's no such thing as "part time" and if you know this very well as an employer, but still pretend the opposite, you play a double game. I won't increase the cost of my work and make "half-assed" products just to satisfy you, the employer. "Unternehmen" wie euch braucht keiner.
- Battery time is critical. Smartwatches lasting only a week do not belong on my hand. Perfect the design, then sell it.
- If I don't know your language and you don't speak English or German, conversations would be difficult to impossible.
- In case you are into chocolate package design bit.ly/2XqvVAm c
- Try to attract "A" players with "D" payments.
- Good to see so many bikes in Utrecht, The Netherlands. But the reportage showed few relatively narrow bike path segments, which appeared slightly crowded, which would make me feel insecure there, given the cycling speeds. Interesting to accomodate the bikes in a separate building to save space on racks outside. Feels cleaner and more organized, balanced perhaps with a somewhat reduced convenience.
- "Too many companies drain values from the economy" bloom.bg/2XrpFIz ↗. They drained. That value is now mostly gone.
- Lakes by area (in km2) in USA bit.ly/2JlA8v7. Included only the labels of the areas bigger than 1000km2 and excluded Alaska with its Selawik Lake, Iliamna Lake and Becharof Lake. Does this agrees with your own result?
- Relationship between calories and price for the burgers at Bareburger bit.ly/2JkJOpK. Not obvious. Five burgers with widely varying calories cost 14$, while three types, which are among the lightest in calories are also among the cheapest.
- Sometimes the slope on which you have to ski is the mountain of code and the only thing you want is to keep your balance without falling into a volume-increasing snowball as the speed increases.
- Have you considered working with small, independent service-providers when you complained that the big service you used stopped caring enough about your needs? Can you expect a known individual to serve you well or do you prefer to be on the "safe" side, relying on a big, stable corporation?
- Do you pick the fruits and then cut the tree? Being realistic means that you are not expecting from a single new employee to do an extraordinary turnover at a troubled company, previously created by the tireless effort of thounsands of knowledgeable individuals, who left or heard your excuse to be laid off for various reasons. Expecting this is not only unfair, but will likely create the resentment that could leave you with no employess at all. Past success has never been a guarantee for future one, but how you treat your people matters and is likely the mark you leave.
- It could be that different people perceive DIY differently. For one group this is a chance to work with 5-6 rare tools and as many different materials while crafting a valuable object through a complex, multi-step process. For another group, it is a necessary need to pick one or two materials, often having no tools at all, and think of creative ways to achieve something unseen/extraordinary that won't simply stay "cool" on a shelf, but will either sell or improve one's situation. Both are hard, but one earns more of my sympathy. And it is not a conincidence that the practice of holding article-contests to involve as many creators as possible while rewarding only few, won't find approval here. But we can imagine that it probably works well as a mechanism to attract more visitors.
- Still not understanding why companies selling products they don't own, but attempt to obtain from third-parties upon payment received, is an allowed practice. There's more than a random quality guarantee involved here.
- You don't have to be an expert to sense what is coming to the market after you see device sale prices which have been made small on purpose (in a brochure) in favor of "lower", yet well-visible prices asking you to buy on rates or rent. Someone came to the realization that the margins from pure sales are perhaps not that attractive relative to work involvement and is now seeking to benefit by earning on the same resource repeatedly, at the expense of the client. Reminds me of room and office space at many places.
- Beware that some scam companies have started to organize their ads in a Q&A fashion in which they take both sides without telling you so. Usually the answer contains a link to their company page. Seconds ago clicked on one such "response". Same company which advertises itself in front of me through various different channels. The paradox is that they seem to have a whole lot of resources to do so, which raises some hard questions.
- WIkipedia has a nice list of the largest lakes in USA by area bit.ly/2JiT0Lk ↗, which iallows you to create a very informative diagram
- Didn't even notice that dummerAugust has passed 10 years since inintiation. Not that interesting or important at all. What matters is only the here and now.
- Some famous mathematicians and when they lived bit.ly/2XoRx01. Looks like Galois lived even a shorter life than Ramanujan. Here negative years are BC and positive ones are AD.
- Fitting circular tables in a rectangular restaurant bit.ly/2XkDCIk (thoughts). Instead of square packing, I was thinking of hexagonal one, but the constrained space and settings make this difficult. Perhaps a larger area could enable better density or several table size combinations to utilize the space more effectively.
- Assuming that many hotels on booking.com present plenty of images. One had 45, of which two were vertical. Someone who is motivated enough to see all horizontal ones will have to make 43 clicks and requests for a total of 3.3MB content. By merging all images scaled down to 180 x 120 in one (906 x 1083), the total size becomes 202.6kB (≈5.9% of the total) and only a single request is made. (And if you pass the image through TinyJPG, this size becomes 166.1kB for a further reduction of one percent). After this, the main details on each image are still well-visible and sharp enough (come to see if you wish), while the initial doubts about possible compression artefacts didn't hold, perhaps due to the high quality input. But this was only one hotel.
- Do you wonder how most shipping trajectories look like or only care about shipping duration and price?
- You heard that there are many islands in Greece, but never knew exactly where they are? Tried to create a simple diagram with (hopefully) the right labels based on existing data bit.ly/2XlZHWW
- Using information by "Zeit" (which cited IEA), computed that the average oil demand spread over the current estimated population on Earth must come close to 2.073 liter/day. Exceeds wildest expectations. On 8l/100km this is the equivalent of having everyone travel by car 25km every day. Does this appear efficient to you?
- Liked the idea of having a bed directly behind the driver's seat on Kenworth trucks (haven't seen this before). When the driver is getting sleepy, the opportunity to rest is at arm's length. And since the truck will be turned off, the rest time will be free of interfering noise (abstaining from outside traffic noise).
- A specification goes much beyond listing what is available, unavailable or standard. Otherwise using the keyword "specs" is misleading.
- Public computer centers in New York bit.ly/2XlSvK8. At the north of the city, at the boundary between Manhattan and Bronx, seems to be the highest density.
- Creative photomontage goes further than previously thought. Saw a photo with a car whose back consisted of many pipes having different opening diameters and pointing in various directions. Possible to assume that all of these would be dedicated to the car's exhaustion system, but not so. Each pipe had a metal grate through which an internal speaker was visible. Hard to gauge the total wattage output.
- Before: Good product at a good price. Then: "Absolutely amazing product for the price!" After: Price adjusted to reflect perceived amazingness and heightened expectations. For most people, not a good deal anymore.
- Ten food chains with the most locations in USA bit.ly/2Xkqra5
- How many other people are currently looking at the same is of zero interest to me. Distracting, randomly arising notifications at the wrong place are lost opportunities.
- Took a free photo of clean pebbles and ran a script to add some green "algae" to them bit.ly/2JfVsSV. Maybe noticeable.
- Remember that if you have a project, you don't need to wait for the worst to come. You could act on it sooner to prevent any unwanted/unintended consequences. dummerAugust could be available for help too, yet not unconditionally. A lot depends on your own behavior.
- Path through some beautiful places in Canada bit.ly/2JdVkmR. An attempt to convert a slideshow to a diagram to see where all the locations are. Includes only three of the lakes in Sasketchwan as a tradeoff. The country contour didn't plot in reasonable time, so I had to leave it out.
- Fan, animated bit.ly/2XeQEaa. Makes some wind to cool you down.
- Interesting that good thermal design of heatsinks (with fins looking as comb spikes) still has to consider heatsink width, fin height and fin gap.
- Circles with opposing forces bit.ly/2XkFYqD. No matter how they affect each other, they can't escape the whole.
- Do you use traffic cameras to look at sunsets or buildings radiating nice patterns of light at night?
- At the place where two elements of different colors connect, the design could introduce an accent.
- Nice to see a list of the farmer's markets in British Columbia, Canada bit.ly/2JfvzCy ↗. The effort to cover the entire province seems anything but trivial, while the promotion of healthy foods to support healthy decisions is a notable cause.
- If we assume that a liter gasoline in Germany costs ≈1.48€ (benzinpreis-aktuell.de), a car uses 7.5l/100km, the distance between Frankfurt/Main and Mainz through B43 and A60 is 43.6km and an RMV ticket (S-Bahn) for the same route connecting the two central stations (Hbf) costs 8.60€ (duration of 36mins), then the cost with the car would be ≈4.84€, which is 43.73% less than the cost with the rail. This big difference clearly highlights why driving cars is so important there, even when the additional cost of this might be increased air pollution. But imagine that the driver makes room for two other people. Then the per-person cost becomes 1.61€, which is 81.28% less than the one with the rail. Geiz ist geil.
- Interesting idea to hang a carpet on the wall as decoration. Perhaps harder to walk on, but much easier to clean and maintain.
- You probably remember the attempt to plot the Tour de France stages in 2017. The cycling event this year will start only in a couple of days and extend until the end of July. I hoped to be able to construct detailed paths of each stage, merging them into a single image. The milestones for each stage were clearly indicated, but he GPS had in many cases trouble finding their coordinates. And even when it found them, my French and geographical knowledge about Belgium and France are so poor that it was impossible to validate whether these were correct. So I ended the effort only after the first two stages (out of 21) bit.ly/2Jfknpw. As you can see, it is pointless to compare the path from few known points against a smooth route on a map. What I liked was that the first stage starts at Brussels, Belgium and the last ends at Champs-Élysées in Paris, France bit.ly/2Xj1OuA. So nice to see partnerships extending beyond borders in Europe.
- Eagle head from point cloud (experimental) bit.ly/2JcpFCi. Point clouds could fill figures of almost any shape, but there are two challenges—speed of generation (SVG elements are costly; canvas is script-revealing) and realistic shading for better feature recognition.
- Looked at image segmentation, where a long sequence of cars in front of the driver had various different (homogenous) colors. A beautiful way to show the participants on the road. But assuming it can be used to sound an alarm when the non-occluded object area exceeds a given threshold (closer objects appearing bigger) may be too much. For instance, a big truck will exceed the area at a much longer distance than a small car, yet they could be of equal importance in case of a crash. Also a thin and high pillar may not "gather" enough area until being too (or maybe not even then).
- Mapping between two graphs means you could have a small diagram showing which node goes into which. But with large graphs, it may be too busy to look at.
- Can you plot many trajectories (e.g. customers moving through a store) and look at the overlap to identify potential zones of interest? Where was the most time spent in hesitation?
- Sometimes it can be confusing to imagine which cities are close to which in the high-density state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Tried to plot their locations and populations bit.ly/2JgCifu and came to an interesting line. Sadly, Bielefeld and Detmold still overlap at the north-east. If you notice mistakes, feel free to correct me.
- Sometimes you look at a single-row horizontal navigation having 12 inks of font-size 14px and wonder how all these long words still fit while having spacing of few pixels in-between.
- Looked at some flower arrangement-packings before making a choice. Pure green, beautifully-shaped leaves, growing fan-like.
- Seems that while sleeping, brain was engaged in thinking of the dynamics of football games and assuming that a more dynamic one could be more interesting to watch. So it thought about the ratio of average ball speed (m/s) to average player speed (m/s). But then what happens if both teams were primarily cleanng the ball in the opposite field, often without coming much in contact with it at all? That would accelerate the ball, but promote the passivity of many players. So we could involve ball distance traveled divided by number of player touches, as the latter could be seen as making the game more dynamic and unpredictable. This means that a game played more thoughtfully would likely have a smaller ratio. So we could take the inverse of this and multiply it by the first ratio. Any idea of possible enhancements?
- Thought that a good comb would be as long as the most common head width, as high (spikes only) as highest expected sensible hair height, have between-spike distance slightly longer than hair thickness (say 1.5 * 50µm to avoid accidental scraping), spike width of 50µm, handle height of ≈2.5cm for a comfortable grip. This means that the comb for an 18cm wide head would need to have ≈1440 spikes, which is a lot more than the countable 52. How precise can a non-nan(o) model be?
- You probably remember the work which used the Porsche car specifications. After a long time, I re-visited the original source and it appeared as if they have become more detailed (which enables more interesting insights). Here is a short comparison on a single instance to validate whether gathering the new data could be worth it bit.ly/2XdArSL. But then it feels a lot of work to get these for potentially hundreds of models, having to click the specification button for each model, run code each time and organize the results before the actual analysis of the data can begin. So I have to know whether someone would be truly interested in that at first.
- Parks and bike paths in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA bit.ly/2Xg5Fby. Unsure why the two white regions were not filled. The bike paths went ouside the city border, but this area is cropped. Interesting bike paths near a portion of the city boundary going from North to South. Overall, the bike paths dominate the green area.
- From Tokyo to Kyoto (short text animation) bit.ly/2Ji4TRU. Movement economy.
- A way to obtain the park names from the park polygons file with the help of some bash commands bit.ly/2Xey81C. Quite convenient, fast and flexible. The [A-Z] eliminates the few instances of parks which started with "[no name]". Sometimes it's convenient to fit all data on a single screen.
- Very much liked the HBR article mentioning "smart engagement". Working in a sustainable way is quite important for long-term health and ability to work. If you engage fully and burn out quickly, finding no good returns, you will not have enough energy to change anything later. Many people are also unaware, how they work themselves into poverty. Maintaining the right level of energy is just as important as having and doing the right kind of work.
- After identifying a mistake, the page with the parks in Vancouver has been updated bit.ly/2Xbgw6E. Better late than never. But if you notice further mistakes, let me know.
- If you wish certain type of services, you have to wish the payments too.
- Centroids for tree species with more than 1000 exemplars in Paris, France bit.ly/2XehQG6. The east of Paris seems to be dominated by "Quercus robur", while the south—by "Platanus orientalis".
- Had the idea to plot the cycling routes in the UK after seeing the Sustrans website (they have a nice map). But then noticed that not every route had ".gpx" data, so if I proceeded, the result would have been incomplete. Then found cycle-route.com, which listed "all England cycle routes" and saw that each one had such file. But after plotting over 220 paths, the result disappointed bit.ly/2JcXcvX. Sometimes we have to accept that the purpose of the data is to sell the maps.
- A review of the layers of the atmosphere bit.ly/2XcVy7p. Attempts to convert an article into a diagram.
- For the own peace of mind, do you think it could be possible to approximate this beautiful box effect without using (several) images, but only the same code with different color filters? bit.ly/2Lpeetu ↗
- Did you also pay for features you didn't need, but were there motivated by and mixed with those you need?
- The more I look at architecture, the more I admire the geometric skills of the creators. It takes some effort to imagine a non-trivial, symmetric shape from above and then project it towards the ground while working from there to complete it.
- 2D circle to shaded sphere-like object bit.ly/2Xclr7t and a smoother variant avoiding JavaScript bit.ly/2LlAJQd. You could also make the lines appear as small connected triangles.
- Don't know much about queueing theory. What I imagine is a pipe with a certain diameter and flow rate. Hence, to have more clients flow per unit of time, I could increase the diameter, the flow rate or both. And eventually adjust the length to reflect the processing time (longer pipes for higher throughput). There is also a tradeoff to make: estimating when the cost of introducing another, parallel pipe (given the properties of the existing ones) would be justified.
- Unrealistic to expect your website to do miracles (there are billions now), but a well-developed and maintained one could still add a lot of value to your business. Most websites are not that good at attracting paying clients, so there is an opportunity. But it likely won't work for you unless you do.
- "At 100% utilization, the response time becomes very bad." Capacity bottleneck.
- Centroids of various tree species among the trees with more than 500 exemplars maintained by the city of Sacramento, California bit.ly/2XbV7u5. Allows us to observe some planting patterns. Blue oaks were planted towards the north-east, Modesto ash and fruitless mulberries towards east, horsetail trees and cork oaks towards south and common hackberries towards the north-west.
- Do you find that machine tool life and cutting feed rate are the most important factors affecting the total cost of milling machine operation? Interesting to read that minimizing the depth of the cuts could reduce the rate of tool depletion, but potentially require more passes, increasing the processing time. That improved demand reduced the cost impact of fixed expenses is probably a case for batching orders.
- Critics of the Eiffel Tower said it looked like an ugly factory chimney. In its finished state it was 986 feet tall, made of ≈18000 parts assembled in-place, weighting a total of 10600 tons at a total construction cost of ≈$1.5 million. It was made in a very short time (especially compared to other structures) and kept the label "tallest structure on Earth" for 41 years.
- Properties of Loewe TVs bit.ly/2X6Ox8i. Somehow always learning about the facts after the fact.
- Are there already navigation systems, which inform the drivers of wet or slippery roads or reduced visibility in advance of reaching a given road segment?
- The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil also releases SiO2 in the atmosphere, which adds to raindrops to cause the metal-corrosive "acid rain". Also acidifies water reserves, possibly affecting aquatic life.
- Saw a photo of severely flooded Nashville in May 2010. Couldn't remember to have heard about it.
- If at time t rain is available at location x and after half an hour it moves to nearby location y, what do you think would be the most revealing representation to study this dynamic—a graph with changing edge weights, an animated contourmap, a vector field, intensity matrix updates (each entry corresponding to lat & lon) or something else?
- "Mieten oder kaufen - was ist wo günstiger?" bit.ly/2Xa89bL ↗. The article's advice not to pay more than 30% of the net monthly salary for rent means that one would have to avoid employers which pay less than the equivalent of ≈3.5 rents per month, maybe even as a beginner. Sounds reasonable.
- A matrix masked in a checker pattern bit.ly/2X9IsrM. Can you notice the disturbance?
- Reducing "engine-on" time likely reduces petrol use independent of source and destination. Two cars stand still for 30mins, one with active and one with inactive motor. Work is comparable, but gasoline use isn't. To reduce this time, better paths can be taken (more direct, better paved, underutilized/less congested, not under construction, in off-peak hours, not closed due to events, incidents etc).
- How well is the weight spread across all nodes? Or is there a danger of cracking at the place of highest registered pressure?
- Time to seconds via dot product bit.ly/2X9AtLn
- Googled for "injustice monitor" and found nothing meaningful to catch attention. Significant omission.
- Pointless to try to leap every leap year.
- Think about the various APIs designed to increase platform capabilities and availability of new functionality. In how many instances would customers pay to use these additions? Have they already done so before the actual API was introduced/pushed to the public? Has the developer earned enough to conclude that this API would be useful to the broader audience? Has the developer collected sufficient feedback from more experienced developers and if so, would they fully support this addition? If not, which objections would they have? In case of skipping these questions, there is risk of publishing code for the seek of recognition or self-assertion (ego). APIs are not a competition for publicity; attempting to show/teach fellow workers how much they don't know by publicly introducing new method names and parameters, before the API was validated or stabilized, makes the work around the potential acceptance of future APIs that much harder.
- Another question which may affect your happiness indirectly is whether you want to serve every possible client, only a small group of carefully selected clients or somewhere in the middle of the range. Because working with clients that bring you down will negatively impact the quality of your work.
- But there is one way you could increase the likelihood to be noticed: by not being on the mass-presence platforms. Being one of 10 clients in the store gives you more exposure than owning a demo next to the thousands made by various people, which is itself better than pushing an app to a store having millions, which is again better than posting on social networks flooded with billions of messages. Effort is not noticeable when you put it in invisible places.
- What has the belief in product-market fit brought to your life so far? Looking for the unreasonable/unrealistic as life passes you by? A recipe for living in permanent misery. Time to throw away the burden of the common wisdom and do whatever you can here and now, focusing only on things you can affect directly. Life is too short to lose yourself in a search of product-market fit.
- What would I do if I had a million dollar? Hard question, since the scale of this number is very different from what I've experienced so far and would correspondingly require a different mode of thinking. One possibility is to diversify the investment. Investing in more of the same I have done so far—expanding knowledge, skills, problem solving, opportunity search, research and data analysis, design and experimentation, developing greater imagination and sense for surrounding complexity. Seeking ways to contribute more, to make more and more useful software while not being obsessed about opinions, expectations or the prevalent common wisdom. Moving to another location that would allow me to be more fully who I'd like to become (traveling more to find it). Investing in physical, mental and spiritual health—to keep myself productive for as long as possible. Investing in a road bike to cut on walking time and running more often (maybe on a threadmill to avoid road pollution). Investing in a fast machine to accelerate the capacity to deal with a world of constantly increasing complexity. Maybe investing in real estate as a way to stabilize income. Investing in the ability to assemble and understand electronic circuits thoroughly (maybe even selling some devices). Investing in a good microscope to see how the smallest mechanisms in this world operate and to learn about materials and life. Investing in a production factory to see more effectively and at scale what brings value to people and makes them happy. Investing time in more meaningful and stimulating contacts. Perhaps an ordinary response.
- Not trusting every label I see in a store. Just because something is labeled as "cashmere" and has inflated price relative to other garments (while still being too cheap) doesn't mean it is. Or could have the worst possible quality qualifying this cloth for this label. Rough enough to scratch your skin.
- Always possible to find linters explaining that the features of your work were "errors". Uhm, not using again.
- New PHP versions lead to new errors on old software. Can't change much about it here, so they will have to remain and reflect history. Being current is more important than trying to satisfy all dependencies of previously unused software.
- Suppose your product is a bag. What could be potentially important about it to be able to sell it? Maybe design (colors and shapes, perhaps also matching clothes), enough space with plenty of compartments, including a stable one for a shake-sensitive, battery-powered communication device. Perhaps enough room to keep spare clothes, a raincoat, gloves and hat (if winter), food (fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds), a diary, a book and/or notebook, a pen or pencil and sharpener, voltage adapter, a map (if at a new place), a purse (with PID card, library card, travel card, flight/train ticket, health card, phone card for static booths, debit card and some cash), a battery charger or battery bank, a digital camera, a pair of AA batteries, two 0.5l bottles of water (also used as mini dumbbells), fragile (sun)glasses and sun creme with high SPF, surface-scratching keys, handkerchiefs (also used instead of toilet paper), earplugs, pocket soldering iron, chips and solder, Raspberry Pi, USB stick, UHU stick or instant glue, business cards, medicaments, plaster, a multi-purpose tool, a screwdriver with bits, a pocket multimeter, plant seeds, shareable sweetness, gifts, small toys (if with kids), eventually a laptop with mouse and/or cosmetics-related pieces like a small mirror, comb, rouge, lipstick, mascara, nail file, hand creme etc. Notes where to return if found or what the last wish would be in case of life lost. Stable handles and bottom, which hardly wear out over time or under weight, shape-preserving bottom to avoid falling into disorder when put on a surface, zippers which do not stumble or fail to close properly. Perhaps a way to wear it on the shoulder and not look funny/protruding when photographed from the side (or appearing too big/small). Giving a sense of peace/orderliness, while feeling as a natural extention of the self. Lightweight and not tiring to carry on long walks. Watertight to prevent item damage. Body made of scientifically motivated material, stressed under variety of conditions. Produced with care for the environment and the workers. Uniqueness, proper reflection of the owner's values and acceptable price.
- The contact page is a safe option. Another way is to post your project publicly on Facebook/Twitter and wait me to approve it.
- An amount of money which hasn't changed much, while market prices have steadily increased has lost on purchasing power. The only thing that matters in a relationship with an employer (not the number paid).
- "Many posess the will, but lack the means." Plenty of people rely on this and the hope that many will expend their will on the wrong things without advancing a tiny bit, so the rest can feel big enough.
- How do you decide when the right time has come to renovate a space (you own)? Do you rely on snapshot data or is this a permanent ongoing process?
- Companies, which keep the salaries of their programmers below what they need to pay for their rents, eventually lose them. Would be inappropriate to advertise their name on a website.
- "If the property is fairly priced and you've decided you want to buy it, trying to negotiate the price is foolish. It is likely that another buyer is prepared to pay what the seller wants. My advice is to offer the asking price—and quickly." Another instance of "satisfied with the rests".
- Bad practice: Paying authors per page and programmers per screen.
- Signed up for a "free" platform years ago? Are you currently employing full-time designer(s)/programmer(s) to correct this mistake or would this change have implied that their cost converges to zero?
- If they didn't need programmers, they could later satisfy themselves with the rests on the market.
- Do you rush in panic, closing hundreds of stores or rather have a more collected, analytic approach?
- Pattern from matrix (911 bytes) bit.ly/2X5ogY6. Took embarassingly short time.
- Functions that ignore NaNs bit.ly/2Jb4als. Had to use some of these on several occasions, but was unaware how extensive the list is.
- "The self-driving car is a surveillance tool" bit.ly/2X4i9Dd ↗
- Could be reversed into the formulation "What else would you pay for which you don't already find/see here?" But would be naive to expect someone to answer it.
- If you like to drink tea, expect someone to offer you luxury tea biscuits in addition.
- The size of the docks and goliath cranes were said to be important factors in determining the ship production capacity of a shipyard.
- Interesting effect: "Lower expectations lead to fewer resources being available to B and C players, demoralisation, and thus poor performance, artificially inflating the contribution of A players." - Paul Sparrow in "A historical analysis in the talent management debate"
- Observing the effect of length and horsepower on the speeds of some of the fastest yachts according to "Boat International" bit.ly/2X3xpjy
- Property comparison of the NordicTrack threadmills bit.ly/2X06CF6. For some reason the script went to recommend the most expensive threadmill ("Commercial 2950"), but placed the least expensive one of the "Commerical" series second (1750 is also the model they currently advertise first on the product page), leading to a significant preference for this series. The model "T12.0" was not included due to the omission of "runnng area" in its specification. But this property gives important information about the potential value of the product and how comfortable it might be to use. There are many other threadmill makers you could research before making any decision, but I still hope that you'll find this helpful.
- Libraries in San Diego County bit.ly/2IXm9vq ↗. More treasures in written form.
- Idea: Plot the current process action sequence with arrows, boxes and labels and then another, simplified version of it (before-after SVG).
- Leesa mattresses by density per price bit.ly/2J0BLhH. The numbers and models are as seen on the ".ie" domain. "UK Single", the default choice, appears slightly before "EU Single".
- When you type "chocolate chip cookies" in Google, every link appears with its own image, which is rarely seen. Do you have a favourite type of cookies and awareness of their nutritional content?
- Bismuth telluride is said to be insulating internally and conducting at the surface. Perhaps there are more materials with mixed properties like this.
- If I've heard about the "pump-and-dump"' strategy earlier, I wouldn't have spent so long with non-paying web design/programming/science.
- Hundreds of thousands of "associates" and not a single employee? Magnificent annual report you have.
- "Reduce the assortment size, reduce the information intensity, make each item relate to the assortment context..." This is for "we are one thing only" companies, then selling you everything from food to smartwatches and accessories for driverless cars. What an artifical lie. Neither reducing assortment nor information intensity. If you dislike this, you will have to look elsewhere.
- Found 135 pages of Elsevier journals and decided to look which of them have high SNIP and SJR factors. Here is a short list of the first 30 most influential journals bit.ly/2X2CF7l. You may find interesting that "Lancet" appears in the titles of nine ot these and "Cell" in another six (50% cover). Will use the full list for personal discoveries.
- Without the image, it would be hard to imagine how a sphere packing could be projected into a Voronoi tesselation on the cube's faces.
- Total generated hazardous waste from all NACE activities and households in various European countries (2004 - 2016) bit.ly/2J3WPDW. The data for 2018 is still missing.
- "A well-designed experiment protects against potential confounding variables (whose effects are indistinguishable on the response)" - Roxy Peck in "Statistics: Learning from data". Also liked the idea of "direct control"—holding a variable fixed while testing the effects of other ones. Reminded me of combinatorics and the possibility of case "explosion". Useful in the short excerpt were also the side-by-side comparison of two dot plots and two histograms.
- "After a while even the best made balloon exhausts its capabilities and needs to be landed." - Edgar Allan Poe in "A descent into the Maelström"
- Positive that some regional police departments publish open data about recent crime cases. Less positive is to look through it and find that most investigations ended with no result or no suspect was identified/found.
- Comparing a big SUV with a jumbo burger was an interesting ad, but breakfast already ended here.
- The "flights" month this year is approaching its end and I didn't travel again. Want to see me at your place? Or is giving respect to foreigners not an option?
- Looked at some excercise mats on Amazon bit.ly/2WZsUGX, trying to find whether there is a relationship between their material volume per unit price and the number of stars and reviews they have received. Used some colors to indicate the same items in the two results. "BalanceFrom GoYoga" and "ResourceFit Extra Thick" mats both seem to be good.
- Cities by population in Romania bit.ly/2WZr2Oe. Only 30 (out of 400) have been labeled. My own geographic orientation also improved a bit.
- A long-tailed squirrel bit.ly/2WXEWAr ↗, which finds hundred acorns, eats ten. The rest for the winter.
- Read about minimum size intersections and thought where they might be useful. What came to mind: in intersections of radar charts of the skills of individuals on a team (although I disike that this is a managerial metric), intersections of regions of fire and forest or oil spills and fish migration, machine detail fittings, tree branch spreads, floor illumination of nearby streetlights, train management (two coming against each other on a single track), advertisements interrupting experiences, optimization of delivery paths, speech interruptions. Sure that you are full of other ideas.
- A naive diagram attempting to illustrate collision avoidance for flights in opposite directions bit.ly/2IXkO80. Or if you you could see some positions in addition to the trajectories bit.ly/2WY7wSd, where paths not taken yet have been greyed out.
- Another idea: wrap a torus with a texture of a salami pizza and call it "salami pizza donut"
- Had the idea of drawing a hyperboloid and a helix coming out of it bit.ly/2WXSQCS ↗, but the patience of fiddling with the details has left me. Time alotted—gone.
- Today's knittings bit.ly/2FkkK16
- Have you heard about "Fossil" or "Rubbermaid"?
- A good excuse to buy a large 1TB SSD is when your website no longer fits on a 700MB CD-ROM.
- "Deal is 67% claimed" is a nice way to encourage more people to buy. If they don't hurry up, the deal is gone. Or reintroduced again at a time point when noone would remember that this was already offered in the past.
- A Netgear WiFi 6 router amzn.to/2FmRxm9 ↗ looks quite differently from the models I've seen so far. Which is certainly reflected in the price as well.
- Comparison of Panasonic microwave specifications bit.ly/2FmnN8G. The model "NN-ST756B" appears most interesting according to an incomplete criteria, which does not consider the appliance weight. May motivate the manufacturer to always include the existing parameters in the same sequence and format.
- Looked at the specifications of six open ceiling fans by "Zoo Fans" bit.ly/2FluwA3. "H25 AC" came first in case air flow, power usage, weight and noise are seen as equally important. But the possibility of a mistake is always present.
- A square tile, which is high at one of its corners and low at the opposite (while the rest being average) allows random orientations for a stunning composite relief on a wall.
- When you look from a distance at a carpet made of nested squares, it starts to feel strange that the legs of the tables and chairs do not end at square centers.
- The KOHLER "Karing" intelligent toilet bit.ly/2ISb26U ↗ has a very beautiful design.
- Do you use metrics and data to reduce your irrigation costs?
- Recreated a beautiful pattern from its context bit.ly/31J48t9. Uses too many elements, but it was supposed to be quick. Perhaps you could find a way to "multiply" this one bit.ly/2ITsl7L as well. Seamless have to be, these structures.
- Used an article on BusinessInsider to plot the average home prices in some US cities bit.ly/2IVAQ1T
- Nice to see a photo of a garden and circles with numbers on the distinct, visible items (flowers, pool, chairs and floor tiles) as an aid to explain what they stand for. Or the same in a kitchen to explain the types of refrigerator, dishwasher, cooktop and other features. This avoids the possibility that people think of them as regular items, appearing and looking similar to those seen at many other places.
- Remember, if you need quality service, you can propose your project. In case of mutual interest, it may move in your chosen direction.
- Used the nice diagrams in a home decor book showing various table shapes, sizes and the number of people they accomodate to quantify the average table area per person in these settings bit.ly/2IRxvRE. Based on all results, it is perhaps possible to fit 3 people (instead of 2) on the rectangular 36" x 36" table, while still having more comfort than 33% of the cases.
- "JR Furniture and Mattress" appears to have a large selection of interior items. At scale, the design becomes much more important.
- Was excited by the Burgerville's nutrition menu and then decided to zoom in to read the small text and numbers captured for each product. At 150% the browser showed a blank page (data table disappeared).
- Whenever possible, test your websites on the slowest machine you can find. Any slowdowns you notice will be that much more revealing. You could also combine the best of several worlds—developing on a fast machine, uploading the result to a test location and then accessing it from there on a separate, slow machine. This way you will know when you are entering development or test mode and the separate machines will not allow mixing of the two.
- In production, you would likely agree that it is inappropriate to log the entire MouseEvent object to the console upon each click. Wondered from where the lag in the expansion of the accordion widget came from, but seeing the XHR fire each time led me to believe that they log the exact position of each click on the page, without even telling you so.
- Can you find a positive relationship between the floor on which a room is offered and its rental price? Is there a relationship between the duration of the stay at a restaurant and the quantity of foood ordered?
- Video of a sliced polygon in a cube bit.ly/2Rl2RUx and a red cube core bit.ly/2ITVHCJ
- Triangles meeting at a center bit.ly/2IQM0VU
- Do you have a CSS grid of photos from your hotel? Are there too many needless ones or not enough time to present them well?
- Sometimes you see several elements that appear to be horizontal sliders with values below the knobs. Once you see that clicks on them have no effect, you realize that these are a static image, designed to show values on different scales (think of <meter> elements). To avoid misleading the user, removing the knobs and placing the values at the right of the scales might be helpful.
- Dimming all other lines except the selected one works well on the S-Bahn Berlin line plan bit.ly/31xu378 ↗. By clicking on a stop name, you can see the amenities as well as the departure and arrival times for the lines passing through.
- Few properties of the passenger ferries built by Austal bit.ly/31PuIRI. Interactive and using parallel coordinates. It appears that the top two models with the highest capacity are also very long relative to the rest.
- Since I wrote about airplanes and wind turbines recently, here is a way to relate their sizes: the diameter of a large wind tubine (160m, 8-10MW) is said to be approximately twice the wingspan of an Airbus A380. Whether the logistics and assembly costs are comparable? Whether running a contrastingly small ventillator next to the turbine would accelerate it?
- Have you checked whether any vibrations from the washing machine propagate to the kitchen plot? In other words, does your software have side effects?
- What is the measurement unit for diffusion? You are right—m3/s.
- Noticed a nice diagram in "Improving the availability of wind turbine generator systems", highlighting that the drivetrain of wind turbines (consisting of gerabox, generator and power converter) tends to fail most often (22-30% of all failures). Pitch/hyd, generator, gearbox and blades were shown to have the highest failure rates in the failure rate distribution diagram. The author also included a small case where systems with higher degree of modularity were found easier to repair. It was also mentioned (in another paper) that a small fleet of of large machines is cheaper to maintain than a large fleet of small machines. A small-drag, high-lift aerodynamic was said to be beneficial for the rotor blades (airfoil-shaped).
- NO2 air pollution too high in 57 German cities bit.ly/31zCdMm ↗
- Property comparison of Airbus airplanes bit.ly/2INyvpM. Not perfect, but used as a gauge. Series starting from A330 appear markedly different. If we construct a metric of normalized variables (range * max_seating * max_takeoff_weight) / (overall_length * wingspan * max_fuel_capacity), ensuring that no component in the denominator can be zero, we'll see that all "neo" models (starting with A321neo) perform strong on it. They are preceded only by A220-300. This is also valid in the cases when we exclude either max_seating or max_takeoff_weight, the only difference being that in these cases A319neo appears in front of A321neo. The information used here was acquired with difficulties; the referenced website frequently triggered the JavaScript debugger due to errors, completely halting the loading process.
- "Wind can have a strong influence on the trajectory of an aircraft during a turn." Hence the idea to estimate wind from trajectory observation.
- Came across a strange idea about aircraft identification with the help of address blocks: 200000-27FFFF refers to Africa-Indian Ocean, 280000-28FFFF to South America, 500000-5FFFFF to Europe, 680000-6F0000 to Asia and so on.
- Thanks for asking, but advertising and article placement are not possible on this website.
- Scraping the top layer of the tongue and putting this under a high-magnification miscroscope would certainly make the image of the week.
- It's rare, but still possible to zoom-in the name of an author over the article they wrote. Yet, by default (100%) everything looks fine.
- "But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically" - René Descartes
- What if the animation of a graph was important and how it evolved over time? Not a static snapshot of it, followed by algorithm application for question answering. Which process could this be?
- Are PV blinds already available? Hiding from the sun and collecting energy from it at the same time is a nice combination of several purposes in one product.
- Does 128GB of DDR4-3000 memory (8x16GB) at 650$ sound reasonably priced to you? amzn.to/31Kzos2 ↗ Only wondering which mainboards have so many slots. Or whether several people would come to the idea to pair and obtain good capacity at a fraction of this price.
- Liked the way Neumann presented their microphones, the data about them, the icons related to their specific use and the indicators about SPL, SNR and sensitivity.
