- "...and if you can afford to wait, electronics usually becomes 27% cheaper on 27th of December" (Adobe Analytics). Interesting numeric coincidence, but this is still unlikely to make it interesting for me. Can't be penny-wise to invest my time in writing cheap software and then be pound-foolish on hardware. Better to wait until 3th of January for discounted "Nürnberger Lebkuchen" instead. Much more affordable, despite the fact that people may look strange as if I came a couple of days too late. Of course, not getting the fast hardware means reduced software output and reduced intellectual input/curiosity, but the coin always has two sides.
- Each app must have only a single main() method bit.ly/2XmPXbr. Wait, by pigeonhole principle, assuming complete execution of all statements, this rule wouldn't hold.
- Average price ($) by meal type at different "Sarabeth's" locations in New York (16.11.2019) bit.ly/2Ks2s0l. Required a numeric brunch on my side. The alignment was perfect for "Central Park South" (probably your choice as well). Only "Upper East Side" had late brunch, which made coloration less meaningful.
- When someone clicks on your breakfast, lunch and dinner menus and and each time this downloads a file like "7b09bb_aa69c3316304456495d4448a9ff6ae51.pdf" on their machine, how would they know which file belongs to which menu? What if they had more "unnamed" files in that directory? A good designer would never leave the labels to chance. And if you wonder, here is a possible naming scheme: "lunch_menu_at_{name of eatery}_on_{date}.pdf".
- If you are on a slow machne using Google Maps, pan the screen a bit and note how this feels. Then switch from "Map" to "Terrain" (main menu) and try the same.
- Taco, nacho, churo, burrito, empanada, enchilada, queso, quesadilla, guacamole? Would have a trouble at such place.
- Hitachi has a microscope with 3000000x magnification bit.ly/2Og1TaT ↗
- Found a table in another paper from an open journal and thought of making an interactive demo (select menu highlighting a point on a map). But then recognized from past experience that such effort isn't minor and that it rarely pays off. Therefore, you can directly see what it is about—the administrative centers of various provinces in China bit.ly/2XjYGLJ. Certain that the details wouldn't fit in my memory, so having such reference is nice. Update: Made a non-interactive map instead (much faster) of the cities with population over a million, which are also administrative centers (information from table) bit.ly/2qmH6dZ. Unfortunately, it's a lot of information on a tiny screen area, so it's not very readable. Was also thinking of the fictive lines formed between Beijing/Tianjin - Wuhan - Guangzhou/Dongguan/Shenzhen and Shanghai - Wuhan - Chengdu/Chongqing. This means that Wuhan has geographically convenient location, allowing relatively fast access to any of these cities (but perhaps only in the presence of fast transport lines). If you notice any mistakes, feel free to correct me.
- "To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient soutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection." - Henri Poincaré. "Economy of thought and economy of effort... is a source of beauty as well as a practical advantage."
- Thought that the main use of mulching was to keep pests away. But a paper had a lot to teach me. It protects the soil from direct sunlight, water evaporation and erosion. It preserves temperature (insulates against heat & cold) and humidity (saving water), improves aeration and nutrient availability (by lowering soil pH), slowly dissolves to increase the available nutrients. Useful in dry areas; recommended depth of 4-8cm. Sounds interesting.
- Facts and figures about the Port of Zeebrugge bit.ly/2CIPBm6 ↗. Nice that these aren't pure numbers only, but combined with thoughtful visualization.
- Few details about port operations I didn't know: 75-80% of exchanged goods volume happens by sea; many ports have problems with dredged sediments; port cranes picking containers can use a lot of electricity (six cranes were said to use 12000-13000kW/s, incurring costs of 180.27€/s). Yes, per second. Another paper mentioned a max. allowed peak consumption of 80000kWh at container terminals (influenced by reefers). Disruptions in the work of the ports in Bremerhaven and Rotterdam were estimated by another paper to cost 771.5 million dollars/week and 682.2 million dollars/week respectively. The larger the ships (for improved economies of scale), the smaller the number of ports able to handle them (need for infrastructure modernization).
- If you went for the cheap solution previously, perhaps you are trying to correct your mistake on Freelancer now.
- Without a great project proposal, you had the opportunity to do the work yourself. Hope you enjoyed the time.
- Is it possible to identify the type of tree which has been cut from its trunk texture? Or its importance for the forest from the maintained trunk humidity?
- Classification of heartbeats from an ECG (electrocardiogram) seems to be an interesting use of data analysis. Could this identify starting signs of arrhytmia?
- Interesting idea: creating a choropleth with regions colored according to the number of times people have searched for a particular disease online.
- Libraries in Kentucky, USA bit.ly/2CM44O5. 204 on a tight territory is not bad.
- Never heard of the ratio leaf area:total plant weight. Was a bit confused of its logical meaning and didn't suppose it could be seen as some development metric. Perhaps useful only across plants of the same type. What if I thought in extremes here? Initially the plant would be a seed, thus having no leaves and some minimal weight, which we can assume to be a number much bigger relative to zero. This ratio would be zero. What if the plant was a giant tree instead? Its total leaf area would be harder to determine, but we notice a cue. Leaves tend to fill a volume determined by the tree crown, the moment they find free space to grow, assuming no shortage of sun and water. This means that the leaf surface area to volume in the crown is a number which grows over time. The tree weight increases perhaps linearly, the leaf area likely quadratically and the the tree crown grows cubically, but only up to some equilibrium point. This means that the leaf area:weight ratio is likely to be highest for the giant tree. So any number between this minimal (zero) and maximal ratios must then indicate a growing plant. The heaviest parts are the tree trunk and the branches. But considering a single branch only, we know that it grows linearly and so does the number of leaves on it. A single branch can hold many leaves, each having a specific leaf area. So, in miniature (of this recursive structure), we observe the same.
- Library visitors (all branches) in Santa Clarita, California (01.07.2018 - 01.06.2019) bit.ly/2OgbrTt. 70000 monthly visitors for a population of slightly over 210000 (Google, 2017) exceeded expectations. Must be a city of readers.
- Do you optimize the packaging or do you leave room for things to rattle inside?
- Complex network bit.ly/2NLy0QF. I think only the forest of control towers is missing.
- Is your factory IoT-equipped and if so what do the readings reveal? Do you have to write code on a per-case basis to understand this, or does the information arrive on your smartphone?
- Read an article today which reminded me of a song by MetallicA called "Master of puppets". In other words, the master first recruits and sends the puppets to condition you. They claim to be completely independent creatures meaning to be around for your own good, supporting your progress (while exploiting you). If you don't recognize this, great, the goals of their master have been subtly achieved, through careful convincing and the absence of much drama. In case you rise to reject them all, you may face the anger of their master, which may come out of the shadows to reveal his true face. (However, he likely wouldn't if the loss in the knitted system is minor.) But I am sure, you will be more than prepared to face your reality. If not, you will hear the same from the next puppet claiming that noone is supporting them in the background. They are just doing their work, that previous (million-dollar) link to their master has long been broken. Fully independent now and there for a radical change (only not against the master). Unbelievable.
- Can you ask which of two cities has a better nightlife when you were afraid of the shadows? (idea came in the middle of the paper "Cities of a feather flock together"). Remember how Alice was told that one of the birds was "mustard" in hope she wouldn't notice? The actual lesson could have been to always be aware who you are dealing with.
- If only being influential could guarantee being right every single time...
- When the cost of new software is cents and the cost of new hardware increasingly many thousands of dollars, we are moving towards a future with no software. Additionally, when someone writes a piece on software and gets six comments and another writes a piece on hardware and gets 63 comments (see AnandTech), you can gauge that interest in software is quickly fading. Or perhaps you noticed somehow that years ago, popular GitHub libraries were getting ≈550 stars/day, while that number has fallen to 200-250 stars/day since then (not considering the few outliers here). At least from personal observation.
- When and how does a marker on Google Maps expire? Some markers are still present, but the businesses are n/a.
- Any idea of the percentage of skyscrapers acting as observatories and the percentage of visits dedicated to this specific task?
- Couldn't offer help to anyone who was unwilling to seek it or appreciate it enough.
- Does it make a difference when you load your car with fuel? Everyone knows that gasoline prices can vary from one day to the next. The challenge is then to identify the times when noone else would be going to the tank station. Friday is perhaps not such a day since people fill the tanks for the weekend. What about Monday? Early risers may choose to quickly prepare their car for the workweek. Morninng and evening hours when most people make their longest movements are also frequently most convenient for them to incidentally pass through the tank station. Saturday is a sligtly better choice than Friday, but there are people who plan to travel on Sunday too. What about Sunday night? Sounds good in case the stations aren't closed. But will the price difference justify the extra movement for that specific goal?
- Does it make a difference to your purse whether you go to a restaurant for lunch or dinner? Decided to look into this idea in the case of today's "Crave Fishbar" menu. The median prices were comparable—$17 for lunch and $16.5 for dinner. But when we took averages, the situation slightly changed: $18.04 for lunch and $19.57 for dinner. The second is slightly more perceivable and also noticeable on the distributions bit.ly/3553vvb. Can we find a reasonable explanation for this reality? Well, lunches tend to be in the middle of the day, where people interrupt their work to make a pause. Yet, they may choose to eat in a hurry if under time pressure. Or they may not find the right companion if the other side (or several people) are busy. The lunch may not happen at the restaurant if it is not close enough, if people carry their own food (dietary reasons) or use a convenient third-party delivery service. Dinners on the other side are usually after work, when obligations are less pressing. This means that they can be visited by more people compared to lunches. Since dinners are at peak visitor hours, it is reasonable to assume that the price of the menu items will be higher. It enables restaurant managers to regulate and meet the increased demand.
- Noticed that the strawberry cheesecake bit.ly/374QPG7 ↗ in the "Junior's" bakery menu was available in four different diameter sizes (6", 7", 8", and 10"), meant for 6, 8, 12 and 20 servings and was initially sceptical whether the prices ($24.95, $36.00, $51.95, $83.95) were set to encourage overconsumption. Considering only diameters and prices, the answer would have been negative. But then we notice that 6" is for 6 servings and 10" is for 20 servings and it feels a big difference that a diameter increase of only 4" leads to 3.33x the servings. Perhaps the cake height could vary. Assuming that servings have standard size/weight in all cases and integrating them into a simple formula, all points align on an almost perfect line. Much better.
- Wave period, wave height and water temperature for six beaches in Chicago, Illinois (30.08.2013 - 11.09.2019) bit.ly/2pjQwGG. Dot color describes water temperature. In four of the cases, we notice an interesting pattern. Above wave period of 7, wave height remains either low (most common) or reaches levels that are among the highest. In-between values become more rare. However, Calumet Beach and Ohio Street Beach do not register such middle gaps. Is it possible for them to be close neighbors?
- By the way, an article claimed that Germany saw two chain crashes recently, involving 19 and 18 cars respectively. In the second case (Bayern), it reported about 29 injuries. But it could be that speed was only a contributing factor here.
- The Netherlands has introduced a speed limit (100km/h) on its highways as a measure to reduce harmful emissions. Thiis sounds reasonable. If you remember, we have seen a dataset where sports cars were having visibly higher emission rates, second only to powerful machines (perhaps a truck can be seen to belong in this category, where the article mentioned there were many in NLD). It would be even better if we had more sources which confirmed this independently. But since the possibility is there, we have to assume that unbounded acceleration could exacerbate the level of emissions. The dataset didn't include many electric vehicles, but we know that the contribution of the majority of gasoline cars on the road is higher than the gains achieved from a very efficient minority. And until the scale weights change, this rule sets a positive example, which can be implemented rather quickly. On the other side, routes having no speed limits may effectively incentivize drivers to emit more. And if someone could reach the new, lower speed with a less powerful engine, this is a win for everyone. Think of the vastly different engines on the roads—some being too powerful, others much less so. If a speed limit was equally easy to reach by everyone, there would be much less need to overtake other cars, improving road safety. But we could think in reverse too. Having equal speed limit for all cars, why do they need to be so different in their tech specs? Can't we have a single efficient engine designed specifically for its top speed task and multiply it in cars of different looks as many times as required to achieve the greatest emission savings at scale? Why design for (over-)capacity that will largely remain unused? Who knows, perhaps companies like Uber or Lyft could be the first to promote uniform fleets.