- Micron already has a 15.36TB NVMe SSD, which reads and writes with 3500MB/s bit.ly/31E336f ↗
- Some density per price results for YAMAHA pianos bit.ly/31zDW4s. A premium piano like "S5X" was listed at 55110€ at the time of this writing. The grand piano "GC1" was available at 18150€, while the upright piano "b2" was listed at 5400€. These were found most interesting based on data only, not on sound quality. Also observe a scatterplot matrix for the upright pianos bit.ly/2IJyHXb, which reveals that weight and price tend to vary together. Was willing to look at Steinway piano models, but specifications were not available. Yet, I liked the strong contrast in a photo showing a giant piano next to a tiny, simple chair.
- Looked at the document describing the technical specification of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and liked the photos, schematics and information. ≈300 perfomances per year have the opportunity to reach an audience of up to 2679 visitors each. The max load of the stage lift is 3300kg, which hints about the kind of instruments that can be brought to the scene. The flooring is made of expensive wood (Australian hardwood brushbox) and visitors/performers are asked to preserve it. This means that sharp objects (or instruments like cellos) should not be stuck into it or scratch the surface (for this purpose, special carpets may be used on the scene). That visitors cannot bring food inside prevents it from coming in contact with the floor. It has a max load of 750kg/m2 beyond which a heavy instrument/machine could induce damage. Also no smoking is allowed. There are several concert grand pianos for performers to choose from. The lighting effects (as seen in the photos) are impressive, mentioning only the 348 light dimmers of 5kW each and the "Cyrano" followspots of 2.5kW here. There are height-adjustable sound reflectors attached to the ceiling to fine-tune acoustics. The maximal ceiling height of 22m is said to be at the center stage. There are smoke and fog machines and lasers. The Grand Organ, believed to be possibly the biggest in the world, is 15m high, 13m wide and 8m deep, made of 10244 pipes. The Concert Hall has a reverberation time of 2.2s with full capacity utilization (which is reducible if needed) with careful speaker alignment to minimize sound reflection off walls. Its configuration can be controlled from a tablet PC communicating with a "Dolby Lake" controller. A special hard drive eases recording and playback while a wide-reaching optical fibre network enables video broadcasting/web streaming.
- If you found this work useful or have a specific project in mind, feel free to connect. Used to allow donations as an alternative way of support, but this is now changing.
- Computed the piano densities of KAWAI K-series models bit.ly/2IKb6FI. While the differences appear to be small, K-200 bubbles up on the list. As a non-expert, I wonder whether greater voulme in pianos can be linked with richer, deeper sound. Curious is also that some pianos were said to be made of so many parts, that they approach the number of parts used in a car. And if that's not enough, you may think of the piano mover problem or the Kamada-Kawai algorithm.
- Comparison of some characteristics of 7 Bosch impact drivers bit.ly/2INhVXd. Please, note that all variables participating in the formation of the score are normalized. We see that two of the cheapest models receive the lowest scores (at least by this scoring criteria) and that instruments below ≈100€ receive significantly lower scores. Also, all instances of "Drill Assistant" models have slightly lower scores than tools with no such label. A nice article at "Popular Mechanics" will also extend your knowledge on impact drivers bit.ly/31BUJDK ↗
- Bike stations with the lowest median and highest variance bike availability (Dublin Bikes, Q2 2019) bit.ly/2IJ5onI. The first table is about the fraction of available bikes to all available bike stands. Initially the station "Smithfield" appeared with zero percent in the leftmost column here, raising the wrong impression that it was overutilized, when its status was actually "closed" (not for the entire period). This illustrates how easy it is to make errors with data if we are not careful. What we notice is that among the most utilized stations, three have a median of 5% available bikes, which is fairly low and may be used by the service provider as a gauge to adjust the available capacity. The second table is based on the intuition that a high variance in the number of available bikes could speak about a station's usage intensity. The "Smithfield" station had one of the highest variances, which might have caused its temporary closure due to maintenance. We could assign this variance to geocoordinates bit.ly/2IOgQhD to look whether there is a clear separation between the locations of the stations with highest and lowest variances. When we average all correlations between stations' last update times and availablle bikes at these times, we come only at 0.0251, which may hint that time is not a great predictor of availability here. Haven't looked into the data about previous quarters.
- Public transport stops in Berlin bit.ly/2ILO5Cg. Or the same, arranged in 12 clusters bit.ly/2IRYn3U. Happy about the last, since attempting to use DBSCAN forced a system restart, which k-means was able to avoid.
- Neither web design nor programming can be reduced to a set of beautiful "pass/fail" criteria applied universally. Most of the time, it is more important to know the underlying reasons why a rule exists and what it attempts to address rather than to religiously adhere to it.
- Have you already equipped your home with sensors? Were most findings/insights you derived from the data actionable?
- Frequently not achieving economies of scale, but quite good at economies of scope.
- This nice week almost ended, so now—rain and thunder.
- Which variables participate in the manufacturing plant output? In the apartment rents for a given city? In the success of an advertising campaign? In well-received art or websites? In shooting great photos (including telescope photos of planets)? In good-tasting burgers or pizzas? In the growth of a plant? In the winning of an F1 race? In successful relationships? In the happiness within the office? In achieving a better performance at the workplace? In the engagement of more women and miniroties in the tech sector?
- What is of interest to you (output)? Which factors influence it (input variables)? Which outputs are more desirable (optimization)? What can be done about it (action) and is it worth doing it (cost-benefit analysis)?
- Triangular loader bit.ly/31wfUqT. If you wish, you may also try a version on a circle with triangles of equal size.
- A selectively colored hexagonal prism bit.ly/2ILrc1M
- Wow, the moon is so clear this night that I see a small shadow on it, which appears as a human with two open hands, ready to hug someone.
- Learned that consumed_nutrient = total_nutrient * (1 - volume_after_meal / volume_before_meal)
- Separately read about Poiseuille law about fliud flow in a capillary and a paper discussing traffic flow/road congestion, which made me wonder whether the two could be related and if so, iwhether the role of viscosity could be taken by the average friction between tire and surface, for instance.
- Subconcious nudged me into what it thinks was missing on some electronic component pages. It was the context (as diagram/graph) when this component has appeared in the timeline of components existing within the same category. And the directed edges of which component was improved to become which one (or which branch it started). Otherwise the many letters and numbers often remain uninformative, especially in a fast-changing field.
- Unsure why my reader doesn't have a zoom that places the left side of the text (iindependent of page white space) next to the left border of the screen and the right side of the text next to the right border of the screen. Proper alignment cannot be too hard, right?
- NBA Finals game results (06.2019) bit.ly/2IIFwIj. Will update as more data becomes available.
- "Low income is associated with lower probability of moving to a more advantaged neighborhood while private and social renters are less likely than other occupiers to move out of deprived areas." An intuitive result, whose effect is anything but heterogeneity.
- Event-mood assignment bit.ly/2IBTnAm
- Is it sensible to pair a cheap, insecure door with an overly expensive, complex door lock?
- Reading how steering wheel-internal, electronics-controlled airbag inflates with nitrogen within 30ms, waiting for the driver to hit 50ms after the collision. Good to know some approximate numbers behind car safety. Never knew about the recommended minimal driver-wheel distance of 25cm to avoid serious injury during a fast airbag inflation. Since ≈30% of the incidents were said to come from side collisions, you can imagine the need for side airbags as well. These are said to be usually deployed in doors, roof and seatbacks and must have even faster inflating speeds since the occupant is more vulnerable to a crash which happens closer.
- Naively wondering whether spectroscopy works via line/plane sweep or asks for a small-fortune device.
- UEFA's website shipped a lot of content (4.0MB compressed, 8.5MB resources) over the wire. Has a comfortable room for improvement.
- Something that was in my subconcious for a while was the high number of golf courses I've seen while looking around for interesting businesses in some US cities. Would have been nice if there was more information about their addresses, coordinates and sizes as this would have enabled an interactive map to inform everyone (possibly some players/future owners/maintainers etc.) without an overwhelming amount of labels. I've found only this list of the top 100 golf gourses bit.ly/2IagXFl ↗, but sharing this here could either help someone implement it or share their domain knowledge that would lead to a more complete result.
- "... the dynamics of epidemic or opinion formation ..." Sounds interesting.
- Using mathematical methods to predict how an oil spill could unfold is fine, but if the dynamic of fluid flow must also be considered (dispersing the blobs), this might be something similar to what the authors mean under "model interactions".
- Interesting that several data visualization companies have been bought recently. Perhaps the market has started to see their potential and the value they add.
- The websites of most journals are still slow, some of them have FOUT or scripts which insert visible elements after the page has been rendered (causing reflow). The ads/banners, click trackers (extra long URLs), the popups to recommend only five other, similar papers, the extra apps designed to render the PDF in the browser (when it already has the means to do so) and spinners to manage the waiting process are so unnecessary. Clicked several times on the wrong link, because my choice was pushed at the last moment by a change in the geometry of the page. Haven't tested the accessibility of the papers on mobile devices/tablets.
- Do you use mathematical modeling to support your product design decisions?
- Intuition-generated triple: (event of interest, value at risk, probability of occurrence). Do you know which events are of interest at your company?
- Which might be better: a job that pays you n with probability 1 (a secure one) or a job that pays 1.75*n with probability 0.6?
- Symmetry means that whenever you have to draw simplified contours of clothes, you could draw the half and use reflection around the y-axis (x centered at zero, with subsequent shift-to-right with 2*max_side_width if using SVG) to save yourself some extra work.
- Borrowed a simple idea to generate these progressively disappearing dots bit.ly/2IFIeOL. The effect could be used to mask an image to progressively reveal it or to animate dot-subtracted disappearance on click.
- To wish you sweet dreams, here is an idea of representing polynomial parts as mini-graphs bit.ly/2IEiKS7. I think I've already seen it elsewhere, but this old, freely available paper goes to great lengths with it.
- Connected lines and dots bit.ly/2I7HrHA. A sense of perspective is available when using much less elements bit.ly/2IAE5f9
- Kalman filter bit.ly/2IDBwJr
- Interesting to read that Louis Vuitton alterady integrates flexible displays in clothing. This means that theoretically it must be possible for a neighbor to log in into you.
- If you couldn't engage me properly the first time, don't try a second.
- Thinking of the number of Bounties a single coconut could fill with the volume of its edible material...
- Found a list of the libraries in Finland bit.ly/2IDdA8K ↗ (after failing with Norway earlier) and tried to exclude any mobile ones as much as possible. This left me with a list of 853 physical addresses. Considering population data, this means that on average, there is a library for every ≈6450 people.
- Cell Picture Show bit.ly/2I5CuyM ↗ has very beautiful photos. Saw the cell structure of some woods earlier and the idea how it can pinpoint locations of relative hardness/softness in the material. South African ironwood is said to have the highest specific gravity (or relative density) of 1.49, where low values (butternut: 0.36) enable easier machining. Some trees (like apples, cherries) were said to use most of their energy for their fruits, creating the argument that their wood is of slightly lower quality in general. Walnuts were cherished as having the best balance of quality attributes (black walnut: 0.51), which for a moment made me think of a walnut orchard and another type of a brain-like material.
- Looked at the excerpt of "Beekeeping: A practical guide" and learned few interesting things. One is to avoid approaching a beehive while well-perfumed as bees are very sensitive to odors, which govern their behavior. They also use this capability to recognize "alarm" odors, released when one of them stings and loses its stinger (eventually life as well). This then encourages other bees to attack too. If correctly understood, the stinger is a multi-component mechanism, consisting of two barbs, a shaft made of two lancets and a venom sac. The barbs hold the first lancet, which opens up to "shoot" the second lancet for deeper penetration (operation supported by "muscles"), so that the total shaft length can be used to distribute the venom.
- Whenever possible, I prefer corded over wireless connection as I find the first more reliable (less nearby influence), less interfering with the body and likely more power-efficient. But being away from the router means this option is unavailable. Noticed that at idle state, the router is consuming ≈2-2.5W less power compared to when in receiving mode (wireless use). This is of course not including the laptop-internal wireless card, which adds some small amount as well. But in case of using a cable, it may be possible to cut on the the total use at both ends. Additionally, one may not have much use for functionality of the type "through-the-wall" scanning to infer about neighbor behavior (see papers).
- If it is true that approximately every sixth purchased item online is returned (and every second from the shoes/clothing categories) (Germany), does this mean that these two can be treated like the rest? Perhaps total convenience comes at prohibitively high financial/environmental cost.
- Plant tasting like meat and meat tasting like plant? 32% protein? Not sure. Sceptical about food advances, but interesting which forms innovation might take.
- 5000mAh / 500$ = 10mAh/$ Does not say anything about the mobile phone of the future.
- Flying to nowhere is such an interesting way of living (saw a noisy bird taking off from the nearby airport).
- Some thinking on coffee cup usage in Germany bit.ly/2I5pSaV. Likely inaccurate, but the numbers are impressive.
- Does leaving a big city for a smaller one to avoid paying taxes remind you of money laundering in some way? And does the arrival at the new place, accompanied with the statement "it doesn't matter that this city will sink in x years, because I'd like to enjoy my life now" not appear strange, perhaps unscrupulous in some way? Might give a taste of the times when true city sinking becomes real and when former "CO2 millionaires" will be leaving for some beautiful beach elsewhere, away from the crowd and its survivory needs. Sweet mobility it is.
- If everything in nature was related, would it be possible to present it as a big graph with the nodes representing living things (flora & fauna) and edges labeled to reflect how they interact? Could it be that some subgraphs are indirectly responsible for the elimination/preservation of old or the appearance of new nodes in some other parts of the graph?
- How many m3 of material were required to build this object? Would it be possible with less and how/why not (list trade-offs)?
- If you intend to show me a placeholder site for 3s, before populating it with content, I will thank you and then look elsewhere.
- Went into the next, almost full ideary (80x, DIN A5, 70g/cm2, FSC, China): Compressing a 100MB image to 1MB could be more useful than compressing a 100kB image to 10kB.
- Possibly another supid idea... when you think of the diagram about the seven bridges of Königsberg bit.ly/2ItOitK ↗ and the reality in some cities based on Google Maps (too many bridges per unit area and almost no sense about their overall composition), do you get the impression that effective bridge positioning could be a computational task? If so, what do you think would an optimal choice consist of? If one part of a river was wide and another narrow, would it be feasible to construct a bridge, connecting a wide spot with a narrow spot (not perpendicular to river flow, if narrow-narrow is impossible) in order to reduce bridge length or would this be dangerous due to potential instability should the water carve its way to the narrow spot or the wind following the riverbed blow stronger against the less well-distributed load?
- The nitty-gritty bit.ly/2Iu5249
- If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, you can use the usual means to connect.
- If you said that you'll start to cherish soft skills more than technical expertise (perhaps because the latter hasn't produced any "cash cows" recently), you have to be prepared for the harsch reality that the former are insufficient in creating products of lasting value and their positive impact is often visible only within a small team. Saying "forget about technical expertise" is equivalent to giving your software engineers permission to quit.
- A 64Mhz MCU sold at "cheap" 30$ does not sound appealing to me, but is probably fine for a couple of small experiments if all other required electronic components are available and affordable. Could be useful to learn something new and apply it elsewhere. Otherwise, the low degree of integration could mean that the environment will get polluted with even more parts, which find use once or remain unused most of the time. This is not too different from using plastic bags or disposable pens. Even when the project is completed, the resource constraints will liekly restrict the usefulness of the problem solved or give it an undesired impression of an amateur product. Even a high-speed laptop for 500$ could achieve a lot more, has a much better price-performance and will likely be used every day. That said, when we hear about billion parts and the Thingiverse, it is perhaps healthy to start questioning the usefulness of some inventions and dig to uncover the reasons they were brought to market.
- When you pay your server provider a nice monthly sum for using their computational resources, it is not a coincidence that you are serverless. That's also the "trend" they are explaining you and trying to convince you in and the price you pay for believing it. That you ran into another dependency is not interesting to them. They only care that you need them more than they do. Therefore: You may not have much of a product if you do not own the supporting infrastructure yourself. Instead of choosing serverless, imagine that you are making monthly payments towards your own server—a configurable one that will help you meet your hardware and software needs better.
- Seeking another service provider to serve you at the same rate you were served in the past elsewhere will quietly reduce your chances. Most professionals do not compete on price.
- Would you rethink your strategy if you saw that one of the top-paid departments iin a city employs strategists? Does the city you reside in have one?
- Someone worked on a codebase, which self-corrected itself everytime they made a change and compiled. Is this the proper way to ensure that software remains functional no matter what?
- Was curious about any difference in the prices of dog and cat food, based on the data collected earlier today, but both pets received equal treatnebt, their owners being charged a median of $7.99. But this individual result may be an isolated case that is not valid in general.
- Wouldn't easily come to the idea that a refrigerator can be seen as a warehouse in miniature. And that the rules about space-efficient storage, as short as possible keep time (fast movements) and the ability to pick the right order quickly could be valid in this context as well.
- If your company is using several third-party software products, which criteria/dimensions does it use to evaluate competitive offers from various companies?
- This entry on tower cranes bit.ly/2IrdFfF ↗ reminded me of the rule for balancing levers. Did not expect to see it in this context, high above ground.
- Identifying strong product categories in the online IKEA product portfolio bit.ly/2Iw9YW4. With too many products, it becomes less obvious which categories define a store. This is what the data attempts to find out. The idea was that some categories may have very few products which are very expensive, while others may have many, which are relatively cheap. A strong category would then maximize the product of the two. This is how we find about the various sofa types (modular, fabric, leather, sleeper), wardrobes (including PAX wardrobes), dining sets and sink cabinets.
- Can't even think of storing 16 million images with the idea to attempt predicting geocoordinates of new ones. Not enough computational bandwidth/hard disk space for such an intensive large scale task.
- Departing flights from "La Guardia", New York (07.06.2019) bit.ly/2InRdEk. (Note that this isn't the biggest airport in the city.) Most left for Chicago (26) and Atlanta (24). Interesting that none of the flights reached the West Coast. Could it be that this airport has been dedicated to serve mostly short-distance flights? (hypothesis)
- A curve that seems to follow itself bit.ly/2I0HlkM and an illusion of a surface between two poles bit.ly/2IvJnZp
- Some good points on data tracking in this article bit.ly/2I3isoR ↗. In the early days, it was quite common to read that large amounts of data (databases with detailed customer information) is what allows companies to thrive and gain competitive advantage. And it made sense, since having more data allows you to serve customers better and make better decisions. Yet, over time the dimensions of data collection and misuse took a highly problematic direction. The former was infused with a sense of being terrible. Within a small company it became less important whether the data was available and more important to limit potential damage/reputation loss arising from the changed expectations related to collecting it. The inversion of the rules by the few affected the many, potentially reducing innovation in the entire sector since no useful software can be built without some kind of useful input. "If you don’t want to share personal data with a company, you shouldn’t have to." Exactly. But this rule is often not followed, which can be seen on the countless "disabled-by-default" websites until the user ticks that they want their data to be collected. "We must require technology companies to... tell us what data they’re collecting, where it’s going, and how it’s getting there." Valid too. As much as possible, dummerAugust does not try to collect irrelevant data (only the one explicitly shared by the customer during conversations), has reduced the automated means of doing so (no need to store data when people find no use for the service), and includes links to the sources, whenever possible, everytime external data is being used. Still not perfect and in need of improvement. But if visitors don't request personalized service, their personal data is not collected and no parts of this website become unavailable or dysfunctional.
- "Have a nose for finding what would rather stay lost." - in "Black leopard, red wolf". Also nice: you can't aim if you can't see.
- 2x2: Will these 30 bonbons make my will 30 times weaker?
- Interesting idea in one of the McKinsey articles: that a gazelle must run faster than the fastest lion, each and every day, or expect to be killed and that the lion must be able to outrun the slowest gazelle or expect to starve to death.
- "DNA codon table" standard genetic codes (Wikipedia) bit.ly/2I2VMFi ↗. Interesting to see possible triplet representations of aminoacids (a resource claimed that some aminoacids may have more than one codon). Most common start codon is said to be AUG (alternatives: AUA/AUU in humans, GUG/UUG in prokaryotes), while UAG/UGA/UAA are said to be stop codons. If I understood correctly, starts and stops indicate the formation of protein chains. Ribosomes (RNA-based) are said to make proteins from all 20 aminoacids. These proteins play important functional roles in cells and regulate metabolism. Intuition tells me to associate the metabolic rate with the speed of aging, at least when the organism sees no real benefit from the newly generated proteins.
- Energy usage of the street lights at 15 locations in Las Vegas, Nevada (08.10.2014 - 12.10.2016) bit.ly/2I0KctW
- Which seats at which theater are reserved for which performance, when?
- Does availability of office space in the area also mean availability of talent to fill it? What's the ratio between the cost of the office ($/m2-person-year) relative to the average cost of hiring and retaining a single employee for a year? At which location is this ratio most favorable?
- Yuu could also help me approach more and more interesting problems by directly initiating a project which would be unwise to reject.
- Liked the Uber movement speeds map, but didn't expect to hear that bikes could be faster than cars in heavily congested areas.
- Something I cannot do, but think is needed: To have a selector that orients gardeners which seeds to sow based on their location, time (month of the year), soil composition in the area, amount of typical sunshine and humidity, disease susceptibility, probability of severe weather events, growth rates, market prices, maybe even more. Possible that some travelers may find that their seeds do not thrive that well in the new climate/environment, so they may need orientation. Throwing a variety of seeds in the hope that at least some of them will do well is a random approach. But as machine learning has taught us, we need to look for results much better than random. This may require a large-scale analysis of data scattered across several different databases, relationship extraction, pattern identification and plenty of insights linked together. How would we otherwise answer the question "Why aren't my strawberries growing here, but growing there?" Why do all gardeners need to relearn the same lessons every time when several people already may have the information they need?
- An airless tire sounds interesting and assumption-breaking.
- A quick demo using ASOS data to estimate the right skirt size based on location, waist and hip sizes bit.ly/2Ih9MtC. To be used as orientation only. Saw someone who demonstrated how different clothes of the same size could be.
- "Bike lanes can be removed to reclaim the streets for parking." No good can't be undone.
- Created an extensive 100+MB framework full of one-letter variables? Good luck supporting it.
- Average garbage fees (€/year) in various cities in Germany bit.ly/2HYzK6y. Decided to plot the tabular data from the article and look for patterns. Cities with relatively high fees seem concentrated in the west and south-west parts of the country.
- Very nice article on the importance of data analysis in sports: "Die Vermessung des Tennis" (in German) bit.ly/2IqOeeu ↗. Interesting to see Djokovic and many other tennis players rely on data and analytic trainers to improve their performance, win tournaments and/or rise quickly in the rankings. Adjusting relative to knowledge of the opponent's strengths/weaknesses to play each game in a different style was a fascinating idea. Yet, one that surely relies on large amounts of historic data.
- Which museum exhibitions were visited by most people? Is there a common pattern in their nature or an explanation behind the observations?
- There are 767 "Poundland" store locations bit.ly/2HWyWiz ↗
- Has a heartbeat function on it. What is it? bit.ly/2Iofydj ↗. It's a "bakewell slice" by the "Percy Ingle" bakery in London. You can see a table with the nutrients for all of their products bit.ly/2IiJHdT. The "chocolate brownie" seems rich in saturates, although the "viennese fingers" are richer in total fat. We notice that the multiseed breads contain a lot of protein relative to other products. And that most doughnuts and gateaux seem to have slightly less total sugars compared to cakes and cupcakes.
- Comparison of pizza prices by size at "Yard Sale Pizza", London bit.ly/2HWfkL9
- Sad to see a metal can with an etiquette reading "Whole chicken". Unimaginable what they did to pack it there.
- Like the way Costa Coffee (costa.co.uk) is specifying its nutrition and allergen data. For instance, the "Caramel Crisp" dessert contains 2284kJ (546kcal) energy in 100g.
- Pin configuration for the ISO1500 tranceiver bit.ly/2HVF0Yg. Interactive explanation of all pins with the help of SVG and CSS.
- "Build it and they will come" has become "Build eventually if they pull properly" in 2019. Client pre-selection, zero waste of effort and zero upfront storage of useless data.
- Any pain point you had on a project recently? Could external collaborators have helped to reduce any related costs?
- Does the thermos bottle have a sticker indicating its thermal conductivity or only one indicating its price?
- Cannot use the frameworks/libraries of companies, whose practices I cannot identify with.
- Some people believe they live by sponsoring the lives of the billionaires/ultra-rich. By working for them for free while being deprived of their own voice and human rights. By buying from their mega-stores, clothing brands, traveling with their airlines, putting money in their hedge fonds, making music for their music labels, not leaving their social networks, using their information products, branded mobile networks, staying at the rooms in their hotels, renting their rent-only apartments all over the globe, buying their cars, etc. If you see a person telling you that you should be injecting more life into your daily living, feel free to refer them to this text and ask them what they think about their clock (who made it) and the accuracy of its arrows. What kind of life is this? Small living for the sucker-conomy.
- Perhaps an object serves to improve productivity or is a machine that serves to meet other people's needs faster, is a tool which significantly reduces wasted effort, is an instrument to gain insight and improve processes and systems or simply advances one's goals. Such objects matter.
- Watched a short TV shopping fiesta on Sunday, which made me think. People who called to buy the carefully arranged objects in the studio were interested in having them before all other callers (first come, first served). They were not caring much about which objects precisely, deciding impulsively based on where the camera was focused (this one, not that one!), they didn't ask questions where the objects came from, who created them or how long/how much effort it took them. The objects themselves were old (possible that many of their creators no longer exist), yet some were beautiful and some extra expensive. Not all of them were perfectly useful or meeting all caller requirements. That someone would place a higher weight on owning objects from someone who is completely disconnected from the effort rather than finding existing people with skills they could support to produce customized solutions/objects for them appears strange to me. We don't leave life with our object collections. Also wondered to what extent supporting the old made the new disappear. The only factor that partially makes these questions shallow was the fact that the event was charitable, so t is hard not to respect any decision at it.
- Interesting that I've never seen this important issue come up before. How is it possible that an engineer who finishes few projects successfully is seen as more capable than someone who finished significantly more, while making few mistakes? Understandable why so many software engineers want to manage their reputation first and foremost before seeking to apply their creativity and imagination at a real problem. This quickly causes newcomers in the industry to claim they were "award-winning".
- The ad offer expires tomorrow, at the same time. In all cases, at least a demo will remain, as a reminder. In case of no interest, ads will no longer be discussed.
- Is it possible to obtain the desired amount of water by pressing the pump the fewest times, by using the least energy when the water level is low and the shortest total button distance traveled? Or do we rather pump until exhaustion?
- Imagined an event with known duration (in this case 135mins), where music must be played to cover it as much as possible, so that visitors don't feel bored for a second. The songs must be pre-selected from a pool with known titles and durations, without human intervention bit.ly/2HU3Ms3. The approach used left 99secs of uncovered time (insufficient for another song) and is thus suboptimal. Here I used songs by Delta Goodrem, but you could think of any other musician or band and try to do the same. In addition, the selected songs can be shuffled for a more random result at the end.
- Battery swapping seems an interesting idea with electric vehicles. Instead of waiting for hours to charge the car-internal battery, a driver could stop at a place, where they have pre-charged ones. Exchange is then said to be possible in a couple of minutes. Not an expert on this, but here are possible concerns: 1) What's the guarantee that exactly the same battery will be available at the time the driver needs it when the number of battery types may vary with the number of car makers and when full batteries of a given type may be temporarily unavailable? 2) Does the neglect of battery discharge cycles mean that such batteries must be free, anytime? 3) How much would be the cost of the service itself and how will it be shared among the stakeholders?
- I do not consider myself a traditional freelancer/remote worker. Most of the time I am not focused on helping a single, concrete person, but seek ways to learn more and apply skills to interesting problems of approachable size. And if that brings clients to me, I'd consider it a bonus. I rely mostly on client interest; if noone looks for this kind of work, it tells me that it is either not important, not valuable enough or that the client wouldn't be the right fit. It is then almost sure that it won't be provided again. Also rare is to feel fully satisfied with client service (although it can be great when this happens). Instead of breaking a day, it could have been used to do something more productive, emotion-free. The traditional unpaid freelance work of the type "I need a quick fix on a simple problem with my framework" (where they don't tell you those are two you never heard about) is not interesting to me. Correspondingly, a client either fulfills the criteria or doesn't.
- "Remote workers often battle anxiety, stress and depression." To be fair, I am more concerned about the consequences of working at the wrong place, fulfilling the wrong requirements all day, not having a single second left for reflection and planning. Not acceptable.
- Thinking about net palette weight and optimization bit.ly/2HRZFwr
- If you pack 1kg of product in paper and then have 5kg of the same product in a larger package made of the same material, will it necessarily hold the added weight? I don't want to be too careless, but always liked the details around package design.
- Inconvenient to see that it took so long to restore the bit.ly service. May think of removing the link expansion dependency here.
- Residential electricity consumption in Mesa, Arizona (01.01.2015 - 01.03.2019) bit.ly/2MpTAff. Enables you to see how the combined electricity usage has increased periodically in the months between June and October. If you wish, you could also look at the datasets about water and natural gas consumption.
- Simple and quick: points on a sphere bit.ly/2MpjmjI
- Is there a scientific proof that brown sugar is healthier than white? Saw several sources claiming negligibly small difference between the two.
- Yesterday, a pie chart ended in the recycle bin. Idea was to diagram which theme parks had the highest number of visitors (in millions) in 2018 (CNN data available online). (Europa Park in Germany and many others were new to me, but if someone asked me to assign the right numbers to the right labels, my guess would be wildly inaccurate, which marked a potentially useful effort.) Lesson learned/rediscovered: pie charts don't work well with too many slices and refuse to accomodate/have trouble with many long labels. The latter couldn't be shorter, since it was also important where (in which city and country) the parks were located.
- Wished I was less helpless when looking at bike data. Having no clue which parameters make for good bike components—when Shimano A is better than Shimano B or when one Bontrager tire is better than another by the same brand. I seem to miss a perspective and a clear explanation of what makes a given part good or better. The specifications seem to assume that the interested person has previous information/experience or is aware of the entire product history behind a given component. This may not necessarily be the case. A designer, whose work is to seek explanations that aid understanding, may find this frustrating. For instance, I have seen laptops advertised with red-to-green indicators like "24% of optimal CPU performance and 35% of optimal GPU performance", along with a price-performance ratio indicator. While this seems imperfect, it could at least give some orientation. Unclear only how transferrable such an idea is. But having some means to relate things is likely indispensible to a potential buyer.
- Went to see the forest to look specifically for elderberry color (requirement). We expected to see many trees, but found only two. There was a bit of stretching to get to the beautiful, bouquet-like white at height. Apart from that, the place was very relaxing, with fresh air and plenty of birds singing. There was an abandoned drinking fountain, which dripped enough water to form a long gutter, ending in 2-3 puddles. Along the path, plenty of thirsty wasps and other insects have gathered to drink together, somehow possibly forgetting about their coexistence. The soil was moist, so it has rained fairly recently, so we looked around for some mushrooms. Most were relatively small and "unknown" so they were left out. There were giant ones growing on several tree trunks, so I couldn't believe that these were collected (won't touch). What made me somewhat sad was to see signs of other people, which were there before us. For instance, you step on the moist ground (sometimes slightly sinking) with high enough grass to be unable to see what's below and when you check, it's a plastic bottle someone has thrown. Additionally, I found it impressive to see a seemingly flourishing forest full with shrubs and trees, vulnerable to disease. I noticed several relatively young trees covered in yellow lichens, which were apparently not only killing them, but also spreading through the branches that were touching. Some other trees had distinct spots of lichens at several places, which was in conflict with the initial intuition of sequential spreading. Not sure what is done in such cases, since I am not an expert on trees. Someone with a lab would have probably taken these lichens under a microscope.
- A short video transitioning between the contours of five libraries in Seattle bit.ly/2Mnu0Yf (can you guess the branch names?). First-time using the the ffmpeg library from the command line, which worked great. Noticed a small trade-off—gnerating an animated GIF was fast, but the output weighted 25.3MB, while the 333kB WebM video required a good amount of processing time. Wished such "library visits" could be real. It often feels that Internet resources are insufficient, too fragmented or provided only as a carrot/attention grabber. But that carrot is insufficient for a meal. On the other hand, actual libraries often have access to (otherwise paid) publications and magazines, which would be too expensive to afford individually.
- For a microsecond, thought that "solar wind" could be two sources of energy.
- Any small inefficiency multiplied by a factor of several millions quickly becomes a big one. For instance, let's assume for a moment that there is no standard which sets an upper bound on the maximum water usage allowed during car wash. It's not the number of service locations that would determine the total waste, but the number of cars which pass through them in unit time. This number can act as a large multiplier for any small inefficiency on average.
- If you had data about the parameters offered by several telecom operators and knowledge of your own preferences and tendencies, would you be able to determine computationally which offer would serve you best? Could also be useful to validate hypotheses and check assumptions.
- "Knowledge is but a tool. The spirit is of the essence." So true.
- How often are you using programming during building design and construction? I don't mean only for geometry specification / visualization, but project feasibility estimation, location/parcel selection, material selection, resource management (worker-to-task assignment), time/cost management, progress tracking and so on.
- Fifteen classes on a single element bit.ly/2HJqO4C. Had to use a snippet to ensure that my eyes are not mistaken about the number of empty spaces. Please, stop this bad practice. The web will thank you.
- Took an unbiased look (free of attractive images) at ALDI Kuchen/cake recipes and placed some tick-marks on those which sounded interesting to me bit.ly/2Mjj3GT. Your choice may vary. An article mentioned that after ≈4400 stores in Germany, the first one in China is expected to open soon in Shanghai.
- Found a formula for the surface area of a regular n-gon and attempted to validate it with n = 6 bit.ly/2HJI0H7
- Idea: to select an important stop (e.g. Hauptbahnhof München), through which most lines pass and visualize the scheduled vehicle arrival times—on the x axis the minutes since 00:00 and on the y-axis the line labels (S1-S8 or U1-U8). All times appear as dots on a horizontal line having the same color as the color of the line label they belong to. Allows to compare transit frequencies and find the line(s) wth the best connectivity to this stop. Doable, but too much work.
- After optimal starting, optimal stopping comes next.
- Not convinced in the idea of having robotic bee pollinators. I prefer the real ones, which don't have to carry multiples of their own weight in terms of batteries. They are flexible, hard-working, communicative (see algorithms based on bee behavior), ecosystem-friendly and have stripes of alternating color.
- Design constraint: If the width of a medium sized car is 1.8m, the width of the two-lane pavement can't be much smaller than 3.7m.
- Libraries and parks in Nashville, Tennessee bit.ly/2wqkFUz. Slightly crowded, but at least some phone numbers are visible (to ask about a book of interest). In the summer months, one could loan a book and read it in a nearby park instead of sitting inside a building. You can also see which livrary branches have registered the highest material circulation as of June 2018 bit.ly/2wrZtgV
- Two concerns: soil compaction under ultra-heavy machines and sport SUVs having 12.9l of displacement.
- Looking at the specifications of a wheel loader by "John Deere" bit.ly/2wqbZh9. Among the few variables, we notice that this model appears to have 13.5l displacement. Since there were only four machines of this type, I thought about comparing several dimensions on a radar chart, but realized that I've done this before and it felt unwise to repeat myself. (Also, the potential insight-to-effort ratio could have been better.) But it was nice to see how accessible "John Deere" machine specifications are. The slogan "100% grass-fed" was also amusing.
- Semantic spreadout and clustering: When you work with too many variables whose names you can't easily remember, label them to increase their semantic difference, then treat similar ones as a single unit. Whenever you have to think of one, remembering its cluster leads you to its right position in the code. Working with dissimilar semantics is a form of abstraction which may aid recognition.
- Style quantization: When working with several insufficiently distinguishable styles, spend little time to merge them into one.
- Are there any recent books/papers/articles, which inspired you to create interesting demos? Is there a library that would get the credit? Did an interesting conversation achieve the same? If so, which person would receive the credit? Is there anything people like us could contribute to expand "external" ideas without worrying they could reach competitors?
- Another detail I would consider is to avoid making the entire site a repetition of a single design element. Despite being very easy to do, this makes the entire composition boring. Think about where some variability can be introduced (but not too much) and how the distinct design elements will play together. The designer can influence the decision too, but it leaves a good impression if you have already started the thought process.
- Please, ensure that you have good input material before reaching out to your web designer. While they could help you shape and expand it, it is unrealistic to expect them to generate the entire site on their own. Creating lots of valuable content can be incredibly time-consuming. Ensuring that you are prepared will likely ease the design process and at the same time decrease your costs.
- "Realism requires us to recognize that... our most secure knowledge is very likely no more than presently accepted error." - Nicholas Rescher in "The limits of science". That science was described as fragile for providing estimates to constantly changing things (even facts said to be overridden by new ones) and the need to prevent unreasonable/inflated/unrealistic expectations were other highlights from the excerpt.
- Using the wall as a drawing surface saves the need to have an additional one. While many-in-one products are convenient, their individual functions have to match the quality of functions offered by each of the several individual products to be seen as a good substitute. Sometimes individual products are being bought before such alternative becomes available/accessible. It is then bought as well, leading to function duplication and waste. As consumers, we have to be able to notice when we have three different devices doing the same and when it is right to adopt a more critical stance towards such lifestyle. Looking to sell series of minor step-by-step improvements often improves corporate earnings/profits more than developing a single, disruptive innovation. This is unfortunate and has implications for many entrepreneurs/startups. When we see companies with several hundred similarly-looking products within the same product category, we should be asking ourselves what percentage of them were made only to discourage competition.
- Wondering whether it is possible for several people to select color, write a label (tablet) and drag-drop virtual "Post-It" notes to be visible on a single, big screen in front of everyone instead of increasing paper waste on a daily basis. Yet, I've heard that tangibility is what makes the notes so good. And while editing an idea on the PC is free, it takes another side/note to correct a filled, obsolete one.
- Lesson learned from concert ticket prices: pre-select clients with different ticket types, whose price points vary by a factor of ten.
- Have you asked yourself which criteria exist to select pet food? How does one identify a good pet food package relative to a random choice?
- Do you have a programmatic way to apply watermarks to all your artworks or do you find that nowadays this is no longer a necessity?
- And if you don't want to distract me, you may consider making a simple donation. Much better is if you need my skills to build/enhance your website, do more general programming, data analysis, visualization, simple art or maybe even mathematical modeling. Similar to what you have already seen here, at small scale. Feel free to propose your project, but be aware that the requirements can be quite high (since you are asking for my time).
- Added an ad box bit.ly/2QsJvfH in case someone is willing to advertise here without impacting the user experience. Goes slightly against the nature of this site and might work only because it is seen as a trade-off. The ads will be limited to four (since I dislike having to deal with lots of people while working on other things), packed tightly and available on this page only. No other advertisements will be seen elsewhere. Provided on a pay-and-forget basis and updated monthly. Ads must follow ethical rules and the decision which to include will be based on the monetary value they bring per unit pixel (put simply). Such ads may not help you much if you seek high ROI; they are meant more as a means of moral and operational support for the human being behind this site. If you feel interested, feel free to send me a link of your ad design and the rate you consider appropriate to pay for its inclusion on this page. Depending on how well this works, readers may see this link more often, as a means of gratitude.
- Saw a source which claimed that June, October and April were the strongest months for air travel. We are approaching June, so here is one provocative question you could ask yourself: "Do I know where I'd like to travel to (be in 5 years), how the short-term goal of the journey would look like and what I expect to see? Did previous destinations meet my previous expectations?"
- Another diagram of the road freight transport flows between pairs of European countries in 2016 bit.ly/2HDpBf6. The information about some of them appears to be missing, but the rest still looks interesting. Perhaps such flows give indication of trade intensity, but ask someone more knowledgeable to confirm this.
- Air-transported passengers (domestic and international) in European countries (2016) bit.ly/2YQWryS
- Energy intensity of European economies (2006-2016) bit.ly/2YRwj7e
- Norway, Tukey, Sweden and France produced most energy from hydropower in 2016, followed by Italy, Austria and Spain (Eurostat). Norway produced so much that it clearly separates itself from the rest, while the difference between the next three was relaatively small (618 thousand toe). Interesting to see two scandinavian countries here. Energy from geothermal sources in this year was strongest in Turkey, Italy and Iceland. Most wind energy was generated in Germany, Spain and UK, while most solar energy was generated in Germany, Spain and Italy.
- Learned about the "three sisters"—successive waves that slow down ships so they can't climb the final crest. Every year ships are said to be lost with no explanation, oftentimes killer waves suspected to be the cause. Interesting that in certain situations such waves have formed "out of nowhere", from strong winds. Also liked the description of tsunamis. My previous understanding was that these were waves high through their entire lifetime. But they were described as being around 1 meter tall and very long, posessing very high speeds and only "stacking" in height once they reach a coast. The seabed is said to determine the speed, course and shape of the waves; it was found that when the water was 5000m deep, tsunamis developed speed of 800km/h, while with depth of at 3000m the speed fell to 600km/h. Hitting many small obstacles on their way has the potential to make their impact unpredictable; an intersection of "currents" was said to be able to cause 50x more waves. At least, the things I found noteworthy.
- Suppose you knew about calendar events with known start and end times and where these events would happen (latitude and longitude). In your view, what would be the most approproate diagram type to describe this clearly without omitting details?
- Read about China's plans/dreams to increase the number of its airports from ≈235 to 450 by 2035 and decided to look how this compares against USA in terms of average number of people an airport has to serve bit.ly/2HDVPa7. As you can see, even with almost doubling the number of airports in China, the average US airport would still have to serve 48.05x less people on average. This highlights how severe capacity problems in China might be. But it is inspiring to see the scale at which they work towards reducing/eliminating the constraints. Still, the major concern with airports is pollution, so it has to be addressed in parallel.
- Happy start in the new week towards your dreams!
- "Luxury items with less prominent logos are more expensive." An interesting correlation. Strong signals were said to be easily copied, while subtlety was found to create exclusivity. Discretion is said to be a core value of many luxury businesses.
- Mountain peaks higher than 3600 meters in the Swiss Alps bit.ly/2HCQEY0. Still exploring, even with a broken mouse. It unintentionally fell off a surface and the laser stopped working. We see six interesting clusters here and of the highest 10 peaks, only Matterhorn was known to me. 10th position.
- After you see someone watching football and come to a paper, which mentions assigning timestamps to graph edges (where you've used times only on nodes so far), you start thinking of potential use cases. Player A passed to player B at time x, who played to C 4 seconds later... could describe a ball posession event sequence. When the ball leaves the field, a new one has to start. What if someone created a single graph per team, with all pairwise connections among the players and incremented counters every time two players were using their edge (varying edge color from blue to red and also logging the times). Could this also hint in which part of the field a team was most active (nearby players on the graph having close positions on the field)? Can the events and times be used to seek interesting correlations? Logging times in a fast-paced game over 90 mins could take some space, but if we knew a typical average for the number of passes per minute, this may be possible to gauge. Which players passed to the same player of the opposite team most often (lost the ball to them)? Which players shooted against the gate most often? Using the gate as an extra node connected to the keeper only allows to see the percentage of shots which were blocked (sum of edges outgoing from keeper) and which passed (keeper-gate edge count). Perhaps you have even better ideas.
- Are you like a rabbit which jumps to learn every existing framework out there just because it might be beneficial on an (unpaid) project one day? To show off some keywords on important documents or to convince people with theoretical knowledge? Tortoises look suspicious at such behavior. They do cost-benefit analysis to determine what's worth learning and they don't waste energy on something that can't add sufficient value to cover the cost of losing that energy (as absolute minimum). Know your potential returns before you start and be aware that moving too fast will leave you without energy when it's most needed. Don't waste effort without being paid well for it.
- Using the same source, here is a diagram of the top 60 worldwide airports by passenger and cargo traffic in 2018 bit.ly/2YLHQVt. Thought about labeling them with numbers and indicating each airport name, but this would quickly overload the view.
- "The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey" has published a report, containing a diagram, indicating the number of passengers transported at four different airports (John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, LaGuardia Airport and New York Stewart International Airport). Passengers served on them in 2018: 138.8 million = 61.9 million (JFK) + 46 million (EWR) + 30.1 million (LGA) + 0.69 million (SWF). Seeing EWR partially explains why Newark appeared as a popular traveling destination in previous data.
- Path through twenty of the most beautiful (according to CNN) villages in Italy bit.ly/2HBnpVG. If you notice coordinate inaccuracies, let me know to fix them.
- Liked the paper "Urban skylines: Building heights and shapes as measures of city size" a lot. The authors came to several interesting insights. Building heights enable us to gauge city sizes. Gradual increase of the average building height strenghtens the desire to construct even taller buildings. Land rents rise faster with population size than with higher income. The shapes of buildings influences their energy efficiency, where smaller surface-to-volume ratios are preferable. But as one moves further into city cores, thinner and taller buildings start to appear, which increases this ratio. Spherical buildings have a ratio of 6/diameter (considered optimal), but a cube (closest to a sphere) with a side equal to this diameter would have exactly the same ratio. Since energy efficiencies are evaluated per capita, the "densification" of many people at a single place allows for economies of energy. Surface ~ volume2/3 (called canonical allometric equation) was said to describe building shapes with the most favorable climate control. Nice to see again the beauty of real-world geometry. For further details, look at the original publication.
- "Cars have become a new form of affordable housing." Sad to read this. Makes me question company payments and prevalent practices in the entire area. Not one I'd like to be in.
- Some leading causes of death by US state bit.ly/2HBxKkr
- Chicago's Divvy shows markers for bike station locations bit.ly/2YHOQCE, which also serve as indicators of available bikes and docks using the fact that their sum at that station remains constant. Then it becomes sufficient to have lightblue as marker background color and increase bottom-up a darkblue level as more bikes become available. Great idea, although the 580+ stations and big markers quickly fill up the screen, asking the user to find the right level of zoom. Divvy also provides historic data bit.ly/2YOQa6Z, which allows you to see that the median trip duration in Q4 2018 was 9min 20sec (8m35s for men, 9m59s for women). The most frequent route was from "Michigan Ave & Washington St" to "Canal St & Adams St" (868 times). You can also see the number of trips distributed over age for both genders bit.ly/2HBjEQ1
- Flight Centre prices (AU$/km) for some flights departing from Sydney (24.05.2019) bit.ly/2YKebMj. There is a high price premium that travelers have to pay in case they choose New York compared to Auckland, for instance.
- Leaving some breathing space makes it bit.ly/2YKbOcu
- Mozartkugeln unit prices by different producers bit.ly/2HytjGU. Another delicious text. Also liked the idea about the geometric optimization of the (area and perimeter of the) wrap material.
- A magic square is one in which the sums on each row, column and main diagonals are equal. Saw one of size 4x4, filled with the numbers 1-16 (no duplicates). All sums were 34.
- Also liked the optics of Ghirardelli's chocolates and Bob's Donuts.
- Liked the variety of products at the "Franz" bakery bit.ly/2HxQrp0, the marketing embedded in the package design and the availability of nutrition data to support motivated analysts.
- Annual electricity usage per unit area at the Network Operations Center in Arlington, Virginia bit.ly/2Hziuod. Do you think that an expanding Internet may put a greater strain on the networking equipment, which in turn may increase energy consumption (and carbon footprint)? Can such growth be compared to the growth from operation expansion inside a regular building?
- Clusters with at least 4 WiFi hotspots in Paris, France bit.ly/2YH4KgL. Someone could almost "fit" a semi-circle through the cluster centers and surround with it the central area.
- But if you have an ongoing, important project that is moving forward too slowly, you could still consider discussing its nature.
- Looking at photos from Venice and thinking of plotting waterways—similar to what would be roads in other cities, but in blue :). Unfortunately, the language barrier does not leave much chance to find where such data might be available.
- Experimented with iterative triangle generation bit.ly/2YEOa0Q, but did not intend to create perfect triangulation. Created to test the thinking behind it, but not completely satisfied with the result. Not an expert on triangles; problems with them rarely seem to capture my attention for long.
- Another figure with at least partial knowledge of itself bit.ly/2WlLFmS
- Looked for nature reserves, which led me to this bird photo gallery bit.ly/2M03unq ↗
- Idea: An interactive slider flipping through historical photos of a person or animal to observe how they changed over time.
- China had to kill many pigs due to a rare disease and Norway has started to lose salmon due to warm waters leading to seaweed expansion and subsequent fish suffocation. Cases showing how easy it is to lose millions of animals. But how hard is it to restore their population to previous levels?
- Checked 3 different butter types on Tesco's website. All contained 52-53g of saturated fat in 100g, which gives sufficient reason to use this product sparingly, if at all. Reminds me of all mayonnaise varieties at the local store, which contained 5-6 E-substances. Still want to spread over a tiny slice of bread?
- An image is an O(n2) object—if you double its width and height, the total number of pixels in need of encoding will grow 4x. It's up to you to decide how big you want the sum of all image dimensionalities to be (feel free to compute it with JS). Algorithmists prefer O(nlog n) which gives you a good orientation why right-sizing at right-clarity is so important.
- Cron jobs could be seen as a form of environmental pollution. Lots of machines doing unchecked computation, periodic network requests, data retrieval and storage, where none of these operations is free. But you could stop any cron jobs that no longer serve you or where your original plans about them have changed. Also ensure that you are not making hundreds of network requests (from several IP addresses on your network), when you can have the data once and distribute it via LAN instead. Also seek ways to touch foreign servers more lightly.
- When you only store and retrieve a bunch of variables, how interesting could this application be?
- Education is a field ripe for scam and plenty of people use this to their advantage. Either wasting your time, making big promises they know can't be fulfilled or capitalizing on unrealistic expectations and developed norms. Norms which dictate that education is well-needed and will profoundly change your life. Yet, education is incapable of penetrating discrimination, so it works only up to a point. Up to the point where you start to notice the injustice you are surrounded with. Education can beat that? Think again. If education improved career earnings so much, wouldn't all students be debt-free and thriving? We've heard that exactly the opposite is true—despite higher levels of knowledge, competence and perhaps practical experience, some people may still carry student debt and its interest years later. Insisting to be at the greatest place, among privileged people, to study with the greatest educators, to enjoy the best and resource-richest libraries, to have access to partnership programs with other universities, to visit the most advanced labs and use their expensive equipment to work on several large-scale projects all have their price which someone is paying. The question then is: How much worse could someone be if they studied on their own time with freely available resources on the web, if they wouldn't accumulate all this debt? Developing a greater awareness for the underlying motive behind the existence of an educational service or resource could help you avoid some costs.
- Have you become an expert at designing login pages? Has nothing to do with where the true value of the product is and whether it was needed.
- If you had plenty of job offers for "CNC Dreher/Fräser" in 2001 and now you seek plenty of people for the same position in 2019, were you looking for the people from 2001 or only for unpretentious workers willing to accept work conditions typical for 2001?
- If you have to seek for a way to write the same thing as the programmer next to you, but in a much more syntax-clever way, the intuition that your work will be needed could be wrong. But if you work on something that doesn't exist yet and you feel this is what's needed to complete it, your syntax choices may not be that important to other people unless you want them to maintain your creation later.
- Do you use OpenStreetMap often? On this machine, it has a memory footprint of 45-50MB compared to Google Maps' 175-200MB (Chrome). A small drawback is that it takes time for some tiles to load.
- Client-service fit is a way to validate whether clients want/appreciate your service before even thinking of offering it at scale.
- Seeking product-market fit in 2019 is not required anymore (earlier it made sense). Today, anyone investing in rent and real-estate will outperform any startup, no matter how hard its founders work. The problem is that noone likes to fail forever, so perhaps the economy must send stronger signals that it has a need for new startups (currently it doesn't). The lack of startups doesn't come without a reason. Another assumption about product-market fit is it has to be one-dimensional, whereas most companies today are multi-dimensional and have various revenue streams. Founders with a strong belief of the need to be in a single market, will find that they fall behind relative to more diversified companies. And their risk of failure, leading to serious consequences is likely higher.
- Remember: Everytime companies can't find/afford people, their managers travel to distant regions to explain those living there how great working for them is (it isn't). Or they explain how beneficial volunteering will be for your skills and carreer (it won't be). Never waste energy accepting anything strongly deviating from your payment requirements and refuse conversations until they are met.
- "Cruft has quick impact; teams who do this end up maxing out all their credit cards." - Martin Fowler on "technical debt".
- Idea: We can examine not only correlations among product properties, but also correlations among events (provided they are described as vectors), among events and times or among events and locations.
- Suppose I have matrix A describing 15 features of McDonald's burgers and use different matrix decomposition methods on it. Is there something in particular I could learn from their visualizations? bit.ly/2M3nh5m
- Used article data to make a diagram of the number of employess vs. revenue for the biggest companies in almost every US state bit.ly/2WkYy0g. Unexpected to see how much bigger Walmart is compared to the rest. Yet, if we consider revenue per employee, Walmart (40) appears slightly behind Amazon (34) in this list. Both Fannie Mae (1) and Freddie Mac (2) are in the housing market. Avnet (15) appears to have an interesting profile, positioned close to Arrow Electronics (11).
- New diagram: Bike paths in Talinn, Estonia bit.ly/2WbwVqA. Hopefully, I came across an old one, because it looks somewhat fragmented.
- Ground-level distance matrix for some cities in Portugal (values in km) bit.ly/2LV3Uvl. According to it, Lisbon-Amadora and Porto-Vila Nova de Gaia must be fairly close.
- Noone is insured against bugs in code. But demanding that because of them everyone in the industry should undergo rigorous additional certification (separate of the requirements they already cover in their daily work) does not consider that this would increase the cost of finding/retaining programmers and potentially discourage new people from entering the profession. Understanding the nature of the arguments, in hope of seeing some rethinking, there may be few benefits obtained by making programming career-accessible only to selected few. In fact, the fewer people work on today's software of increasing complexity, the more likely it is that we see more burnout/exhaustion, leading to even more mistakes.
- If someone is holding you back, try to understand their point of view first, before writing that "they must be eliminatied" for slowing you down. Otherwise, on the next, bigger obstacle, you may find yourself with no buffers to rely on.
- Something is deeply flawed with this notion that a rich person has to announce on the cover of their own book a big number with all the zeros they are worth. Makes me seriously concerned about the future and about the quality of the networks which helped promote the current situation.
- A pizza made of several meats, said to have 3370 calories beats a whole 1kg+ roasted chicken of 6890kJ (≈1646 kcal) by a wide margin. Must be quite a big one, when intended for 8 servings. In cases like this you get the impression that calories (at one place) aren't necessarily the same as calories (at another). It is not that I am deeply interested in food, only in the boundaries of what the data tells me.
- "Endowment size correlates clearly and strongly with institutional quality." Striking to see world-class universities depending so much on them. To the point that tuition fees start to account for a much smaller percentage of their total revenue compared to less popular universities. Determining spending levels as a percentage of moving average of endowment values is new to me. Do you think that this would be the right time to ask for a donation as well? Or would you rather prefer to receive concrete service instead?
- A new week could mean a new beginning for your website. Provided your scale has the right accuracy to keep requirement and compensation in balance.
- Found a nice diagram of the hotels and the number of their rooms in Downtown San Diego bit.ly/2M9bSBl (source is indicated)
- Can you find which street intersections in your city are the most dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists?
- Seven properties of some Honda cars bit.ly/2Wb5AVA. If one would choose only by these criteria, looking for low displacement, high horsepower, high torque, high fuel economy and high fuel tank capacity at low price (assigning equal weights to them), a script would recommend either "2019 Accord LX" or "2019 Accord Sedan LX". These aren't necessarily the cheapest models, but with good combined characteristics relative to the rest. Drawback: Such data can hardly tell us much about the quality of the driving experience.
- A book claims that in 20 years, Alcoa went from having 7 employee injuries/day to being one of the safest in the industry.
- Good to see a list of all libraries in San Diego on a single page bit.ly/2Wcv7xu ↗. If you look on the right, there is a PDF convenience link called "printable map", which probably looks familiar to you if you have seen other similar diagrams here. Case in point: sometimes what we look for isn't strictly available on an "open data" website, but exists as a sublink somewhere under the activities of a City Hall. Open data doesn't even have to be called "open" in order to fulfill its purpose.
- Nutrients in "Gotta Have It" serving sizes of the Cold Stone Creamery Signature Creations icecreams bit.ly/2LT6phK. You can also see how they look like bit.ly/2LURzYa ↗
- The study claiming that travelers find the price of the flight more important than the security of whether they'll arrive or not, seems suspicious. Perhaps all participants in it should be asked to sit in a flight on free fall for a while—to refresh their memories. The integrity of their statements may return sooner than they think. There should be no tolerance for shipping faulty, life-threatening products.
- Whenever I see a product with extensive specification, it makes me feel more confident that this company is staying behind a promise and cares deeply about fulfilling it. Not simply about bringing more units to the market for the sake of immediate and higher profitability. Specification "integrity" means that the same parameters are being pre-selected and tracked during the production process in the same way that a cook would track the ingredient proportions to achieve the same taste every single time. What is not specified can be widely varying.
- Had the idea to compare the specifications of robotic vacuum cleaners as this could have been useful to (potentially) many people. But the websites of Eufy and iRobot were not consistent in how they presented this information, Ecovacs had plenty of models with poor descriptions and Kärcher had good descriptions, but only two models. Perhaps it is not fair on my side to ask for more transparency from what is seen as a developing, highly-competitive industry.
- "Up to 500 production steps per wafer may be required using hundreds of different machines." Wafer factories were also said to have automated material handling due to the cost and errors arising from manual processing. The cost of such factory can approach billion dollars.
- I agree with the idea that having metrics, which don't tell much, is less useful than being aware of the number of conversations with clients, the number of received projects and their diversity, the satisfaction level seen on a real face. Many of these can be observed only during two-way interaction, not within software counting the non-clients visiting the website.
- Sugar content vs. total calories for catering beverages offered at Applebee's bit.ly/2LS8gmO. Liked that they updated the nutrient tables three days ago. According to one, the "non-classic", fruity lemonades contain the highest amount of sugar and calories. The calorie difference between "Pepsi" and "Coca Cola" is relatively small. "Diet Pepsi" and "Diet Mountain Dew" are the only two with both zero gram sugar and zero calories. "Coke Zero" and "Diet Coke" both have 10 calories.
- "Deceptive site ahead" bit.ly/2W9YsIV. Supposed to be the site of an eatery. Saw some images of foods, before this red screen appeared. Please, follow best practices, so that your websites always operate at their best.
- Not into jewelry, but looking at this ring's sapphires bit.ly/2WeCN2d ↗ reminds me of multi-step animations and my rare engagement with them
- Updating to a newer version could make some previously working demos, relying on a module in the old version, non-functional. This was the case with the demo about the new book releases on Amazon bit.ly/2LP2keh, which I didn't notice for a while. Made a small change and it works again, yet not with the desired performance.
- Sure, you can obtain the same results elsewhere. Good luck.
- Explored the product nutrients at "Brasserie Bread" bit.ly/2M2fvZM
- You can choose. If YouTube significantly improved your life, you could visit it often. If it didn't change it, while wasting your time with download, buffering, scripts, ads and low-quality content, it's time to insert it in the domain blocker. Added advantage: websites can't autoplay videos anymore, as many of them are hosted on this platform. Another minor browsing idea: having images turned off by default, enabling them only if titles/text appear interesting. You'd be surprised how often you won't even toggle them on. But now browsing has become generally faster on all websites (and functionality still works as intended).
- Isn't it ironic that the companies which made trillions while spreading servers all over the globe are now explaining you the attractiveness of "serverless"? Isn't it ironic that those who made fortunes are the very same people who are now explaining you that there is a crisis and you should be paid less each day while working harder than ever? What someone convinces you to believe, makes you so much easier to manipulate.
- Also, every time you upload a video on YouTube, you give Google permission to do with it anything it wants, including merging this data with the one from all its other (intransparent) services, through which it collect data about you, until they gather a complete profile to understand which other services to introduce to learn more (while being even less transparent). This is important to realize. A company that has hundreds of services operating in very diverse branches of the economy is not a company anymore, but a machine. If you ask someone at Google "What is this company about?", they won't be able to answer you. They are about anything and everything. Rule number one about online content is that you never entrust it third parties, especially the largest entities.
- When you see that a chocolate factory uploaded all its photos on Instagram, leaving their website almost blank of content, you ask yourself what they were thinking. Now, due to lack of initial planning, Facebook owns their content and can decide anything about it.
- Functional play makes sunshine available more often and longer bit.ly/2LRtKAx
- "Warmies" bit.ly/2W86XEl ↗ will make you smile. And as a list of seven ordered items bit.ly/2LMSedR.
- Interesting thematic soaps here bit.ly/2LPMBvw ↗
- Pizza Hut pizza nutrients bit.ly/2LQZg1e
- Extra large chocolate block tower at "Thorntons" bit.ly/2LM6p2P. Someone found a way to illustrate the etages of the building I was speaking about.
- "Costa Coffee" has an overwhelming amount of data on coffee nutrients. But people who don't enjoy this drink likely won't spend much time on it.
- "Fuel Juice Bars" smoothie nutrition bit.ly/2W7EnTn
- Converting the Timberyard logo to SVG bit.ly/2LRX2Pk. One has to look hard to see a difference. Reduced to 10.47% of the original size.
- "50% of all industrial accidents occur on shipping and receiving docks while handling material." Keyword: material handling.
- Not what I hoped to see bit.ly/2LOyqXy
- Looked at an open dataset about the shopping centers in Charlotte. SouthPark Mall appears to be the 4th largest in terms of area, but has an extensive number of tenants, including Microsoft and Tesla. Looking at shopping centers appears to be a great way to find businesses one never knew about.
- Library locations in Madrid, Spain bit.ly/2LYfZQe. Inaccuracies may be present, but knowing about them could help improve the diagram. Used "inside-out" numbering for the first time and it helps in following the numbers more easily compared to the chaos present in previous diagrams on the same thematic here.
- If a company intends to serve globally (and this one does), it cannot allow itself to have a special section on its website called "NYC store" as this immediately speaks discrimination.
- Nuts and seeds on offer (demo) bit.ly/2LNNLYJ. Simple gallery of products (yours will be different). The photos were made with a phone camera—they were dark and not very crisp, but were touched in GIMP later. The demo also illustrates the need for image consistency. Descriptions and prices have been made-up.
- Recipes by Mirrisons bit.ly/2WepbUV ↗. Extends over several pages.
- You can label several rectangles dedicated to each floor of a building, color them according to their specific use and stack them on top of each other, clearly indicating their numbers. Hovering any of them then reveals the floor plan for this specific level along with a legend of all businesses present there. Has the advantage of being clear, beautiful, fast, space-efficient and the disadvantage of requiring a lot of work to design (what could be a large number of) floor plans. But at least it is possible that the layouts of several different floors look similar.
- Creating a "metro" line how clients should reach the business goes further than a simple metro line.
- Looking at a new cup technology bit.ly/2W5Z4PK ↗
- "Primal elements" has "bath bombs" and my first association about these spheres was about filling a bathtub with water and throwing to score from a distance. Might be the wrong use.
- Tasks with oversimplified diagrams, 5-6 defined variables and an unknown are baffling to me. Usually I'd refuse to approach the ones lacking context and can't support teaching methods which fully omit it.
- If possible, describe the problem you are trying to solve before the actual code you write. Or include the link pointing to the problem definition (less convenient, asks for connectivity twice). Being unaware of it, your code can reach destinations you didn't initially think about, where the lack of context could make it look unprofessional/wrong.
- Advertised features of Bosch washing machines bit.ly/2W3Epvv. Based on these 68 models, WAY287W5, WAW285W5 or the smaller and more silent WIW28440 could be interesting. One potential problem is that too many models do not appear to be significantly different, which may confuse potential buyers.
- Nutrients for the muffins at "Muffin Break" bit.ly/2W2ETC9. Somewhat spurious in the "dietary fiber (g)" column. Lets us see clearly how the three new muffins have a lot more protein, more fiber and less sugar compared to previously existing alternatives.
- Climbing high on a gym wall, using ground as a reference system, could mean purse avoirs following equal and opposite direction (see membership fee).
- "Nutrients in Krispy Kreme donuts" bit.ly/2W4ANtp reuses the code from yesterday.
- A component configurator for custom desk/chair design is such a great idea so rarely implemented (see Officeworks bit.ly/2VZ5vUM ↗).
- Managed to pack 38 different pizza slice types on a single screen by selectively disabling page elements (not even writing code). But preserved the original "Order Now" links below each one. Keeping this tasty screenshot for the right occasion.
- Liked the idea of recipes using only four ingredients, presented by IGA Australia bit.ly/2LIbNEs. Exactly the kind of abstinence I try to practice with my own projects.
- Neither would be "Coles" in Australia an easy task (3052 locations).
- "Migros" is said to have 1123 store locations in Switzerland—much more than expected. Plotting them would be "after the payment only" option.
- Lindt chocolate products and their nutrients bit.ly/2W6Go28. The idea was to observe how the different series (e.g. Lindor, Excellence, HELLO etc.) compare to each other. We see that the Lindor series (bonbons) are consistently high in fat (also saturated) relative to other products. The Excellence and HELLO series are relatively high in sugar, except when the Excellence series comes with more than 70% cocoa indicated on the packaging. Increasing cocoa content to 85→90→99% decreases sugar to 14→7→2g.
- Weight vs. price for road bikes at "Bikes+Vienna" bit.ly/2LGq7Nv. The cheapest bike below 7kg is the 2017 model "FUJI SL 1.5" (6.33kg), but it will cost you 3500€.
- Some Deutz motors next to each other bit.ly/2LGfKJz. For instance, the new TCD 18.0 L6 is rated at 830HP, reached at 1900rpm.
- Diameter vs. nominal power for Senvion wind turbines bit.ly/2LCMxPB. "Wien Energie" lists "Windpark Glinzendorf" as using MM100 wind turbines, which led me to this company's page.
- Comparison of Hyundai Kona models at "Wolfgang Denzel Auto AG" bit.ly/2LH8NIm
- Aida (Austria) makes bags and shoes for women. From chocolate bit.ly/2LFZacX. A type of mode I haven't seen before.
- Area vs. price for Winegg's real estate bit.ly/2LHtZ0V. Abstracts away locations having rent-like prices.
- Price distribution of women bags at "Humanic" bit.ly/2VZq03r
- Being able to work with and distinguish between large number of variables while thinking is of great importance. I mean variables we know about, accessible to non-destructive modifications, which preserve our flow of thinking. Not variables generated as part of intermediary steps by a black box, which then become untraceable, must be searched for or interfere with the overall composition. Our capacity to deal with both is limited, but through practice, we can expand it.
- Please, inspect whether the third-party product you are loading on your website insists to inject its name into most of your element's classes. Creates noise pollution.
- Weight vs. price for bikes from Hollingsworthcycles bit.ly/2LOPD34
- Interesting idea of having your brand appear on corporate chocolate bars bit.ly/2VUxTYd ↗. Letting employees take them home or share them with friends means that more people see that label.
- The time investment to make a beautiful cake (with all fine details) could take time whose cost exceeds its price. Possibly a hint of a very competitive industry.
- Estimating room paint cost bit.ly/2LAJXcV. You could also add laminate. Selecting "Colorado Oak" by rightpricetiles.ie means that the floor in this room will cost you additional 573.69€ (cheaper options may exist).
- We have some cookies here, but we squeeze you for the juice.
- Great to see theater specifications on several occasions bit.ly/2LACwm1 ↗. Different from those by W3C, but still useful.
- Even as an adult it could be hard to "fix" these Ravensburgers bit.ly/2LDuJUL ↗. But quite some material for kids in there.
- Finding Appletons ready-made poster frames with maximal area per unit price bit.ly/2VYWDOW. The A1 size (tops the list) looks best. Which creative idea will you put in there?
- Characteristics of some products by DelTaco bit.ly/2Lz1KBk
- I clicked and clicked on the "skip ad" link, but nothing happened except watching those precious seconds continue to fly-by.
- Price distributions of the products at the "Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf" bit.ly/2VTp4xP. Did not succeed with merging both into one violin, being dark on the left and light on the right, preserving the original curves.
- Could not do the same for the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) as no attribute described the airline names. Part of the problem is visible when images are turned off bit.ly/2VYJwx5. Also not all of today's departing flights were shown, but only the first 64 pages, corresponding to the timespan 05:30-13:38. In these 8h 8m, 91 flights were scheduled to leave towards New York, 77 to San Francisco, 62 to Chicago, 51 to Las Vegas, 44 to Atlanta and 40 to Seattle. There were 36 flights to Washington (Miami and Denver had few more). From the international destinations, Vancouver (26), Toronto (22), Tokyo (21) and Mexico City (19) were most present. What most surprised me were the number of flights to Newark (31).
- The most frequent flights from Canberra Airport (Australia) tomorrow are by "Qantas" and "Virgin Australia", both having (17, 11) and (10, 6) flights to Sydney and Melbourne respectively.
- Looked at the departures at "Edinburgh Airport" today. Not obvious, but "British Airways" flights leave 7 times towards Heathrow today (and 6 others to London City), while flights by "Air Lingus (Stobart Air)" leave 6 times towards Dublin. Not having eyes to see that, but scripts are wonderful at creating summaries.
- Electric wheelchairs could be interesting in increasing mobility of disabled people. It simply hurts to see someone using their two hands trying to spin the big wheels while carrying their own weight. Hard to imagine how exhausting it is.
- Somehow came to the latest PDF issue of the magazine "Versailles". Not understanding much French, but saw a photo of smiling firefighters bit.ly/2VTmjwr, once again feeling relieved. Won't forget how these great people risked their lives. Also liked the small touch between the top "p" and the bottom "N" in the title—almost mnemonic.
- Saw an interesting pattern at "Brasserie Moliteuil" and wrote some code to recreate it bit.ly/2VWYjIK
- Price per macaron at Carette, Paris bit.ly/2LC8kHa. For the moderately unsatiable, 9 or 16 macarons could look fine.
- Quick codification of the less than obvious idea about "warehouse presence cost" bit.ly/2VYAEYm
- Comparison of arrival time violins at work- and rest days by the M1 metro line at "Merode" station in Brussels, Belgium bit.ly/2LB8miI
- Exploring the kindergarten data by "Technologiestiftung Berlin" bit.ly/2VWJJRo. Some interesting results here. The last diagram took longest to adjust properly; had to move the left boundaries further as connections to the latitudes were hardly visible. The reds connect opposing axes, while the blues—neighbor axes.
- Reflected Gaussians bit.ly/2Lyqrhl (4.3kB)
- "Baker's Delight" product nutrients bit.ly/2VVJ1UA. Some labels were so long that they pass through the color boxes, where I saw this after the fact. Used GIMP for the bottom labels—some appeared smooth, others crisp (not sure why). Not interactive.
- In the middle of life, "Life is what you make it" suddenly refreshes memory.
- "New products are in-store everyday. You never know what you’ll find!" This could be a problem for clients looking for some more predictability. With some thinking and few minutes of input daily all the web can know.
- In a path passing through cells, plot which and count how many get activated. Count number of path intersections and compute total path length.
- How would you quantify a fragrance or perceived beauty in a picture? Are stars enough to understand why they are (so many)?
- Attempted to gauge required soil content to fill a small container bit.ly/2LInk6m. Looks slightly more than expected; do you find this reasonable?
- Would not easily come to the idea that given enough data, the decision whether to buy or sell could become a task for a logistic regressor. May have lots of applications. But what if we could apply classification in metro context, for instance? Giving point coordinates and obtaining all line numbers (as label) expected to pass through them? Would such 1:n mapping be possible?
- Had the idea to manually validate the correspondence of the lines on a metro map with lines obtained from GPS coordinates. Looked at the recently discovered Munich metro map for inspiration and chose the U6 line for further exploration bit.ly/2LzFR55. As you can see, the simplified map is made of seven straight lines, but GPS reality looks different. For instance, if we notice the position of "Münchner Freiheit" on both sides, on the left it is not clear that it could be located approximately at the middle of the route. Also the stops at the top are too close together to suggest that the path between "Garching-Hochbrück" and "Fröttmaning" could be that long, for instance. Please, note that these coordinates may be inaccurate. Hope you enjoyed the comparison.
- Had an idea to take a curve like this one bit.ly/2LA4cYg and convert it to a straight line while preserving the lengths of each colored segment. Unfortunately, computing derivative and definite integrals according to the arc length formula has the disadvantage of being too slow on my machine. Sympy also gave me very long results (likely complex numbers), which were hard to decifer. Wished it was possible to compute the integral once and then only switch the boundaries, obtaining the various results, but those boundaries had to be passed to the integrate function, effectively asking for several function executions. Maybe there is a better way.
- A beautiful grid of the architectural styles and branch info of the libraries in Seattle bit.ly/2VXi1Uw ↗. Also liked the spacing between them as shown on the map.
- Glass art bit.ly/2VV2zbM ↗. Quite amazing what can be done with this material.
- "Project Plumage" studies why and how birds got their beautiful colors bit.ly/2LsBeJL
- "My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe." - Stephen Hawking. I saw the equation that he wanted to be engraved in his gravestone and wondered what it meant. The Royal Society attempted to describe it clearly, yet I went to underline each variable-explanation pairs with separate colors (where the whole still looked confusing), creating a separate file. The last underlined sentence was that "black hole entropy is proportional to the horizon's area and not the volume." But the way this has been shown (thermodynamics shivers) makes this steatement appear almost as a message relevant to everyday life. Could this be an allusion that in order to minimize our planet's entropy, we would need to isolate certain areas in order to restore the hurt/vulnerable ecosystems there? That smaller area in effect is "more manageable"?