- Seattle's "2018 building energy benchmarking" (updated on 28.10.2019, bit.ly/2O64Uuo ↗) enables us to see that only six buildings have source EUIs above 1500 (the rest being below 1200), with two of the highest values attributed to data centers (on 2020 5TH AVE and 4310 12TH AVE NE) having 2965.3 and 2683.9 respectively. After that follow UW Physics Astronomy Building (1963.3), Westin Building Exchange Office (1747.9), Washington State Convention Center (1640.4) and Port of Seattle, terminal 18 (campus) (1572.2). High numbers, but if a lot of value is created at these locations, this may still be better than having buildings with average values, which simply waste energy.
- Remember how rare you are bit.ly/2CFJnn4 ↗
- Slightly altered the structure of the
Löwen Mövenpick icecreams page (locally) so as to fit all flavors on a single teaser screen bit.ly/2CQLHI9. While getting a sorted (not asorti) list of flavor names, script noticed three duplicates. Perhaps a small oversight, which the untrained eye is unlikely to notice. If you prefer even more flavors, also look at Dreyer's (another Nestle brand).
- Relationships in the World Metro Database bit.ly/2qKqbC2. Strongest positive relationships were found between network length and number of stations (0.92), number of stations and number of lines (0.917), network length and daily ridership (0.800) (or ridership per km), average line length and stations per line (0.791), number of lines and daily ridership (0.790), daily ridership and population (0.700), number of stations and population (0.595).
- Electricity generation at the solar WPCF plant in Las Vegas, Nevada bit.ly/33GHUZH. The pattern seems periodic, varying between ≈250-820 thousand kWh. Among all sites, this one had the highest solar energy production.
- Found a good explanation why certain cakes tend to twelve pieces—to be suitable for groups up to six (but hopefully not exactly five) members. If you don't know how many will come in advance, some flexibility by design could be nice to have.
- The total duration of a phone call can be used as an indicator of the strength of a relationship. Raises the question, perhaps, why someone still haven't bought the same product as their satisfied friend. And to what extent peer pressure can "nudge".
- "A shop is 'favourite' if a user bought more than 75% of the items there." Do you have a favourite web designer/software developer who is working on more than 75% of your projects? Would you say that closest/most available and favourite are the same?
- Not that intelligent myself, but assuming that if someone sees the same trajectory in a given day, knows the direction in which a person is moving and the two points where they stay longest and most frequently return to, they have the notion where "home" and "work" might be for that user. Additionally, if the trajectory of movement passes through a local store, where they make a credit card purchase, their financial status could be inferred or a purchase history constructed. Data, which is freely/conveniently provided and so useful to those corporations.
- On one dataset (CenceMe) only three latitude-longitude pairs captured by GPS were sufficient to identify 100% of the users, while on two others (GeoLife and CabSpotting) five points were enough to identify 95% of the users. Additionally, when the capturing fidelity was increased to 5 digits after the comma (corresponding to a physical area of 1.11m by 0.96m) , only two points were enough.
- "Knowing only four points in space and time allows to uniquely reidentify a user with 95% probability." How many points did you send via your combined smartphone and smartwatch usage today? "Specific people were reidentified in supposedly anonymized medical records or movie preference databases... The number of possible research questions on mobile phone datasets is gigantic." Your actions, habits, movements, acquintances are used for traffic monitoring, disease outbreak prevention, health estimation... "Individuals appear to have highly predictable movements. As population we act and react in a remarkably synchronized way." Not strange then that you have to enable geolocation capturing before you can do anything meaningful with the device.
- Are you having noodles today (optionally potatoes later) while leaving the meat and alcohol for Sunday? Or is perhaps noone around on the weekened to track your consumption habits and tell you what a bad choice you make?
- "We lift any weight" is a good value proposition from the Port of Vienna. Wish I could handle 25kg for more than two minutes in a side-by-side comparison against a browser sweating at a 25MB page.
- Interesting diagrams in Climate Transparency's "Brown to green" report for 2019, which I could have used yesterday. Energy intensity of ≈450gCO2/kWh for G20 countries in 2018 seems to be approximately the median. Aviation and transport (except aviation) emissions of approximate 0.525 tons (UK, 2016) and 1.8 tons (UK, 2018) of CO2/capita repectively send an interesting signal. The first number is equivalent to driving ≈5250km with the modern car in a year, which doesn't appear exceptionally high. Further, approx. 0.75 tons and 5.15 tons of CO2/capita for USA (2016 and 2018) lead to the same thought that, overall, we are still producing most of the emissions on the ground. By a wide margin and despite the calls to significantly reduce the number of flights and their distance.
- Free WiFi locations by provider in New York City bit.ly/34MxoQH. Learned about "Spectrum" and "Altice USA", which have over 200 installations each. It seems that few tiny spots still remain unclaimed.
- Another reason is that the median US company is said to pay a software engineer ≈$170000 (backed by data), while at a top German company you could hardly expect more than 100000€ (if at all), or the equivalent of slightly more than $110000 (large percentage of which would be a tax). Payment isn't everythng, but still crucial for improvement and if your growth opportunities are limited and competitors are constantly more resourceful than you, you are setting yourself up for a costly failure. Another aspect is that countries like China are already ahead of Germany in many areas, which makes economic stability in the latter questionable in the long-term.
- Good explanation why software developers aren't top priority for the German economy bit.ly/33wGFMt. Unfortunately, few of them would agree to breathe the exhaust. Better to make a circle around this country.
- Things you can't ask me to do: freelance, consult, speak (conferences), teach. Do yourself a favor not to discuss any of these. Not seeking additional professions.
- Do you take measures to balance utilization in the presence of several projects which are asked to be finished at the same time? Unless you have several workers, you have to postpone some at the expense of others.
- Always missed the context about CO2 emissions and specifically where we started. Saw that some newer cars were specified with below 100g/km, but couldn't relate this number to anything from the past. Thanks to a paper bit.ly/34OyknI, we see that in the 90s, average car emissions in Greece were ≈220g/km. The direction is right, we only need to increase the speed. Interesting is too that we could use the environmental cost of electricity generation there to estimate that a new car would release as much CO2 per km as a 8W LED bulb running for 17.5 hours.
- Didn't know that dyes are present in so many products: textiles, food, paper, plastics, packaging, lasers, household products, cosmetics, detergents. A paper was concerned with their toxicity, but I did not understand much of it.
- Learned that in 17 years, my country has increased the bright areas at night by only 10% comparing to China's 226% (in absolute terms). Explains why "we're making progress" (not only on this front) remains so unpopular with me.
- Interesting that the travel times in London by heavy rain and heavy snow were found to increase by 6% and 11.4% respectively.
- The good news is that these skills are now widely available, so it shouldn't be a problem to find alternatives/replacements.
- If you couldn't respect during the good times, during the bad I took that opportunity away from you.
- Some pay billions in advertising budgets to Google and Facebook and then claim they can't afford a project from you. No chance to ever start a conversation.
- Not sure, but think I've noticed it on schematics more than once (Beijing, elsewhere), so my question: Is there a particular advantage to organize a road network to have some major arteries as concentric circles around the city center? I suppose that this allows the city to expand more evenly in all directions, without having some districts disproportionately disadvantaged. But curious whether you know of some more mathematical reasons explaining why this must be good for drivers as well.
- Tried to look for patterns in the flight times for some frequent sources and destimations at the Munich Airport (MUC) (08.11.2019) bit.ly/33qNGyl
- Suppose you invested a lot of effort to bike many kilometers (as a good excercise), but at the end you got tired and your speed decreased. Wouldn't you feel demotivated to see someone on an electric bike passing you by, not even making the slightest effort? How often do you encounter a similar situation in life?
- Did you have to clean up a lot after the work they did for you?
- Ordered the pizza today, but couldn't order the web designer/programmer for that project? Such a bad joke you have.
- Didn't expect to see so many ice rinks in Montréal. Skating must have a strong tradition there (not sure about nearby cities since I haven't seen enough data). Then we remember hockey and other sports, which partially explains this state.
- Liked the nutritional data at "Tim Hortons" and wondered whether there is some perceivable numeric difference between a donut and a muffin. Left with no stamina to explore this, but if you wish, you could look into it and share your findings in a simple bit.
- "A growth-promoting gene from Chinook salmon put into fertilized Atlantic salmon eggs makes them grow like a trout would, reaching the market weight of 2-3kg in 18-24 months rather than in 3 years." - Vaclav Smil in "Growth: from microorganisms to megacities". Profits above all. It was not mentioned whether this product was marked as containing GMO or not.
- Culture fit. Heard this many times. In other words, a company already established its non-payment structure and feels threatened when an outsider tells them about the market price of the value they provide, when the company has long forgotten what it meant to pay for it. This enables them to quickly discard the candidate by the rule that "they don't fit the culture". Sounds like a generic excuse and one that ends the dialogue for doubts about the good sense of self-worth of the would-be colleagues.
- "It's now easier than ever to be an entrepreneur (when you can outsource work to others)." Correct. You only need to start a Twitter account and claim that you already know ten programming languages and have at least ten years of experience. Didn't matter that you started them yesterday. Noone is going to question your words. Outsourcing gives you the ability to work with more such people and since this is great, what could possibly go wrong?
- Wthout a well-paying project, no service.
- Most popular cities for Pizza Hut locations in the UK bit.ly/36BvCDL. Would you say that Nottingham is relatively hut-rich when you walk around?
- As a visitor, when you walk inside a restaurant having a model of a polar bear, you recognize soon what is on the daily menu. The variety is meant for a good nutritional balance.
- "Capitalism has worn off." Nope, it finally starts for you.
- Another useful lesson from a diagram: if a point has to be placed at a location where someone has died, it can take the shape of a small cross. Much more descriptive.
- Smartphone after-swipe background change bit.ly/34F9Q01. Liked the idea and it seems to adapt well to a context. The color areas are also void of symmetry, which is nice.
- You earned my five stars for today bit.ly/34E5s1o. First time taking an OS window and using its borders to verify whether the lines were truly horizontal. Easiest tool to grab; cheap and abundant resource; case-sufficient.
- A fleeting thought, but is it possible (in theory) for fracking to pass through a Chernozem soil surface layer, some ancient city ruins, a layer of useful minerals and a flow of groundwater before some oil is finally discovered? Reaching one after destroying four (in this case) must be highly inefficient. Wikipedia says something about potential impacts bit.ly/2PSfJ5L and FracFocus lists some chemicals, optionally used as additives bit.ly/2NOsgEG ↗.
- Is there a maximal number of flights a passenger-transporting machine is allowed to make before it is phased out? Or is it repeatedly repaired and kept operational for as long as possible? On a product lifetime scale, are 30000 flights closer to the equivalent of a car with a mileage of 30000km or one with 300000km? Don't know, seeking a frame of reference only.
- "What is The Coca-Cola Company's position on GMOs?" bit.ly/2pMEd5U ↗. What about more responsibility?
- A beautiful photo grid of animal variety at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden bit.ly/2NjF4DY ↗
- Realizing you can be only as fast as your slowest client would make you look more carefully who you work with.