- Came to the Natural History Museum to look for data (referred by a paper), but was greeted with: "The world is in trouble: one million animals and plants face extinction" bit.ly/2LuLUHT ↗. Couldn't easily digest the scale of this—much to be written about in those 1500 pages.
- In "How do we make the air in our cities breathable?" bit.ly/2VNcP5R ↗, the author reminds us that particulate pollution can be generated by braking systems, battery production (EV) and road-tire friction. (Mistakenly believed once that electric car means zero emissions.) Liked the ideas that Paris, Madrid and Freiburg have implemented for traffic reduction in selected areas. Disliked how quickly air pollution can offset the effect of excercise (China, India). Still worth remembering that cars aren't the sole reason for the current state.
- If there is a caroussel showing three items, and the user clicks on the right arrow, they expect one item to appear on the right and one to disappear on the left. But this way it requires three clicks to see three new items. Saw a caroussel, which showed the next three items at once instead. Perhaps less intuitive, but it makes sense that something which was already seen does not need to be preserved. The space is then used efficiently to gain maximal new value on each click, accelerating access, especially if the items are many.
- Janny's icecreams appear as work of art bit.ly/2VMU3LV. Often wondered how tall working material didn't find a way to fall off.
- As a web designer, do you allow a shoe company to hire you or do you ask it to become a client instead? Which do you think is more professional?
- Weight vs. price for the racing bikes available at "Das Radhaus", Berlin bit.ly/2Lrfuhn. The more lightweight the bike, the higher its price tends to be. A cyclist would probably look to balance between these two criteria. Two models at ≈8.9kg with a cost of ≈1000€ seem to fit this description. If we want to optimize for both criteria at the same time, we could create a score and rank by it, obtaining a short list bit.ly/2VQOKuQ. We see how much difference 2.4kg (and many other adjustments) can make in the final price. One could also pay additional 20€ for a bike that would be newer and 0.3kg lighter (third on the list). Comparing with the model having a score of 4.45 (which appears at a sweet spot in the first diagram), we have to decide whether a reduction of 0.9kg in weight (and other adjustments) is justified at a cost of 320€.
- "These are the favorite employers of economists and engineers" bit.ly/2VNT5yZ ↗. Perhaps they speak of machine engineers here, which prefer to work for car makers like Audi, Daimler, BMW, Porsche or VW. If so, this would be understandable. But if software engineers believe these are the right employers for them, something is very wrong here. Software engineers should work at purely software companies (the type of which Germany has a deficit). The willingness and greed to be on the "get-rich-quick" bandwagon may eliminate it sooner than most people think. Plus: the stream of cheap workers attracted this way won't last forever.
- "Dunkin' Donuts" US website is "access denied" from here. The German version is accessible, but it lists only products having no ingredient information—another form of "access denied".
- MVG has downloadable maps of the (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, Tram) transport network in Munich bit.ly/2VYhpyl. Clicking a second time on "Schienennetz München" reveals all maps—something which was less obvious to me. If you have a fast enough machine, you could look at the beautiful "Verkehrslinienplan Stadt".
- Learned about the closing of an Aldi branch in Germany and wondered how many other alternative brands exist. Worth mentioning are Lidl, Kaufland, Penny, Edeka, Rewe, Netto, Norma, Plus, Real, Hit, Kliver, Serpa, Klaas & Kock. Perhaps there are several omissions here. Now, how many German software businesses could you think of?
- "Autohaus Ulmen" has 702 used cars with similar characteristics listed. Can you write a script which finds potential cars of interest?
- Torten & Kuchen von Bäckerei K&U bit.ly/2VTTNuk. Schoko macht glücklich.
- Products by Bäckerei Kamps bit.ly/2VNJkRj. Makes you forget about the puffy croissant in the morning. The table preserves the original order (bread, bun, pastry), letting us see that the increased sophistication in taste starts to shift the shades to stronger reds.
- Wrote a script attempting to select a car among 162 different Mercedes-Benz models on sale at Nord-Ostsee Automobile, based on their characteristics bit.ly/2LszC2T. The model that came out is probably some kind of a hybrid.
- A cafe used a layer of circle packings (hollow circles) made of golden-looking metal as a layer set against the wall, illuminated from above to a nice effect.
- BAUHAUS has this beautifully geometric, mosaic pattern for floors bit.ly/2LsXCmB. Wondering about setup difficulty.
- Ice-disco on an ice rink is an interesting idea bit.ly/2LGx0i7. People skate while listening to music and watch how all the lighting effects paint (and reflect off) the ground. Some bumps are likely inevitable...
- Studentenwerk München publishes the weekly menu of each canteen, bistro or cafe bit.ly/2LrGbmj (also available in PDF for print) to make this aspect of student life more predictable.
- It was natural to look at Häagen Dazs data from here bit.ly/2Ln1XaB. But we see how skewed the data presentation in the "trans fat" column becomes, where the two existing values of 0g and 0.5g are both seen as extremes, despite being low. A similar effect we observe with the "calcium" column (it's often 0%, 8% or 10% of RDA). "Bourbon Praline Pecan Ice Cream" is the most caloric (380cal/serving). Two ice creams containing peanut butter also contain the most total fat (but not saturated). Looking further, peanut butter might be related to higher protein content. The "Mango Ice Cream" is low in many ingredients, average in few and high in vitamin A and vitamin C—a somewhat unique combination (as you see in the second diagram). Could dietary fiber affect iron content in these products? A small deviation: While Ben & Jerry's website was heavy and slow (10.2MB resources, 4.2MB transferred, 197 requests, 44.53s finish time), Häagen Dazs' was much more convenient to use despite using large images. The latter was also responsive and managed to show the important information space-efficiently, which was of great help while preparing the material for the demo.
- Ingredients and overall properties of the Ben & Jerry's icecream pints bit.ly/2LmMOWN. The "Vanilla" flavor sets itself apart, but has above average trans fats (2.1g in 100g). "Chocolate Fudge Brownie" and "Peanut Butter Fridge Core" look interesting relative to other variants. "Peanut Butter World" and "Truffle Kerfuffle" are indicated as richest in calories.
- When you see hundreds of overwritten style rules, something is not okay.
- Some products (with known nutrient values) by Bäckerei Ströck, Vienna bit.ly/2LsFuJi. Liked the quality of their photos and the way "Erdbeerschnitte" hides whole strawberries under the visible surface (was not included due to a missing nutrient table). Despite the diagram showing that "Laugenbrezel" contains a lot of salt, a quick search enables us to see that it is only 2.5g. The coloring is relative—adding concrete values would have made the whole unreadable. Of the five croissants, three were in the reddish zone when it came to saturated fats. The other two had 8-9g (in 100g). "Finnenbrot" seems to contain the most fiber, while the "Punschwürfel" is rich in sugar (42.4g). "Chefsalat" appears to be quite different from the rest bit.ly/2LpL9jt. Interesting how "Nougatschnitte", "Zitrusschnitte" and "Mohnschnitte" have appeared on the periphery, although not getting close to "Kokoskuppel groß", which is rich in many nutrients.
- Images tip: try to load fewer, smaller, better-optimized images and not fill the front page with 16Mpix, rescaled variants for every product you might have. Otherwise you force the user to disable images altogether.
- Locations of the Merkur stores in Vienna, Austria bit.ly/2VMTBNF. Coverage at the north is possibly something that can be improved. Also noticed that their website comes with bronze accessibility certificate bit.ly/2Lsd1TZ, which is not something I see often. Websites made by dummerAugust don't come with certificates; instead accessibility is considered as natural part of the design process leading to a new website.
- Data about art/culture events in Vienna bit.ly/2VMcWyn (for your next app). There is also a nice plan with the Citybike stations bit.ly/2VL8nEC (where the first hour after taking a bike is said to be free)
- Thinking similarities. Once as a way to find the most similar quality among the items produced (to eliminate variance reaching the client) and once as selecting locations to travel to based on similar availability/density of electric vehicle charging stations. Or once as selecting cities with similar cost of living, so that one is not automatically forced into insurmountable debt immediately upon arrival. Or once as finding the most similar part to replace a (no longer available) defect one. Also nice to see a reminder that paths on a graph don't have to depend on all-visible characteristics—each node and edge can have several attributes, captured in vectors, where the path through the nodes depends on some decision involving one or more of these invisible variables.
- Quarterly GDP per capita by US state (2017 - 2018) bit.ly/2VKX4ME. "District of Columbia" reaches an impressive value.
- Wrote a small script to look at the Geekbench CPU results, computing multi-core score divided by TDP, inspired by a book, which mentioned the MIPS/W metric. The tested Intel "Y" series processors came first (m5-6Y54, m5-6Y57, m7-6Y75, 4405Y) by a wide margin, while the "G" series came last (G3900, G4400, G3920). Yet, TDP is not peak power at maximal load, which is problematic here. We'd rather know the power associated with the measured performance. Here are two diagrams, the first considering base and max frequencies, cores and threads, single-core and multi-core scores and TDP bit.ly/2VLBNm3. The second is self-explanatory. We could also test for similarity, using one CPU model as input and obtaining a short list of the most similar models to it. If the input was "Xeon E3-1535M v5", the list would contain Core i7-6920HQ, Xeon E3-1505M v5, Xeon E3-1575M v5, Xeon E3-1515M v5 and Xeon E3-1545M v5. We could also ask which CPU (on cpubenchmark.net) in the price range 100-300$ achieves maximal performance per unit price. If the given prices are correct (doubtful, since several inaccuracies exist in the data), then Xeon E5-1650 v2 (likely Q3'13) at $119.95 could be worth a look.
- Saw a shining lamp holding an open book and reading. Too bright to look at this.
- World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) says that worldwide wind power capacity has reached 600GW by the end of 2018 (53.9GW were installed in this year alone). The highest developed capacities exist in China (221GW), USA (96GW), Germany (59GW), India (35GW), UK (20.7GW), France (15.3GW) and Brazil (14.5GW).
- Library accessibility in West Palm Beach, Florida bit.ly/2LwXYbU. The wider neighborhood has 44 libraries, but only 8 of them appear to be within the city. These are close to bike lanes, but only 2 appear to be directly bike-accessible.
- action ↔ reflection
- Nice to see the idea of robotic vacuum cleaning extended to robotic lawn mowing. Perhaps robotic environment cleaners could also appear one day given the plenty of junk to collect.
- Wishing you good night with this simple, yet beautiful idea of representing a molecule via a graph with colored vertices bit.ly/2VCTCni. In this case, the first plays the role of a legend for the second, but if the structure was very complex, where lots of the elements repeat, I would think of a way to include each of them only once.
- I often feel that the stores selling hundreds of breads, pastries/cakes, donuts, biscuits/crackers, bonbons, and so on are really creativity and design stores. How many different products of these types could you think of, before you start feeling exhausted/giving up? They've beaten that number by a factor of 10-30 and it all looks magnificent. That's hard creativity work, often involving many try-and-fail experiments, ingredient selection, mixing, arrangement, preparation. Yet, it often loses the spotlight in favor of profitability or the rolling innovation in praise of (the/any) new.
- "White chocolate often contains more calories than dark and milk chocolates." Didn't know it, but wondered, since two different sources contained several bits of "suspicious" data. While the difference was not too big, it was made obvious.
- On cityobservatory.org, Joe Cortright makes an important point that housing and transportation costs are practically inseparable. He states the observation that rent at better locations is more expensive, but reduces traveling costs, while lower rents tend to be in spaces far apart from an ideal center, where the cost of daily transportation becomes significant. Clear explanation, which highlights a market tending to perfection (where every factor is priced in). This means that transportation also determines affordability. But the time spent on it is the actual cost, not the cost of the fare itself.
- "Sprawlball" showed an interesting graphic of the NBA shot locations, according to which mid-range shooting (distant, but for 2 points) has become less popular in 2016-2017 compared to 2001-2002. The most common shot locations recently were either close to the basket or in front of the line marking the three points. It is possible that players have learned to weigh on the risk of missing, so they seek either more safety or prefer the risk only when justified (personal interpretation). But the diagram also shows the extent of game optimization: the most common shot locations were very dispersed in 2001-2002 and very concentrated in 2016-2017.
- Looking at Caterpillar industrial engines and thinking of the next demo. Perhaps you pay well enough to pull me away from that, in a direction you find more useful?
- Before reaching to the next bar of "Ritter Sport" chocolate (for sweetly-geometric reasons), you might want to take a look at what the data reveals bit.ly/2Lu0m2K. "Peppermint" and "Marzipan" are light on calories and low on trans fats (good), but perhaps less than optimal on carbohydrates and sugar. They also have lots of sucrose, but Wikipedia says it is a sugar naturally produced in plants. The "Dark whole hazelnuts" version is lighter on sugars and salt, has lots of monounsaturated fatty acids (yet, probably of the good type) packs average energy and is rich in protein (all values in the table are in 100g product). The "74% intense" version has the least amount of sugar, but the most saturated fats (and it also stands out from the rest). We could also determine feature importances and see that energy is influenced to the highest extent by the overall amount of fat (0.71). Saturated fat and sucrose receive importances of 0.14 and 0.11 each. Sodium seems to be most influenced by salt (0.673), but this is something we already know.
- Median prices of wine bottles by category in the lunch menu of "Ciao Bella", Minnesota (03.05.2019) bit.ly/2Li7grZ. Looking at this, would you consider Cabernet Sauvignon as "classic" among the wines?
- A 15% discount on a 1700$ Dell XPS 15 laptop model would be 255$ saved. Enough to buy the kids carry-on and put a 6-core, 8750H inside. Like modern kids do :).
- Liked the design of the AwayTravel suitcases and decided to make a quick comparison of the models bit.ly/2LsA5Ci. If based on this initial information, we created a metric called "capacity-density per price", then "The Kids' Carry-On" would appear to have the most desirable characteristics, despite being the cheapest. Then follows "The Large" (not in the aluminum edition).
- Monthly construction material price indices in the UK (01.01.2014 - 31.03.2019) bit.ly/2VEB5Hc. New homes and repairs seem to become more expensive.
- A tiny little room to keep the washing machines on top of each other is such a great idea (haven't seen this before). Why have something that doesn't look particularly appealing at a place where you have to look at it every day, even when not using it? Or where you would operate it for a very short time relative to the duration of the usual stay? This way, the room is used only when needed, with the added benefit of noise reduction. Remember koselig and hygge?
- Fast Company's list of most innovative companies for 2019 bit.ly/2LiVxcK ↗
- Ran a script on Trulia offers in a selected city to look at some exisiting properties on sale. For instance, it found this one on.trulia.com/2LkkhRZ ↗.
- Single-loop icecream bit.ly/2LhzGlW for the hot days. We could also sprinkle tiny colorful dots on top.
- Grid from absolute-positioned elements (screenshot bit.ly/2LhS4Lz, quadratic bit.ly/2LefzVL and rectangular bit.ly/2LdoRB9 demos). Be sure to refresh multiple times to see different arrangements.
- VAG (Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft Nürnberg) has published specifications of the U-Bahn in Nuremberg. Before I know it, I was computing power to capacity-density and found that the vehicle operation number "701/702" had the highest result. It has 8 engines (total power of 1120kW), 61500kg of empty weight, mm-dimensions (length, width, height) = (38360, 2900, 3566) and can accomodate 320 passengers (source: bit.ly/2VDpJDc). The busses tend to be fairly similar, with 200kW power, 12816cm3 engine capacity, ≈12700kg empty weight, mm-dimensions of (11980, 2500, 3300) and capacity of 82-83 passengers.
- Target bit.ly/2LfHG71
- 3 killers: hesitation, lack of quality clients, lack of quality thoughts. Most concerned about first and last, attempting to be flexible in the middle (where you can have an impact too).
- Number of cyclists at different locations In Helsinki, Finland (01.01.2014 - 24.04.2019) bit.ly/2VF1Pr8. "Heperian puisto/Ooppera" and "Baana" have registered the highest counts among these seven locations. If we look by hour of the day, the highest counts were found to be in the interval 16:00-17:00 (for all locations). Perhaps these distributions are related to specific changes in the weather. If w were more motivated, we could also see the distributions by month.
- Correlations among criteria in the World Happiness Report, 2019 bit.ly/2LgHpRn (source: bit.ly/2LfduZG). Used the data from the report (on 156 countries) to construct this (symmetric along the diagonal) matrix. It is perhaps not surprising that GDP per capita positively correlates with life expectancy. The three factors that influence the rank of a country most are GDP per capita, life expectancy and social support (this doesn't mean that the importance of the rest is negligible). We also see how people in countries with high GDP per capita tend to enjoy a higher degree of social support. Freedom is related with positive affect and we need so much more of it.
- Is machine-enabled breadbaking at home worth it? bit.ly/2Lc28Wl
- Do you know which are the biggest parks in New York? Had no idea, but tried to offer some help bit.ly/2VETN1l by listing 30 of them. (Finding their addresses or coordinates from there shouldn't be that hard.) Would you say that this is a plausible selection? Showing a 1648 x 41 matrix with all park facilities wouldn't be readable, but we can easily find that the parks tend to be rich in playgrounds (827), bathrooms, basketball courts, handball courts, spray showers, baseball fields, fitness equipment (151), eateries (130), Wi-Fi hotspots (124) and dog-friendly areas (122). No park has roller skating rinks (but 25 have skate parks), only four have paddleboat rentals, only six have ice skating rinks, six have beaches and six have zoos/aquariums.
- Can we trust pricing in online menus? What if the last update was several months/years ago (and no timestamp was set)? Can a 500KB menu, which takes more than two minutes to download, be current?
- Accessibility features have to consider nearby elements. Here is what happens after click, before a new page is loaded bit.ly/2GVe62A
- Good to see Subway providing nutrition data in two formats (on-page and PDF downloads). Looked into the different types of sandwiches, salads breads and their calories per gram. "Veggie delite" looks like a good choice either as a sandwich or salad; among the breads I'd hesitate between "Mini 9-grain wheat" and "Artisan flatbread". Notice that in the first diagram "Sweet onion chicken teriyaki" gives the impression of being a good choice due to being light in calories. It has almost no fat, but is rich in carbohydrates and sugars. Compared to "Veggie delite", "Ultimate spicy Italian" is very calorie-rich (3.13x), fat-rich (22.3x) and sodium-rich (5.26x).
- Learned that depending on scarce helium could mean lack of balloons on some days.
- Vehicle crossings and toll revenue of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937-2016) bit.ly/2GSAWYx. The "smoke" in the third diagram allows us to see that 1987 was the year when the policy has started to change. The collected toll taxes in 2016 were 5.3 times the ones in 1987, while at the same time the number of vehicle crossings in 2016 was still 2.283 million below the level in 1987.
- Path through the libraries in San Jose, California bit.ly/2XSncm3
- Whether you show it or not, whether you speak loud or not, whether you are young or old, whether you are rich or not, whether you are religious or not, whether you are happy or not, whether you sort people by occupation or not, whether you see yourself as professional or not, you are magical. Understand that well and never feel too small to show the world what you are capable of.
- "Jack In The Box" burger ingredients and calories per gram bit.ly/2XUMaBc. We see that the most caloric tend to the north.
- This was made three years ago while still being relevant bit.ly/2XPqoyU
- Looking at bestseller handmade soaps by "What The Soap" bit.ly/2GRKD9D. What's interesting with great products is that we often don't realize that we need/want them until we see them.
- Blue parakeet bit.ly/2Y00AjV requires long-term commitment (10-15 years). The diamond dove is also beautiful.
- Script tells me to prefer "Little Hamburger" among the dogs, burgers and sandwiches at "Five Guys" bit.ly/2GRDHt9. However, price was not available where it might have changed this choice.
- If a very big open space uses large flooring tiles and looks great this way, do you think that context suggests the right use? What would happen if the tiles were very small and can the best of both worlds coexist? #affordances
- "We appreciate your business" said at the end hints the client that the transaction mattered and that they were welcome and valued. But it's often left unsaid, sometimes to a missed opportunity. Good to see places, which practice this relentlessly.
- Please, ensure that when using a responsive website, no new, uninvited offers appear bit.ly/2GPIifb, otherwise your clients may be comparing apples and pears or demand something you don't have. Also be aware of the difference between "best price" and "lowest price" to avoid misleading your clients.
- The advantage of a push-down-everything page is that it allows anyone to see how long it takes people to respond. We know from experience that Twitter is already great at this. The longer the period, the less likely is that the potential client cares about the work and the business in general. This can be an aid in client selection, although maintaining some tolerance in how clients can vary their recency over time is beneficial and desirable. For instance, a stranger who discovered our work from several years ago may choose that they need our service today (extensively). Similarly, a regular client may find factors that no longer suit them, seeking better service elsewhere. In all cases, approachability is not to be left unchecked—we have to develop (but never communicate) clear boundaries about what is allowed and what isn't. Beyond them is no return and there are only separate ways.
- Noticed that some businesses have relatively few products, select one and then present it in a fullscreen photo, perhaps as a means to fill the existing space. Could this scare a potential client?
- 4 for 3 is not something you'd be able to receive here. Great design and code can never be that cheap and work only in conjunction with demanding clients having high-quality projects, where intense collaboration comes natural.
- Just because something is "tradition" doesn't mean it is healthy or right. Time to inspect these traditions. Anything with a high enough frequency of occurrence that is slightly off the scale has the ability to negatively impact your quality of life over time. Only you can decide whether you want that.
- Is your business relying on another (e.g. selling on Amazon, in Walmart etc.) for the majority of its sales? What happens with its long-term health should a company you fully depend on get in trouble or disappear?
- Showing multiple popup windows breaks the experience. There could be one about GDPR, a second about existing promotions, a third asking users to sign up... you have to be very sensitive what you allow or the screen will quickly become a confusing parcel map.
- On which device and type of excercise did you spend most of the time in your last training session? Would there be a benefit of switching to another one and when would have been the right time to do so?
- If you seek (or offer me) hosting, I cannot help you. I focus only on delivering your projects as long as these meet the criteria. Also in the weeks and years that follow.
- 5811 "Wendy's" locations in USA bit.ly/2XSNpkE ask for a diagram, but's its not one that would take only a couple of hours.
- Lost another $98.10 of script-generated money (bit.ly/2XYHkTV) on orderings at "Kol's Pizzeria and Roast Beef" in Malden, MA (bit.ly/2GPIWtm ↗) and you probably don't need assurance that the taste was remarkable. Especially liked the baklava, despite being unaware how much of it was served and how much I was able to consume. Hard to know such details after so much Easter bread.
- Another article (Quartz) highlights worker abuse in the garment industry in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, finishing with "many workers don't earn a living wage". 21st century.
- "Kung Fu Tea" says "free drinks for new app users". Is this how one finds new users nowadays?
- Good to see BestBuy informing the consumer about device specifications on its website (this is often not the default choice). For instance, if a big-size, double-door refrigerator is said to consume 677kWh/year, we can relate its ≈77.28W/hour to the 55W/hour of a TV, divide by 11 and come at a ratio of 7/5.
- Isn't it beautiful what one can achieve by combining art and serving sets that are seen almost every day bit.ly/2GONjER? Nice shapes and colors, although the latter are perhaps slightly too intense. Creative work often finds a way to bring the relevance of unexpected connections to new everyday/frequent uses.
- AnandTech wrote a recent article "Intel 9th gen core processors: all the desktop and mobile 45W CPUs announced". It has several tables, which I converted to a diagram bit.ly/2XSWyJI. Based on these specifications and result, the desktop CPU models i9-9900T and i3-9350KF look interesting. Cannot say much about the mobile "H" models (there were only 6 with no price announced), but 9980H comes with 16MB cache, which is a lot more than the 9MB seen in 8750H, for instance. Would be nice to be able to use one of these new chips.
- Perhaps you are a connoisseur and want to experience a variety of tastes. Selecting one item of each category from a menu can be slow and costly, but a script can do this at random bit.ly/2GNSYv0. The menu here is from "Dragon Village" in Alameda bit.ly/2GOyD8J ↗
- Unintentionally found a page with the libraries in Sacramento bit.ly/2GQRSPe ↗
- Happy Easter with lots of smiles! (if you celebrate it today)
- Market locations in Munich, Germany bit.ly/2XR9Lml. Hypermarkets (13-17) and permanent markets (18-22) have the smallest numbers and are quite concentrated relative to the rest. The weekly markets are very dispersed and cover a wide territory.
- Wouldn't push entire news stories into the alt property of an image. That's not the reason it is there.
- Always be aware what websites load in your browser in the background and how they behave with your resources. Good design is recognized by the quality of the experience.
- Vacant buildings in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA bit.ly/2XNcHAD
- Parcels in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada bit.ly/2XQW6fb. Based again on open data. Darker areas must have smaller parcels, but the resolution is clearly not enough to see this.
- Bike lanes, parks and libraries in Charlotte, North Carolina bit.ly/2XQQpOl. To improve reachability, the lanes will likely have to be expanded.
- Each pie coming with its own sentiment is a non-obvious idea bit.ly/2XQWElo ↗
- Boost Juice have an attractive animation revealing the ingredients used in each smoothie (on hover) bit.ly/2GMviqC ↗. Liked this lot, which led to quickly reusing the previous demo to see their taste-ingredients bit.ly/2XQ90Kw.
- Found an outlier price on the Breakfast King's menu bit.ly/2GMq3Yj ↗ (screenshot: bit.ly/2XQHlZE). Probably a small mistake, but one which causes confusion. Yesterday I was asked what 21/2 teaspoons mean.
- It's saturday once again, so before rewarding yourself with the next Schogetten bar (on discount), think of the taste-ingredients bit.ly/2GMt1fh
- The same done with laptops on Amazon: offers bit.ly/2XPeqFk (warning: 8.6MB) and price distribution by series bit.ly/2GP677b
- Found 113 (out of 994) laptop models listed on Walmart's website, having an 8th generation Intel CPU bit.ly/2XNyzMm. Sorted them by price to bubble up some interesting offers relative to each series (Easter egg ideas). Also created a boxplot to see the price distributions bit.ly/2XL4woo (outliers costing over 2700$ were omitted), illustrating a clear relationship between processor segment and price. Interesting is that some models with 8550U appear cheaper than both 8265U and 8300H (e.g. Lenovo ideapad 330s with 8550U), while at the same time being significantly cheaper than high-end laptops using the same CPU. Apart from this, we have already seen that specifications have shown 8300H in slightly better light (although its base TDP is indicated as 3x that of 8550U). Hopefully this helps at least a couple of programmers to compile/execute their code faster.
- "...the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule" lat.ms/2XOZGXf ↗
- Bundesliga standings after the 30th game bit.ly/2XM3zw8, in case you are interested in football. "RB Leipzig" seems to have a great defense.
- Finding where the most Joes of the trader type reside bit.ly/2GJp4Ij. Could be incomplete.
- First time seeing the variety of choices, colors and shapes at XOCOLATL.
- Exploring the alcohol content by volume and bitterness of some handcrafted beers bit.ly/2XHTpN1. Haven't touched alcohol from a very long time as I vividly remember how dizzy it made me feel once after drinking half a bottle of 5% ABV.
- Double integral computation bit.ly/2XGpIvN
- I see that in my work I have frequently omitted one or more important details: starting with a very clear statement of what I'm trying to accomplish and why, breaking the work into small pieces later re-assembled into a cohesive whole, keeping overall topic constancy, recording all results, decisions and the entire procedure sequence that led to them, explaining the degree of the uncertainty in the result, commenting (at the end) what the work means relative to own effort and wider world, reflecting whether it was success or failure.
- Do you use Tipex (correcting fluid) on your monitor as a way to correct your website's content?
- One of the papers from the last year's NIPS proceedings showed t-SNE on a GanGogh collection, works by Picasso & Van Gogh (and obviously operations on them). Tell me I'm not in it for the art.
- Liked the speed of the latest Julia version, the constructs +(1,4,9) and *(1,4,9), single-line function definitions and single-character exponentiation (^), the automatic updates. Still disliking the "end"s (equivalent to "close here" on a door), my inability to plot from a file (tried several recipes, but nothing worked within my editor of choice) and the need to re-learn libraries with slightly different syntax to be productive again. But if the issues are resolved and a healthy ecosystem builds around it, the language can become much more interesting.
- A walkpath over colored matrix cells looks nice. Almost reminds me of the game of jumping and stepping over charcoal-drawn boxes on the ground.
- Quick demonstration of a small issue which appeared today (after Chrome update) bit.ly/2XFNojK. Right-button mouse clicks in other programs work as usual.
- An attempt to gain some understanding about economic performance of the countries in Africa bit.ly/2XIV58L
- Reused a former dataset to show linear regression on housing prices in Portland bit.ly/2XDLC2x
- Must have come earlier to the idea that series patterns, which appear to be periodic with many ups and downs that are far apart (and therefore hard to compare), could also be presented as a matrix (x: months, y: years) with cell colors related to each value. The advantage is that now same-month values are packed close together, allowing finer trends to come into view.
- "Green material for refrigeration identified" bit.ly/2IzPpKZ ↗
- Wondering whether AI and algorithms couldn't be used for new discoveries from microscopy images in the same way they were used to find exoplanets (and more) in astronomy images.
- Anything slightly more beautiful gets destroyed by the stupid affinity to colorize bit.ly/2Xz8JeP. Like the kids, can't resist.
- One reason not to include 3D diagrams here is computational. Not hard to understand why when you see LIDAR data weighting 64GB.
- Another one: Create vertically elongated parallelepipeds/3D bars to represent the height of buildings and color-code the shapes according to site EUI. Describes a beautiful image seen yesterday.
- Idea: Programmatically draw a top-level view of a room and its objects. Put small circles inside some (in their centers), add nearby labels with [number, 'W'].join(''), write "lighting plan" with small letters below. Not unreasonable, but no idea about your layout.
- To support more work like this, you could propose a project, explaining your requirements and constraints. If it is of interest and mutually beneficial, we may work together.
- Streets, streetlights and libraries in Boston, Massachusetts bit.ly/2IBpJxC
- Finished reading the "WHO guidelines for indoor air quality: selected pollutants" bit.ly/2XGowsp ↗ and must admit that it's a scary document. Poor indoor air quality can harm our health in various invisible ways. Pollutants like benzene, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, naphtalene, nitrogen dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), radon, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene are only a small excerpt and proof of this. Two recommendation points were to use low-emission materials/products and ventillate often. Even furniture, wood, clothes, adhesives and paints (which are so common) are said to emit. Undetected and/or long-term exposure to these substances can cause various different illnesses ranging from ashtma, anemia, leukemia to many different cancer types. New buildings are said to have higher concentrations of benzene. Its presence is also increased by heating/cooling, printing, the use of kerosene stoves, smoking, driving in rush hour or even using a mosquito repellent. Two ways in which carbon monoxide is produced are by heating/cooking or open fire. Exposure to carbon monoxide can cause low birth weight; lethargy, nausea, dizziness were common observed effects. Even low exposure levels can accumulate over time, causing an illness. Formaldehyde is built up by fuel combustion, power plants, furniture, wooden products, insulating materials, textiles, DIY products (various), cleaning products (various), cosmetics (various), electronic products and paper. Naphtalene is found in rubber, leather, moth repellents/desinfectants and was linked with respiratory tract lesions and anemia (avoid the use of mothballs if possible, but also of solvents and hair sprays). Nitrogen dioxide increased markedly inside a car in a tunnel during rush hour (built up by combustion or use of gas-based appliances) and may affect respiratory health or lead to cough. Sources of PAHs (see above) are the burning of fossil fuels, solid fuels or biomass. High-fat food was said to emit more PAHs than low-fat, emissions increasing with temperature. Boiling produced the smallest PAHs dose, while broiling and frying—the highest. PAHs are said to attach to particles (like air dust) and may lead to DNA adducts or cancer. Aluminium production and iron/stell founding can lead to lung cancer ("sufficient evidence"). Radon concentration indoors varies depending on changing weather conditions: it is exhaled by the earth outside and then enters buildings through cracks/fractures. Groundwater may also expose us to it. It is carcinogenic (IARC), ionizing radiation received by everyone. Radon exposure has been linked with the development of lung cancer in some miners in China. Trichloroethylene can cause damage to nerves (also optic), kidney, liver or lymphatic system or lead to cervical cancer (a way to accumulate it is by drinking water often). Tetrachloroethylene is used in cleaning agents, solvents, textile finishing, paint removers, printing inks, adhesives (can accumulate in water). Inhaling, taking showers/bathing, washing dishes are ways of exposure. Dry cleaned clothes have been shown to emit it too. Said to affect liver, kidney, blood; irritatates the eyes, respiratory tract and skin. If this short overview is not enough for you, you can read the entire document.
- The report "Port performance freight statistics 2018" by the US Department of Transportation has included a nice diagram, which informs the reader that the top 5 biggest ports by area (gross container terminal acres) are Los Angeles (1704), New York/New Jersey (1496), Long Beach (1399), Savannah (1200) and Jacksonville (1085).
- Much more than expected: New Zealand is said to have generated 35.5TWh electricity from renewable sources in 2015. Second only to Norway.
- Routes and stops in Atlanta, Georgia bit.ly/2XsaaLO. Interesting organism; especially like how neighbor-arteries comming out from the center form approximally equal angles. Haven't labeled the axes, but by now it has probably become clear that the x-axis corresponds to longitude and the y-axis to latitude.
- Recommended illumination levels for various uses bit.ly/2Xz9KDp
- Speaking about water usage: A quick look at WaterSense labeled products allows one to learn about 1gpm showerheads by Niagara Corp, 1gpm faucets by Chicago Faucets and 0.8gpf tank type toilets by Tynan, Niagara, Ferguson or PROFLO.
- San Diego's districts are said to carry human names, which I see for the first time.
- "Nutrient availability in oceans is low, with chlorophyl found at increasingly greater depth." Well, the fish has to eat something too if someone wants to have it in their plate. Wikipedia on nanophytoplankton: "...it is evident that albeit minimal size (hardly visible) and apparent irrelevance, nanophytoplankton is an integral part of sustaining life on Earth."
- Saw an informative (but unlikely to be accurate under all circumstances) pie chart about approximate water consumption by type of use: toilet flushing (30%), taps & baths (21%), clothes washing (13%), showers (12%), washing up (8%), outdoor (7%), other (5%), drinking (4%). We pay only for the last one, right? (Waterwise had a diagram showing water use of 140l/capita-day in England, which was still lower compared to other locations.)
- Current idea: interactive building with several floors oriented in 3D (CSS), which reacts to mouse over events by pushing the top and/or bottom floor apart to make room for the 2D projection of the current floor, showing all rooms/spaces on it.
- An idea to demonstrate path variability while traveling north-south through the biggest cities in Argentina and Chile bit.ly/2XvuU5C. Not perfect (and somewhat unexpected), but the contrast is still nice. To ensure better consistency/comparability, we could include only cities with more than 130000 people bit.ly/2ICMJMP, but the warning lights start to shine brighter.
- The popular is not always the best and the rare is not always the worst.
- Looked at Intel CPUs once again, this time only at mobile processors (previously at desktop and server), doing no manual data collection and including a lot more models and features. PCA results in some small distinction of i7-8700T, although it is close to 8600T, 8500T, 8400T, which are close to E-2186M and E-2176M (Xeons). The Xeons are then closest to i7-8850H and i7-8750H, which are slightly further apart from i5-8400H and i5-8300H. My prior belief was that the "H" series consists of more performant units than the "U" series (perhaps to the point that nothing better exists yet), but did not expect an algorithm to find gaps in that thinking.
- Found an interesting use case, which might be incorrectly handled by my editor. Say I copy the base of an URL and want to have it in front of hundreds of relative URLs to make them absolute. When placing multiple cursors to edit simultaneously, typing works fine, but not copying. Expected behavior: copy to each line, not only the first.
- Which of the existing two shelves would you choose to present your products on sale? bit.ly/2Ix7p8C. If one is indifferent to supported maximum weight per shelf, the second score becomes only 1.34x better than the first. In some cases the material (metal vs. MDF) could also play a role in the selection.
- Is there any type of work you'd like to see more of? How much would that be worth to you?
- Which burger would you select if you could hardly read anything on the menu bit.ly/2XmIPKY? Design choices matter.
- Theoretically, an algorithm which sees photos of hotel room interiors must be able to guess the room price range. Likely requires very large amounts of data and complicated algorithms, which distinguish (and are able to classify) the finest details.
- "Occupational employment and wages, May 2018: Web developers" bit.ly/2XqIHdC ↗. Contains several choropleths.
- College tuition and fees in USA (01.2009 - 03.2019) bit.ly/2XrF1Ze. Consistently rising.
- Annual installed PV capacity by type of use in USA (2004 - 2017) bit.ly/2Xv9hlZ. More recently, installed residential capacity/year exceeded 2 gigawatts.
- Monthly freight transportation services index (USA, 01.2016 - 02.2019) bit.ly/2XoalI7. Fully aware that selectively "dimming" elements which should be less prominent makes diagrams look better. Still rarely doing this as it would require more time to implement and repeat (the code) for each subsequent diagram. It feels better to spend it in learning/gaining insight about various things (and thinking about the best way to tell a story) rather than wasting time on trivial details. I hope you agree with me.
- A non-convincing attempt of serving a triangle of four sides bit.ly/2IrjNHv
- Regions with the highest influx of people in Zürich, Switzerland (1990 - 2017) bit.ly/2XwyxZ7. Interesting to observe the high growth in Opfikon after 2005.
- Download finished bit.ly/2Xnb5xa. Felt so slow and manual to point and click and open separate pages, only to come to the links leading to the actual files. A batch download saves time, the disadvantage being that now you see how bandwidth-limited you are.
- The real-time availability of bikes in Roubaix, France bit.ly/2XplKaA looks as a demo material. This time someone else could approach it and share their result.
- If API call results are updated often, one way to see what has changed is to plot the old and new series in different colors and/or plot the set difference.
- Battery performance of some electric vehicles (CHIP test result visualization) bit.ly/2Xok1Cu. Tesla Model S seems to cover the largest area on these three dimensions.
- Slimming down the "Vancouver Public Library hours and locations" page bit.ly/2ItsQY6
- An attempt to find the minimum spanning tree for the biggest cities in South Korea bit.ly/2IqZJ87. Based on the geocoordinates I found (which may be inaccurate), this is what I could assemble (having hard time not crying). The algorithm tried to sink me in deep waters, connecting Mokpo and Gaigeturi at the South, but adjusting the threshold eliminated this important edge. With no claims of accuracy or exhaustiveness. Made primarily for exploration. If you find mistakes, feel free to correct me.
- An idea unseen before: Have a triangle with three labeled, dependent features and use barycentric coordinates to put points inside, closer to the corner they are most similar to. The points can be labeled too (and/or color-corded based on another criteria like importance), so that the item/label gives a sense of belonging to one of the clusters. An interesting way to plot 3D data in 2D.
- Withheld 10% of the data (equivalent to 3 teams) and tried to predict their ranks in the NBA standings table (2018-2019) based on their wins and losses bit.ly/2IrOagG. The result slightly deviates from expectation, but we see that the teams with rank 28-29 have W19-L63 and teams with rank 22-24 have W33-L49. The result for "Detroit Pistons" is one place off, but it is still surprising to see such an accurate result with relatively little data. If you insist, you could also see an "iceberg" view of the ranking bit.ly/2XlowxO. To convert the 30x2 wins & losses matrix into one of percentages, we could use L1 normalization and final multiplication by 100 bit.ly/2XjUPgr
- First time visiting Argos, but I find their website optically nice bit.ly/2IpHEHm ↗
- Not sure what happened, but one of the demos, showing photos from NASA cameras stopped working bit.ly/2XlgeWm. To ensure that it is not a temporary failure, I will wait three more days, before removing it. A reminder not to rely on external services and APIs, whenever possible.
- If you forget that log-in is lock-in, you may not come out (from some "free" services).
- You get the best version from me when you make the best payment.
- Do you think it is possible to create a diagram about capital inflows and outflows of various entities, so that when the user hovers over a point, they see all inflows in green and all outflows in red (as non-intersecting arcs), where non-participating nodes are temporarily dimmed? An idea only, since one needs a lot of data to realize it and make the case reasonably informative/interesting. How many entities does an outflow pass through and does this tell a story? Which nodes have the highest in-degree/out-degree and are all of them always in equilibrium (inflows = outflows) or accumulate capital that remains unused over time?
- Comparison of some properties of Harley-Davidson motors bit.ly/2Xhzp3G. Does not include photos and the short analysis is imperfect (since not all features are included). Also not a fan of motorcycles in general, especially when they are used to draw attention in the wrong way. But I hope that the data lens here could enable someone in a circle very distinct from my own, to think about the ways they are coming in touch with the numerics of their unit and how a greater awareness for them could enhance the quality of their decisions.
- WWF says that ice is disappearing for walruses—an increasing threat to their lives wwf.to/2Xfhsm1
- People in some smaller cities around San Francisco seem to complain slightly more often from aircraft noise (Source: City of San Francisco, Noise Abatement Office, "Aircraft noise complaint data", bit.ly/2XfZ1hi) Most recently, citizens from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Los Altos Hills called more often than people in Oakland, Soquel, Portola Valley, San Francisco and Mountain View. Positive is that compared to the last 2 years, complaints in the top 3 cities fell to 45%, 22.9% and 26.32% of their respective peak levels. Hopefully, their needs were met.
- "What will they think of next?" bit.ly/2Ik6icn. A building with a beautiful, geometric, hexagonal facade pattern. Not any type of building, but a library. Would be hard to replicate with SVG.
- "Compassion for others begins with kindness for ourselves" - Pema Chödrön
- "Up to a billion birds die in collisions with glass each year in the United States" - American Bird Conservancy. This was invisible to me until a magazine wrote about integrated UV patterns designed to enhance window visibility for birds.
- Very nice comparison of thermal control feedback bit.ly/2Xa7vGH
- A nice interactive map of the traffic intensities on the roads in Ireland bit.ly/2IjOU7N ↗. Clicking on a location shows AADTs in the last three years; choosing List Items -> Site Data (and date) -> Daily Volume shows the hourly distribution for a given day.
- Parks and libraries in Brisbane, Australia bit.ly/2Il568H. Not sure how big they are, so both were presented with dots only. There must be many parks since their dot size is small.
- An experiment in Sweden has shown that reducing the number of vehicles by 20% reduces congestion by more than 20%. Wouldn't rely on my intuition in this case.
- Like this idea of New Zealand Transport Agency to overlay routes popular among road cyclists with roads having intensive heavy vehicle traffic bit.ly/2X8AUAV ↗ (also see "Popular places to cycle", bit.ly/2Ijr24a ↗)
- "97% of buildings in the EU need to be upgraded" bit.ly/2XbxI7A ↗. There was also a diagram primarily in red bit.ly/2X8dL1v
- Cycle network in Sydney, Australia bit.ly/2Xbwp8F
- Monthly primary aluminium production by region (01.01.1973 - 01.02.2019) bit.ly/2IjDtg2. Essentially says that China has no competition. With copper mine production, Chile comes at the first place bit.ly/2X9T714 yet China imports a lot and then has no competition in copper smelter production. As you can see, virtually all refined copper gets used. When it came to steel production, China was again leading as of 2013, followed by Japan, Ukraine, Russia and South Korea bit.ly/2Ihiuux. The biggest steel importers were USA, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. Notice how back in 2000 and 2004, China was the second-biggest importer after USA.
- Yearly total installed solar rooftop and wind capacities in Austin, TX bit.ly/2IhcpOP
- "The cost of solar PV has fallen 80% and the cost of wind by 30% over the last 5 years", says IRENA in a publication. The statement that electric vehicles are 3 times as efficient as gasoline and diesel cars did not surprise, but that heat pumps achieve efficiencies of 4-5 times higher than condensing gas boilers was interesting. They estimate that 8 technologies would be key to decarbonization: wind, solar PV, electric mobility for passenger cars, recycling (plastics etc.) + biomass feedstock, efficient appliances, other efficiencies, other renewable energy and efficiency in electricity use.
- Census.gov has a nice step-wise animation about health insurance coverage (2008 - 2017) bit.ly/2IhWsYE
- Total visits of the public libraries in Delaware, USA (2013 - 2018) bit.ly/2IjKTjp. Woodlawn library registered a lot more visits in the last two years of the period.
- Attaching a very large number of classes (like eight) to a single element is not something I would recommend, even when doing so is relatively easy. With hundreds of elements, the costs become obvious.
- Big open spaces make one feel free and alive (an excuse to watch the Grand-Place stream) bit.ly/2IiRwT6
- How can I help you?
- You can also see the street lights by their wattage in the same city bit.ly/2IilfvH
- Total bike counts by 15-min intervals at different locations in Calgary (2018) bit.ly/2XfnTG3. There are two well-pronounced peaks when cyclists were especially active: 07:30-08:00 and 16:15-17:30. You can also see some locations with relatively high numbers of bike counts and pedestrians bit.ly/2X9IGuw, where it is interesting that many of the red dots on the left happen to be very close to limits between two or more wards. Initially, the idea was to color-code the wards, but as you can see, there is not sufficient data to enable this.
- Would you easily come to the idea that Honda Civic 2019 could be a relatively low-emission car (CO2)?
- Collision cases by year in the National Collision Database by Transport Canada bit.ly/2X779QV shows a slightly positive trend. You can also see various other aspects of the data bit.ly/2IdsTqY or the collision locations and the bin-hours with the most fatalities bit.ly/2X9S3Kq. Notice that geocoordinates and concrete dates were not given. Results like this can be obtained much faster by a much faster machine. My time is finite and when I lose it, you will also perceive that loss.
- Total passengers enplaned and deplaned at different airports in Canada (2010 - 2017) bit.ly/2X58pEj. Although Winnipeg appears slightly lower than Halifax, in the last year it had higher numbers. We could also use the airport locations (bit.ly/2X0bVjk) to get a feeling where these airports are bit.ly/2X468Jt. The biggest dots appear to be very close to the US border—on the east and the west side respectively.
- Attempting to look at the neighborhood names in Edmonton, Canada bit.ly/2X9wkT7 reveals that there is a big energy and technology park in the north-east.
- Passenger-kilometers revenue of Canadian railways (01.01.1946 - 01.12.1995) bit.ly/2X87tij
- Top 100 city pairs with highest median number of outbound and inbound air passengers, where at least one city is in Canada (01.01.1997 - 01.01.2016) bit.ly/2IeYYic. If my calculations are correct, over 21 million (non-unique) people have traveled from New York to Toronto in this period. The color coding also highlights how often Toronto appears near the top in different route combinations. Overall, this city has greeted a lot more passengers compared to Vancouver, Montréal, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa or Halifax. Vancouver had 2.17x less passengers, but 1.17x more than Montréal. Knowing the number of passengers and the kilometer distance between each city pair allows us to find the approximate total distance traveled (collective footprint). Yet, this would be limited only to some flights in North America.
- Monthly net sales of gasoline in Canada (01.01.1993 - 01.12.2015) bit.ly/2Ifuhcy. Using points instead of lines reveals several, periodically occurring resource acquisition patterns.
- Exploring the fleet equipment (straight trucks and road tractors) by province in Canada (2009 - 2010) bit.ly/2IfrUGT. Would have been nice if the data had a more recent timespan.
- First look at Canada's National Collision Database collided with a 26-page document describing what the individual parameters mean. Won't discourage me.
- Some operating statistics of Canadian airlines bit.ly/2IfTeov. The number of passengers grows faster than the passenger kilometers. The load factor is kept between 80 and 90%.
- Streets, parks and libraries in Austin, Texas bit.ly/2X2OGFi. Unfortunately, I haven't learned how to fill polygon areas yet and it shows.
- Energy rates for residential use in Austin, Texas (01.01.2006 - 30.09.2018) bit.ly/2X4dZGS
- Total passengers and total operations at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (01.06.2013 - 01.02.2019) bit.ly/2IditI6
- Median family income in Austin, Texas (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2X9g2tz. Looks good.
- "Outsized discoveries are highly likely to require wandering" - Jeff Bezos. No ideas without wandering and wondering.
- Making changes to existing work is not necessarily worth informing about when you are the sole owner. Much better is to improve the quality and let it speak for itself. Whoever finds interest, they will return again to see the latest version.
- Saw a photo of a ship packed with containers and imagined many labels and lines indicating what they contain, all gently moving in 3D while the ship progresses on its route (non-static camera).
- Cities and counties in New Jersey, USA bit.ly/2IdrUY0. Only some city labels were shown.
- "A national atlas of neighborhood change" bit.ly/2X8tldL ↗ (map: bit.ly/2IeQdoy)
- Relationship between altitude and pressure bit.ly/2X3bYek. As you can see on the link provided, it is non-linear. Here is another view which connects two vertical scales. High altitude is linked with low pressure and vice versa. Ear-felt during driving with frequent altitude changes.
- If one runs for time (many laps) and they notice that running speed fell below 80% of the maximum, theoretically they could receive a signal to stop in order to regain some energy before getting fully exhausted.
- Looking at some truck transport characteristics in USA (2007 - 2015) bit.ly/2Ic9sih. Despite the increasing number of truck registrations, the overall fuel consumption is decreasing. That the average distance traveled is decreasing too could hint about acceleration in the use of newer technologies. You can also see which cities allowed faster average speeds for trucks between 2012 and 2015.
- Number of visits and item checkouts at the libraries in Tacoma, Washington (31.12.2013 - 31.12.2018) bit.ly/2IaZEoL. Unfortunately, the most recent number of item checkouts is 6.16 times lower than it was at the start of the period.
- Used several datasets on Results253 to make a picture of Tacoma, Washington bit.ly/2X1gxWn. This time no labels were included, but a legend. Interesting that in the north-east, fewer buildings of these types exist or they did not have their coordinates specified. Similarly to Edinburgh (Scotland), many museums appear relatively close together, which raises interest whether this is done to simplify their management.
- While traveling at night as a way to save on hotel rooms might seem acceptable, the cost of feeling dizzy during the day(s) will become apparent later in terms of reduced performance over extended period of time. Wouldn't (frequently) risk that.
- Some blankets with properties which were found to stand out wrctr.co/2X5MCwp ↗
- Looked at City of Philadelphia's "Large building energy benchmarking data" for 2017 (bit.ly/2WWNRxD) and narrowed my focus on entities like supermarkets, libraries, manufacturing plants, restaurants and hospitals, looking at those with the highest inspected source EUI and water use. Never heard of Pathmark Store before, but saw ≈7x higher water use level relative to the next supermarket (ShopRite of Aramingo Avenue). Similarly the PepsiCo manufacturing facility at "11681 E Roosevelt Blvd" was indicated to use ≈4.28x more water than the next plant on "10080 Sandmeyer Ln". Decided to learn more about Pathmark by visiting their website. Was unprepared to see a weekly ad with a 2l Pepsi at the cheap price of 78 cents. Exciting or disgusting?
- Many workers engage in low salary-high effort activities, while savvy investors have learned to walk away in this case. They are meticulous about avoiding small return-disproportionate risk in their portfolio. Therefore remember: you deserve much better.
- Always question the design decisions you see. Not easy to come to the idea that a frameless shower could reduce the scrubbing surface, but also not hard to notice two separate surfaces (frame and wall) going parallel to each other, which could eventually become one, leaving only a salient showerhead.
- Liked the way "Organic gardener" indicates when to grow what in each of Australia's climate zones bit.ly/2WUuxB2. The two PDF documents (for spring-summer and autumn-winter) are nice too and set a positive example what other regions could do too. The first inclination of a web designer would be to assign a separate page and seek a way to make all useful information accessible at once without making it look overwhelming.
- Liked both this breadbaking math bit.ly/2I82zyx and the math describing the minimal material needed to wrap an item with rectangular shape diagonally: material_area = (item_diagonal + 1.5*item_height)2.
- An article on BBC claimed that by being on time, Delta Airlines saved 74 million dollar on fuel alone (2012).
- A useful idea: letting people rate cycling routes bit.ly/2WRaZxE. "We found 1571 routes for you..."
- Footfall at different locations around the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland (2012 - 2014) bit.ly/2WZDmcZ. "Princes St" seemed to register the highest counts.
- So nice to see Edinburgh, Scotland having such a large number of parks, libraries and museums bit.ly/2I8FnjD
- Libraries in Ghent, Belgium bit.ly/2X0rtnf
- "They are about 1200 castles and chateaux in Czechia." Expected that there are many, but not that much. As a kid I visited the "Spiš Castle" and left deeply impressed.
- Using machine learning to identify homes on sale with favorable characteristics bit.ly/2I6aSuN. Considers price per m2 for homes in Portland, Oregon, which were available on Zillow (valid for today only). The same idea can be applied to the home offers in any other city to enable more informed decisions. Obtaining the addresses of interest leads the attention to some quite beautiful photos.
- Plotting city limits, streets, bikeways, schools, hospitals and parks in Alameda County bit.ly/2I8Q4Tv. The streets seem to go outside the borders, but additional detail is always nice.
- A company known for overpaying its existing employees, achieving mediocre or no growth, which is seeking outsiders to come save it from bankruptcy for cents, forgets that better performers demand even better payments.
- Most of the time intrinsic motivation seemed to engage me better than extrinsic one. Many years ago had a performance review, which ended with a promotion and the words "we are sure you could have done better". Asked myself whether such treatment was justified and left less than a week later.
- Unsure why medicament waste is taking such broad dimensions. Currently, if a sick person stops their treatment, several blisters with pills may remain unused, where other people could similarly need them. Yet, between-people medicament reselling does not exist as a service as it is likely not in the interest of the big pharma corporations.
- Wondering how much a car owner would be ready to pay monthly to have their used car listed for sale on a website. If at all.
- Streets and subway entrances in New York bit.ly/2WUv3z0. If you can, avoid the photo with the subway unit which crashed its way to the top of a street.
- Feasible region bit.ly/2I5gCor
- While hiring many trainees might appear simple and cheap, it also brings the entire company at a trainee level. No advantage is without disadvantage.
- You have to calculate the return on your investment in university studies. If you have to study five years, but you expect that by the time you finish, your knowledge will be widespread and hardly unique, giving you mediocre perspectives on the (changed) labor market, then your time was wasted and only increased your debt pile.
- Having infinite amount of data you can turn into infinite amount of work, beneficial to infinitely many people? Not me.
- Liked the idea of an interactive graphic with the frequency of burglaries in Germany, but did not expect to see dark-colored areas with over 200 cases per 100000 citizens. For me, this breaks the image of Germany as a "no crime" country and shows the extent to which they weave the news in order to speak positively about themselves in front of Europe and the rest of the world. Haven't seen a similar map about USA yet, but it could turn out to be interesting as well. The power of interactivity in storytelling cannot be neglected.
- Feeling like a hungry panda? Here are the locations of the Panda Express stores you could associate with bit.ly/2WPr0UH. Possible that you recognize the neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA.
- Will continue to accept requests/feedback on Monday.
- A balanced workday bit.ly/2VqFqu4. Here work intervals appear slightly shorter than 90 mins.
- "Making video games is not a dream job" nyti.ms/2CTV1LF ↗. "... often treat their employees like Tetris pieces ..." What about a reciprocal 1 of 5 stars? They'll probably pay to have it removed, right?
- "Combinatory pay" is trying to pay workers with laundered money, non-existent money, cheaply borrowed money, money not created yet (out of thin air), passive money (having no value added), cryptocurrencies, future promises about exponential growth, binding stock options, vouchers for in-store purchases, tokens... Still willing to know why you get no applicants?
- Quick documentation of a controversial idea to combine two games into one bit.ly/2CW6n1C. It always looks you'll get the apples and then...
- Salad complete in case someone gets hungry later.
- A slightly unhappy waiter bit.ly/2VuJ86h
- Liked Steven Strogatz' view of applied math as a push and pull between the real world around us and the ideal world in our heads.
- Learned a small lesson from the last bit. Automation often matters more than we think. Initially, hours were spent on manually gathering the data and editing it to the appropriate shape for further use. It became clear that following this process could take several days since the volume of the data was much bigger than originally anticipated. Unhappy with the slow progress, it was time for another approach. A separate script was written to do the same and it was much faster and error-free. At the end, the first action felt like hitting a tree with a dull axe (frustration causing increase in intensity), while the second felt smooth as if extra time was spent on sharpening the axe. And the effort saved can be directed towards something else.
- In an article from today on CNN cnn.it/2D8dZyn ↗, the author wrote that high sodium (salt), low whole grains, low fruit, low nuts and seeds, low omega-3 and low vegetables (in that order) were among the highest risk factors in a diet linked to death. Specifically, the grains we consume today are said to be highly processed. So I decided to look for high-quality, whole grain products as listed by the Whole Grains Council bit.ly/2CUFXgG. These are said to be 100% whole grain (having a 100% label) and have many grams of whole grain per serving. The brands with the most products on this short list are: "Minsa SA de CV" (34 products), MASECA (19), Corn Flour Producers (18), R&S Blumos (11) and LifeLine Foods (8).
- Learned about the devastating flood in parts of Iowa. Noticed that currently some road sensors are either down or register almost zero traffic bit.ly/2CZlZ4C. The data is said to be updated every five minutes. Earlier another sensor on the west side was showing a very low value. Suspecting that the n/a and low values may be related to the flood.
- Would be nice to see a plot of "number of components" against "car price". Could have implications for hand-made art (composing with many tiny, individual pieces), software development (designing systems from a large number of components), machine design, electronic circuit design, aircraft design and so on.
- Web design was again mentioned as a profession with great perspective. Projected growth 2016-2026: 15%.
- This Lego clerk bit.ly/2CUodCh appears more current than me
- Have seen "The Economist" only twice in life so far. What I liked about it is that it strived to give a broad overview of the situation at various places in the world, expanding the reader's worldview. A valuable perspective, so if you have the chance to see a more recent issue, spending time with it could be useful or give you some new ideas. Back then "Popular Science" was also good.
- If you knew which city you'd be in next week, would you start using regression today, attempting to predict what the weather could look like? Seven data points could laugh at you.
- Was never sure about this, but "IFPI music consumer insight report 2018" has listed the most popular music genres according to 19000 people from 18 countries: pop (64%), rock (57%), dance/electronic/house (32%), soundtracks (film/TV, 30%), hip-hop/rap/trap (26%), singer/songwriter (24%), classical (24%), R&B (23%), soul/blues (22%), metal (19%). "Singer/songwriter" appearing in the middle could mean that people are spending a lot of time listening to their own music as a means to improve it, although this could be an improper interpretation.
- Would never come to the idea that Seattle and Vancouver could be almost on a straight line, with a distance below 200km.
- In the last minute, the preference results for Wendy's burgers bit.ly/2CSUQAd became incomparable to those of McDonald's (Wendy's has not specified vitamin A and vitamin C content). Since these were assumed to be positives,
the scores can be up to two points lower (this would have been the case if all values were normalized together). But at least, the result tells me not to look at the "Barbecue Cheeseburger" on the menu (especially double and triple). With Burger King's results bit.ly/2VfHSnn, I could not include "Bacon King" as the page was giving an error: "Too many redirects". Despite of this, close to the top of the list appear 4 cheeseburger varieties, which is also consistent with the results about McDonald's and Wendy's. Perhaps this is why a data scientist would prefer a cheeseburger if they had a choice. - Suppose you look at a photo, taken from above, showing an area with lots of houses all looking very similarly, in a slightly different orientation bit.ly/2CPxZp4 ↗. As if they were planned by the same builder, utilizing the same methods and using the same materials. Looks great from a design perspective, is beautiful and consistent. Except: relentlessly and repeatedly doing the same will likely not guarantee better results.
- Remember that if you wish to have me work on your project, you will have to communicate with me. I removed the option of supporting me without communication, because I like to stay in touch with those who care.
- Script attempting to convince me about my burger preferences should I enter McDonald's bit.ly/2VhLaX5. Again, cheeseburger and hamburger seem to be among the most basic in the menu. But "Double Bacon Smokehouse Burger" is deep in the minus ocean.
- Interesting that according to Taco Bell's website, the one-dollar burritos give most calories per dollar bit.ly/2CRsjLf. So if someone is thinking of choosing a "XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito" (870cal at 4.79$), the price would be equivalent to getting almost 5 "Cheesy Bean and Rice Burritos" for a total of 2150 calories. The disadvantage is the need to have at least five hands, appear with five friends or pay for extra durable packaging. But it true, this doesn't encourage people to actually spend more if they are not seeking to experience a specific taste.
- Trying to do art computationally rarely works the way you expect it. Incredible waste of time and resources. Update: Made the figure manually in GIMP bit.ly/2CPG6SE. I was trying to create only the black contour in code, from start to finish, "without lifting the pen". You can imagine my frustration. Instead of creating art to be enjoyed once, much better is to spend time on developing a product that will be used repeatedly and by many people.
- Easy to overwhelm the viewer with choices, which look the same bit.ly/2COr13K. Removed some "more details" buttons, the "accumulator" label (it's obvious what the item is anyway), moved the last item on the same row and added some floating point numbers. For such a small difference, it would be hard to imagine someone feeling good about their choice of purchasing the most expensive item.
- Recreational areas in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada bit.ly/2CQs6rQ
- Number of visits at museums in Florence, Italy (2013 - 2017) bit.ly/2CPll9L. Have you ever visited "Museo di Palazzo Vecchio"?
- Having devices which rely on button cell batteries? (I have a mini-clock depending on CR2025.) Before seeing another device in need of battery exchange, you might think of which of these cell models give you the most capacity per price-volume bit.ly/2VbJL4r. It feels then that the clock designer made a good choice in battery selection in addition to device design. And it shows: the display of time (large), month, date, day of week and temperature is available non-stop for approx. a year. CR2032 is widespread too.
- At Maggiano's, you can have spaghetti at 63.25cal/$. Suppose that C-Town has on offer 3lb apples at 5.99$ (latest weekly ad) and you researched that 100g apples have ≈52cal. A kilogram of apples is then 4.40$ and contains 520cal, which computes to 118.18cal/$. So the apples will feed you better and are healthier too.
- Sometimes, when you are especially hungry, you might be interested in the calories per dollar you receive from a menu item bit.ly/2CPiOfs. It could be wiser to have several small, low-calorie meals during the day (fruits and vegetables) instead of a single high-calorie item at a restaurant.
- Parks and library branch locations in Chicago, Illinois bit.ly/2COGzEq. Identified a gap that I haven't seen all libraries on a single diagram and went after it. This led to a beautiful discovery of almost equally-spaced branches spread over the city territory. Only one bigger spot on the north-west and one on the south-east were not having any branch.
- "Young astronomer uses artificial intelligence to discover two exoplanets" n.pr/2V6ExqE ↗. Great to see people, ideas, data, AI, powerful machines and scepticism collaborate for future impact.
- Low lie conductance factor... (01.04)
- Revenue passenger miles for some airlines operating in the USA (2008 - 2018) bit.ly/2CYRJqD. Interesting graphic hinting about intensifying competition.
- Tennis results from Miami Open 2019 bit.ly/2CMQcUr. Lots of data in case you choose to do something useful with it.
- A nice idea to make use of the extra spacing around the trackpad of a laptop etsy.me/2CQcXGO ↗
- Still remembering the argument behind biggest fish being most vulnerable to pollution: the food chain is longest and each step adds.
- What an enormous burden it must have been for the dead whale to carry a dead fetus and 22kg of plastic inside its body (Source: CNN, cnn.it/2CIeyP5 ↗). A human would crumble in less than an hour below such weight, yet noone even noticed the effort until the fact. Reminds me how often effort goes unrecognized in the workplace too (and the consequences of this) and how oceans can't function as throwaway bunkers for harmful pollutants, dumped by entities hoping to remain unnoticed.
- Trattoria-terminatoria
- Like the idea behind the choco cucumbers mixed in a glass bit.ly/2VanDay ↗. The origin etiquette is a nice touch. Feels almost exquisite.
- This "infographic" instinctively filled me with very sad emotions bit.ly/2CIzZ2f ↗
- Sometimes I look around at other businesses for inspiration. Here I saw a seemingly "paper-like" brochure by C-Town Supermarket bit.ly/2VbdiLt, which actually has hover effects, where a click shows you a better detail of the product and allows you to recommend it on your social networks. Simple and effective. Wait, did I see two for five?
- Toronto has 42 unique locations with indoor ice rinks. When was the last time you've been to one?
- Tried another representation of Dublin bus timetable data (for 4 bus lines only) bit.ly/2V3xTRT. Requesting a single line sends less than 4kB of code, while seeing all data requires ≈8.5kB. Doesn't hide content when JavaScript is missing. These are the times when vehicles leave at terminus.
- Optimizing material use means that focus has to fall on the most important features relative to expected use. It's not sensible to make the legs of a table several times thicker than the table top (same material).
- Have you thought about making a complete online representation of your store(s), so that the same shoes appearing on the sixth shelf on the right of the entrance corridor, at the second row, third from left-to-right, also appear at the same location and have the same price as in the physical store? When clients see (on their screen) models packed in a grid, they often can't imagine where these could be located inside the physical store and have to resort to asking employees about the model name or spend time explaining looks once they arrive there. Improved consistency makes the experience a lot more predictable and saves everyone's time.
- Not feeling invited to this city or any other place where I don't find myself creatively stimulated or respected. Trying to be the place I'd like to see myself in. Only noticed that the cheap flights have started to appear again this year and wondered about the indirect expenses.
- Using a combination of several services (Myclimate, distancecalculator, Quora, a blog post, European Environment Agency, Eingineering Toolbox etc.), attempted to gauge the difference in terms of CO2 emissions if I were to travel from my current location to Berlin by airplane or by bus, taking in account that terrestrial distance is longer. I was interested only in emissions which can be directly attributed to an individual. For the air transport, Engineering Toolbox gave me 130kg, Myclimate 304kg, EEA 425kg, manual estimation ≈200kg of CO2. For the bus transport I arrived at a number of 144.3kg of CO2. Duration by plane was said to be 3h 45min, while that by bus was said to be 35-37h. After averaging, CO2 emissions airplane:bus come at 1.83, while travel duration airplane:bus is 0.104. In 2016, according to the International Energy Agency, emissions from fuel combustion per capita in the EU were 6240kg of CO2, which would be the equivalent to slightly less than 12 roundtrip flights on the same route or ≈89140km traveled by bus.
- Amsterdam land use 2017 bit.ly/2V6RosH. Had a small inconvenience: the legend was covering almost half of the horizontal screen width, so I made two screenshots and stitched them together to a single image. Forgot that in this case the interactive functionality won't be there...
- Interesting to hear about hairdressers having an app to allow people to book their time.
- An SVG pill train entering a "black-cylinder" tunnel bit.ly/2V6Oft9. Not having more time to spend on it, although it's visibly asking to be animated.
- Not hard to build etages of decoration, although you might want to suggest some stability at the bottom bit.ly/2V1MvBf
- Electrical and thermal conductivity of some pure metals at 20℃ (relative to copper) bit.ly/2CLne74
- Average annual residential consumption of natural gas per customer by state (USA) bit.ly/2CIwskQ. Individuals in Alaska use a lot more natural gas compared to people in other states. Illinois, Michigan, Connecticut and New York complete the top 5.
- Why would a "production" website output plenty of information to the JS console? Haven't you already tested it well enough before release?
- To receive anything, your payment arguments need to have appropriate length.
- Significant volcanic events since 1753 bit.ly/2V8Emv2. (Red means distant past, while blue stays for more recent event (but is harder to see)). Looked at the NOAA database and found many events on Java and several other places in Indonesia. Japan is also well-represented with Honshu, Kyushu, Izu Island and Hokkaido. The Phillipines also appear with relatively frequent volcanic life (Luzon and Mindanao). In Europe, only Italy had a total of 36 volcanic events. Also looked to see whether elevation was in some way connected with volcanic event frequency, but couldn't find a well-formed relationship. Running PCA and tSNE with four selected features returned the following result bit.ly/2V6dIma
- Rent prices of offices in different neighborhoods in Bonn, Germany (2017) bit.ly/2V5s7iu. Only min/max values were given, so boxplots were not possible.
- Average bike counts at selected locations in Groningen, The Netherlands (2010 - 2017) bit.ly/2CLGnWO. Marked only three locations since the diagram looks noisy having zeros for some years.
- If there are plenty of stores on an airport, providing a long list of the brand names, spread over several pages is unlikely to be the most useful representation to a newcomer there. Proper construction and positioning of polygons (SVG)—according to the physical location of the stores,—supported by a well-thought-out interactive functionality could be more helpful (a designed experience).
- Indices of the top 100 airports in 2019 (Skytrax) bit.ly/2CK5wB7. Already knew about Singapore Changi Airport (number 1) (and its extraterrestrial look), but its relatively good strategic positioning was less obvious. We could almost see how it could serve as a connection link between all airports to the north and south of it. Whether it is truly used in this way is something that the passengers arriving there know best. Another detail is that among the top 10 airports, three are said to be in Japan.
- Since I saw a blog post with photos from a hospital in India, I wondered what kind of stamina is required from a doctor to listen to and serve the hundred patients waiting for their service.
- Exploring four rail routes in France bit.ly/2CGJD5K. SNCF is a such a data-rich website. We could also compute average speeds and use them to color-code each segment. Here are the average speeds for each route bit.ly/2V5HOGv. So the train from Marseille Saint-Charles to Valence was fastest overall.
- We often hear too how web page size rarely decreases, but easily increases over time (current median of ≈1.8MB). But a great designer can often find many ways and usually seeks no excuses.
- "Lowering weight by 100kg for a petrol driven car reduces CO2 emissions by as much as 8g/km." (Source: "Lightweighting: a solution to low carbon mobility"). The authors claim that Europe needs more lightweight vehicles to reduce its carbon emissions. But many customers seemingly want the latest technologies and ask for bigger, more spacious and comfortable SUVs, capable of performing well in a variety of harsh environments. The average SUV was said to weight ≈250kg more than the average sedan (apart from having worse aerodynamics). The integration of more and more automotive electronics means further increases in weight above the average of 1392kg. This way, any efficiency improvements manufacturers realize get consumed by the desire to own bigger, heavier, higher performance (and more profitable) vehicles. Sometimes, zero emissions (electric car) can only be enabled by the the installation of a heavy, long-range battery. Even automatic gearboxes were said to add weight.
- Average salaries before and after taxes in some countries (16.05.2018) bit.ly/2CIDYvY. Came to this slightly older article and decided to create a diagram using the available data.
- CO2 emission labels according to the Vehicle Certification Agency bit.ly/2CG3zFS. Anything above 256g/km is "M".
- What's the function of proper employee remuneration inside your company? What should it achieve?
- "Scientific publishing is dominated by men". Yet, I do not fully exclude the possibility that the use of powerful machines with terabytes of memory and NVIDIA TITANs does not lead to some posing spread over hundreds of pages. Why was this paper even written and why should its collection of haphazard results matter? Women in science are likely not willing to rush into presenting their results as noise.
- Coworking spaces are an attempt to make people pay a second rent, so that rent seekers can earn more by working even less. It's then not a coincidence that the total number of offices has grown so much over the last years. A lot of powerful investors likely stand behind and inflate the market, seeing how lucrative it is to rent more space for 200$/month per person. The claims are that the spaces have design promoting creativity and without them it would be impossible to connect the people and ideas of the future (questionable). And while the "hip" people attempt to invent things with uncertain outcome, the cash-in of their counterparts is always guaranteed. How much better is then to use the room you already rent to collaborate in a much less organized/shiny space, while not having the 200*n dollar additional cost (for n people)?
- Starting to wonder whether large companies are not better known for their layoffs rather than innovative products.
- Analog Devices shows that an error page can be made of 404 components bit.ly/2V1WMgG. Not exactly, but I found this original, even when clueless about the purpose of the device.
- If the diagram just made is correct, increasing frequencies in Qi decrease both electric and magnetic field strength bit.ly/2UZxhNh (but electric field strength seems to decrease more slowly). To see this more easily, the x-axis goes only to 500Hz here.
- By mistake clicked twice on a "+" sign to expand content. The "+" restored at least a second before the content disappeared. Normally, the right behavior is to hide the content first, then update the tab state.
- Came across Lincoln Paine's book "The sea and civilization: A maritime history of the world" bit.ly/2V6wNEM. It's not simply a book, but a masterpiece of writing, possibly deserving a special reward for literaric expression and contribution (please, excuse me). Makes you realize how high-quality writing looks like and leaves you wondering how such linguistic beauty is even possible. Liked its slightly old-fashioned approach, the calmness/lack of haste in expression, poise, sense for historic/geographic detail, dynamic range of word selection, fidelity, fluidity and overall coherence. Only after reading the excerpt I saw that it had ★4.5 among ✍101 on Amazon. The topic might seem mundane, but the writing is superb.
- Liked Heine's poems so much at school that the decision to own the collection came natural to me bit.ly/2UYJqBR. A small reminder about the power of poems to uplift during dark times.
- Some companies list in their requirements that they are looking for programmer-teachers. A questionable practice, since the attempt to do both leaves one neither a good programmer nor a good teacher. But asking the person to fail this way could be used to demoralize/humiliate as a precursor to explaining their low relative worth to the company. What I recommend in such cases is not to apply. There are many other jobs where one could play to their strengths instead of being forced to engage in their weaknesses. Personally, I never taught programming and don't even know how to do it properly. Not a teacher myself, not experienced in teaching and not motivated to be a teacher. Mostly a self-taught programmer (over the course of many years), which prefers to work on real-world, practical problems rather than listening to or explaining abstract theory.
- Good lesson in customer engagement: With each purchase issue a temporary promo-code giving the buyer a chance to win one of few valuable items. Request that the code is sent along with personal data through a form on your website. Among all people buying goods and obtaining codes (they need to send every time) spread a couple of awards and you've grabbed everyone's attention.