- The event → thought → feeling seems like a worthy sequence to pay attention to. (Tells me that thoughts must precede feelings.) Could the advice to stay focused on the goals in order to minimize the interference of anxiety in life be a useful one?
- "The tough trees can grow in denial and withstand far worse conditions." Allows you to select the problem you want to have—broken software or broken chainsaws.
- In case you can't pay enough to www-workers, you might need to hire for the wood wide web. What's ineresting about it is that trees turn out to be very cmmunicative too, supporting each other in moments of pain, planning reproduction despite severe weather and postponing the growing of fruits until they ensure that most animals won't be around to pick them. Or so a source, at least.
- American Heart Association says that if these signs are present bit.ly/36FDVhA ↗, you shoud call for medical help.
- Annual mortality cases by cause in USA bit.ly/2CjG30w. Couldn't come to the surprise from reading the excerpt, but even so some facts have been useful. Not sure whether my LDL cholesterol levels fall between 50-70mg/dL (for a total below 150mg/dL), but it was alarming that the average American was said to have a total of 200mg/dL. Clogged arteries and reduced blood flow to the brain can have severe consequences.
- Simple arithmetic: if it takes a student five years to become a specialist in their field (say in computer science) and your company finds a way to fully exhaust (and consistently underpay) beginners within 3 years on the job (leading to their burnout), eagerly seekinng for the next fresh candidate to continue with, you have programmed your way for not finding future employees. You consume much faster than the system is able to produce. Sooner or later you will have to deal with the consequences (and think of the ethics) of this behavior.
- Sadly, the numeric pad is not available on all machines. Since JS can detect the difference between digits below the F-keys and digits on the numpad, one could potentially explore ways to use the pad matrix to resize windows. 2, 4, 6 and 8 even have arrows on them and it is also intuitive to see how they could affect the left, right, top and bottom positions of a rectangular window. If one were to press "6" (right arrow), they could indicate that they want to operate on the right side of the window. "5" can then be used as controller. For instance, six followed by five could mean shrink the window by x% of available screen width, while five followed by six could mean "take this window and expand it to the right" by the same amount. Five followed by 2 (bottom) could mean expand window to bottom by y% of available screen height, while two followed by five would be the same in reverse. Further, window manipulations like five followed by three become possible. Or the equivalent of someone taking the mouse and dragging the tiny bottom-right corner of the window. In case of improper window alignment leading to off-screen portions, the "0" (zero) on the numpad could be used to align the current window on focus to the top-left corner of the screen (0, 0) while preserving the existing dimensions. These are only initial thoughts, but you get the idea. Mouse-only window resizing is a potential accessibility issue.
- Window resizing should be easier for older people who managed to hide half of the browser window on the right of their screen when no after-tabs draggable area can be seen and when the spacing between the opened tabs and window border is so tiny that it is hardly visible to them. Is there a chance that something is an issue if you have to explain it twice?
- Thought about another ratio this morning, trying to brainstorm where the locations with lowest number of free to imprisoned people would be (no idea). Now the quote makes me believe that it is lower than physically observable and I don't know how to account for this fact.
- Avoid pesticides in your code or it may grow in uncontrolled ways.
- "You are so preoccupied with controlling your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that you don't even know you are living." Do you know the alternative? It is working for a multi-billionaire boss being great at convincing that as someone poor "you should be ready" to go to extreme lengths to improve your life, while meanwhile they greatly benefit from that, using your extra effort and constant accusations of poor performance to crush your mentality. So what? In this case, you only lose your spirit and creativity, becoming noone—a pawn in someone's hands,—while in the latter you remain aware of not living a life according to the rules others have set-up for you. But somehow you remain aware that you derive your meaning of life through the work you do and you find that your genuine, unsuppressed contributions should be the sole reason for your existence. You are aware of a life not ived, but refuse to part with your future chances (big difference). And if as a writer you are telling me that the first is better than the second, why didn't you become a scientist to prove it?
- "Grab their attention by the throat", a convincing book tells me.
- Parks and libraries in Birmingham, Alabama bit.ly/32ge24K. This is the best label positioning I came up with due to parts of the city looking as satellites.
- Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park (21.11.2019 - 05.01.2020) bit.ly/2NJtvoy ↗
- Time for Dinah, but already ate (salads take so long to prepare). Good too that they don't have to include specially-sourced ornamental feathers.
- Combined open and other publicly known data to plot the locations of some recommended restaurants in Atlanta bit.ly/2NireC5. Unfortunately, only two out of the six "hot" restaurants (33%) appeared inside the city limits, if the coordinates were correct.
- Alice tried to catch a rabbit going down a rabbit hole and fell slowly through an endless well in an empty room with many locked doors and a key, which didn't fit in any. But behind the curtain was another one, which could be unlocked... and so she always managed to find a way out of the riddles until one day the white rabbit was in the position of justice and her hasty words were used against her, leading to the loss of her head. Under stress, she found that her sister woke her up, which herself tried to imagine how she might have felt, falling into her own sequence of thoughts about how her future children would feel... A recurrence in different forms. The deeper meaning might explain why I wasn't able to derive much from the book as a kid (which, let's face it, was at times intentional). Perhaps it is also suitable for grown-up kids, which have forgotten how it felt to wonder and seek applications for what appears unreasonable in the present context, but suddenly making sense in the next. But if you have a good basic understanding that lessons start with 10 hours/day and lessen by an hour/day, while you get the chance to learn about ambition, distraction, uglification and derision, you are ready for it.
- Didn't know that Ceconomy is the mother company of MediaMarkt and Saturn (Source: Spiegel). Same owner. Reminds me of at least one such pair of other companies (Kaufland and Lidl). It's clear why this is done: diversification reduces risks even at the cost of lying customers under a false identity. Some long time ago, I expressed the opinion that I find it important to include labels like "a {name of parent} company", which remained unnoticed. Every time an identity branches out is made a conscious attempt to mislead the customer. With this accepted practice, the best thing you can do is to question everything and everyone.
- Another week for great clients and projects (only). After you connect, we'll see the extent of description fit.
- Onshore wind turbines by "Siemens Gamesa" bit.ly/34x7ekV
- It is perhaps better to build stronger bases which could hold future turbines once the original ones reach the end of their life. Hubs are said to be reusable, and if they are a good fit for the new rotor, they could be retained, partially reducing installation costs. But if the base won't be able to sustain the new weight, the hub replacement costs must be included as well.
- In the "Future of wind" report, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) acknowledges that wind power generation will play an important role for reaching a future with clean energy and low environmental impact. They believe wind output would contribute more than that of solar, although you might have seen other claims elsewhere. By 2050, they project wind to generate a third of the total global electricity. Since onshore wind is characterized by lower (and better) LCOE than offshore wind (0.06$/kWh vs. 0.13$/kWh) (and already comparable to fossil fuel's 0.05-0.17$/kWh), they expect that onshore wind installation will increase tenfold until 2050 (relative to 2018). You can see the installation costs in some countries for 2018 bit.ly/2WBMq8Q. The trend is towards installing larger, more powerfull turbines. What did not previously ocur to me was that they will not only require higher hubs and rotors with larger diameter, but also significantly more stable/wider foundations to carry the increased weight (considering only y-axis is not enough). Further, the amount of materials required—as shown in the case of the sample 50MW wind plant,—can be astonishing. 22386 tonnes of concrete cannot be assumed to come at zero emission cost. Other useful details included "offshore wind needs grid connection to shore" and the existince of floating platforms (for water depths exceeding 60m). Wind turbine suppliers with highest market share in 2018 were Vestas (20.3%), Goldwind (13.8%), Siemens Gamesa (12.3%), GE Renewable Energy (10%), Envision (8.4%), Enercon (5.5%).
- Sheltered and unsheltered homeless people counts by council district in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2NdoiXb. The curve is hypothetical, but even so, it may describe the add-up potential of inaction. Other cities may have a similar problem.
- A reminder to look for the symmetry in the design of electronic circuits.
- Assume for a second that the use of harmful chemicals in agriculture is responsible for the rapid decline of birds and insects. If this is true, what leads us to believe that this process hasn't already started with humans as well? What is harmful to them must be highly probable to be harmful to us as well?
- Locations with ancient sites in Germany bit.ly/329K3eN. Used information available on Wikipedia. The initial idea was to seek clusters of related sites, but you would probably agree that it is hard to find proper clusters for something which appears as one long line. For me, this is an interesting and unexpected pattern, so I am curious whether it continues at the eastern border of The Netherlands as well. (Update: Now I see that "Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum" is in nearby Nijmegen). I was in Xanten (Colonia Ulpia Traiana) a long time ago and found this large area quite impressive. Unfortunately, I've heard later that the place was severely flooded, so I don't know about the degree to which it was damaged (hopefully not).
- Out of 959 rings at "Guldfynd", the median came at 3498 Swedish kronor, which Google reported to be $365.75. Or approximately 56% of the price of the Adidas sneakers I saw today on an Australian website (not AUD either). Trying to understand value in perspective.
- Made a simple diagram of the cities in Colombia having more than 50000 people (labeling them if having 350000+) bit.ly/325HaLP. Noticed a small point overlap and it turned out that the distance from Medellin to Bello was reported to be only 9km. Also interesting is how below a fictive diagonal line, big cities become increasingly harder to detect.
- Woolworth's latest brochure has a nice composition of picture frames on sale, but it is easy to find that the large set of three frames has the most value bit.ly/2oEHXpr
- Samsonite carry-ons ranked by internal volume (in3) divided by price ($) and weight (lbs) bit.ly/2WCvKhE. Totes and duffels (which I dislike most) are exactly the ones this system wants me to know about. Also can't imagine to roll/carry an inflexible underseater as a primary daily luggage, unless no better options exist. But the Omni PC 20" Spinner bit.ly/2NarTFB ↗ is the first, which starts to sound reasonable and it feels reassuring to see so many positive reviews about it. Your favourite choice may vary, depending on what you are looking for.
- Could the difference between juice and smoothie be reflected in a different nutrient composition? Hard to generalize, but we could look at a concrete example in the case of the "Tank" drinks bit.ly/2qga7r8. If my eyes don't fail me, most drinks with higher reported sugar content tend to fall consistently in the "smoothie" category. Not sure why this is so, but it looks interesting here.
- Smartphone prices at "Saturn" and "MediaMarkt" bit.ly/2WK3dXH. Note that this doesn't tell you how the price of a given model would compare across the stores. Some models which are available in one may not be available in the other. The most expensive models were 2100€ at both stores. Both websites were using the same "sticky" prices, the design of which involves several spans for each digit (including the point and cents) of the price. This uses the browser caching effectively, but makes pages heavier, having to download more content. Offer layout also had many elements in common bit.ly/2N82ooh. Both websites showed text in small letters at the end of each page and used the same "Einverstanden" button on an overlay positioned at its bottom to make users accept cookies. Both websites were slow: Saturn had lots of warnings and few errors, while MediaMarkt was image-heavy, which took a lot of processing time. It could be that there were memory leaks with both, since browsing after a given number of pages became progressively slower to the point where subsequent pages (with only few offers) started to take minutes. You might think that all of these are pure coincidences. It could also be that the long-term competition (using each others know-how) has made them increasingly alike.
- Nutrients in Philadelphia spreads bit.ly/2plX6fT. The Milka variant skews the data here (compared to it, 7.2g of sugar does not appear much, but still more than all other variants), "Lightest" looks promising and "Original", which could be the default choice for many, actually is said to contain a lot of fat.
- You might have seen tables with wide legs, but different orientations bit.ly/2qdIU8u. Could it make a difference in terms of stability which one you choose and why? Would you consider this a case where extending things to infinity could simplify the thinking?
- Isn't it inspiring what type of messages you could deliver despite the quadratic chocolatic complexity? bit.ly/2pwmHCN ↗
- "La Cucina" also has a large tea variety bit.ly/2qfnZCk ↗ that goes beyond the ordinary.
- Thank you for your repeat visits last month! And if you have projects, which you believe to be mutually beneficial, feel free to speak about them.
- "Dine in" and "Take out" are very intuitive labels, which is a mark of good design. We could only ask ourselves why we aren't seeing many similar ones.
- Prices by tea type at "Demmers Teehaus" bit.ly/2JHBmlk. Green tea had the highest heights, while "best choice" seemed to offer the most value. Black and green teas were most common with 76 and 55 variants respectively.
- Sweatshirt prices by gender at NewYorker bit.ly/2N43ilG, ZARA bit.ly/2WvoRib, GAP bit.ly/325LRFI and Icebreaker bit.ly/339vA3N
- Interesting idea to paint stairs in white and have some regularity of black fractions. From the viewpoint of someone at the lowest end, it looks like a piano, whose realism would be determined only by whether it is making real sounds under command of hasty walkers. But a musical rule stating that once you have passed through the uppermost stairs, it becomes much harder to return to the previous note, could make for suboptimal pieces.
- "Fissler Souspreme Multi Pot" received an iF Design Award 2019, which made me discover the page listing design-excellent products, which were awarded over a timespan of 66 years bit.ly/2C3HmAG ↗. Currently looking at the 50 degree warm jacket.
- Pullover prices by gender at BRAX bit.ly/2JEzlGJ
- Tried to make myself a picture of today's operations at the Tokyo's Narita and Haneda airports bit.ly/2C2vVsZ and more specifically how they differ. As you can see "Narita International Airport" was slightly stronger in international flights, while "Haneda International Airport" was much stronger in domestic flights. Not sure whether this is valid only for today or over a longer timespan. Seoul, Shanghai and Hong Kong are among the top international airports, while Sapporo and Fukuoka are the most popular domestic ones.
- "Castle fine art" has beautiful brochures which are almost fine art in themselves bit.ly/2PvVAlY ↗. Some paintings were highly realistic, while others were looking after my skin.
- Nouri healthy balls look nice bit.ly/2PGs2Cl ↗
- In general, if you are paid for a large project, it is unwise to bother the client with small details. But this doesn't mean that they can be neglected.
- Parcel centroids in Santa Clara, California bit.ly/2WvZcpx (Source: County of Santa Clara, "Parcels", bit.ly/2pkebXD ↗, 574.6MB GeoJSON file). Also attempted KDE on these points, which after a long computation gave a distorted and unsatisfying result, since few points likely had erroneous coordinates. Here we see that the smallest parcels tend to be concentrated in the north-west of the county.
- Believe it or not, Internet is also part of the web design service if you still haven't hired the designer to work full time in-residence for you, but only need them for a project, preferably from a distance and without having to care about employee formalities (like stable contract, vacation time, health insurance etc.). Because if it's missing, you have automatically cut the branch on which you were trying to sit. A web designer which can't learn the necessary documentation to do your work or download/upload and share data with you, wouldn't be of much use to your company. It's in your interest to consider the basic cost of service and integrate it into your project proposal. Or get an employee in-residence.
- Junk remains junk no matter how you seek to promote or hide-and-show it again later. Doesn't matter whether you labeled the week "crazy", the offers "ridiculously cheap" or "seductive" or claimed that 100 people were watching just two hours before all offers expire (according to a visible countdown). Doesn't matter that you've put the modern Joker face on those TVs or that you stuck the "sold" label to some items to simulate buyer interest. Junk remains junk no matter how or when you sell it. How many "crazy" weeks can you afford to sell it at presumably "lower" prices, before your tricks become transparent to the audience?
- Always discuss your project and work with a real designer in front of you, day after day. Pay a premium for quality service and don't seek to discriminate. Otherwise you may find yourself working face-to-webcam with some assertive "I can has it too", which then goes to employ an entire chain of people behind your back, where the last leaf gets exploited for five dollar. You'll be sponsoring the chain while getting the $5 work. Making the right choices daily ensures that there will still be professionals around by the time you desperately need them. Not only "fake" designers or programmers.
- When you read "minimize the sum of distances of agents to the nearest facility", do you think of hospitals first?
- The World Energy Council's report about the "Energy Trilemma Index 2019" bit.ly/2WqGlMn ↗ has graphic elements which remind me of some work from yesterday. The domain is different, but the information is again valuable. If you wish, you could draw your own triangles. I find that pure ranks do not tell me exactly about the background findings which led to their formation (or any subsequent changes since last update). But it feels nice to have some approximate, overall view.
- Noticed a bug, which could be in a window manager. If I double-click on an image, but the pointer for some reason enters in drag mode, then the image viewer pops up with the loaded image and at that moment I release the cursor (effectively dropping the icon over the opened image), a growing sequence of windows expands in my taskbar until all memory is eventually exhausted and the machine needs to be restarted. Sometimes I notice this early, being able to close the parent window and in doing so all its children it has spawned, but other times I feel less lucky (taskbar is floating, so not always visible). The question is whether this is critical enough to be "addressable".
- The unfortunate consequence of producing many parts of a complex system at several different factories around the world is that in case of repeated system failure, it is often unclear who is responsible.
- Please, don't use the console as a logger in production. Be aware that none of your clients wants to know about the internal workings of your application. What matters to them is that it can be used without any problems.
- Multiplication of Gaussians is said to be used in the Kalman filter, so you can see a diagram illustrating the idea bit.ly/2Jz9CQ5
- The mythical man completes projects on a monthly schedule.
- A text indirectly gave me an idea whose single-file experiment ended with three shapes bit.ly/349XAV1. The last one may have a hidden semantic.
- Proximity of the libraries in Dortmund to bus and bike stations bit.ly/2prrqpl. Uses the same source, but with three different datasets. The spacing between the libraries which are not in the city center seems almost equal, which is nice.
- Some years later, realized that this country isn't for me due to being and feeling "noone" there and due to the general lack of respect. Felt used, partially abused and reflected that it was the right time to leave. To this day, if someone connected with me, they had zero chance to show their disrespect twice.
- Total visits of the Center for Art and Creativity "Dortmunder U" (2013-2017) bit.ly/2oxbO3e. The only time I visited it, part of the building was still under construction, but there was an exhibition inside. There were lots of kids too, which was nice. I remember a demo of a spinner spreading paint on square sheets of paper, which were then ordered on the floor. The composition looked quite nice and I left impressed.
- Made a picture of the number of pubs, hotels and restaurants in different constituencies in Ireland (as of 03.06.2017) bit.ly/32XtxQj. "Kerry County" seemed to be rich in all three, while "Tipperary County" had mostly a large number of pubs only. Interesting whether popular pub locations have higher rates of people with alcohol consumption problems.
- Jewelry specialist "Tiffany & Co" probably hired some web designer at below market rate bit.ly/2q1Wbkq. If I could count properly, this paragraph is 20 nesting levels below the <main> tag. Wished to find the median ring price, but will leave the task to their designer.
- Collected and codified all observations on divisibility I could find in a book excerpt bit.ly/2NmE9S2. So enjoyable to learn about the method of multiplying by 11 and task solving using extreme cases and backwards thinking. Hope to find it and read it entirely, if possible. Guess, tomorrow is also a day.
- If in case of strong winds, trees near electric wires may fall over and cause fire, there must be a way to map-highlight the locations with greatest risk (close proximity, tall tree, old wire etc.) and then selectively introduce contextual measures to improve safety there.
- Do you offer on-the-fly recommendation? Suppose a buyer placed few items in their shopping cart, but haven't found the time to pay for them yet. You identified that one or few more items could be related to them, based on a possible task they might be used to accomplish. Would you suggest these two items next to the rest or rather keep the experience tidy and fast?
- If you see health as an asset, it might not be such a great deal you get from someone willing to pay you to destroy it.
- Enjoyed the excerpt from "Millions, billions, zillions: Defending yourself in a world of too many numbers" by Brian Kernighan. The full version would be a pleasure.
- Parks and libraries in Nashville, Tennessee bit.ly/2NgAhCg. High concentration of libraries near the center, lower in the suburbs.
- First laptop I see with 10th generation Intel CPU (1035G1, 1.00-3.60Ghz, 6MB cache, 10nm lithography, 15W TDP) bit.ly/32WIOkg ↗. Looks very good for the price of 400$ and Intel's page shows support for DDR4-3200/LPDDR4-3733 in case the integrated DDR4-2666 feels slow at some point. Perhaps even better models exist. But test for potential issues, before you decide to accelerate your teams (making them more productive).
- I'd refrain of saying that an external professional is 4x more costly and "high-maintenance" compared to internal employees. Otherwise it is well possible that you surround yourself with a team of four underpayed & overworked individuals, having to seek results that way.
- Suppose you want to program a "thunder" graphic, observing that you can take an equilateral triangle, discard its right side and repeat the rest connecting top vertices with right ones. Then on the right of this triangle, you take the middle point of the side you previously discarded and use this to extend another (rotated) triangle, this time with missing left side, connecting left with bottom vertices. At the end you connect both lines at the most stretched places, adding small parallel extensions where needed to preserve the pattern, also colorizing the shape. A naive programmer would look at the task and insist to draw all lines separately across the entire perimeter of this thick zig-zag shape. The number of required elementary operations wouldn't matter much. Someone else might come and think that this is a single shape and has to be treated like one, choosing to draw the same with several, very thick lines going through the center of the shape. This way, instead of using 17 lines, they will achieve the same effect with seven.
- Next week is another chance to convince yourself that these services are "need-to-have" rather than "nice-to-have".
- Currently, Zillow lists 543 room offers in Toronto where the median monthly rent computes to $1933 (or C$2525). But there is still a good chance to come to one in the bin $1500-1623. Similarly, out of 472 offers in Boston, the median comes at $2067, with a good chance to see one in the bin $1632-1689. Standard deviations are 894.84 for Toronto and 810.46 for Boston.
- Had to feel more like one bit.ly/2PknvVI
- Celebrating birthday with a small diagram of the bike counts at one selected location in Toronto, Canada bit.ly/369G2dv (the other three locations had much shorter time intervals of data collection). Eastbound traffic seems to have increased almost 50% over a 25-year period.
- Used data from "DeFazio's Pizzeria" bit.ly/2PmRKM0 ↗ and tried to estimate which ingredients could contribute to the pizza prices to the highest extent. Few which the script pointed to were "homemade vegan Parmesan cheese", "vegan Mozzarella", "garlic", "homemade Bolognese sauce", "fresh basil", "Calamati olives" and "Mozarella cheese". In all cases the bigger pizza offered better area per unit price.
- "A note on disk drag dynamics" starts with an empirical observation of HDD power usage, said to depend on platters * rpm2.8 * diameter4.6 (no dependence on capacity (GB)). Laptop disks were said to have smaller diameter, spin at lower speeds and have one or few platters (standing in full constrast to server HDDs). This means that makers tune on all parts of the equation and possibly even more variables. The equation for SSD drives will look differently in the absence of moving parts and presence of electricity-controlled capacity.
- Enjoyed the Jorge-Meeks 6-noid (looking as six tubes radially coming out from a center, hopefully not hiding a boom box in there) and another surface, which appeared as four connected cups. So I thought that fluid bottling can then be reduced to a two-step process: 1) fill the fluid once in the first surface (let it spread to all) and 2) lower a multi-component guillotine to make cuts at equial distances and plug the holes.