- Be honest with yourself. If you had doubts that any non-trivial software you planned to develop would have less than 100 clients, paying over 30$/month, would you even start working on it? The economics of software can't be neglected by sticking the neck into code sand ("busy being busy"). It's one thing to develop software to attract clients (which may never come or pay, see below), but it's much less risky to await the requirements and charge to them. Well-paying clients first, software second.
- If one has realized that it is possible to earn more from rent (think Airbnb) than by working as a full-time (12-16h) programmer or scientist, then this economy is seriously flawed and has to realign with its priorities and stimulation methods. Either it pays or it sees no quality work in the future.
- It surprises me to read that a company does not experiment internally unless it makes them money. But sometimes this is probably beneficial too, considering how often experiments fail and what a waste of time they turn out to be.
- Decided to look at Bentley car specifications for similarities among the models and correlation among the features. Unfortunately, at model number 5 (each having 28 features), it became apparent that others don't have the complete characteristics. Pointless to continue.
- Greatest bug of all: going out of business.
- Have you plotted the trajectories of your delivery vehicles? Anything unexpected that became apparent?
- Still having no clue how this type of diagram is called bit.ly/2CGihN8
- Also first two colorful Delaunay triangulations bit.ly/2UWQO0D
- Quick test of Hamming window bit.ly/2UWFSjB. Can you distinguish the individual functions forming the whole?
- Getting some sunshine before the actual exposure (early in the morning) bit.ly/2CBbbti
- Sample stacked bar plot: "Monthly expenses by category" bit.ly/2CAxUFS
- Revisiting old data about Wimbledon 2017 to generate a mini "dendrogram" capturing the last four games of the winner in men tennis bit.ly/2CxvJmn
- Happy to construct Voronoi cells for the first time bit.ly/2CEjYdR
- Scipy docs taught me RBF interpolation bit.ly/2CEfWlB
- Some Gaussians with integrals in color bit.ly/2CBBQ9j, shown in a compacked 4-in-1 image.
- "Update the parameters (likely one-by-one) and check whether the score has improved" ⇝ in-Census-tractable
- Never resting on Lorelei
- Tried to combine several small datasets available on the City of Brussels Open Data Portal to learn about the city, but some more detail on the lines would have been wonderful bit.ly/2CwF2mj
- Annual average daily traffic (AADT) at locations in Buffalo, New York (1971 - 2017) bit.ly/2UUa3YC. Here measurement recency was indicated in color varying from blue (old) to red (recent), while the dot size defines the AADT count. Looking at several of the bigger dots allows us to sense that they might be on the same road. The data seems to confirm this, since of the top 15 AADTs, eight are on NYS Thruway and seven on Youngmann Expressway. The highest counts on NYS Thruway were in 2010 or 2011, while the highest on Youngmann Expwy were in 2012 or 2015. For instance, the segment from Kensington Expwy (M51) to Cleveland Dr (M50A) (on NYS Thruway, (42.939522, -78.766308)) has registered the highest AADT count of 149900 in 2010. The top segment on Youngmann Expwy was from RT 5 Main St to I-90 (42.95485206, -78.76626492), which had an AADT of 122699 in 2012. If we look differently at it, both locations appear relatively close to the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport.
- When you type "New York" in the Swarovski store search, you get the addresses of 147 stores. So I tried to plot their approximate coordinates bit.ly/2UVVWSI, but not all of the addresses were found, and of those that were, several locations were likely incorrectly reported or with some margin of error. The main point here was not be precise, but to show the scale of operation a single brand could allow itself to come after you if they sense some money odor.
- Buildings and bus transport in Halifax, Canada bit.ly/2UU93Uy. If the data is complete, then some buildings on the north-east remain unreachable by bus transport. People living there may use other means of public transport (I don't know about) or fall back on traveling by car (if they have one). For this reason, the absence of busses may not necessarily mean lower noise level in that area.
- Bike paths in Bordeaux, France bit.ly/2US0f1p. Unfortunately, they somewhat overwhelm the traffic regions. Did not know in advance that this would happen, but I am reluctant to wait once again to compute the whole only to make it look slightly better.
- Some watchmakers in Switzerland bit.ly/2CzmmlW. Many of these brands tend to be close to the border, similar to the many German brands (we have already seen) based in Glashütte.
- Bike paths in Zaragoza, Spain bit.ly/2UNMEZ2. Some lines appear almost connected to me.
- Roads, bus lines and stops, bike paths and hospitals in Metz, France bit.ly/2CA46J8. We notice that towards the periphery the number of bus stops decreases and the distances between subsequent stops often increase. Many hospitals appear to be concentrated in the central and central-east part of the city. The south-west region does not seem to have a hospital, despite several long bus lines passing through it.
- Good article on what can be seen as a potential secondary form of exploitation affecting poor people bit.ly/2CCjLIe. "Evicted" could be an interesting read.
- Parks, trees, fountains and playgrounds in Nice, France bit.ly/2CxmAu8. Does not seem to cover the whole territory, but we can still see some objects near the coastline.
- Dreamed about a polyhedral box with truffels of the same shape and wondered why I haven't seen one so far. Had it open without remembering anything about the process or whether it was done in a sustainable, package-preserving way. The last could "require a mathematician", similarly to the funny statement that flipping pancakes would fully engage one.
- Always wondered why product features on some pages on Amazon were described with many spacious images and texts, often occupying several screens compared to the minimal comment area, hardly reachable at the end. Designed for product presentation, convincing and advertising dollars, the message that it's about the buyer and not about the wish of the seller somehow got dilluted. But like in many others cases, design is never consequence-free.
- Ever heard about the five Ss and their Japanese equivalents? bit.ly/2USmMuO
- Parks, kindergartens and monuments in Singapore, Singapore bit.ly/2UNDHyF. Please, excuse my concretization effort. I was looking to plot the streets as well, but found only single points, where I wanted them to be lines (so they are not shown here). I liked the way many kindergartens were naturally located inside or in close proximity to parks, which was something I expected to see. The monuments seem more concentrated—not every park seems to have one. For the contour, I used the "National map polygon" by the Singapore Land Authority.
- Tree species with more than 1000 exemplars in Sacramento, California bit.ly/2CHZKjB. Plenty of vacant sites for new ones. One could now look around to determine whether geographically close cities tend to have similar species among the most common.
- Compiled a page with the images of the tourist paths in Norway (Source: bit.ly/2CwNKBc). Can't show them as they are copyrighted, but you can see them yourself. I liked especially "Høstfarger ved Gjende, Nasjonal turistveg Valdresflye", "Foss i Helgedalselvi like nedenfor Turtagrø. Nasjonal turistveg Sognefjellet" and "Fjellet ved rasteplassen Flotane mellom Lærdal og Aurland, Nasjonal turistveg Aurlandsfjellet". On the photos are some waterfalls, smiling people and snow-covered landscapes.
- An attempt to estimate the annual cost of not having car tires properly inflated (to recommended psi) bit.ly/2UQEzT9. Assumes the year starts with tires in perfect condition, which may not necessarily be the case. NHTSA says that properly inflated tires can save up to $0.11/gallon. Taking in account this "worst case" cost for each month, the annual amount using the same settings could reach $55.60/year.
- Cities by population in Turkey bit.ly/2USwWfi. If you notice any mistakes, feel free to correct me. One person was asked: "In which country is the city Batman, capital of province Batman, lying on the river Batman?" After learning the answer, I realized how little I knew about this country... hence another diagram.
- Austin's radar traffic counts show speed of zero for Lamar/Schoal Creek and Lamar/Sandra Muraida on some days in 2017, which seem to follow a weekly pattern. Another diagram attempts to show occupancy vs. volume for all observed values bit.ly/2UO6KCc. Occupanies above 70% become increasingly rare (noone likes congestion), yet 100% occupancies were reported often as well (perhaps due to road maintenance/very high traffic). We see that volumes of around 90 reach to slightly higher occupancy levels. Could this tell us something about the capacities of many roads? If a volume of 90 is responsible for up to 70% occupancy, what kind of volume would be required to have 100% occupancy on the same road? But then such thinking might be incorrect once we remember that the values on the y axis vary up to ≈255 only. The second diagram shows that lower occupancies allow higher speeds. In most cases speed decreased rapidly (from 60 to 40mph) when road occupancy reached slightly above 20%. After the latter reached 50-60%, speed fell to ≈20mph. (The dots on the 150th horizontal look suspicious.) Also notice what happens with occupancy rates once speed falls below ≈5mph. You can also see the result of PCA on the volume, occupancy and speed data bit.ly/2UMaUuo, but it is not easy to interpret. While I was also able to see a 3D plot, trying to manipulate the viewing angles was impossible here with so many points.
- Police stops by problem type in Minneapolis, Minnesota (31.10.2016 - 20.03.2019) bit.ly/2CuoR9m. Truancy was a new word for me. The locations appear to be reported at block level (many likely overlapping), but the grid style looks beautiful.
- Interesting that when car Li-Ion batteries drop below 80% of their original capacity (given a warranty of 5-8 years), they are said to become unsuitable for driving (see NPL Insights). Replacement batteries could then become expensive, but hopefully not as much as a new car (especially when the cost of Li-Ion storage drops as well). Liked what Amsterdam did on their stadium, collecting the equivalent of ≈150 "depleted" batteries from Nissan Leafs and channeling this power to serve ≈7000 households for one hour. Also illustrates the size of the secondary market such depletions open.
- Learned that Солун and Thessaloniki are the same city. Always believed the first was somewhere in Turkey, while the second—in Greece. To correct this frapant mistake (and hopefully save face in front of myself), here is a combined diagram, listing the cities in Greece by their population bit.ly/2CG9FGn as seen by WorldPopulationReview and after adjusting the point sizes based on population counts. Only cities with more than 10000 citizens were shown at the bottom. Even so, it was unexpected to see greek population so concentrated, considering the number of big cities around Athens. Thessaloniki is close to Kalamaria and Larisa to Nikaia. You can also see Patra, Irakleion, Volos.
- How good is a store locator, which outputs addresses piece by piece, one click at a time (JavaScript only)? A fragmented and non-productive experience by an otherwise luxury brand. Brand value depends on perception; a negative one can take away from it.
- Visiting a product page today means being ready to be followed by this product across all other websites. Advertising should never have been a business model, at least not in the way it is practiced.
- Your "opportunities" are very often my "no-nos". Why so?
- Weather at the school "Heinrich-Hübsch" in Karlsruhe, Germany (04.2016 - 11.2018) bit.ly/2ULHtIV. I am not sure whether global irradiance of over 3000W/m2 is possible, but leaving this here as it was seen in the data. The mean computes to 142.82W/m2, while the median to only 6.07W/m2. Some patterns are recurring, which is not surprising. The median temperature was 13.04℃. Humidity varied a lot, which means that having the means to smoothen its effect could be beneficial to the average person in the school. The median average and maximal wind speeds were 6.74km/h and 9.68km/h, while wind directions in the range 228-232° had the highest mode. The three highest registered wind speeds of 112.32km/h, 54.59km/h and 51.59km/h occurred on 10:35 04.11.2018, 14:54 24.05.2017 and 14:36 04.04.2018 respectively. Yet, the first value looks isolated and quite different compared to the other two, especially considering the high frequency of the measurements. So we should not exclude the possibility that it is erroneous.
- "Irradiation solaire annuelle sur les toitures" bit.ly/2Cu8xFI ↗. This dataset shows median solar irradiation on 295049 roofs (as polygons) in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. As much a I would like to see a colorful (billboard-sized) image encoding all values, it is not possible to approach this and obtain a meaningful diagram in reasonable time. If you wish to accelerate the kind of work done so far and see more of it in the future, while at the same time receiving help with a problem you have, consider initiating a mutually beneficial project. Or if you wish, you could donate an older machine/component you no longer use or have use for. In either case, it is preferable to contact me to understand whether any of these could work out well.
- Accessibility of the libraries in San Diego, California bit.ly/2UMNdlE (Source: data.sandiego.gov, "Roads lines", "Bike route lines" and "Library locations" by various publishers). Initial attempts failed (only the road lines were ≈56000, each consisting of many points), but then I changed the approach and it helped. Basic road-based accessibility looks fine to me, but this still does not give an accurate view about the number of wheelchair-friendly branches, for instance.
- Does the bulkiness of a smart plug appear "smart" to you?
- Counties and cities with more than 10000 people in Oregon, USA bit.ly/2CvR0gi. Only some of the cities were labeled. Eugene and Springfield are very close in Lane County, while Salem is on the border between Marion and Polk counties, also close to Keizer. Around Portland labels become quite hard to see with cities like Gresham, Hillsboro and Beaverton, all having over 100000 citizens. But we see clearly the higher concentration of big cities in the North-West. If we were to follow a fictive line from northwest to southeast, we would notice the fast-growing county areas. Despite of this, the number of big cities inside them decreases.
- Fires in the last 3 days in Seattle, Washington bit.ly/2USmBj6. Let the word "24 hours" mentioned in the source not mislead you—the data is reaching many days into the past, so a filter of the last three days has been used.
- When you walk through a room, passing through doors, do you have to walk diagonally? What's the area used for the activity and the length of the path? Is it (mostly) a straight line near a wall or a straight line passing through the center? What's the frequency of encountering obstacles or other people on your way? As a walk-browser, would you think about the movement as if repainting an entire screen or as if touching only a small rectangle on it?
- In a recent, freely-accessible NREL report there was an interesting diagram of average system power capacity vs. average energy storage duration for various technologies. Sharing it here in case you haven't seen it yet bit.ly/2UNaX9m
- "We don't just think in order to act, we act in order to think." Minor detail.
- In 2013, the food waste problem was estimated to cost 75 billion dollar to the American economy annually.
- Suppose you have some solder, which is a mix/composition of several elements in some proportion. Is there a device which can uniquely determine that they are x% of A, y% of B and z% of C? If so, how is it called? (Might have learned this in school, but in a non-lasting way.) Somehow reminds me about blind source separation bit.ly/2U0y4jq with the difference of not using existing data and an algorithm, but a measuring instrument, obtaining immediate results.
- BusinessInsider has ranked my country as number 4 in the list of the most unhealthy to live in. As long as I'm not feeling respected elsewhere, living here is fine for me.
- Release of harmful substances is more common than we think and the consequences for the environment are sometimes irreverisble. Came across an old dataset (Google for "Alberta oil spills 1975-2013") and ran a query per substance released to see the the difference between the volumes released and recovered. Net release of fresh water was highest, but this may indicate an attempt to compensate for the negative effect of various spills, which for instance were hard to recover. Lots of salts were released as well. Volume of unrecovered gases (466095000m3) was higher than that of crude oil (88413.5m3) or chemicals (12268m3). But even years later, this information is still useful as a gauge of the frequency and difficulty of dealing with some types of pollution.
- Menus of school canteens in Nantes, France bit.ly/2UHS1ZJ. Can someone confirm whether this data is current and accurate?
- Looked at the historic product and country complexity rankings (PCI) as provided by the Observatory of Economic Complexity (1962-2016). These measure the relative knowledge intensity of a product or country. For products, "analog instruments for physical analysis" were said to have the highest median complexity of 1.86, while CPUs came at 1.32. Machinery for specialized industries had 1.73, while miscellaneous electrical instruments had 1.67. Mathematical calculation instruments had almost 1.47. The word "miscellaneous" appeared 8 times among the top 30 products, indicating that highly specialized ones have higher than average complexity. If you prefer to see the most knowledge-intensive countries instead, there is a diagram bit.ly/2CoscH2
- Here's how often your website hits 100% CPU usage over here bit.ly/2Cs3Dc3
- Sometimes the work you do doesn't meet your internal quality criteria, so you have to discard it incurring the full time cost.
- Interesting design decision: To use the top of a blender as a cup in which the drink gets done. No need to simmer over an extra cup, having two surfaces to clean at the end.
- Water levels at various stations in the UK bit.ly/2UOHagk
- Wished I had more devices with which I could make measurements about a variety of parameters. Sensors, microcontrollers, contexts and a bit more sixth sense. Not just a dumb core waiting on non-existing data to proceed.
- A streamline experiment showing some character bit.ly/2UB0spw
- Bird song recordings by John Hutchison bit.ly/2CnqPIA. Liked how rich these sounds were back then. Today, it could be difficult to hear such conversations when many birds are in danger. Relaxing and reminding.
- Western Australia regional price index for goods/services (2000, 2007, 2011 - 2017 every 2 years) bit.ly/2UFra0r. In the Perth metro area, housing prices in 2011 spiked at several places like Derby (region of Kimberley), and Karratha, Newman, Pilbara and Port Hedland (all in the Pilbara region). At several locations, recreation and education costs were highest in 2007.
- Looked at computed values about PM10 emissions at various locations in South France. Some of them were indicated to be in Marseille, Nice, Aix, Toulon, Arles. (Arles was given as top destination to visit in 2019, which brought me to this website.) I don't know anything about these. What I noticed is that median pollution for the past year were decreasing in that order, also wondering whether the population sizes did so too. Almost: Only Toulon had 25000 citizens more than Aix, but the difference of 1µg/m3 between them is small as well.
- Specific absorption rate (SAR) for various mobile phones bit.ly/2Co5ONH. Something I did not expect to see: The median radiation in body use came to be higher that the one in head use (and the difference of 0.24W/kg does not seem trivial). You can see the models with the best and worst results in each category. When it came to carrying the phone close to the body, the 1. Generation iPhone had the lowest SAR value (0.003), but this could also be due to a measurement mistake, since for head use this model received a rate of 0.62. If it is not a mistake though, it is still a remarkable achievement so many years and phone models later. Many HTC models also did well in the "body use" category. The 7. and 8. generation iPhones were slightly more radiating than the Xth generation (1.35 vs. 1.00W/kg) in both usage scenarios. Owners of Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom may be surprised about its good rates of 0.2/0.14 (body/head). A look at the diagram will enable you to see more. Thanks to Germany's "Federal Office for Radiation Protection" for providing this information.
- Some clock makers in Germany bit.ly/2CiN16D
- Saw a photo with a label "Connectic" (the photographer didn't capture the suffix "ut") on a wall, which was sufficient for me to think "Connecting" and wonder what was hidden behind it. The Internet addiction problem.
- Trees in Paris, France bit.ly/2Cq1hKP. You can see the 10 most common types out of the 742 found.
- Four birds in a grid bit.ly/2UFxhld. Four hundred would have appeared much more magnificent. It's not so much the image weights which stop me, but the need to have a full page listing photographer names.
- Working with 3D city data may create some interesting landscapes, but requires a lot of resources, so it has to be motivated by the problem/task. Knowing how much time 2D data takes here, it would be pointless to try this. Leaving many CPU-intensive tasks for better (shorter CPU execution) times.
- You might hear that an expensive, newly built apartment has been equipped with a Miele washing machine. Why could this be important and why this brand? It could have been almost any other (Samsung, Whirlpool, Beko etc.). There must be a factor influencing this decision. An unrelated paper, which had nothing to do with the news or the topic, mentioned that most washing machines on the market are designed for a ten-year lifecycle, while Miele machines were designed to last for 20 years. Interesting "detail", which never occured to me, pointing to a prefence for durability, longevity and low maintenance costs. Additionally, a quick visit at this brand's website reveals that all their machines have the label A+++, which adds low resource usage to the list. Interesting how the unrelated helped create new connections.
- Circle grid, inviting with some colorable spaces bit.ly/2UGGRV8
- Like how beautiful randomness at several levels can be bit.ly/2ClThdS. Inspired by the idea of repeated random selection (random country, then random city in that country, then random citizen in that city and so on).
- In "skeptical doubt" about this very same phrase.
- Poisson distribution can approximate the probability of getting x visitors on a website on a given day. Would that be practically significant to someone who does not spend all of their time writing clean HTML/CSS?
- Wished to have a copy of "Experimental design" by Roger E. Kirk in front of me.
- Investment in a website isn't something that happens once after which it can be forgotten. It's an ongoing process (also of self-discovery), which takes some time and hard work. But if done well, it can grow your list of clients.
- Have you been able to extract a useful insight for yourself out of using a smartwatch or would you rather say that the investment was not worth it? Have you logged continuous data or only sporadic one-time events?
- Milk production and delivery in the Netherlands (2015 - 2018) bit.ly/2UCtAg3. Do you notice a periodic pattern here?
- Some ideas from the excerpt of "The definitive guide to transportation": Faster modes of transportation are usually more expensive; shipping an order by an airplane is much faster than by ship, but it can cost 20x more. Demand for transportation reflects demand for goods/services and thus can be seen as an indicator of economic vitality. Rail and trucking volume reflect the economic activity of a nation, while ocean and air transportation illustrate trade levels among nations.
- The World Shipping Council wrote that liner shipping is the most efficient mode of transport of goods. In one year, a single large container ship can carry over 200000 containers with cargo, while many ships are said to be able to transport 8000 containers with goods in a single direction. If all containers loaded on a 11000TEU ship were instead loaded on a train, it would need to be 77km long. I was concerned about environmental impact, but they wrote that maritime shipping accounts for ≈2.7% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions (can you confirm this?), giving the example that a ton of goods shipped from Melbourne to Long Beach (12770km) would generate less emissions than transporting the same cargo with trucks from Dallas to Long Beaach (2307km). Interesting.
- a) I rely on my own design/platform/software developed by a dedicated/responsible web designer/developer specifically for my needs and b) I rely on external services like Facebook, Pinterest, Etsy, WordPress, Medium or another to present and promote my business. Which one describes you better?
- Reading the excerpt of "Deep medicine" by Eric Topol. An 8-day old boy had constant seizures and if they continued, this could lead to brain damage. He was brought to Rady's Genomic Institute in San Diego, where a blood sample was sequenced, which produced 125GB of data. Analyzing it with machine learning highlighted 962 genetic variants causing diseases. A very rare gene was found to be the cause and its effect (the seizures) was seen modifiable by the dietary intake of vitamin B6 and the aminoacids arginine and lysine. After the treatment, the boy's seizures ended 36 hours later. Great illustration of the power of data and the importance of having the right tools and references. Identifying the latent before the observable in health conditions may become one possible use of machine learning.
- Frequency of occurrence of aminoacids in proteins bit.ly/2UxTqlr
- Once again the weekend is approaching. A recent article on CNN looked at the cost of a weekend break in several European cities bit.ly/2UCkujt. Update (22:23): Extended with the data from the original publication "City costs barometer 2019" by UK Post Office.
- Bits per Joule as a metric for energy-efficiency of transfer was new to me. Note how no measure of distance is present. Also: Could you think of a real usage for probability per unit time?
- Dot flower with a small RGB effect bit.ly/2CjO8ml
- "Problem is, today's consumers are not buying the most efficient air conditioners", says the International Energy Agency (IEA). Their diagram shows that the average air conditioner in USA has efficiency (SEER) of 4.2 in the presence of an equipment with up to 11.3 (2.7x better), while in Europe the market average is 5.3 in the presence of 11.0 (2.07x better). Also interesting how production of plastic grows almost as fast as cement and aluminium combined. And the indicators of clean energy progress bit.ly/2CiYenN showing areas in which more effort would be needed.
- Cannot tell whether it was a software problem that crashed Boeing 737 Max bit.ly/2UGRbMV (in German). But sometimes software engineering becomes mission-critical and touches many lives.
- Code execution speed matters a lot. Once you start paying a lot, you can expect to receive more attention, better service and orientation towards your specific task.
- Also available: Streets and street lights in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2CjldPs (uses the same source). Shows a very good coverage with only few small areas where black shows through (streets with potentially few or no lights). Potentially, because the lights there may not have been added to the data. But the number of lights still says little about how bright they shine or whether all of them are needed. We see high concentration of street lights at the north. The diagram took a lot of time to compute.
- Library accessibility to cyclists in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2CfsFeo. This time the previously mentioned idea worked well and the result is pleasing to the eye. The bikeways are continuous (no fragmentation) and they pass visibly close to the actual building locations. A good example to learn from.
- Quality of living ranks by location (according to data by Mercer) bit.ly/2UAccZt. The lower the numbers, the better. The absence of a number means that this location is not in the top 231. If k cities received the same rank n, the next one on the list had rank n+k.
- EUDatathon 2019 bit.ly/2UAcAXK might interest you if you like using open data for problem solving and you're not hiding from competitions, publicity or (potentially) politics.
- Angst (fear) + Strom (electricity) caused me to associate the unit with an electric chair the first time I heard about it.
- Tried to make myself a picture of the population of various cities in Nigeria bit.ly/2UzCmeT. The country is said to have almost 200 million people (worldpopulationreview.com), yet only ≈9 million are said to live in the capital Lagos. This low percentage (4.5%) means that the majority are likely stuck in poverty, being so poor they can't afford to seek better lives for themselves/their families or they are somehow artificially kept away by the rich. Here only the labels of the 16 largest cities are shown. If we were to connect points (2, 11) and (11, 4) (or the two axes from latitude 11 to longitude 11), the diagonal line would pass through a region with relatively low density of big cities, which is interesting. On the one side of it would be Kano, Kaduna and some other big cities, while on the other side would be Lagos, Ibadan and many other cities of middle size. These numerous cities look as if located on a line; we could perhaps imagine a perpendicular from Lagos towards that line. But is this enough to indicate "striving towards the capital"?
- You might think that by baking your own bread you'd be avoiding the calcium propanoate and some other additives found on the packaging of most breads in the store. Until you calculate the cost of the bread-baking machine, the time spent in preparation and waiting, the electricity used (over 3.5 hours @ 550W), the cost of the whole grain flour, yeast etc. to get a reasonable quantity that would be enough for today, but insufficient for tomorrow. Suddenly, the idea of bread-baking starts to look much less attractive.
- Plotted the river segments within the EU and saw that there were far more than expected. Unsure how water-rich they are or what the results of some centrality measures would be.
- Can you write code which accepts a file with function definitions and outputs the names of the functions which might need refactoring (longer than n lines)?
- Some relationships between planetary features bit.ly/2UvF0lJ. These are some of the more interesting ones I found.
- Screenshot from the "KrispyKreme doughnuts" general data protection regulation bit.ly/2Cgwi3F. Wins the award for the longest excuse.
- Pinkshotdogs median prices by product category bit.ly/2Cep68r
- Dynamic image switching in the background often takes valuable CPU cycles. With n-1 inactive tabs, the effects may start to accumulate. What can be done so that these elements become dynamic only after coming into view (without having to disable JS)?
- Looking at the store directory of a shopping center bit.ly/2Uu15kE. Empty, with some placeholders awaiting initialization. The content depends entirely on JavaScript, potentially affecting many businesses located there.
- Scientific and technical consulting businesses are in the top 5 of the active business types in Los Angeles (Source: data.lacity.org, Office of Finance, "Listing of Active Businesses", bit.ly/2CefCK5). They are slightly behind motion picture/video industries, but before legal services and full-service restaurants. This is so great. Are many of them on the west side, perhaps facing the coast? bit.ly/2CenhIl
- A simple example of converting a text to a vector bit.ly/2C8KjAz. Here I removed single digits (as they refered to notes in the text), but you may choose to preserve them in your case. It is easy to see why seeking similarity across many documents containing long texts can quickly become computationally expensive. Not to mention the storage space required to hold them.
- Have a great start in the new week! (And if in the middle of it you come across a problem you can't solve yourself, remember which services are offered to you here and their potential cost in your case.)
- Locations of the libraries in Manchester, England bit.ly/2UxtI0o. Once again, not a fifteen-minute task. Had the idea to verify whether all branches can be conveniently accessed by cyclists, but the cycle routes were only available as PDF maps (not easy to compute with).
- Simple idea: Ounces per dollar for three drinking glass sets on Amazon bit.ly/2CctVz5. All sets had at least 10 glasses of the same type. You could also gather additional information to compute the total holding volume (instead of weight) per unit price, since this would be the utility you'd get (apart from design aesthetic and material quality). Note that these values reflect the current information (pieces, ounces, prices), which is subject to change anytime.
- OpenFoodFacts bit.ly/2C9GSti looks interesting, but it is ≈2.2GB, which exceeds a weak CPU-I/O pair's capacity to analyze it. It is situations like this, which teach me to stop early. Still sharing the link, in case you find it useful and usable. The separator in the CSV file is tab.
- Throughput of some pipelines in Canada bit.ly/2CaK1Jq. The NGTL System, upstream of James River seems to have the highest throughput of all examined. Great to see such a rich dataset made public.
- Pavement roughness category in the state of Victoria, south-eastern Australia (10.05.2016) bit.ly/2UrBzww. If I understood correctly, the bigger spot concentrating some greens, oranges and reds must be Melbourne.
- The trash pile problem bit.ly/2CdBCov ↗. Wondering whether a combination of computer vision (object detection), machine learning (classification) and robotics (object pickup) cannot help in the junk sorting process, saving the mental power required to manually look and decide on million arriving items.
- An aluminium bridge in Canada required repair after the application of salts to enable drivers to pass through the snowy roads bit.ly/2UsfuxJ ↗. The salt came through in contact with the bottom of the bridge columns and their surface started to peel. The solution was interesting and minimal: the damaged parts were sliced and replaced with stonger galvanized steel, while the rest of the existing construction was touched as lightly as possible.
- Learned that magnesium weight is about 2/3 that of aluminium. My imaginary table would have been 1/3 too heavy at the legs. Yet, corrosion prevention may become more difficult. Which do you think causes higher environmental emissions: shaping a material requiring a lot more energy, but then likely emitting much less over time (possibly Al) or choosing a material said to be much easier to form (Mg), but then requiring anti-corrosive coatings, which will likely emit over a long time? Are there non-emissive coatings?
- Strength of the relationship between pedestrian count and temperature on the Brooklyn Bridge (01.10.2017 - 31.07.2018) bit.ly/2Uo8LFe. Expected to see a somewhat stronger positive relationship, but it was only weak-to-moderate (0.38-0.39). The x scale is the time (omitted for the title), while the y scales were normalized within the interval [-1, 1] to bring otherwise disparate values under a common denominator and more easily examine the connection. This made the y-values less meaningful, so they were hidden as well. The median hourly rate was 145 pedestrians towards Manhattan and 137 pedestrians towards Brooklyn, while the median temperature was 49℉ (9.44℃). You can also see the pedestrian count distributions in the two directions (at log scale as a side-by-side boxplot) bit.ly/2UoPP93 or the kernel density estimation (KDE) bit.ly/2Cb8Cho, allowing us to see some temperatures at which pedestrians on the bridge felt more comfortable.
- Exports of commercial services in European countries (2007 - 2017) bit.ly/2CcpOTp
- In case I learn nothing else from that paper... bit.ly/2UlYLMy
- Happy 8th of March to all women!
- Player interconnection graphs for the today's football game Porto - Roma bit.ly/2CaNOGz. Checking the number of intersections in both cases could be interesting.
- Population, number of housing units and average number of occupants per unit by district and neighborhood in Barcelona, Spain (2007 - 2018) bit.ly/2C8tRjI. In the third diagram, "Ciutat Vella, el Barri Gòtic" starts at &approx.3.9 occupants per housing unit in 2007 (which was not shown as a trade-off) and rapidly falls down to start climbing again in more recent years. This also appears to be the strongest dynamic of change. Also interesting how "Sant Andreu" is methodically getting closer to "la Nova Esquerra de l'Eixample" in terms of population and housing units. We could even make these diagrams more interactive, so that they show the labels only when the user hovers over a line.
- Top 20 biggest airlines in the world (06.03.2019) bit.ly/2C7O9df
- Traffic counts in Wichita, Kansas (31.08.2017) bit.ly/2C7EDH3. I might have found a small mistake in the data—it appeared unrealistic to have only a single point with 10x higher traffic than on any other point. After fixing it, the diagram became much more believable.
- Looked at the 311 service requests in Kansas City (2007-today) (Source: Open Data KC, KCMO information technology people, "311 call center service requests",bit.ly/2UnTeVR) and examined the median times to close issues of various types. Illegally parked vehicles, barking dogs, returning calls to citizens and weatherization issues were mostly closed on the same day. Trash collection issues were solved within a day. Ambulance requests were closed in 2 days, fire and noise in 4 days, broken asphalt in 6 days, IT/websites in 6.5 days, graffiti in 7 days, sinkholes in 9 days. Stump removal took as long as closing engineering requests (a median of 17 days). 25 requests were related to the Google Fiber Project, having median closing time of 21 days. Property maintenance and pavement restoration took 56 days, hydrant repairs were finished after 101 days, land use and property requests took a median of 169-170 days. Requests involving a land trust required 322 days and those connected with the Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) took longest (611 days).
- Libraries in Tacoma, Washington bit.ly/2UiLLr0. Washington is a state here, not the capital (caused some confusion in me initially when learning about the difference). Especially liked how the labels of the southmost library became surrounded by the boundary (on three sides) with no manual adjustment required.
- Some urban centers by area and population in China bit.ly/2C6lC7V. Surprised how big Chongqing appears to be.
- A list of Canada's national parks bit.ly/2UnVdcH ↗
- Attempting to get an impression of the restaurant sector size in various US states bit.ly/2UntsRq. One diagram shows the estimated sales per individual in each state and another complements it by looking at average number of restaurant locations per individual against estimated sales per job in the sector (2018). By these criteria, we see that District of Columbia manages to separate itself from the rest. New York has both many restaurant locations and high sales in the sector. Massachusetts has a very low number of restaurants (perhaps resulting from a specific policy), but they seem to achieve very high sales per worker. We could also hypothesize: if the estimated sales per job are lowest in Iowa, restaurants could be (relatively seen) more affordable there. The second diagram does not tell much about restaurant density, since I did not consider state areas (possible improvement), but we know that District of Columbia has a very small area and if it has so many units per individual, it is possible that finding a nearby restaurant there is easier too.
- The excerpt of "Universal principles of design" contains two I didn't know, but somehow suspected: 1) environments rich in nature views reduce stress and enhance focus and concentration (biophilia effect) and 2) high ceilings promote abstract thinking and creativity, while low ceilings promote concrete and detail-oriented thinking (cathedral effect).
- "A lightweight item might be perceived as cheap." True, if we consider the usage of less material, with the overall shape suggesting fragility, instability or indifference to some important decisions. But rushing to produce such items in mass quantities to increase profits rather than make the objects better sets a low bar about what goes into their making. This is where elegant design finds its place. It actively manages the perception by careful selection of material, process and operation. It still uses less material, but does so in a thoughtful (even data-driven) way, improving the object properties relative to the hosting context, fulfilling a purpose/satisfying a need and eliminating waste as much as possible. Due to the attention to detail, the designed object is still easily recognized next to the one born by automation. (Heavy, automatically generated websites are not necessarily more expensive.)
- Chvorinov rule about casting solidification time: t = (volume/area)2
- Looked at some tables and tried to think how I would approach building one. Noticed that many did not appear very attractive, were bulky or heavy. Some were overpriced, others were said to have montage issues. It appeared that too much material was in use. What I look for in a table is that it is big enough (and inviting for up to 4-6 people to work comfortably, in advance of any future need), has a thin base and legs which do not stand in the way. With high load capacity relative to self-weight (so that someone stepping over it to reach an object at height does not break it). With the right height (self-adjustable is preferable) and lightweight enough to be moved around without too much effort. Do you think that transparent polycarbonate could be used for a thin base or would it break easily under load? What about thin legs from aluminium (non-corrosive, with zero interconnections)?
- Seeing me in-person is always possible, but the best way to increase this probability is to ensure you pay. Over time could eventually open this option to you.
- Building permits by final date (in the past decade) in Seattle bit.ly/2Umxud0. There were many permits with uknown final date, which were not included here. Blues represent more recent permits (to build/demolish), while reds resemble permits which date far into the past. Interesting to see a small region with dense blue points at the north-west side of the city. Do you know something in particular happening there?
- Noise levels during the day in Breda, The Netherlands bit.ly/2UmiuMe (Source: Gemeente Breda, "Geluidsbelasting Lden", bit.ly/2UkXtS7). Shows the average noise levels ((low+high) / 2) at various locations. Took some time to code and compute.
- Ecological footprint explorer bit.ly/2C2VwCM ↗ seems to be another interesting project with detail at country level.
- CNN: "22 of the top 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India" cnn.it/2C6XPVh ↗. An interesting finding if you also look at the report linked in the article.
- Interesting plot from the World Bank showing how inflation in consumer prices changed between 1960 and 2017 bit.ly/2UjFPOp ↗. Did not expect to see such a sharp decline.
- Good idea: We are programmers which happen to type, not typists which happen to program.
- Sometimes I remember the contents of an article, but don't remember where I saw it. Then I hypothesize and search directly at the (possible) provider's page. Very often, this returns a lot of results, but not exactly what I expect—this particular article. Then I fall back on Google and despite its much higher level of noise, it somehow manages to find it. Leads me to believe that many websites (where the content base is much smaller) can do much more to improve the findability of their content.