- Pitty that your website allows itself ten seconds to show its first image. Such performance is inacceptable and also bad for your business.
- What is your first association when you hear about "algorithmic fairness"?
- Do you have a plausible explanation why South Africa has a quite different uncertainty profile than most other countries (1996-2019)? (Source: "World Uncertainty Index (WUI)", bit.ly/32RDD56 ↗)
- Saw an excerpt from "Applied deep learning with PyTorch" and it is very well written, also nicely illustrating concepts concepts like ReLU, max pooling and convolution. Unfortunately, machine forbids runs of deep learning related code and asks me for a non-optional upgrade instead. Something else I found nice to learn about today were the causal algorithms in CDT, which are said to pair well with PyTorch. Never tried those either.
- Also contained a parallel worth mentioning: that quality often matters more than quantity. Foods created with speed in mind are brought to market with all kinds of contaminants, which then make many people sick and raise their healthcare costs more sharply than the savings they accumulate from getting cheap, junk food. Food produced with care on the other side, puts the environment and standards first and observes movements through the entire value chain until the product reaches the customer in the right condition. Scalable, for-profit production is not allowed to interfere with the interests of the clients, independent of their count. Quality food is produced more slowly, but offers better nutritious and health benefits while limiting the negative side effects. These contrasts remind a lot about the way our software is created. As a client, do you prefer sofware made of spaghetti code, having bad smells or one which is clean, organized and correct? Think which one you are supporting more frequently with your votes.
- "The information in food can literally upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every bite." - Mark Hyman, MD. Said so nicely.
- Did not expect that what appears as a small curling stone could weight ≈18kg. Adding to this a running/contact surface with diameter of only 13cm (Wikipedia) and pushing the stone from a sliding position partially explains the delicate handling I've seen.
- A goalkeeper and diagonal coverage bit.ly/2PgVcrm
- "Cost of living city ranking" by Mercer for 2019 bit.ly/2BGZ0ds ↗
- The total number of LED lightbulbs from Philips was much higher than expected bit.ly/2PfTdDJ. Ranking by the same criteria (luminous flux/wattage), we see that five units (seem to be filament lightbulbs) come with 200lm/W, which is impressive. But the next start at ≈145lm/W, which is a wide margin, raising the question how such difference became possible. The first diagram shows a linear relationship (positive correlation of 0.943), but we also notice three visible steps, indicating that concrete luminous flux levels may have been used as a benchmark before product release (where in these cases wattage was slightly more flexible). Such levels are 400, 450 and 470 lumens (low brightness), 800 and 806 lumens (average brightness) and 1521 lumens (high brightness). For some reason, 1500lm was almost 3x more rare than 1521lm. Ideally, we wouldn't have seen any steps, but a more randomized picture. One where matching the exact brightness of existing incadescent lightbulbs wouldn't be an absolute goal. This leaves a small gap in the range 1100-1500lm, which might indicate a future opportunity.
- Streets, parks and libraries in Durham, North Carolina bit.ly/33W6PIj. This is what I could construct, unsure about the recency of the data. You can also see the number of visitors by library branch between 01.07.2013 and 01.06.2014 bit.ly/32LfJYO
- Noticed that "Cree" had some lights with up to 190lm/W in its XLamp portfolio, which exceeded the highest 155lm/W seen on the Energy Star website. But these numbers were achieved under some ideal (binning) conditions, so I wondered whether they were still performing better. Computed max light output (lm) / max power (W) for all models, which had both specified bit.ly/32LDSyK. As you can see, some XLamps are close to the slightly lower efficacy. In practice, high CRI would also play a role in deciding which one to use for your task.
- Another subtle factor that fires you as a company is the overinvestment in infrastructure and underinvestment in your employees. You can't tell me that because you need to invest millions in your infrastructure, someone like me should be working extra long, unpaid hours. Fired!
- Interesting that beyond a certain level, rising temperatures cause a decrease in solar panel output. It was found that above 25°C, solar module voltage can decrease by 0.5%/°C. Hence, at higher locations with concentration of cooler air, performance may improve.
- "We hire for spikes, not well-rounded people." So you can swap them every 2 years, without having to be kept responsible. Fortunately, it's not that hard for any potential employee to see why you have to be fired on the spot.
- Scientific visualization bit.ly/3626zsY ↗ at NCSA
- Using three <source> elements (plus one <img>) inside a <picture> element for every hotel room photo on the page is not so great. Especially when all source elements have the same srcset (long URLs), but a varying media attribute (making style part of the HTML). On the website of a luxury hotel we should strive for better.
- "Hydrogen a culprit in capacity loss of sodium-ion batteries" bit.ly/2N5VLS7 ↗ The phrase "presence of impurities" might be triggering a neurochemical reaction in me due to some associations with quality of code.
- Coordinates, phones and opening hours of the library branches in Denver, Colorado bit.ly/2BH5TeB (Source: Denver Public Library, "Locations & Hours", bit.ly/31DWtvb ↗). 26 branches, mainly located in the south-west, could mean lots of reading material. City boundary coordinates were missing, which raised some questions about accuracy, but the coordinates are approximate anyway. The most consistent opening times seem to be on Friday and Saturday.
- Parcels in (most of) Denver, Colorado (low resolution) bit.ly/2BCZgu1. You can see the line intersections as indicated by mapshaper. Patience-tested me, but also saved machine from some file pollution.
- Seeing a photo of Tesla Gigafactory from above gave me the idea to estimate its area in terms of number of cars that have parked in front of it (using pixel areas). The earth.com photo from 08.09.2017 gave ≈6833.78 cars, but latest Google Earth photo (also showing the expansions since then), gives hints about ≈29452.25 cars (or 30000 if you round it). Included were only the white, closed areas without the open parkings.
- Another day for your projects, but only if you come with a reasonable proposal.
- Assumed that 900W is a lot for a 8K (7680 x 4320) 85" TV, so decided to verify this against a simple 1920 x 1080, 24" monitor using only 17.5W power. Divided the product of total number of pixels and screen area (in2) (assuming both were having the 16:9 aspect ratio) by power usage. And it turned out that the TV had ≈3.9x higher score. Mammoth usage—"yes". But does it come with its own efficiencies? At the surface, the answer seems to be another "yes".
- Can you recognize the parcels in Los Angeles as well? bit.ly/2pJV4Wq (4011 x 6000 pixels, 4.1MB). To improve visibility, the map would have needed to be even bigger. Now, nothing stands in the way of using a thick, red marker to highlight your (affordable) strategic positions.
- Parcels in Boston, Massachusetts bit.ly/2Wbk2KM (10376 x 7500 pixels, 4.2MB). (Source: Analyze Boston, Boston Maps, "Parcels 2018" from 17.06.2019, bit.ly/31z3aPa ↗). Again zoom for details. The label was omitted due to the very large image size (but filename is still descriptive).
- Parcels in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2pNj62P (5000 x 4541 pixels, 2.2MB). Zoom in to see the finer details.
- Public art in Vancouver: Everything matters, but nothing is important bit.ly/2JddoOD ↗
- "For some weird reason, people normally expect better services from private companies than from their own governments." Perhaps for reasons of responsiveness and care. In a complex entity, a decision has to wait for approval, moving through a a long chain of stakeholders.
- Preceding an open dataset with a diagram is not a good idea. Avoid putting your cart in front of my horse. An alternative is to have a separate page where you share all your findings and not only some lines or bars.
- CNBC and Nasdaq have lots of interesting data, which allows you to learn more about companies you don't know, if you are ready to spend the time to extract it.
- Number of divorce cases by year and marriage duration in Salzburg, Austria (1985-2014) bit.ly/2P8zeXn. Did not include the graphs for durations exceeding 10 years, as they were aggregated over five-year intervals and were thus incomparable. If you wish, you can view them separately bit.ly/2PcMvhF. Here you probably see how the first 2-4 years have been quite important for most people and how after long-lasting marriages fewer partners were willing to divorce.
- Library accessibility via bike transport in Salzburg, Austria bit.ly/35WOxZp. Please, note the numeric format of the axes. It is not the usual WGS84, so I cannot confirm whether the axes are properly oriented or have to be swapped.
- Also wanted to do the same for Colgate toothpastes, but product ingredients were missing in all descriptions.
- Common ingredients in 21 "Head & Shoulders" shampoos bit.ly/33SdH9z. Only four seemed to be present in all variants on the given page: "Methylisothiazolinone", "Methylchloroisothia-zolinone", "Sodium Chloride" and "Dimethicone". Personally, I have trouble pronouncing the first two.
- Temperature against viscosity for water bit.ly/2pEU1qS. Saw that ketchup has relatively high viscosity, which helps explain why shaking the tube feels energy taxing when you consider potential energy gain. Also found an interesting formula to calculate the viscosity of a blend of two fluids when their individual viscosities are known bit.ly/35QrfUS
- Mass-to-charge ratio is another one I wouldn't normally think about (particle context). From a geometric perspective, mass and velocity are easy to visualize on paper (size & vector length), but a property intrinsic to a dot is not so intuitive to identify.
- Amusing association: each time someone presses the camera shutter, the camera bottom opens and drops another dead AA battery (cartridge case). Burst mode would be stuttering without a fast enough reload mechanism. In this case, specific capacity (mAh/g) may be more important if you have to carry a heavy, battery-full backpack, which by itself looks like a big battery.
- "We have no reason to believe 5G is safe" bit.ly/2MWXrNG ↗. Millimeter wave radiation with increased risk of cancer, genetic damage, learning/memory deficits doesn't sound good. Personally, I'd be happier with a slightly slower Internet if my health wouldn't be compromised. Could current wireless tech also be harmful, to a lesser extent? At least cables seem to limit the affected area. "802.11 wireless networking: The definitive guide" mentions that running cables is time-consuming, expensive and may require construction (capacity expansion via switches). Compared with this, WiFi is more flexile, especially with older buildings and can be deployed extremely rapidly (likely enabling higher profits). Wireless signals penetrate walls (also behaving unpredictably), cover large areas and account for fast-moving clients. Curious that one of the first uses of WiFi was for package tracking in logistics.
- True. You could obtain a pay cut not only through salary reduction, but also via increased responsibilities, which were not part of the initial contract. The second is a more indirect form, but still one you don't have to agree with.
- Suppose you were looking for a new room and found one of size x m2. The landlord didn't specify its built year, so you went to the place to make yourself a picture of the situation. You estimate that the building has six floors with three identical apartments each. Given that you have city data about the buildings (like the one we've seen about Chicago), could you predict the potential room condition without having to look inside or have the landlord present? Would you then ask to see it (if you expected it to be a good one) or would you wait to see data from the noise sensors first, being wary that someone else might come to take it faster?
- Not in hope of clients having problems. Much happier when they don't, since it would save me quite some time not having to look into hairy, "easy to deal with" details. And it's nicer to meet positive people, independent of whether they were clients or not.
- Event schedules are such a great place for design to leave no room for wrong interpretations.
- "Every business has 3 stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders." You missed the customers of your customers. But you may not have shareholders and only rely on few employees, which leaves you very focused on the other two.
- "Magic has to be verified with cold, hard numbers." Agree. Strange, seems the calculator found legs to hide somewhere.
- Quick demonstration of the long tail in swimming bit.ly/2o2Ofim (FINA rankings for men and women). You really can't afford to remain unknown.
- Consistent button labels: "like", "follow", "subscribe"...
- You might be tempted to look for high-conductivity, induction core, copper cookware, until you find that a set of ten units is priced at $1400. Great things tend to have high prices, but great clients know why. Happy and productive new week!
- Construction years of the buildings in Chicago having an area of less than 6000 square feet bit.ly/2J6UFUO (Source: Chicago Data Portal, City of Chicago, "Building footprints (current)", bit.ly/2oOx191 ↗). Not sure whether these are all buildings (391782) or a representative selection. The median area computed to 1354 square feet. One building had an area larger than 6 million square feet (1000x more, can you guess where it is?), but the highest density was at the lower end. You can also see the building conditions by construction year bit.ly/35QL0f3, where the most sound buildings were built in the years 2006 and 1925 (14772 and 12196 respectively). The distant 1889 is particularly problematic due to its association with 114 uninhabitable and another 1100 buildings needing major repair.
- Sunday data jam for your pleasure: "D'Arbo jam nutrients'" bit.ly/2MzRzet. You can expect 929-984kJ energy per 100g product, without being exposed to saturated fats. But notice that 52-56% of the content is sugar.
- The end of the month is another opportunity to look at the monthly sales, revenue and profit graphs to validate operational direction.
- Now and then seeing ideas, which remind me of Salvador Dali's "melted" clocks. This is also how the iceberg of the available time tends to melt.
- Still haven't seen real-time KDE on 2D road transport in a given region. Computationally expensive, but the moving blobs could reveal interesting time-dependent patterns.
- One week left to birthday. Time passes so quickly. Assuming that you no longer have the necessary tiime for that one.
- "Retirement is a need, not a want." Precisely. So I make sure clients cover that too, not only the risks of burnout and eyesight loss.
- SIAM published a nice list of job titles for people with applied math or computer science skills bit.ly/2J3Q1Ht. Feels somewhat incomplete, but stills highlights the enormous potential for growth.
- Floor area of the Royal Parks in London, UK bit.ly/32FiMC9. With its 2500 acres, "Richmond Park" seems to be the largest.
- Mixing rosehips in a blender turned out not to be such a great idea (if you proceeded despite my warnings).
- Ran a small script through the noise data for Eindhoven, The Netherlands (≈197MB data) and here are its findings bit.ly/2P1qfat. You could also visualize the locations if you wish—this has been omitted due to time constraints. Indicated three "Rondwege", which had the highest median noise levels.
- Some insect speeds according to National Geographic bit.ly/2BniLqr. These ants in Sahara may soon have to face competition from Bloodhound. Can these enter nostrils unnoticed?
- Liked the way Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) indicates the overall system status bit.ly/2MqOQ6P. Currently some minor delays on the blue line. Noticed that several transit authorities (also Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority etc.) are offering freely downloadable transit maps, which is great.
- While you are moving in a hall and speaking, a moving robot ahead of you could be filming your YouTube video.
- Toroidal transformers have toroidal core. The simplest toroid core is the torus. Some bakeries have tori (doughnuts) on offer. Doughnuts are edible. It does not follow that transformers are edible.
- Streets, parks and trees in Sioux Falls, South Dakota bit.ly/2J0ySOB. Main streets seem to follow a square pattern, even if they span outside the city boundary. There are over 69000 listed trees (in brown, green was used for parks), where a higher density can be seen in what appears to be the city center.
- You probably remember the book series, where "The fast hand" was representative of the sample. A difference in reaction time between milliseconds and seconds could make the difference between life and death. Think about this the next time you publish another 20 second website.
- Do you use data analysis to identify the (human) nodes where it would be most efficient to apply a limited number of vaccines to prevent the spread of a disease?
- Do you use data analysis to select the best components for your electronic circuits?
- Take a look at the variables in your code. They have some limited lifetime (a good practice being reducing it), beyond which the program knows nothing about them. A variable is essentially a small piece of data. But we insist storing regular data far beyond its original purpose (to help solve a concrete problem), which enables the possibility that it is sold, acquired (ater company acquisition), stolen, used in targeted campaigns or bound with completely unrelated information for knowledge extraction. A less glamourous, but fair alternative is to collect only data the client wants to provide, for a limited time—say 2 weeks or for the duration of the project,—and only act on it within that timeframe. After the time is over or the client confirms that keeping it further is of no use, it can be garbage collected. This way noone else gets to it without their consent.
- Surveillance capitalism deeply affects our collective future (apart from creating market inefficiencies). Clients who feel betrayed no longer consume, and when they are fearful of touching more products, there is no longer a chance that some of them become successful on the market or that new, fast-growth companies appear. Producers will then tend to postpone or cancel their products/investments. A feedback loop.
- Perhaps I didn't fully understand the science behind it, but why would someone integrate compressed JS code in a separate iframe? This science lab page was more than 1.5MB and took ≈20s to load (script-heavy). For having 11 static images with some short descriptions, this isn't exactly lightweight. Unsure what percentage of the scripts never trigger with an inactive user.
- If asking you about your problem encourages you to tell me about your tech stack, your project proposal was rejected.
- If you are a client requiring exclusive service from me and paying well for it, that's fine. If you were looking for additions to compete against your current stack of cheap professionals, that's not me. You are looking for someone else.
- Beauty-ops, gigs, toks and coins promise a "quick and minimally harmful rise in status". If you belong to the believers, of course.
- "productivity = KLOC/person-month". No need to read that book further. But plenty of such "experts" exist.
- If a service like Fiverr (5er) was called 5000er, I might have participated. Until then, no free lunch from me.
- Imagine electricity had "time to recharge".
- Thought of buildings made of arc etages bit.ly/33HH0M5. After becoming aware of the termite and flood risks, paid extra attention to strenghten the bases. With such shapes, it is slightly less clear how to optimize total floor area to building volume, so that stretched hands don't touch the ceiling. Initial idea was to increase curvature bottom-up while keeping each pair of arc points attached to the bottom floor, but that would exceed the allotted time.
- Fibers (in textiles) have high length:thickness ratio. Learned that kapok fiber is considered the lightest natural fiber (from a fruit tree), which is also water-repelling, but not as strong as cotton.
- Size ranges of different microscopy techniques bit.ly/2MPnOF4. If I understand correctly, wide angle X-ray scattering appears to be the most sensitive, while scanning electron microscopy is among the three with the widest range, perhaps a sign of versatility in application. But I could be wrong.
- Chewing at a sword-long baguette while walking down the central street... the sense of decency would yell at me.
- With a $10 pizza and a $10/hour employee cost, the weekly application of the two-pizza rule (in a team of five for half an hour) costs a company $468/person-year. The equivalent of 10 good books, which every employee could have read or a subscription to one or more libraries. And if after subscription someone read 30 books/year and discovered 3 good ideas in each on average, where only 20% of them are practical/implementable, and where they find the time to realize only 25% of the ideas on this short list, that would be 4.5 demos/person-year.
- Days ago wondered whether it was possible to compute the length of a single curve participating in the double helix by using a double integral in connection with the the arc length formula.
- Wrote a small script to look at the pattern in the placement of the supporting boards for a sample roof bit.ly/33BYLw9
- Interesting observations about the Golden Ratio bit.ly/2Bf78Sd ↗
- Interesting architectural idea—to have "people" engraved in pillars, using their heads to support the upper floor.
- Could never serve a non-paying company. Canceled the conversations instead, for a lifetime.
- Out of the 756 bikes at bike-discount.de, only 35 met my criteria to have a price between 800€ and 1000€. The minimal price was 99.83€ (a bike for small girls), the median was 2116.64€ and the most expensive was 9074.62€ ("Aerium C:68 SLT 1X12 LOW carbon´n´red"). These prices do not appear "discount" to me.
- Saw some nice photos in "Goodbye things: The new Japanese minimalism". Especially liked the one with a single tiny mattress and blanket in the center of the room. Most expensive possessions wouldn't make me happier either. Who needs that $3000 ring or the $100000 car? It takes a certain inner strength to be able to let go of everything extra. Everyone is different and will leave different things, while preserving others. But without a balanced view, we could easily go to extremes during this decluttering and find ourselves more miserable later. This excerpt also created an uninvited association in me. First, we've heard that Japanese people are known for their longevity. Second, we see that the culture of minimalism is important to many people there, perhaps more so than elsewhere. Third, we've seen that the more items exist in a closed space, the more likely it is that more of them could emit harmful, invisible gases (remember formaldehyde?). The question then is whether minimalism can reduce pollutants so much as to increase longevity. Perhaps nothing more than a stupid hypothesis.
- When you make fullscreenshots, do you find yourself obligued to clean up the extra you don't need similarly to when you remove textbook fluff or excess code? Being disorganized here could easily cost you hundreds of megabytes or fill up your hard drive to the point your machine refuses to complete elementary operations.
- "Contain the problems before they have the chance to spread" seems like a useful advice, but one that can be misused too. Suppose that an entire course is aware that a lecturer is only wasting their time, not teaching them the skills to succeed in real life. The lecturer might be great at containing the attempts to be criticized in order not to lose their position. From their perspective, the problem doesn't see the chance to spread. However, once these students start entering the industry, it starts spreading like wildfire.
- If you make yourself irreplaceable, you are no longer seen as an employee with a 3-year expiration date. You plan for a busy life of 30 years and know that any short-term, unpaid overcommitment would work against you. Instead of waiting to be replaced, you start replacing yourself every single day. And you charge for the privilege of having others pick your brain whenever that's convenient for them, not you.
- If a small sofa costs $200 (inconvenient, only one seat), a medium one costs $400 (more convenient, 2 seats), a wise seller could offer a big one at $500 (most convenient, 3 seats). And since the last has the best space:price ratio, they will be pushing for more sales at the highest, conveniently rounded price point, potentially achieving higher profitability. Business brain told so last night.
- Which truck (vehicle selection) should pass when (congestion avoidance) through which routes (path optimization) to load which stores (vehicle-stores assignment)?
- Repeating the idea in C = (1-t)*A + t*B many times allows one to realize an inverted tree of mixings, eventually ending in a root. Reminds you perhaps about mergesort.
- If you invited biological sequences at your office, it is reasonable to expect that you signed a multi-year contract with bioinformatics, in one way or another.
- Used an excerpt from a book to try computing the kinetic energy of a spinning compact disc (CD) bit.ly/2qbUFfL. Do you find any gaps in this reasoning? One might assume that since this energy depends on the 4th degree of the radius, it would be much higher for a large, spinning vinyl record, for instance. But this is likely wrong due to its very low rotation speed of only 33.33rpm (LP, d=41cm). Using the same formula on a data of a sample vinyl, we obtain only 0.0255 Joules, or a result which is ≈908x lower.
- Also notice this imaginary curve on the right in the following diagram bit.ly/2VE0JJA. A tennis player has to rank high in order to have the chance to add more points. But after an age of 29 years, if they didn't rank within the top 400, it becomes almost impossible to improve.
- Looked at age and points for the top 1000 tennis players in the ATP ranking bit.ly/2B93t8r. It seems that when seen as collective, players that are 22-23 years old seem to perform best. It is then reasonable to expect that these are the ages where the chance of scoring points is highest overall. But we also notice that 89 players of age 23 have made only slightly more points than the 17 players of age 33 or the 25 players of age 32. Since the group of the players which are 32-33 years old is much smaller, they have made much more points on average. This means that there is an approximate span of 10 years in which already good players can expect to improve, but only if they persist. However, the first graphic tells us that after age 25, many players either start to fall off the ranking or perhaps lose interest.