- Comparison of hosting companies as seen in a SmashingMagazine article from 12.02.2019 bit.ly/2C4QOnU. Number of outages against total downtime per year (mins), both at logscale. Had a minor hosting problem yesterday (unable to upload), but thankful about the fast response in solving it. Some memories about old readings and this quickly led to the idea.
- Train stations with the most cancelled trains in Germany (2018) bit.ly/2UjMt7n. According to "Die Welt" bit.ly/2UjMkB5 ↗, almost 2.4% of all trains were cancelled. Intended to see how many of these stations are close to each other, since if a train is cancelled at one of them, nearby ones where it would have passed through, would be affected as well.
- A small demo showing dynamic product selection and total price estimation bit.ly/2UloAMG. Uses details from a real website, but following the link enables you to make direct purchases there if you wished so.
- Colorful rainbow leather boots etsy.me/2UjkUv7 ↗. The triangulation looks beautiful.
- "Shop by price" relies on the customer to select the segment they belong to. So inpolite.
- Offering an online dictionary and then loading all the ads upon a query, very much defeats the purpose of using one.
- Always found it interesting that the technologies listed inside job requirements would take one 10 years to master, yet the company was looking for a candidate with much fewer years of experience. Signals about corrupt hiring practices at most companies.
- A diagram of the Global Connectivity Index (GCI) for 2018 as reported by Huawei bit.ly/2Ujuk9G. Left the whitespace to 100 to indicate the potential room for improvement.
- Bus lines in Gävle, Sweden bit.ly/2UekWV2. If correct, the longest route must be that of line 91 with a distant second being the route served by line 27.
- "If you are a good concierge you can do it for them" cnn.it/2BZYfgg ↗. On the importance (and hard work required) to satisfy demanding customer requests.
- Found it quite interesting to read that graphene has very high thermal conductivity, while graphane is completely insulating. Questioned whether almost anything on this broad range would then be possible, remembering a paper giving a (concrete) large number of patents in the area.
- "Mapping all of the trees with machine learning" bit.ly/2UgSAJB ↗. Enjoyed the high level of detail for the trees detected in satellite imagery/LiDAR scans in various cities. Much better than anything I could have ever done simply by using open data.
- Small gradients oriented in circle bit.ly/2C1ZQCh
- Fought multiple hours with building gnuplot from source until I find out which libraries were missing on my system (wanted to have the latest version). This post bit.ly/2C2kwtB and the "./configure" output helped me a lot, since it highlighted that I didn't have Qt. For some reason Qt5 didn't work out, so I used --with-qt=qt4. Also had to use "sudo make install" (not just make install) at the end to avoid the problem with permissions and inability to write to directories. Before that last command I also enjoyed "make check", which threw a large number of plot tests in a short time on the screen, with some beautiful gradients, 3D plots and drawings. Inspired (finally) and will look for new applications tomorrow to be supported by this functionality.
- Steps to disappearance bit.ly/2BZWM9L
- Painting with randomization, multiple layers and transparency bit.ly/2BZyBbo
- If one were to keep a laptop lid open by placing an apple on the trackpad while looking at the side view, it would appear that tech is trying to consume nature. So the leaf comming out of the apple could be drawn as a flame touching the lid's corner (or the most essential camera).
- Still some time left to start your project this week. If not, wait for the next one to come.
- Looked at the rainfall at 86 locations in Calgary since 1988 (Source: City of Calgary, "Rainfall data", bit.ly/2Udl4UJ), but wanted to avoid overwhelming you with a diagram here. The top location had average rainfall of 0.383 and according to Nominatim is located at the City of Calgary's Roads and Water Services depot. So there might be some installation with water gathering capability. The second location is at the eastmost 128 Avenue NE circular and the third is on McKenzie Towne Gate St., direction towards the circular. The scarcest average rainfall was observed on 100 Sierra Morena Green SW near Fire Station 33 (Signal Hill), followed by 68 Street SE in Great Plains. Taking the averages avoided the "equal medians" problem due to having the majority of the (frequent) measurements reflect the absense of rain.
- Traffic crashes in Cincinnati, Ohio (23.02.2010 - 26.02.2019) bit.ly/2BUQQPi. Due to the too many points, had to drop the opacity to see overlaps well, which led to this "X-Ray" effect. Some crashes were marked outside, but relatively close to the city boundary (not shown here). Most did not happen at an intersection; only a third of this number did. The fatal injuries reported during the period were 150, where the possible injuries were only 9% of the no injury cases. The crashes happened at daylight and 3x less often at a dark, but lighted roadway. Rear-end and crashes at angle dominated. During the incidents, the roads were mostly dry, but in almost 30% of the cases, they were wet. Cases when it rained were almost 5x less common (than cases by clear weather) and snow was even less frequently reported.
- Could you say that "Louisburg" is a good street to live on in Boston? Looked at the data for 2018 (Source: Analyze Boston, Assessing Department, "Property assessment", bit.ly/2Udwis7) and all highest medians of total property value per living area (in square foot) for single family dwellings happened to be in zipcodes 2108. But "Loiusburg" had a much higher value than some other streets: "Beacon", "Byron", "Beaver", "Willow", "Spruce" and "Otis". Zipcodes 2121, 2124 and 2125 with streets like "Townsend", "Woodward Park", "Brookford", "Merlin", "Waumbeck", "Gaylord", "Dean", "Algonquin" and "Rosedale" had the lowest median values (≈15x lower than the highest).
- The inductance of a toroidal inductor seems to depend on its geometric properties: L = ((μeffμ0N2h) / 2π) * ln(b/a), where μeff is effective permeability for gapped cores, μ0 is vacuum permeability, N is the number of wire turns, h is the core height, a and b are the inner and outer radius respectively. Geometry plays a role in electromagnetism here, but is present in many other areas as well.
- Reading a paper mentioning the running with a heavy backpack as a means of excercise. Another fitness "aspect" that escaped my attentions.
- Finding subsequent points by angle and side bit.ly/2BXaeuL
- Covering cluster vertices with bubbles bit.ly/2BZv5xD. Cheated a bit here. The finishing contour was done in GIMP. For such a small set of points (and no real-world application) writing an algorithm was not justified.
- A look at the first 25 principal components of an image bit.ly/2BU5vKw. The reduction in variance becomes slightly more visible compared to obtaining only numeric values from explained_variance_ratio_. If you expected to see several image segments, I have to disappoint you.
- Derivatives of a sample polynomial bit.ly/2BVh18x, hopefully with correct computations.
- Does working on this spark joy? #KonMari. In most cases many of the works presented here followed this principle—perhaps subconsciously. If it brings joy to the creator and is useful to the audience, it's a win-win.
- Tried to gauge several indicators of the largest hydroelectric power stations based on limited data from Wikipedia bit.ly/2BR9CXC. Did not include the installation locations to keep the diagrams simple. For instance, "Itaupu Dam" is located on Parana river in Brazil/Uruguay, while "Three Gorges Dam" is on Yangtze river in China. The "Cleuson-Dixence Complex" (which manages to extract a lot of power while keeping flooded area minimal) is in Switzerland, while the Hoover Dam (old and well-known) is in Colorado, USA. If we assume that a year has 8760 hours (=365*24), then "Itaipu Dam" with its over 7000 hours working at full capacity must achieve a very high efficiency. A hint about this is also seen in the last diagram, where this dam manages to separate itself from what would be a diagonal line passing through most other installations/dams. If you want to learn how a dam works, USGS offers some basic info on.doi.gov/2U8Ljvu. If I understood correctly from a material seen a while ago, the shape of the dam gets progressively wider (from top to bottom) due to the increasing water pressure at depth, hence the curved shape. But perhaps it is by far not the only measure taken to prevent potential devastating consequences of having a breakpoint.
- You may see double here bit.ly/2U91Gbx
- Found the name of the shape used in an old demo listing national labs. It's called "astroid". Here are several of them as a reminder bit.ly/2BTDin0
- Total airport passenger movements by month for selected Australian airports (01.01.1985 - 01.10.2018) bit.ly/2BRBhYq. Nice to see the difference in airport operations between Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
- Cooking techniques: roasting, braising, poaching, sauteing, steaming, frying, grilling, smoking, barbecuing, boiling. Kept here for reference only. Would also like to test eggs prepared at 64℃ and 73℃, but this requires an accurate equipment I don't have. At 100℃ I rarely liked the taste, but now I see a possible reason in written form—overcooking.
- According to the Engineering Toolbox, the heating energy required to heat 10l of water to 30℃ must be the same as heating 7.5l water to 40℃. This is interesting.
- Too little or too many items in stock seems to be a common problem. Economic order quantity is defined as Q = sqrt(2*D*S/H), where D is the demand quantity, S is fixed cost associated with order and H is a holding/storage cost of each unit. Read more on Wikipedia bit.ly/2BWiafT ↗.
- What could be the optimal street-wash schedule when no cleaning has taken place for a while and when many of the already not so clean vehicles consistently shake off their dust upon vibration? Thinking whether large-scale action of a single entity (e.g. the municipality) could completely compensate the absense of many small-scale actions coming from the participants on the road.
- If a place sells circular and square pizzas at the cost of 5$ and 6$ each, this may engage the mind in thinking about the right choice. For a circular pizza of radius r and quadratic one with side a, the latter would feed better if a > 1.9415*r. If the seller believes that that side must be 2*r, square is safe; if the side is something like 1.75*r, circle is safe. Not a case for the 2m ruler though.
- Can you create an algorithm that would color a carpet? Can you actually have the result on a real carpet? Can you sell that carpet (at scale)? Three diff(erent/icult) things.
- So far you might have wondered how is it possible to pay for any service you receive here. Turns out that if you have an office of FexoPay, SmallWorld, Ria or Moneytrans in your city, you already have the means to do so. Perhaps not the cheapest option, but a very direct one. And if I could truly help, that would make me much happier.
- Interesting how recruiters seek to hire "a biologist who is also a good programmer". Conveniently sitting on a desk, constantly speaking, convincing and expecting all the skills to come to them for free. There's no such song. If you want to hire such professionals, your only chance is in being (and proving) better than they are.
- Still surprised that plenty of shop owners either don't have a website, don't have one that works well or find no time to speak with their web designer.
- Initiating a custom project will help you see more useful results, which consider your particular case (and business). But try to clarify what you want before contacting me and ensure that your budget looks attractive relative to your demands. As I said, I cannot consider every project and have limited time I can assign to them.
- Ran a script to look at 48 Volvo car models based on their specifications to see which ones it will recommend bit.ly/2BPQIQS. Included series: S60, S90, XC40, XC60, XC90, V90. All their numeric characteristics were considered. The three models XC60 T8 eAWD Plug-In Hybrid come at the top. Since their score is practically the same, one may prefer Momentum, starting at 52900$. An example how you can integrate code into your decision-making process. Limitations: the script does not consider seat comfort, navigation system usability, sound quality, engine noise etc.
- Muse Polyhymnia by Meissen porcelain bit.ly/2U6Jb7w ↗. Many of these figurines look beautiful, but such quality tends to be expensive. High object detail, face and action realism, consistency among a series of collectibles are not easily achieved. A single figurine often costs as much as three average laptops. But you may still like how Sancho Pansa was hiding below Don Quixote's horse.
- Learned about more Chinese cities from a single diagram than I knew to date bit.ly/2U0OTHX
- Achieving stability is not easy bit.ly/2U35N8M
- Area from which green areas are reachable within a 400m/5min walk in Antwerp, the Netherlands bit.ly/2U5Mjk2. Hoping to have understood this correctly; in the presence of a mistake, you can always correct me. Green may not have been optimal here; couldn't find a better alternative.
- Looked at the excerpt of "The bottom billion" by Paul Collier, which seems an interesting one. Tend to agree about the existence of traps, yet not with the attempt to clarify which they are.
- Never heard of self-tying shoes. Unfortunately, Nike's 350$ model got "bricked" after a software update, according to "Popular Mechanics". Don't know whether this is exaggerated or fixable through another update. But cutting corners on the quality of code is rarely a good idea.
- Despite its said limitations, I liked the rail transport cost function by M. Grosso and decided to describe it (to keep as reference) bit.ly/2BOTINi. Illustrates very well the power of mathematical modeling and the benefit of deep parameter analysis and understanding.
- Boeing aircraft models by maximal takeoff weight bit.ly/2U1s8DS. Please, also see the limitations of these data. I assume that the unit of weight is kg, but in order not to make a mistake I have omitted it as well.
- Travel planning recommendation: customers which traveled to A also traveled to B and C.
- Sometimes you wonder when the next vehicle (public transport) arrives before you've reached the station with the information board. So you take a look at a timetable instead. But it has an overwhelming amount of content, making your manual search slow and inefficient. And the possibility of searching long enough to miss the next one may make you uncomfortable. An app can easily use the current time to filter out all irrelevant content, quickly showing you only few time points to make them easy to understand and remember. It's accessible anywhere, on any device with a screen, without requiring input except the line number and the station name.
- Weeks ago I saw "R600a" as refrigerant and wondered what it meant, how efficient or environmentally-friendly it could be. But was unable to find sufficient information. Today, when not looking, came to the paper "A theoretical comparative study of CO2 case refrigeration systems" having an overview on refrigerants, noting that none of them is perfect. The authors say that R600a, R600, R290 are good choices, but that NH3, R1270 and R152a were most promising. Particularly appealing seems R1270 since it fell under "best energetically" and "best environmentally" categories. Yet, most of these (excluding R152a) are said to be highly flammable. And if there's an increased potential of fire, home owners may not exactly be happy. Still, I have yet to see a model using R1270.
- The largest shopping malls by gross leasable area bit.ly/2U5cc3d. Includes only malls having more than 100000m2 leasable area (as seen on Wikipedia). Among these malls, taking the sum of leasable area by city and state, you can see the top 30 results. Bangkok (Thailand) and Jakarta (Indonesia) come at the top, by a wide margin. But this does not include the smaller shopping malls. It is still possible that taking their areas into account, another city emerges at the top spot. It is also unclear how current the data is, but it includes one mall built in 2019.
- Parking place occupancy in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2BNwLtS. Somewhat slow; hopefully accurate.
- Los Angeles metro maps and timetables bit.ly/2BR7teG. Noticed that the tact on the blue line was every 2-3 mins. Quickly convinces you that waiting 20 mins for a bus is a time-waster.
- Variable constants of the type MAP_WALL_X (in a game) now toggle associations in me. The dimensionality of language.
- Annual passenger journeys by rail in Great Britain (1950 - 2017) bit.ly/2U2sASj
- Map of the Amtrak rail network in USA bit.ly/2U7pHQg ↗. Realized that I knew nothing about the lines and stations there.
- Forgot to mention that a threadmill also felt incompatible with a more dynamic lifestyle. Once one starts to travel a lot, it becomes unavailable. And then actually having one at a place where you don't need it becomes a waste. Which is why going to a local club having threadmills, in a city one plans to stay for a while, could also be a good choice.
- Any content on dummerAugust has always remained free, although it wasn't free to produce it. Many newspapers have started to realize the cost of creating and publishing online content and their materials have become increasingly inaccessible or available behind a paywall only. I believe that this is a step back, against the true nature of the web, which is why I won't participate in it. What I did here, I did for everyone, independent of location or background. Yes, I often try to demonstrate skill too to make you feel more confident to collaborate on a joint project, but my main point has always been to bring things forward in any way I can. Which is why my work appears to be "unstrategic" or "random". But this way of working prevents me from becoming narrow- and single-minded to the point of exclusion of anything else in life. Whenever someone paid for the work created specifically for them, it allowed them to participate indirectly in advancing this operation and in increasing the depth of contribution. For this I will always be thankful to all of you who appreciate and support dummerAugust.
- Seeing beautifully shaded sns.kdeplots yesterday night gave me the idea to try plotting the temperature distributions for several cities in the last 30 days and look where they overlap. Went to look for such historic data, and tried to use my existing key with OpenWeatherMap, but this didn't work (historic data may not be available on the free plan). Also looked at other websites. Some of them (like the Weather Channel, AccuWeather...) had such data, but they offered it only in addition to the ads they were serving (you would agree after seeing the 330 HTTP requests). This left my CPU utilization at consistent 60-70%, even while doing nothing and keeping one of these websites open in a tab. In addition, there were plenty of errors/warnings which were popping up once I tried to access the devtools console, which made it very hard to type and evaluate things there and then return to check whether the class names corresponded to reality. After a while I gave up, and I don't plan to visit weather websites anytime soon again. I probably saw enough ads at least for a month ahead.
- Stephen Wolfram mentioned that he likes to have his main computer as powerful as possible. Understandable, since without much CPU power, the kinds of tasks one can accomplish become much more limited. I also liked the threadmill-under-desk idea to stay fit as I believe that prolonged periods of inactivity may have something to do with decreased productivity and the ability to concentrate. Yet, the last time I tried to find information/specifications on good threadmills, NordicTrack's website informed me "not available in your country". The cheapest options available locally at a dedicated sport store start at over 1000 euro and in my opinin, they haven't run with the times.
- Properties of some Centrum multivitamins (as % of daily value) bit.ly/2BNfC3I. Whites mean 'n/a' (not available), dark blues stay for very low values, dark reds for very high. Higher biotin level is available only in two products one of which has "beauty" in its label (not sure why). Centrum Silver (either for men or women) has high quantity of vitamin B12 (not seen well here, since the scale ends at 100%, whereas the highest B12 value was 1667%). We see that Centrum attempts to be strong with vitamins, where almost all its products cover 100% of the daily recommendation. But the coverage of vitamins A, D3 and K seems to be somewhat lower. Further, the quantities of iodine, panthenonic acid, manganese and to a lesser extent folic acid, niacin, riboflavin and thiamin seem to be important to Centrum. Note that this is not a recommendation to take multivitamins.
- Sometimes, the next thing to do appears to compete for the same resources you used in the previous task, which are still unreleased. Plenty of open tabs, new desktop file arrivals, open images, unintentional memory leaks and others motivate the need of "unloading". Even getting rid of the tasks done still takes time (apart from the mental adaptation).
- Beautiful landscape from a traffic camera in Calgary, Canada bit.ly/2U5hXhG. The designer helped accentuate the division of the format.
- Median gross monthly wage by nationality and by professional position and gender in Geneva, Switzerland (2008 - 2018, every two years) bit.ly/2U5er6Y. We notice that the higher the position level, the wider the payment gap between men and women becomes. In 2016, for instance, men at lower management positions were compensated slightly better than women at top, upper and middle management positions (according to the data). The median for masculine top managers in 2016 (11141 Swiss francs) converts to over 9800 euro/month. Apology for the inconsistent styles.
- Hourly traffic counts at 30 measurement stations in Leeds, UK (1997 - 2018) bit.ly/2BNZOgW. After 2007, the traffic counts at "A64 York Road" fell a lot. Perhaps a new installment helped to relieve the situation. Around 2001, the road "A658 Victoria Avenue Yeadon" registered around 7500 passing vehicles, which since then has remained a record among all measurement stations. The fact that this single value was backed by other similarly high values recorded almost at the same time means that there is less likelihood for a measurement error. (Perhaps you remember the historic background behind this traffic level.) "South Accomodation Road, Leeds" no longer registers high values as well. But we see that despite not being recorded too often, values at "A647 NW of Pudsey" (number 11, West Leeds) remain consistently high over a very long time. Perhaps something helpful can be done there too.
- I like how met.ie provides the current weather observations in Ireland for fee download bit.ly/2BLL3vn #open_data
- Locations of the LinkNYC kiosks in New York bit.ly/2BH3gd9. According to Wikipedia, there were 920 links in 07.2017, where planned were 7500 (at that point). Currently the diagram shows 1858, which means that they doubled in 1.5 years. Not sure about the differences in geographical areas, but Manhattan has almost 4.4x more kiosks than Brooklyn and Queens. This could also mean that the focus is on improving the state in Manhattan first.
- Some of the restaurants in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2U6hEDj. Noticed the long line and decided to look up on Google Maps what was happening there. Not completely sure whether it is "Ventura Blvd", I decided to see how many restaurants contain this keyword in their street address. A hungry person in the neighborhood would have 431 options.
- This is as if someone would buy software to discover that the developer didn't work on the functionality only, but also on the tools dedicated to data collection/evaluation, tracking/action logging, third-party ad integration or obtrusive offer notification. Or on your smartphone's beep sound waking you up in the middle of the night. Few things are then less surprising than people unwilling to pay for software.
- Strange that today's hardware is still unconditionally bound with software sales designed to increase the profit of big corporations. Seeing Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, McAffee LiveSafe or others among the preinstalled defaults quickly convinces what the buyer pays for.
- The disadvantage of trying to speak clever and teaching while on a podium walk (in the style of "this time too shall pass") where you don't take a moment to prove/verify or demonstrate the correctness of your claims is that with today's course audience sizes, you can be sure to teach more than enough people the wrong thing. How big would be the impact if they were to share what they've learned with their friends/colleagues later? As if the name of your university gives you all the credibility you deserve.
- Wondering whether someone good in computer vision could take the image of the Tesla cars ordered for delivery to Europe and run an object detection algorithm to compare the approximate count against the claim.
- s-t path bit.ly/2BV07XF. Noticed that when I use 16 lines from s and require that all pass through unique points, where the second and next to last levels have exactly 16 points, the code was too slow to pick good choices in reasonable time. Possibly the approach needs further refinement.
- Plotting temperature zones (using no external libraries) bit.ly/2BIADMI. Weather forecasts with moving zones served as an inspiration.
- A diagram showing the planned construction/improvement of Deutsche Bahn's rail tracks bit.ly/2U0arEu ↗ (Source: Spiegel)
- Beko BFTF2715SSIM refrigerator specifications bit.ly/2TZZNOi. The look does not adhere to reality, but it is a model with a top freezer and the numbers are real. Illustrates how we can visually "program" the specification and not only program according to a specification. In this case, SSIM does not mean structural similarity index.
- The latest collection of yarn for creative knitting bit.ly/2BKN7DF. Smooth and very soft, for some colorful clothing. The side has been picked for you in advance to save you time spent in exhaustive search. Fairly expensive material that gets thinner the more you use it, but hopefully you won't notice this before the sale. In packs/balls of 100g, shipping over Internet included.
- Ever wondered why taking the direct path felt so tiring? bit.ly/2BHUhZe
- Star, repetitive bit.ly/2U5H2bW
- Spiral with disturbances bit.ly/2BEw4TB
- Rotor swept area vs. rated power for some Vestas wind turbines bit.ly/2BI55Xj (Source: vestas.com)
- Photovoltaic energy production in buildings in Genoa, Italy bit.ly/2TSFemx. The data included values about capacity (kW), surface area (m2) and produced electricity (kWh/year). After normalizing the three, the third value was divided by the product of first two, sorting the results. "Piazza del Monastero 6" and "Via Serino 30" could eventually benefit from capacity expansion, yet further observations could help to verify this. Both places had small installed capacities and used areas, but their output was good relative to other locations.
- Library branches and visits in Barcelona, Spain (2010 - 2016) bit.ly/2BEZam0 (Source: Open Data BCN, "Visits to libraries in the city of Barcelona", bit.ly/2TW7Co9). The branches with the most visits were "Jaume Fuster", "Ignasi Iglésias - Can Fabra", "Sagrada Família" and "Vapor Vell".
- Libraries in Nova Scotia, Canada bit.ly/2TUVgN1. So many that the only useful thing would be to show the points. And one imaginary line.
- Provinces and territories in Canada bit.ly/2TSCOV6 (Source: Government of Canada, "Administrative boundaries in Canada - CanVec series - Administrative features", bit.ly/2TV6r8p). Not as beautiful as Google Maps and there may be some distortion in the proportions. Borrowed the colors from Wikipedia, suspecting some logic behind them.
- "Oh, wie nett ist Kanada" bit.ly/2TPTGMh. Enjoyed this two-page article a lot and the way the inner positivity of the author helped to shape it. Presents a useful way of seeing life from another perspective (kindness).
- Took a while in terms of time, but looked into the median CO2 emissions (in g/km, combined) by vehicle brand (and for some models) in the car park of Luxembourg bit.ly/2TS2GjW. Among the cars, which had values assigned, one Mercedes was said to emit 628g/km CO2 which was the maximal value found. Many of the most emitting cars on the list seem to be expensive sports cars from Pagani, Brabus, Maybach, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche, Dodge and lifestyle brands like Bentley, Rolls Royce, Lexus and others. The median vehicle was said to have 5.9m length (which seems a lot if correct), 2.26m width, 2.73m height, 4 cylinders, 96kW max net power, 1968cm3 and fuel consumption of 5.4l/100km. The top five car colors were said to be gray (147400), black (101112), white (95364), blue (57113) and red (41264). We can also compute the correlations between the maximum net power (kW) and CO2 emissions (g/km) (0.6220) and between engine capacity (cm3) and CO2 emissions (g/km) (0.7341), which enables us to see that higher engine capacities contribute to a greater extent to higher CO2 emissions. After learning this, we would like to sort by capacity and power (in that order) and look at the resulting CO2 emissions bit.ly/2BEZ1ig. Unfortunately, with so many powerful machines, not a single one in the top 30 list has its emissions specified, which looks as an important omission. The dataset owner (SNCA) can further improve the next version of the data, so that the intensity of pollution from such vehicles can be gauged relative to what has been found about sports cars. With so many vehicle class layers, each emitting more than the previous one, it is a wonder that this planet continues to breathe at all. Which is why I am grateful that Luxembourg at least does something good to improve transparency and hint about the extent to which some corporations may try to hide details from public view when this is in their best interest. The current state we live in often has a previous explanation.
- If you have a project I might be interested in, you could use the contact form to connect with me. And if you want to support future work without asking questions at all, donating an item on one of these short lists (a.co/08OuOgR (US), amzn.to/2BEGlPM (DE)) helps a lot as well
- Districts in Potsdam, Germany bit.ly/2BHEolC
- Roads and bike paths in Melbourne, Australia bit.ly/2BGdYAO. We notice a very good coverage with bike paths here as if someone carefully selected where they should pass through. This is likely only the central part of Melbourne as Google Maps draws a much wider boundary for the entire city.
- Ending the day on a weak note with a (third order) polynomial inbetween colorization test bit.ly/2TTtHUi
- Doing the work and shipping it is much better than having lengthy discussions around moving from front-end through back-end to no-end and back-again.
- A circular spinner suggests returning from where one started (inaccurate feedback). One full rotation, at most, is preferable over three or more. But the latter is what we perceive most often. A bystander of (bug-caused) infinite spinning would think that prolonged loading closely follows the same pattern. If possible, removing the doubts (by removing the spinner) often remains the best option.
- A dataset will never be a file with six numbers inside. Seeing this sufficiently often to secure a bit.
- I think that well-informed people can more easily distinguish good quality from bad when they see it, which is of great help in everyday life. People who are less informed, do not appreciate quality that much and tend to perceive something as a deal when its price is cheapest. Hence, a good way to choose informed clients, which better appreciate the kind of work we do, would be to ask them specific questions and observe their understanding of quality in terms of the things they require/expect and the issues they bring forward. Many of them believe they know well what constitutes great quality after they learned the opinion of a vocal group and accepted it without doubt as universal truth. Yet, sometimes even the majority can be wrong as often seen in a show where many people couldn't become millionaires, because they relied on public judgement, which mislead them to give wrong answers to specific questions. Reason enough to beware whom one trusts and to be sceptical of "experts" which walk in groups and use modern words to gain popularity and to "fit their mosaics" of mutual support (often at the expense of the less vocal minority).
- Very often cheap turns out to be expensive and expensive—cheap. If you anchor your mind to believe that a device, which is three times as expensive as the cheapest in the category, is a bad choice simply because of its price, you most likely won't notice alternatives which are up to five times more expensive compared to that. (Which means this device actually had below-average price within the category.) And this anchoring and early elimination of alternatives will find a way to shrink your quality of life as well. Always tell yourself that you deserve better.
- Metals sorted by melting temperature bit.ly/2BB4WoE. Many of these appear to melt between 1000℃ and 2000℃. If I remember correctly, tungsten (wolfram) was used in lightbulbs and tantalum in some capacitors. I wonder whether higher melting points can be associated with higher material cost.
- Announced salaries for some professions in New York bit.ly/2BPye3d. Good to see efforts to make salaries more transparent. Here are included only position titles with at least 8 announced job openings and a relatively high mean annual salaries. You may notice that executive directors and portfolio managers, for instance, receive much higher salaries, but there were also comparatively few openings for them, so they were not included in the diagram. But we still see that positions, which require some form of managerial skills, tend to have higher upsides. Despite not being among the highest, the salary of a "computer specialist (software)" still has a visible advantage over many other professions listed here. To be fair, I don't understand the difference between civil engineer 1, 2 and 3.
- Experts always have concrete payment criteria. Make sure you satisfy them or seek service elsewhere.
- Asked myself whether a relationship between operated kilometers and lost customer hours could exist after seeing the updated London underground performance report. Fitted two models on the data bit.ly/2TS48D1 (05.2011 - 02.2019), where the blue line is the RANSAC regressor, which is supposed to be robust against the outliers observed. It tells us that if a linear relationship exists, then increasing the operated kilometers tends to decrease the lost customer hours. Then (and only then), with each 2.245km added, one customer hour is saved. When we think about it, this seems somewhat intuitive: The more metro trips are made and the faster the vehicles move (more kms/month means faster average speed), the less passengers will have to wait to be served.
- Trying to suggest movement of an airfoil bit.ly/2TYDatD while using the symmetry to simplify the code.
- SVG flower field bit.ly/2TRG6YP. Each flower has been described with 8 parameters, all of which are random, but within carefully chosen constraints. At most 300 flowers can be seen at a time.
- SVG honeycomb bit.ly/2BOGlNt
- Forwards only bit.ly/2TQNuDO
- ∇∆∇∆ in functional frame bit.ly/2TRFiDj
- Perspective and shading bit.ly/2TQ6xOA. Beautiful functional art and subsequent shading of the closed shapes has always inspired me. Crayons, evolved.
- Under slightly more suspicious circumstances (involving that vacuole means "empty space" and chromosome means "colored body") I would probably assume that a cell means a "designer".
- Strange idea to describe the result in the (long) abstract. Probably increases visibility when everything else is hidden behind the paywall. Unable to understand the logic behind the structure, but thankful of the practice.
- I agree about the value of data, especially when it is used as a means for better understanding, decision making, gap analysis of the missing/unseen and improvement in all areas of life. Not when it is used as a weapon, for extortion, speech suppression, spreading of misinformation, discrimination, monopolization, suppression of competitor growth. Therefore "whoever has the most data will win" sounds like a misunderstanding. Improvement / contribution / uplifting matter most here. Data can be only as important as the meaning we load it with, so we have to ensure it's a positive one. Yet, real data is often a snapshot of the current state, where more of it is required to predict the future. This is very much living in the now and consistently reloading it to say what might be. A small disconnect from our nature—we are not actively doing anything to invent that future ourselves, but seek to focus on ascertainments. What if we considered expanding our creativity and imagination as a means to increase our productivity instead? These two not only live in the future, but they charge us to enlarge it. Data is finite and often siloed; imagination is infinite and abundant (in every human being). Anyone could imagine three simple cubes spinning in their head, but few can tell what would be if they were tensors waiting to be merged. Which do you think could scale our future better? Both, but we should forget speaking about impact, at least for a while.
- If a company gets 200 CVs/position, this is not necessarily good. They have to spend more time in the selection process and that would be difficult when everyone could easily claim to know 10 programming languages and speak another 4. Much better is to go after the right candidate out of conviction that the work they've done (alone, not "borrowing" work that others did) was good and would be a good fit for the company in whatever it does next. Someone put it very well: the offices of the future will have "brain" teams scouting the environment/entire world to hire even more brains. Another question is whether they themselves won't be scouted. Whether this scenario has already arrived, I will let you decide for yourself.
- Finally found the manufacturer of my chrome-based, tube-like desk lamp I bought in Germany many years ago. Good to see that MeliTec GmbH still exists. Didn't know much about the technology: 48LED lights * 0.1W = 4.8W, having a luminous flux of 400lm. 83.3lm/W is not too bad, considering the year it was made. It is placed on top of a high bookshelf (having few books actually) and used instead of the general lighting. Not sure about its CCT, CRI or R9, but it does help at night. Wished it had the ability to adjust the brightness level.
- The average price of 2.65€/ticket cannot explain why public transport in Germany is at many places overcrowded (as an article claims), while the average utilization in the country remained unchanged at 22%. This hints about extreme concentrations of people at few places. Many of them probably travel with monthly cards and the cost per trip there could be several times lower, which encourages additional trips. A card which costs 60€ and is used only twice a day * 30 days accounts for a cost per trip of 1€. Yet, the more one travels, the further this cost drops. To prevent overcrowding then, one could raise the prices of the cards at places where people travel at a much higher frequency and thus perceive the cards as relatively cheap. The right to travel doesn't give one the right to abuse a service just because it is easy to do so. And if one would go further to evaluate the economic value of each of the mentioned 10.4 billion trips, this would lead to some serious questions. Because it may indicate that many are mechanically traveling for the sake of traveling and arriving...
- Never understood how one has to browse a Java project that starts at directory depth level 8. Accessibility issue or an anti-pattern?
- Stops (and lines passing through them) in Stuttgart, Germany bit.ly/2BEr69I. Unfortunately, in the time allotted, I was not able to plot the lines only from the information through which stops they pass. Trying to infer the exact sequence gave me wrong results. In the lines file, VSS shows only start, middle and end stops for each line, but this is insufficient to construct an accurate picture.
- Better to start speaking about your problem earlier before it's too late. Noone own a magic wand with which they can influence quality of service or make it perfect. Because being late, highly-demanding and non-paying is the combination that almost certainly will get you a "No".
- "We need around 3x more ambient light for comfortable reading in our 60s compared to our 20s." Useful to know when everyone is destined to get old and deal with deteriorating eyesight. Also enjoyed the ideas about light ducts, "wall-washers", human centric lighting according to the circadian rhytm and photoelectric dimming where electric lights are gradually adjusted throughout the day relative to the available sunlight, keeping luminance constant. Also made a small diagram out of the Swiss standard about the recommended maximum power consumption in new lighting systems based on room and building type (in W/m2) bit.ly/2BBCD9E. The source is also in the diagram; if you have the time and look to improve your work environment or that of your colleagues, I highly recommend it.
- Simplified map of Cologne, Germany in case you ever need it bit.ly/2BB88kh. Always nice to see more city administrations helping tourists find their way. I remember being asked a lot of money to obtain a map about a city after arriving there for the first time. But such initiatives decrease the likelihood of speculation.
- Air temperature at different locations in Austria (14.02.2019) bit.ly/2TOoY6j. Started to pick up around 10:00. Until 13:00 the highest average temperature was in Mödling (7.42℃). Also nice to see the changes made at data.gv.at. It feels more responsive now and the zebra effect is a plus.
- If you hear someone telling you that they are "ten times better" than you, you should be asking yourself whether they are not speaking about hiding a 10x+ faster machine (than yours) in their basement. Because one day they will be writing all the "important" papers and explaining the rest of us how profound their findings were and how glad they were to achieve them in minimal time on a 100-core machine with terabyte of RAM. Sadly, neither the problem they worked on nor their approach or results were particularly impressing relative to utilized infrastructure capacity. In other words: computing power will never be able to buy you a brain.
- Perhaps 12-15 years ago I remember reading Chris Anderson's book '"Free", where the main idea (if I remember correctly) was that over time everything tends towards a price of zero. Had my doubts of course, especially after having paid 444€ for Nokia 6510 (now I don't own a mobile phone). But in some way I was almost shocked how logical the arguments appeared and decided to share them with few people to see what they think of them. They looked at me strange like "do you really trust this?" But the prices have fallen in many areas since then. The other day I saw another source, again citing Chris Anderson, but in another context. This time it was about science, where he must have said that "automated science" will make manual one obsolete. Once again I was doubting "How good can automated science be?", but then I looked around and saw a market, which doesn't find interest in my manual work/service offerings, which means it must know better. In all cases, it seems, this person is thinking so far ahead of the times that not listening is accompanied with direct consequences.
- "The average number of workers per firm increases logarithmically with city size." So the average salary decreases quadratically during intensive collaboration?
- Robotic arm ready to pick its own code bit.ly/2TOzYQS. With a bit more imagination, one could be animating joints soon.
- Another intresting equation I saw: force of infection = transmission rate * effective number of contacts per unit time * proportion of contacts infectious
- Radiation model to predict travel fluxes between two locations based on population distribution bit.ly/2Bua7H1
- Saw an image and assumed looking at a shielded cable made of multiple layers. But label below mentioned "human artery"... No doubt of the complexity of the system.
- Graphene is very thin, but can be ≈200x stronger than steel. Used in transistors, electronic memory and circuits, displays, solar cells, capacitors, batteries, coatings, sensors, advanced materials.