- Impressions from the Michio Kaku book "Physics of the impossible": Thoughts can be used to move around objects in a room (via computer, supperconductors in walls, magnets attached to objects). Japanese Maglev trains reached 1000km/h. "We might become the pets of computers" - Arthur Clarke. Most science is made indirectly rather than directly. If Jupiter and Saturn didn't exist, Earth could be bombarded by asteroids 1000x more often; without moon there would be changes in Earth's spin causing extreme weather conditions. We were said to be civilization of type 0 (using fossil fuelds), whereas one of type 2 would be able to fully utilize the sun energy and one of type 3 would be able to fully utilize the energy of an entire galatic. Physics laws change at microlevel. Specific impulse (in seconds) is used to measure the efficiency of a rocket engine (higher is better). Ion engines may enable multiplanetary transport (low thrust, relatively high specific impulse). A dynamic planet or star can be used to turn around a rocket and accelerate it or save some of its fuel (used by "Voyager" to reach Neptune). Antimatter (Richard Feynman: matter which moves back in time) is the most expensive substance in the world (CERN), but could one day be used to bring much needed thrust power to rockets. An antimatter detector like PAMELA acts similar to a fishing net. Galaxies can also be used as telescopic lens to illuminate antimatter (then observable via Hubble). Objects tend to become smaller the faster they move. An expanding Universe means energy is dissipated, potentially leading to full icing (but not permanent). Multi-universe colonies have greater chance of survival. Keywords: Hubble, Chandra, International Space Station, Allen Telescope Array, Kepler telescope, SETI, PAMELA antimatter detector, CERN, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) & Higgs boson, LIGO, LISA, BBO (gravitational wave detectors), quantum theory, nanotechnology, energy conservation, black holes, Stephen Hawking, Gödel
- Park and recreation areas by acreage in Florida, 2019 bit.ly/2OEqh86. Circle sizes vary, but are somewhat hard to see. (Source: Florida geodata portal, bit.ly/2VBzoYJ ↗)
- "If King Kong was 10x bigger, he would be only 100x stronger, but 1000x heavier. The monkey's weight grows much faster than its strength, while increasing its size. In other words, it would be 10x weaker than a normal monkey and its legs would break." - Michio Kaku
- Can't say whether today's sirens are louder than those 30 years ago and by how much (dB). As a kid I didn't pay much attention to this. But with "autonomous noise" you give a definition of concern.
- "Optimizing running a race on a curved track" is an interesting paper, possibly useful not only to runners. The authors found that running on the center lanes enables the best performance (fastest), then follows running on the outermost lane and at last running on the innermost lane. Inside lanes were considered a disadvantage due to the high curvature, meaning that the runner has to expend more energy to counter the centrifugal force, while running on the outisde lane reduces visibility (noone to chase in front). Always assumed that all lanes are equally long down to the centimeter, but this paper proved me wrong. Wondered whether the 1.22m lane width could fit a cheetah opponent. But good to see the interplay of several factors and an interesting perspective.
- Under which conditions does a room have a good amount of daylight coming in? Liked the following observation: windows facing south, window-to-wall ratio of 40% (50% with high-performance windows), depth of the room ≈2.5x the height of the windows. Nice to see several factors at play here: light source availability, heat transfer tradeoff, light reachability of the interior. Sun shines on me while writing this.
- An application which shows in-store customers the exact location of an item of interest (as colored polygon on a map) could be immensely useful. Suppose you heard about the great chicken in the store, but you have trouble finding it. You depend on nearby employees to tell you, but they may not be available, not know exactly or find your questions interfering with their work. Perhaps there is a way to highlight a polygon when one types "chicken", so that the experience separates the store from those not offering it. But what if the items on sale were million, where the browser would hardly handle the DOM burden and where using SVG would make the download cost substantial? If you can think of another alternative, the only thing that's left is to gather accurate data on million items and ensure their positions don't change too often.
- Shows another reason not to include images when you could achieve the same with pure HTML and CSS—a very small fraction of the URLs could point to a non-existing resource and you have no easy way to notice this when you rely on too many resources, most of which seem to load fine.
- Someone mentioned that Phoenix is getting increasingly popular among entrepreneurs, naturally leading me to the surge cities data, which Inc. published in 2018 bit.ly/325iN1L ↗. After dimensionality reduction bit.ly/2B7XjoY, we see that this city was not too far from Austin, but also closer to Riverside. San Francisco and San Jose show high similarity and they easily separated themselves from the rest in this year (according to the listed criteria). On a straight line, Phoenix was too far from them, so it was quite dissimilar. But this might offer great growth opportunities, at least until the large gap starts to close. We also see that Boston was a relatively unusual city and it managed to separate itself more than Austin, Seattle or San Diego, for instance. The last two also showed some surge similarity, despite being geographically much more distant than the 67km between San Francisco and San Jose.
- Two beautiful circle packing diagrams on pages 4 and 108 in the book "Planar maps, random walks and circle packing" will make your geometric day.
- Suppose you learned that it is possible to seek correlation between time and the type of event. But then the phrase "space-time" bubbles up in your mind. Would it cause you to check whether correlation between space and event type could reveal something you missed?
- If you think about energy, area and time separately, you might feel that they are totally unrelated or not interesting at all. But if you consider them together as a single aggregate unit in some mathematical arrangement where you infuse them with a certain semantic, contextual meaning, they may start to appear logically connected. Have you recently discovered other practical variable combinations which appeared to make no sense at first? Was also thinking about variable swapping with random disciplines. For instance a = "geometry" and b = "statistics" leads to "geometrical statistics" and "statistical geometry". Can such disciplines potentially exist and if so what would their core be made of? Is it possible to juggle-swap three variables whose unique combination still makes sense?
- Someone tore apart the vinyl wall covering of a hotel room to expose the mold on the wall. Well-hidden under the beautiful facade. Thought it was some unrealistic seaweed.
- "Insulating sheetings are prone to insect infestation. 'Insect interstates' then provide pathways into buildings." Sounds like a graph. Insulating against organized conquerors is NP-complete.
- In 2017, the number of people without electricity fell to less than a billion for the first time.
- Incadescent lightbulbs are said to be ≈13lm/W, which means that a LED light with 150lm/W would have ≈11.5x better efficiency.
- A single bird can't make a summer, but zero birds won't overturn the winter either.
- If you wished me to focus on your project instead, propose it in the usual way. In the best case, we might even work together.
- "Creating healthy and sustainable buildings: an assessment of health risk factors" bit.ly/2VyLnpQ ↗ is also rich in useful information. Occupant comfort depends on thermal comfort, air quality, daylighting, sound comfort, universal design, ergonomics. There are some age and gender-specific preferences when it comes to thermal comfort: women prefer slightly higher room temperatures than men, while elderly people prefer higher temperatures than young adults. Indoor air is often more seriously polluted than outdoor air—it may contain over 900 chemicals, particles and biological materials,—causing illnessses like asthma, lung cancer and stroke. Tobacco use, cooking pollutants, asbestos are common. Terpenes are indoor-prevalent chemical compounds. Chemicals are also in our pesonal hygiene cosmetics and indoor odors. The main source of CO2 in buildings is our metabolic activity. The recommendation given is that CO2 indoors has to be up to 350ppm above the one observed outdoors. ASHRAE were said to recommend a value of 1000ppm (max 2500ppm). The values detected in 24 schools in Slovenia were ≈4000ppm. Poor people working in less favorable conditions are more exposed to illnesses; higher air quality was linked with a 10% increase in worker productivity. Reducing the number of sick days per employee had greater financial return than energy savings. Construction products, wooden furniture, paints, adhesives, varnishes, floor finishes, disinfectants, cleaning agents and other household products were all said to emit formaldehyde (HCHO), which irritates and eyes, upper & lower respiratory tract and can cause headache, fatigue, rhinitis, ocular and nasal problems, dermal symptoms. Formaldehyde emissions were found to increase 10x as relative humidity increased from 25% to 85%. Higher temperatures and higher relative humidity (conditions seen in summer) were linked with higher formaldehyde emission. The opposite (lower formaldehyde emission) was more typical during winter. Atmospheric humidity can affect static charge buildup on the floor. Plasticisers in PVC, which is used for window frames, walls or flooring can easily emit phtalates (no covalent bond to the plastic exists), which can increase incidence of certain cancers. Phtalates are then emitted through the whole product lifecycle and can be absorbed by carpet, wood or skin and re-emitted in indoor air. They can also attach to the dust we breathe in, leading to more severe health issues. Dampness in buildings (due to inadequate ventillation) has serious health effects by growing mites (also abundant in household dust) and moulds, which are allergens (80 million Europeans were said to live in such environments). Mould/dampness (also in water-damaged houses) were associated with fatigue, nasal symptoms and cough. People living in energy poverty were said to be 3x more likely to live in damp, unhealthy buildings (more people couldn't cool in summer than couldn't warm in winter). Buildings were said to be a good media for the growth of microorganisms: bacteria, moulds, viruses, dust, pollen, soil, plant debris, fungi. Humidifiers, dehumidifiers, HVAC/cooling devices, indoor A/C units were found to stimulate their growth. The recommendation is to ventillate frequently and naturally (avoiding the use of an air conditioner) with minimal ventillation rate of 6-7L/s for homes, 12L/s for schools and up to 25L/s for offices (all rates per person). Our eyes were said to resonate in the range 1-20Hz, so air frequency noise below 20-100Hz and vibrations (from ventillators/fans) can interfere with their normal function. Long-term exposure to such infrasound can also cause fatigue, headache, nausea, concentration difficulties, disorientation, motion sickness, vision problems, dizziness. Steady noise from general sources, which is above 33dB was said to have potential impact on health. Daylight regulates our circadian rhytm and vitamin D generation. People exposed to full-spectrum daylight (as opposed to only normal light) had 9x less pronounced dental decay.
- "robust strategy (performs well against alternatives) over a wide range of futures" +1
- Was deeply touched yesterday after watching segments of a video with a mid-age mathematician starting a lecture with an apology for "never having programmed before". And I thought that there must be something wrong in his environment. Wondered whether some programmers could have pushed him to believe he was in some way inferior. And from where this social expectation came that a mathematician must be a programmer as well. Disagree with that. A mathematician is free to pursue anything they fully believe in, in the same way an entrepreneur is pursuing their idea hoping for an impact. Sometimes this means that writing code will actually work against them. Not all ideas can be illustrated or elegantly expressed in code, which by itself is not creative. While many programmers tend to reuse existing patterns, a mathematician can often see through their work and point at their wasteful computation (see "Analytic combinatorics" for mini-taste). He can also be instrumental to gaining lots of small insights in a way that a pure programmer would only stare at in disbelief. A programming team without a good mathematician isn't as good as they think they are. While this may not show on the current project, it could be on the next. So calm down and prepare to respect any helpful mathematical thought if you don't want to hurt your career as a programmer.
- How good can be a team of programmers, which isn't a team in its excercise? Takes 5-10 intensive minutes daily for a visible long-term effect, allows combat formation on the floor, synchronous movements (no hand flapping), left and right wing must keep the same height while the (job rotated) pilot-in-command explains the instructions. No chance for hiding somewhere and explaining "I already did them" by culminating three push-ups with two burgers.
- Good example for a Markov chain: an individual passing through a set of living states (maybe related to health) to enter a death state and recur in it forever. Moving through transient states happens with probability P < 1 until reaching an absorbing state, which leads to itself with probability P = 1 (recurrent). It seems then that the states through which variables in a program pass follow the same pattern. Once initiated, with the help of branching and looping, a variable transitions to several different states until it eventually settles or in some way participates in the final output of the script. Beyond that the variable doesn't change; re-running the script causes a new one to take its place. That "eventual absorbtion is certain" has (in my opinion) a lot to do with entropy. The lesson from this is to pick our life states wisely and look even for the floating point errors, which may be a means to an end.
- "Texas A&M Tuition Calculator" bit.ly/35rJpMH ↗. Haven't seen many applications like this, but improved transparency is beneficial to every student.
- Shorter time-to-market is one way to offset the impact of short product lifecycles. The question is whether you have the capacity and ingenuity for it.