- Apart from the good sight under low-light conditions, features on owl wings have been found to enable "silent" flight (for easier hunting). The feathers were found to slide soundlessly in one another, while the wings produced 5-10dB less noise compared to those of other birds and were said to be able to adapt to the surrounding flow field. "The flight of owls is so faint that even the most sensitive microphones are at their limit." Led to some nature-inspired ventilation.
- Combined uncertainty looks beautiful bit.ly/2TNOIPY (Source: "Applied mathematics of space-time & space+time")
- "Those with extremely high levels of intelligence are more motivated to simply create something of lasting value to the world" bit.ly/2BzJLDt. Later asking themselves "what for", having regrets about unacknowledged time/effort and developing suicidal thoughts. This caught a useful string here, playing to which could end in a tune.
- Exploring horses bit.ly/2TJy3gt. Uses the Weizmann dataset as seen in "Combining top-down and bottom-up segmentation" by E. Borenstein, E. Sharon and S. Ullman.
- Wondered how many people use data to analyze their sport/jogging performance relative to the state of health/physical and environmental parameters. All may change often, yet they appear connected and probably can't be considered in isolation. A car without fuel can't go too far and one which is fully loaded still has to prove its aerodynamics against the wind. Which is why seeking great results to the detriment of health (or the exclusion of anything else) or neglecting preparation in the support of good physics may adversely affect the overall performance.
- Brain seeking to connect dots tells me: 1) if you stop consuming meat, you save on emissions, water usage and animal suffering, 2) stimulants/pollutants/feces/soil particles will have harder time touching your food, hence deadly microbes won't find a base for growth, 3) meat can be treated at high temperature to eliminate (most) microbes (which can last in us for a long time), but 4) doing so is said to release acrylamid which has been linked with cancer (for which the European Commission issued a special warning). Can temperature (and duration) then be optimized so that microbes get killed before acrylamid forms? Research on this would be nice. Also interesting to learn that natural food (fruits and vegetables) was expected to have more microbes than canned food (which was thermically treated). But once the container is open, it can still be mishandled, so they can still conquer it. Also wouldn't come to the idea that natural food has microbes partially due to our willingness to use "natural" fertilizer, often having animal feces as its component. Paired with improper composting, the crops grown, which reach the table effectively become microbe transmitters (which was said to kill more people than the use of chemicals, which I cannot validate). What would be "best practice" for ensuring all vegetarians eat safely?
- Someone said that in every crisis there is a good opportunity.
- Strange to see that we declared "war" on cancer in 1971, but ever since the number of deaths has only increased. A bitter surprise was to see a diagram showing faster growth rate for cancer than for the general population. Soon we'll have 50 years from that point. One of the longest wars humanity ever fought?
- "Would you like some chocolate?" Sounds good, but a quick check on the label shows polyurethane inside. Had to read this twice, in disbelief, since I associate this with a foam used in home isolation. Uhm, no, thanks.
- Sources of vitamin K-1 bit.ly/2BvSZ3E. Attempts to convince me to consume the basil next to my desk. Unfortunately, it's winter now and its leaves are clearly unhappy with the amount of sunshine and warmth. Would be nice to see it thrive first and until then, if needed, enjoy few of the dried leaves with a nice smell. Feeling strange that a second source (next to USDA, I believe) writes about its benefits. Sigh about the tightly p(ack/lant)ed terrasse-in-dream.
- The Independent wrote that the quest for more palm oil led to deforestation on Borneo (having one of the oldest rainforests in the world, see Wikipedia), which over a period of 16 years (1999-2015) costed the life of 100000 orangutans. Strange, because I saw it advertised as "cheap" oil. To be fair, sometimes it feels to me that we had all these magnificent animals until yesterday and then... (finger snap) they are gone. What happened, how, why—so fast I didn't even notice.
- If a paper tells you that many construction materials like cement, lime, steel, brick, aluminium are energy-intensive, how would you order these in decreasing order of such intensity without researching further?
- Choosing the correct site for a wind turbine also seems to require careful data analysis. Not every location receives optimal airflow, which may not allow the turbine to reach its rated power output; some sites are prone to high turbulence which causes fatigue, reducing both its output and lifespan.
- Looked into water quality lab results made available by the California Natural Resources Agency bit.ly/2TK1eAi. Specifically into variance as percentage of parameter value range, seeking which locations had high variability in which parameters. We see that conductance, dissolved chloride and total dissolved solids varied a lot at several locations bit.ly/2TFIOAs and if needed, we have the coordinates to plot them.
- Used data to compare different "Lay's" chips flavors bit.ly/2THqU0r. The median product is said to have ≈535kcal in 100g (max is 571.43kcal), which is slightly less than expected. But many flavors contain 35g fat per 100g chips and some give you over 1g sodium/1.3g potassium.
- Typed a city and looked around the markers to explore businesses available in the area (Google Maps). One marker belonged to a weapon store, which was the last thing I expected to see. Fully aware that weapons are legal in USA; fully unforgiving of any corporation/company having no ethical stance about promoting them in its products.
- Please stop flooding the market with new cars having MPG <= 20. In the latest fueleconomy report, there are so many different models meeting this criteria that it raises questions how prepared we'll be to reduce harmful emissions with tempo so as not to become endangered ourselves. The authors of the report have a small list of recommendations for drivers as well bit.ly/2THfNnU.
- Don't let das Rathaus become a rat house. (Saw one of these little things running around.)
- Switched Chrome theme from default GTK+ to Classic to see what will happen. Looks less pretty and new tabs no longer animate on open/close, but responsiveness is perhaps a tick better. Not aware whether anyone else felt the same.
- The imagery and data in big offline catalogues still provide opportunity for good online work.
- Counties in California, USA bit.ly/2BrA61U (Source: California Employment Development Department, "California Counties", bit.ly/2TIbeKc). Slightly daring, but I hope you'll like it. An improvement would be to use only four colors (every planar map is four-colorable). In case you want to center labels inside a polygon bit.ly/2TChoLH. This uses a single loop (instead of three) and has no functional dependencies.
- You can decrease my load averages and latencies by finding a good reason (and a well-paid project) to work with me. Cannot promise reduction of cognitive burden (here), but at least will take a look at accelerating your throughput.
- Small addition using the diagram from a couple of days ago: "Sample rail route passing through the top 5 cities with highest average salaries in Germany" bit.ly/2BvRkLn. Simplified, as the paths between two stations are rarely straight lines. Used red to hint about the primary color seen in the logo of Deutsche Bahn (DB).
- Libraries and parks in Tampa, Florida bit.ly/2TEBsNL. Interesting that many libraries lie outside the administrative boundaries of the city.
- Approximate locations of the librarieis in Corpus Christi, Texas bit.ly/2Bq161J
- Texas Deparment of Transportation (TxDOT) made state and many city maps freely available bit.ly/2Btorj4 ↗. Surprised to see very acceptable panning speed inside a high-detail PDF document (53.7MB) (on a single-core CPU).
- Abandoned and vacant housing in Indianapolis, Indiana (as of Jan 2018) bit.ly/2TGI7XG. Looks quite alive.
- One function at schools/universities that needs improving is the need to keep students informed about canteen/mensa menu plans. If students need to arrive at the place to see the menu, something is wrong. There may be already too many people waiting in line, which means that by the time one's turn comes, the next study block has started. Or one might exhaust their time budget by arriving there only to find a menu they dislike, now unable to look further. Improving awareness of the daily/weekly menu offers can prevent many people from staying hungry. This is not "nice-to-have", but a "common sense" function of an educational institution. Not meeting this demand sends the message "we don't care", where a simple app or website with a regularly updated (daily/weekly) menu could have helped a lot. Some places already have that.
- Streets and street trees in Charleston, South Carolina bit.ly/2BpUyjI (Source: City of Charleston Open Data). Which is why I liked the idea of having the trees planted between the road lanes.
- You'll get the Abwrackprämie. But only if you could climb to get it first bit.ly/2TyRhW6 ↗
- Sometimes the shortest path has the widest holes. Few things are as one-dimensional as they seem.
- Tried to learn about car tires from the valuable information and ratings provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Especially enjoyed how when one clicks on a tire model, they show what the individual numbers in its description mean. For instance "P215/65R15 89H M+S" means that the tire is passenger type (P), has 215mm width (larger numbers describe wider tires), height-to-width aspect ratio of 65 (height = 0.65*width) (lower may be better), is a radial tire (R, typical), has 15 inches wheel/rim diameter, 89 load index (higher carries more weight), has a speed rating H and a mud and snow (M+S) capability. All this information enables fairly interesting interactive demos. But I looked into tire ratings assigned to models made by Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear and Continental. The script I ran found these models especially interesting bit.ly/2TD6CoG (loon on the left side). For some reason it assigned higher importance to the difference in traction grades between "AA" and "A" compared to a treadwear difference of 380 (as indicated at the end). But overall, the combined characteristics look fairly similar with scores of 2.5384 for the first model, 2.5128 (all shown with treadwear rating of 500) and 2.5 for the last shown (64th of 629). We see that the series Continental ContiProContact is overly present here. Yet, if someone could live with slightly worse traction capability, but prefers to have up to 76% more longevity, they may still choose Bridgestone ECOPIA EP150, having the highest treadwear rating on this limited list (four manufacturers only). Further, 255/40R19 and 265/40R20 look impressive here. Which is why on a second thought, we might want to incorporate the tire dimensions in the overall ranking, seeking models with long width, short height and long radius. Now, in addition to three relatively high ratings we also find tires with favorable dimensions. This time scores vary in 3.9794-4.7717, but again we see no reason to be satisfied: The introduction of 3 more features has made the 3 existing ones lose some of their previous importance. So we can merge the three new into one we call "dimensions", weighted by a factor of 1/3, which we stack horizontally next to the old three, arriving at this result bit.ly/2Tzhx2M. Normalizing the scores of the shown models, we see them vary in 0.9095-1.0000. The two models we noticed previously have found a way to appear much higher on the list.
- Vacant buildings in Baltimore, Maryland bit.ly/2TBf08c. Said to be last updated 3 days ago.
- Some crime cases for the most common offense categories in Orlando, Florida (01.01.2010 - 31.12.2017) bit.ly/2BnVFjO. The city boundary surprises as if belonging to two separate cities. If we plot the streets only, we see higher density in the upper region, which is also where most crimes were registered. That the colors appear slightly desaturated is misleading—there were lots of cases within this seven-year period. Interesting is also to observe to what extent the thinnest connection between the two regions (upper and lower) serves to encourage crime. If you don't know the difference between theft, robbery and burglary, some good sources on the web may help you find out more.
- Visitors of the library branches in Palo Alto, California (2000 - 2016) bit.ly/2BpqaG1. Looking at the total number on an imaginary line between the highest and the last values, we see a slight downwards trend. But 2017 and 2018 might have reversed it.
- Machine trying to protect me from making myself illusions bit.ly/2TIBV1a
- Removing a style declaration has to influence the look of the page or affect its usability in some way. Was this property even needed? Attempting to eliminate properties that persist, but get overwritten (also with !important) is also a good practice. After seeing several websites with high number of overwritten rules, it calls to raise awareness about this issue once again.
- Like how the numbers highlighting the features of this bike switch to a "X" after being clicked to reveal more info bit.ly/2BoNpQy (scroll down to see "highlights")
- Saw a photo from an aquarium in Dallas. Featured an electric eel with a yellow "high-voltage" warning sign in close proximity. Renewable energy took animal forms.
- Specialty pizza calories bit.ly/2BqRPGq. A female at age 35, who is moderately active and has the need of ≈2000calories/day bit.ly/2BoiELw and decides to eat the "3-meat-treat" would exceed the recommended daily calorie intake by 68.5%. From a single pizza in a single meal for the day.
- Using this data we can compare whether there is a difference between the geographical center of all states and the center of proximity to highest average salaries bit.ly/2TycOOE
- Average salaries in German states (01.02.2019) bit.ly/2BrfM0p (Source: gehalt.de). Looks very good on paper, but the reality might be different.
- With my non-existing French, the translator and some time, only this limited view: "Bicycle and green network of Toulouse Métropole, France (14.02.2015)"" bit.ly/2BxLMAf. Hoping to see much less fragmentation in the most recent plan after it is made available.
- 1) Invest billions for each of hundred questionable companies 2) Explain that everyone has an obligation in excess of several hundred billions to fix the infrastructure, which is "falling apart" (airports, dams, bridges, roads, energy transport, water/gas pipes, water purification plants, ...) and hasn't been fixed since year yyyy.
- Does someone know why the excerpt of "Practical analysis in one variable" by Donald Estep on Google Books is cut so badly? bit.ly/2TzUuEW
- An attempt to find structure in a QR code bit.ly/2BlkFrZ
- Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) from different sources (08.11.2018) bit.ly/2TwtKoQ. "Wind and solar have become the fastest growing sources of new power generation globally" - Bruce Usher in "Renewable energy: A primer for the twenty-first century". Both appear to have low LCOEs.
- Never heard of the Irish chain Supermac's, but they have a nice table bit.ly/2TxFuYe. Can you imagine creating something useful out of it?
- Libraries and loans in Montreal, Canada (2012 - 2017) bit.ly/2BiocXQ. In 2013, "L'Octogone" (the south-most branch if the coordinates were correct) had the most loans, but in 2017, branches like "Ahuntsic", "Du Boisé" and "Marc-Favreau" have seen higher number of loaned materials. (We could probably think of this as intensity of provoked interest as a result of intelligent stock pre-selection.) The second diagram for the loans per quadrat meter-hour considers the library areas and their weekly (yearly would have been preferable here) opening hours. According to it, the "Rosemont" branch has demonstrated great performance.
- Parks and park land toilets in Adelaide, South Australia bit.ly/2TxeR5t. Some parks seem to have extended names, which may be for historic reasons. But the park arrangement looks interesting.
- Bike routes in Adelaide City Council area (22.05.2014) bit.ly/2Tw0U7Q. Perhaps you know better how the current network looks like.
- Near Meningie, SA they found good potential for potato growing (the light blue zone). Australia is perhaps among the few countries I've seen, which have extensive soil map with property analysis, classification and growth potential per crop type.
- Climate zones in South Australia bit.ly/2BmILm1. Wouldn't come at the idea that at this small territory noticeable climate differences could exist.
- Traffic incidents in South Australia and Adelaide only (2012 - 2017) bit.ly/2BliNPI
- Slightly better than yesterday when the work on the parks caused cursor speed to approach 5fps... The processor barely coped with the file size and the typing speed. Here "Intel inside" can be both a reason to laugh or cry, depending on how you see it.
- An attempt to show the approximate city populations in Thailand and the Phillippines bit.ly/2TCwO2w.The common theme is the high concentration of people in a single region. The point scales are slightly different. Since most cities in Thailand were very small, their point size was increased to make them more noticeable. Some of the labels may refer to provinces, not just to cities.
- Trees and streets in Seattle, Washington bit.ly/2TuYqqu. You can also see the most common tree types with more than 1000 exemplars bit.ly/2TpITZ6 (Source: data.seattle.gov, SDOT, bit.ly/2BkobCP and bit.ly/2TqJEkl)
- Realized that plotting park bench locations over park polygons allows one to identify places where resting is made unnecessarily difficult (relative to the expected stream of passersby), so that adding benches at the right positions can be appreciated by tourists, tired sportists and elderly people.
- AI helped to reduce congestion in Hangzhou, China cnn.it/2TrsMtS. Good that regular drivers are already noticing the positives.
- If you have many items on sale, the cost of a website will be less expensive relative to the revenue you could get by increasing the number of sales and the average sale price. If you have only few items in a saturated market with lots of competition, a website may not be the right answer for you. You may achieve better results by serving people directly and relying on word of mouth, at least initially. And as long as you are comfortable having random clients recommend you (I am not). The more expensive items you sell and the more often, the less you will notice the price of the online presence. The importance of a solid, business-oriented website grows proportionally to the value of the items being sold. Car and machine makers, computer and chip manufacturers, real estate sellers, tourist agents, watch/jewelry makers, hotel room providers, event organizers, even bike sellers can get a lot of value from it. Yet, many of them still do not realize that their websites can be improved, where they have developed unwillingness to argue with the response of the market, accepting the status quo. If a car maker doesn't care about having a dysfunctional website, what does this tell about the value of their brand? Don't make it a dollar brand before you even know it.
- Boundary, streets and parks in Minneapolis, Minnesota bit.ly/2Tv4y1V. For some reason three of the biggest parks (only one is shown here) are located outside the city boundaries. Took some time to compute, but looks nice.
- A fruit and vegetable bag bit.ly/2TtvIGp ↗
- Looking at the interior of a dining place (photo), I like the creativity that went into the design of the seats. Someone realized that people sitting at two nearby tables could be oriented with the backs to each other, so instead of using material for two seats ㇘㇗, it could be enough to use one extra wide bottom and one divider for a ⊥. This way, only two pieces (compared to four) and half as much material for the backrests are used.
- A dollar store could use something better than a dollar site. The challenge is to determine what to include, since the benefit of selling a cheap item may be offset by the time needed to take a photo of it, set and update the price, keep descriptions accurate etc. All of this is much more than a dollar of effort. Useful items to include would have been cheap materials for creative ideas, yet these were hard to find.
- Wondered about the weight of an Instant Pot, assuming the need to periodically rinse it under water. If it's too heavy for the average woman, then it may not be that useful. Saw it yesterday at ≈150$, while current Walmart ad has it for 98$ in limited quantity. Liked that the availability of WiFi allowed the cooking process to be controlled from a distance by a smartphone app. Unclear whether this is valid only within the home network or allows remote cooking from a distance of several hundred kilometers, when a flight is scheduled to arrive soon.
- One noticeable positive on the websites of many supermarket stores located in New York is that they have several free, easily accessible recipes with tasty-looking photos. Simple idea, universally useful, easy to implement, yet mysterious why so few other chains elsewhere find interest in it. Especially when it can boost ingredient sales and raise people's satisfaction for being able to put something special on their table.
- Would you keep an item that is beautiful, but has no use or an item that is ugly, but very useful? If you can assign weights to what matters to you most and values to eacn item you have, you might be able to find which things are worth eliminating from your life before they start owning you. Having few items of great value is often preferable over having hundreds of useless ones that rarely get your attention.
- Libraries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania bit.ly/2Tu1iUv
- Some traffic hazards and crash incidents in Austin, Texas (26.09.2017 - 02.02.2019) bit.ly/2TA4U7i
- Found the reason behind the strange feeling associated with hex color #777777 (grey). If only the web design casino could make rich.
- World clocks bit.ly/2BieZyW. Finding the right one could become challenging...
- Liked the design of the page about the parks in Ontario (115) bit.ly/2Tu7RX2 and the care that went to present each of the 81 park features with separate SVG icons (their logo also looks good). To increase understanding of what the parks offer relative to each other, a single, unifying diagram with all parks and features was created bit.ly/2Bf9EZ0. The first thing we see is that many parks offer fishing, hiking, swimming, canoeing and/or biking. You can see the details yourself to identify any interesting parks you might want to visit in the future.
- A slim vase is one that despite being very thin at the middle still manages to contain (and balance) all the flowerheads at the top. Have a nice weekend!
- Ran a small script on basic Tumi carry-on luggage specs. Among the 39 travel pieces with listed price (£), dimensions (cm x 3), weight (kg) and volume (l), it recommended me "International Carry-On" (£595) (small and lightweight), followed by "Extended Trip Expandable Packing Case" (£545), "Worldwide Trip Packing Case" (£745), "Extended Trip Packing Case" (£695) and "Short Trip Expandable Packing Case" (£495).
- Relationship between streets and streetlights in Los Angeles bit.ly/2BecDBc (Source: data.lacity.org, "Street Centerlines", bit.ly/2BfZojr and "Streetlight locations", bit.ly/2TrK8H8). The idea was simple: Place the streetlights next to the streets and observe which street segments have lower density of lights. The result is not perfect, but may serve as orientation. The darker brown color shows the streets, the light orange are the lights. Both datasets seem to be current, so this may show which regions could use more illumination. Very happy that the hardware constraints were not sufficient to make this impossible.
- Leaning about Chipotle food ingredients and their calories bit.ly/2TneHgV. Added all possible data stuff to my tortilla, burrito, taco etc. to learn any secrets of the nutrition calculator. According to the diagram, some foods, which are easy to see, are less similar to others. This may be good or bad depending on the viewpoint. Some ingredients appear twice as they have been offered in different contexts (for instance with tortilla, burrito or else) or serving sizes. Both the apple juice and the organic milk have relatively large serving sizes of 6.75oz and are said to hide only 90-100 calories. In 4oz(113g) the Chorizo has 300 calories and relatively high amount of sodium. But the bottom right of the diagram is probably the most interesting. Here large serving sizes came close together as indicated by the labels. Many of these foods contain lots of calories (also from fat) and by looking more closely, we see that chips is a very common theme among them.
- So many room features in this hotel bit.ly/2Bih9yp. Beautiful and inviting photos. Also the "ultra-fast Internet" box on the left looks fairly convincing.
- Trees with more than 1000 exemplars in Frankfurt/Main, Germany bit.ly/2Bh5lfN. Preserved the German labels instead of the Latin ones.
- Average cost dedicated per attribute in the "Camden Better Homes Mechanical and Electrical Program" bit.ly/2Tp3iNH. Always nice to see programs aimed at improving quality of life for many people. This one seems to aim at improving heating in the listed wards (especially in "Gospel Oak", "Regents Park" and "Kentish Town") and the availability of lifts in wards like "Hampstead Town" and some others. Although costs for water services and tanks are also planned, their absolute values tend to be much smaller. This data is only temporary and subject to change.
- Daily meteorological parameters at the Luxembourg/Findel airport (01.01.1947 - 31.01.2019) bit.ly/2TqgYbx
- Daily (likely mean) PM2.5 air pollution in Luxembourg (01.01.2014 - 17.12.2018) bit.ly/2BcvbBO
- Parks in Oklahoma County bit.ly/2Bf36tD
- An attempt to estimate how many liters of water are used each year in the car wash industry in USA bit.ly/2TnCY6M. The number is hard to imagine. While the intuition that these services use lots of water seems correct, it is also true that cars are washed much less frequently than we take showers, for instance. The number of people also exceeds the number of cars, where not all vehicles are well-maintained. But if everyone (325.7 million people) took a shower (using 80l on average) every 5 days during the year, the total amount of water used would be 4.54x higher than this level.
- Quick frame-based animation of a plotting process bit.ly/2Tpr7oK using this idea bit.ly/2Tr1TX2. The frame-inbetween delay was set to 16ms instead of 120ms. Using this approach to animate the 815 points related to the previously shown relative sizes of the cities in Japan (in terms of population) forced me to manually restart the machine after more than 2 hours of computation. Does not seem to scale well.
- Saying that you run Raspberry Pi at home is much less impressive than saying that you run your threadmill at one gigahertz.
- Also interesting and useful, from the same source is "Kompostfibel: richtig kompostieren—Tipps und Hinweise". First time seeing so many details about composting in a single, freely accessible document.
- Remember that if you want me to learn new things (and share them with you), apply new methods faster, write more bits/articles, write more useful code/execute it faster, apply new approaches, methods, have more time to think critically through issues I see, you could contribute by working directly with me (best) or you could do anything to accelerate the slow technology currently in use to support the results you see. If you have no time for the first, I could still appreciate a small technological gift, which saves me a lot of time and eventually enables me to expand service to a greater audience.
- Enjoyed "Bodenschützen leicht gemacht" (vom Umweltbundesamt) and learned many new things/tips. Recommending it in case you understand German well and are interested in the preservation of soil. Particularly nice to read about the ways to attract bees: by sowing one of Phacelia, clover or yellow mustard (produce nectar and pollen). Peat in soil was undesired (avoid), but said to be reality in many commercial products on the market. Using natural compost is a way to avoid/reduce the usage of mineral fertilizers. ≈13million tons (out of ≈300 million, or 4.33%) of plastic are said to reach the oceans every year (fine particle emission). Glyphosat (used as weed killer) has already been noticed in human urine. Plastic bags found inside biowaste, which were not taken out on time, were then found in fertilizers, spreading fine particles in the ground. But also ash was said to have no place in the biowaste. Salts used on snow in winter are harmful to the soil (sand as alternative). Car-wash installations using cleaning agents and pollutants, which were not properly recycled, are an additional burden on the environment. 82kg food per person-year has been said to be thrown away in Germany.
- Still haven't seen a recipe where the ingredients were themselves images, placed next to/below the final product. Perhaps no two ingredients or preparation methods are the same, which is why even perfectly followed instructions may not lead to the same result. But showing the input makes the result more natural and believable.
- Took a brief look at the Bradford City Council's fleet and the MPGs with which they indicated the various models. Considering the median values for each make and model and eliminating motorcycles, busses, vans, trucks and machines, it appears that among the cars "Volvo V50 1.6D S Estate" had the highest median (47.41, single unit), followed by "Ford Fiesta Edge 1.4 TDCI" (45.01, single unit) and "Toyota Auris Petrol Hybrid" (44.00, two units). It was strange (could be a mistake) to see one "Dacia Sandero Ambience 1.2" with an MPG of 91. Yet, the median for that model was 35.87 (but is more accurate among the 29 units).
- Was also possible to see which hours of the day were associated with the highest bike activity at Erhardt.
- Monthly climate conditions in Munich, Germany (01.01.2000 - 01.08.2018) bit.ly/2TlF2Mz. Median monthly sunshine duration for the entire period comes at 156 hours out of ≈720h/month. Yet, this may not be the same as "sunshine hours" which sum in relation to sun intensity (which is a more useful metric). Some people may find the humidity levels slightly uncomfortable.
- Bike counts every 15 minutes at 6 locations (x2 directions each) in Munich, Germany (2017 - 2018) bit.ly/2TnLFho (Source: Referat für Stadtplanung und Bauordnung Мünchen, "Daten der Raddauerzählstellen", bit.ly/2Bdehmj). I've set a hard limit of 300bikes/15min per direction to clearly see what was happening. (In a single case Olympia registered a lot more than 300 bikes, but this spike is only partially shown). Most locations (with the exception of Arnulf) registered more bikes in direction 2 (whatever it means). We see that overall Erhardt registered the most bikes, while Kreuther—the least. Margareten had a very similar profile to Hirsch, perhaps having only slightly higher usage. Olympia showed the most variability, where many cyclists seemed to prefer July, August and September. Not that at all six locations we see a little gap in March 2018, which could have been due to bad weather, sensor maintenance or something else.
- Sad to see a reportage about people working for a national observatory, which have to starve and live in unbearable conditions. Hardly imaginable and truly affecting.
- Total number of alcohol-, escape- and traffic accidents in Munich, Germany (2000 - 2017) bit.ly/2TjWhha (Source: Statistisches Amt München, "Monatszahlen Verkehrsunfälle", bit.ly/2B9uPMg). The good news is that the accidents due to alcohol are comparatively few (1.2-2.2% of the total traffic accidents). But the accidents connected with escape from the scene are ≈25% of all traffic accidents, which raises some tough questions.
- Total number of passengers divided by total number of takeoffs and landings in Munich, Germany (01.01.2000 - 01.09.2018) bit.ly/2Ti48Mo. Nice to see a 2.1x improvement over 18 years (the last known monthly value relative to the lowest one in 2002).
- Cities in Japan by population bit.ly/2TrOIoZ. Blues indicate smaller cities, red—bigger ones. What I found interesting is that one could almost draw a horizontal line to connect many of the bigger ones. Does this speak to your experience?
- Time-to-frostbite under different temperatures and wind speeds bit.ly/2BkNLI3. Tried to connect the dots corresponding to the different time periods (from very limited data seen in a video) and it somehow feels that the lines increase in frequency and curvature towards the top right. This probably means (hypothesis) that in the case of more extreme weather, smaller changes in temperature or wind speed can have greater impact.
- A couple of lines for the average image size (in pixels) on a page bit.ly/2ThCzT7. Slightly disappointed that [w, h] += [wi, hi] doesn't work here. You could also find the total number of pixels if you wish to get scared of what is being served on the page. I was concerned that only images with specified "width" and "height" attributes may show up, but Chrome is sufficiently clever to return the right values even when these were not specified by the designers, which is nice. Small note: using 1 x 1px spacers seems old-fashioned in 2019.
- Interesting bits from the article "A new golden age for computer architecture" in CACM: "memory accesses have become much more costly than arithmetic operations", "accessing a single block in a 32kB cache takes ≈200x more energy than a 32-bit integer add", "off-chip DRAM accesses require ≈10x the energy of the last-level cache access". You would probably agree that the cited compiled-to-interpreted language performance difference of 62000x (or 100-1000x in more general cases) far exceeds the 100x factor seen in some books. But anyone who did some quick experiments probably intuitively felt this.
- Would have been nice if we had a single device which acts as: a thermostat, humidistat, air purifier/conditioner, intrusion/fire/smoke/noise/good morning alarm, light intensity/ventillation controller, door/window/blinds controller, appliance function timer, overvoltage protector, WiFi 6 router. For the things we often can't see or think about, but take for granted. "Yellow cheese" walls made me think about this.
- Can't trust big company X which feels the need "to rely on the better infrastructure" of big company Y, to (share and) store their user data in the cloud. It's like a lightning strike to their existing users.
- Came to an article about the most eco-friendly cars according to the ADAC Ecotest 2018. Made a small diagram using the results bit.ly/2TkQNTi, but remaining sceptical about them. And it's relatively easy to see why.
- Also in this week: No pay—no say.
- The wave height (m) contributes more than the wave period (s) in the overall wave power density bit.ly/2Ti8vqG. That longer wave periods increase this power density (instead of decreasing it) seems somewhat counterintuitive.
- Average global horizontal irradiance (GHI) in various cities in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (2015 - 2017) bit.ly/2B581x9. Due to overlaps, some smaller cities were not shown. Plymouth and Cardiff seem well-separated over the three years. The paper also contains a beautiful yearly GHI intensity map, which is worth seeing.
- 18.46% of all service requests in Miami (02.01.2013 - 26.01.2019) are connected with a damaged garbage container and at least 34.65% have something to do with garbage (illegal dumping, missed garbage or stolen containers) (Source: "City of Miami service requests", bit.ly/2B5o9yE). Good to see so many people caring about cleanliness and clean beaches bit.ly/2Tgx3Ar.
- Clustering the libraries in Florida bit.ly/2TgMKHT
- "The system was so overdesigned that the engineers probably thought it will never fail" bit.ly/2B5yL0m
- Currently in the process of going through newspaper clippings from around 2000-2002 containing URL address and descriptions of their content. As you can imagine, many of the links no longer work, but there are some gems too, like Hermitage's virtual website or the list of parks by the National Parks Conservation Association bit.ly/2ThXCoG. Update: They ended in the recycle bin as most were not very useful.
- "One million people annually fracture a hip or vertebra due to osteoporosis." Exceeds the expected and also true that older people seem to be more affected by it. It is said that bone loss can be preventively reduced by excercise. Yet most people don't excercise at all and once having a vertebra fracture, they see relief from the back pain coming only from lying in horizontal position. Strangely, even walks can increase the back pain. And those with fracture and no will to excercise/move would be even more susceptible to further bone loss and hence more fractures...
- Difficult to be a fan of expensive coworking spaces or conferences that make one feel relatively comfortable in a well-controlled environment. The organizers have to pursue their own goals, backed by rents and tickets. I believe that ideas should have the chance to be born at unexpected places, with unexpected people at unexpected times. Even on a walk-talk in the park (especially so). The last is free and much more accessible to everyone. Still not seeing many apps announcing web conferences in the park and on the move.
- Don't know why whenever I click on a bike to learn more about it, I see its image and a message box on top (and center) of it saying "14 people are looking at this right now". Hardly seeing the bike, but the interest. Anyway, my question is not related to interfaces. Noticed that different bikes had different number of spokes in their wheels, so I wondered whether there is a way to determine their optimal number when the goals of having lighter wheels and better aerodynamic behavior appear to be conflicting. In other words, when is the weight of one additional spoke justified? Should both wheels have the same number or is it beneficial to let the one have more spokes than the other?
- The cider with lime and mint has a great, radiative, yellow-green, inviting color. Hesitated, but a quick look at the ingredients listed 13 E-values (fully utilized counting skills). Possible record among the items seen so far. A reminder to always seek how things were made and not just rely on beautiful looks. Software can also be made to impress with great design and robust operation while being a consistent mess in the background or supporting ethically questionable practices.
- You visit a friend to see their new washing machine. After discussing the supported programs/functionalities, the conversation moves to "what it eats for breakfast". You notice that your friend has two tubes, partially full with liquid washing powder. On the back of the one is written "4l", where the recommendation is to use 110ml on a single wash (moderately dirty clothing) and the other is indicated as 2.6l, where it is recommended to use 90ml/wash. You also learn that on a scale 1-5, your friend rates the first tube with 4.5 stars and the second with 4 stars. They cost 7.50 and 5.40 accordingly. You sense that it might be possible to find out which of the two is cheaper per unit wash and whether this is sufficient to favor one over another bit.ly/2TnmefG. We see that the second type of liquid powder is slightly cheaper per wash, yet the relatively rough "resolution" of the star rating (and the difference of 0.5 stars) do not make it possible for it to receive a higher happiness/wash_price score.
- With ceiling lights (LED discs) it is easy to overestimate how many are needed, especially when one has no clue about potential brightness/efficacy in advance. This may lead to the assumption "the more, the better" until one realizes that the place has become very bright, potentially harming all eyes. If during the day the lights are on and overwhelm a strong daylight from the outside, near the window, then this may indicate a problem. Selecting the minimal number of lights for the specific room and spacing them evenly to prevent strong wave overlaps is an effort worth making in advance. Your eyes will thank you.
- Each bit can be seen as an engagement in the exploration of a selected alternative. Not all will be terrific choices, but in their entirety they hint about the individual and its background, ways of thinking, beliefs and physical context. In the presence of better alternatives, all of these can be changed.
- A personal takeaway from the excerpt of the book "Smart choices" is to always ensure sufficient number of alternatives, spend modest effort to reveal new/better ones, create imaginary to challenge the real ones, not fall back to default ones. To finish: "Alternatives are the raw material of decision making" and "your decision can't be better than the best alternative you created". Looks like an important book (if we consider the alternatives).
- If a client cannot recognize the effort that will be invested in their project and are unable/unwilling to compensate for it properly, there is no reason for a designer/developer to cultivate and keep interest in their problem.
- A book on renewable energy gave the cost of electricity generated by a solar installation as ≈0.21$/kWh. The author claimed that predicting the future energy price (after 25 years) is impossible and that even at that rate people would be willing to invest in their future. But this seemed a lot to me and I didn't quite like this motivation for further action. After plugging in manually collected data, the estimate became even worse than expected: ≈0.32$/kWh. Could we then conclude that operating a solar installation is not feasible at all and if so why would so many people step to it anyway? Looking from a slightly different perspective today led me to another result bit.ly/2B715Q6, which looks slightly more believable to me. Another mistake? Not to forget that producing much more electricity than one can consume is a form of waste in itself...
- Thermal conductivity at 25℃ of some materials bit.ly/2B1PZMg. Removed gases which tended to have the lowest values and also metals, which had very high values, skewing the diagram. Diamond, silver, copper and gold had the highest values of 1000, 429, 401 and 310W/mK accordingly. Here only thermal conductivity in the range 0 - 3W/mK is shown. Note, that whenever a range of values was given, averages were taken. The next time you see a blanket made of 100% polyethylene and you wonder how well it keeps warmth, you can refer to the data, where the thermal conductivity of this material is said to be 0.33W/mK.
- Bipartite graph of popular subjects and locations to study them in Germany bit.ly/2B3ZIBx. Only subjects which were offered at least twice were included (and only locations which offered at least one of these subjects). Still quite unreadable, but beautiful in its own way. Here are some possible locations if you wanted to specialize in data science bit.ly/2T85eKh, all things web bit.ly/2T8qjUV or applied mathematics bit.ly/2B3I1Ci. It is also possible to make the bipartite graph interactive (using SVG and JavaScript) by highlighting the available specialties after hovering a university name or by highlighting universities after hovering a subject. Thankful to Hochschulkompass for providing this information to everyone.
- Pedestrian and bike crashes by severity in St. Paul, Minnesota (01.01.2016 - 12.10.2018) bit.ly/2ThbFe4
- Changes in total funded (green), total overnight (blue) and total capacity (red) places across all shelters for some cities in Alberta, Canada (01.04.2003 - 31.12.2018) bit.ly/2AYiH0y. Shows how Calgary has almost 3-4 times as many funded shelter places compared to the city of Edmonton. However, a positive development in Calgary is that the number of shelter admittances on each day (overnight category) is decreasing over time. This number slightly increased in Edmonton more recently, but the number of funded places still seems to cover the needs. In Grande Prairie the situation looks slightly more problematic—shelter admittances have exceeded the total capacity of all shelters.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?) 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. 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)
- 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 (D