- Could you find favorable locations to grow your crops, given you knew that many prefer smaller daily peek-to-peek amplitudes? You could also integrate land prices and expected local demand as part of your computation.
- Three months from now "conclusion" will appear as "final words". Changing world.
- Do you think 3x3 rotation matrices could also be used in robotics, not only in on-screen object transformations?
- Norway was 15 years at the top of the Human Development Index, which is amazing.
- Toastmasters blog has a small advice on decision making: count down five to zero and act on it immediately (otherwise psyche convinces you it's not that important). Can doing this often enough create a positive habit? Already hesitated with the words and my script-based helper frequently exceeds its allotted time.
- Sadly, the proof of high coupling, low cohesion. But writing whatever I'd read.
- Which variables help to explain the success or failure of your advertisement? What about user satisfaction level?
- Do you have a good understanding about the number of days each item you sell spends in your inventory?
- There's a big market for attention. You could offer a product to satisfy it.
- Few interesting bits from the book: "grow watermelons on a peach tree", "stay on course in big rivers", "a company without focus is like a dull knife", "be like a needle hitting with a high enough concentrated force", "harvest more crops and increase soil fertility", "last year's high-end model is this year's low-end device", "toast those who succeed and offer a helping hand to those who fail" (said to have been used in the early days), "global market domination requires the absense of Achilles heels", "see both the trees and the forest". There were few details I did not agree with, but enjoyed it overall.
- "Absorb the energy of the universe over a cup of coffee." These must be a lot of cups when zero meaningful actions happen meanwhile. Good advice for people who advance via contacts, not skills.
- One way to have programmers be less excited about salads is to compensate them so they don't have to think about them.
- Beet and blood are both red and you may not distinguish from what the salad was made.
- Never engage your programmers with salad-making. They'll cut their fingers and then you'll have to write the code yourself.
- "The cost of local employees is much lower." Great. Then hire only local employees, or even better, only those who knocked personally on the interview door at Tuesday, 9 AM.
- Twitter: "We are no longer using phone numbers or email addresses collected for safety or security purposes for advertising." This is a good beginning and it's nice to be honest about it. However, I thought yesterday about this problem potentially popping up elsewhere. Currently the use of facial recognition software at some airports is said to be for security reasons too. But how much of this data could leak to advertisers or big companies needing lots of it to train their (deep) learning algorithms? They constantly complain of not having enough data and now passengers are conveniently converted into supporters of their big data goals, participating in the expensive data collection for free. Would people otherwise willingly share their photos with an unknown actor? "Security reasons" has become a word used for monetization and creation of competitive advantage and we should be wary of this trend. This is not saying that data shouldn't be collected at all.
- Only 85 pages into it, but found it surprisingly useful. Haven't seen it recommended elsewhere (perhaps due to the fact it is about a Chinese rather than an American business), but already looking forward to continue reading tomorrow. The book is called "Built on value: The Huawei philosophy of finance management" (freely available online at Springer bit.ly/2M0F6jI), but it is also about a business philosophy, experience and observations the company made over a period of 28 years. Engaging even if slightly repetitive. But if the mentioning of the title invokes negative associations in you to the point you dismiss it entirely, you may not find its hidden treasure.
- A book described "Droste effect" as reflexive nesting and my first association was with the works of Escher. Wished that Wikipedia told me that art is completely unpredictable instead, becoming itself art.
- Seems like a way to recognize pure gold when you see it: its density is said to be 19.32g/cm3, (or ≈19x as much as an equal volume of water). Call the authorities if it swims on the surface.
- Color codes for volcano activity bit.ly/35iM9vq
- You won't hear me say "I can solve your problem well and fast." How could someone claim not only success, but how it will look like, before even knowing the nature of the problem and its context? Can be said only by an assertive person.
- Great to see that I'm not the only person which noticed that assertiveness and competency are two different things. Do you think a person claiming proficiency with 10 programming languages + 10 frameworks could be assertive? If your company consists primarily of teams of assertive people, it's understandable that proficiency doesn't come.
- "How long will it take?" Wished I could run some regressor on previous data to find out (onkeydown) rather than having to think about it or manually insert values in the PERT formula. Unfortunately, not every project is described by the same features. So instead, I try to give a time estimate that would enable me to provide the necessary work in sufficient quality while still fulfilling my compensation goals. If this isn't possible, the only thing left to me is declining to proceed with the project.
- The ratio administrative to academic staff reminds me of the ratio managers to employees.
- Went to a distant store by feet (not a car owner) and they told me at 08:55 that they open at 10:00. Felt like lost time apart from the strong, cold wind which on the way back made me feel as if I was drunk.
- Ingredients of most "Loacker" products bit.ly/2LT4U12
- Some of my takeaways from "Hot property": Globalization leads to increasingly similar patterns of housing price developments across economies. For instance, several countries had around 15%/year housing price growth in their capitals, while the average for the country-rests was 6-9%. Amsterdam, Vancouver, Beijing all grew at 15%/year, Berlin at ≈12.5%/year, Seoul at 10.5%/year. Sydney, Oslo, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Dublin were all shown as hot property markets. Housing prices often grow faster than income, which forces low-income people to leave or take on more debt to be able to stay. Between 1997 and 2016, the available housing in London increased by 470 thousand units while demand grew to 1.7 million. Claims were that 25% of Londoners live in poverty after consideration of their housing costs while one in every 50 was said to be homeless. Rising housing prices increase mortgage debt among new buyers, which is a risk for banks in case a housing bubble bursts. Land shortage and the meeting of strict construction standards (e.g. low level of noise) can limit the number of available units (Stockholm), driving prices higher. Reliable early warnings for unsustainable housing bubbles: nominal house price growth and high price-to-income gaps. Australia has a population of 25 million, where 10 million live in Sydney and Melbourne. Very high population density increases the demand for housing and its price. Airbnb (and likely similar services) was said to have a strong effect on rent and housing prices. During the ten years after 2007, 50-70% of the new housing in Iceland was offered on the platform, which increased overnight stays by 290%. In the case of USA, researchers found that every 1% growth in the platform listings for cities with median owner-occupancy led to 0.018% and 0.026% increases in the rental and buying prices respectively.
- If you can't reach me during weekdays (project), but still want me to notice you, there is another way. At the end of the month is my birthday and optionally you could honor it in some way. Guessing that shipping time would take at least two weeks if you are based in USA or China. So saying this now prevents the case of being accused for saying it too late while giving you enough time to plan accordingly. You'd still need the right address though and that's quite personal.
- Would you say that four small eyes are better than two when looking at big data?
- Would you describe your business activity as rent-seeking or wealth-creating? Do you exploit the economy or do you expand it instead? Asking after learning that well-intended people also switch to rent seeking out of frustration that their work requires lots of personal development (quite slow) and is not appreciated enough. Not surprising that we pushed ourselves in the corner with "fast/convenient beats meaningful".
- "Cheap smartphones are privacy nightmares." Exactly. Always hesitating at a cheap price and remembering the potential shortcuts (not just in manufacturing quality or features) and law violations made in order to sell more and faster. The "finger-off" response then becomes natural to me. No browsers, contacts or USB-to-PC connections from such device. You offer $250 laptops instead? Not to me.
- Which particle system is more dynamic? We could think in terms of total kinetic energy as a sum of the kinetic energies of all individual particles: K = sum(m*v**2 for m, v in particles) / 2, where m and v are their respective masses and velocities. What is left is to compare the Joules in each case.
- "Minimize total waiting time." Let's think of a concrete, simplified example. At one bus stop two people wait for the same bus, which comes every 20 mins, while at another, 12 people wait for a bus arriving every 5 mins. Assuming average wait time per person is half the interval length between bus arrivals, total wait times in each case become 20 and 30 mins respectively. Does this mean that it is economically feasible to make the bus pass through the second stop more frequently? What about all other stops along its route, do they also need to be considered? The availability of busses and bus drivers? If bus stops are often approx. equally spaced, is it practically possible to make a vehicle pass through one stop much faster than through the next?
- Is your company also experiencing a project cost overrun? You probably remember the Brook's law stating that "adding people late to a software project makes it later". Can't help on this one, but you could still propose another one if it is in the starting phase and has the necessary budget.
- Sad to read about the cost overruns experienced during the organization of many Olympic Games. It seems that large projects with less than ideal planning could more easily run into debt. But they can still contribute to peace, ultimately benefiting everyone. At Pyeongchang 2018 saw ≈2750 athletes from different nationalities competing in 28 sports (still remembering the beautiful ceremony). Somewhat strange is that one reason for cost overruns at some games was cited to be land use—once it became clear a large project would be built, prices of land in the area rose dramatically. Stadium development and equipment (for all sports), the Olympic Village, renovation of existing assets, roads, parking places, parks, additional infrastructure (e.g. swimming pool), points of interest for tourists, personnel and subcontractors, security, administration, protective measures against epidemies etc. can also contribute to cost overruns. The organization of the Olympic Games was said to show similar properties to the cost overruns seen during the building of large railways or power plants.
- Do you know your country's R&D budget as percentage of GDP?
- "The enrollments in entrepreneurship courses in poor countries are high, but they often have low social value of return." Only some knowledge of questionable quality is not sufficient to keep the entrepreneurial flame. Where capital is missing (and it's missing because someone else wants it), that flame can't be sustained for long. As someone said nicely: "The best-educated children of the poor are often worse off than the poorly educated children of the rich." Capital matters tremendously.
- ANOVA on three series is said to be able to replace pairwise t-tests. A p-value can be derived both from a t-value or an F-value. Good morning! Feel free to interrupt me with your important projects this week. If not, take the time do the work yourself.
- Used data from Wikipedia to create an overview of the listed textile fiber properties bit.ly/2oZZk3J. The next time the color of the grid will have to be a bit more subtle. Otherwise, it looks as if "lightweight" is the most common property. It likely won't be that useful in isolation, but when combined with others, e.g. "soft" and "warm".
- "Fine Merino wools are mostly in the 18-21µm range, superfine wools in the 14-17µm range and expensive ultra-fine wools are ≈12µm." (Source: "Physical properties of textile fibers" by Morton and Hearle, excerpt) Fineness is seen as important for fiber value. We have already seen some clothes made of Merino here, but we didn't knew that an ultra-fine variant exists that could be better. This could mean that "expensive" is more in the sense of unaffordable here. Still, the data is nice and reminds us about the importance of making ourselves a picture of the situation (here preferably with a microscope).
- Interesting to learn that insurance and telecom companies may partner so that the former can learn about risky driver behavior from the driver's smartphone.
- Signed up on a website, where the first message upon sign in was "Starting from {date} member subscribers will need {terms and conditions}". Why were these not mentioned prior to registration?
- A single-loop Zifferblatt which knows its code bit.ly/2oeYZu0
- An earthquake with magnitude 9.2 changed Alaska on 27.03.1964. (Thought the scale ends earlier.)
- That avalanche sizes follow a power law is a striking mathematical description.
- Strange that I never heard about this domino effect on 14.09.2003 when 45 million Americans were left without electricity due to mass-failing generating units and power plants (508 + 265). Perhaps you remember.
- That the spread pattern of forest fires and/or diseases could resemble a gradual node activation on a graph would not easily occur to me. I looked at graphs mostly as something static and not from the view of a dynamic process. Which means that extinguishing the fire at important nodes (centrality measures) could help reduce a severe situation to several subgraphs which are easier to tackle, at least in theory. However, firefighters often approach at the periphery first, where these nodes could be hardly reachable.
- A simple sentence which had me deeply irritated this afternoon bit.ly/2Il7KJW. Not from stone. Unwilling to be part of a famous company.
- Liked a new type of heatmap I haven't seen before: where the x and y axes represent counts at particular times for two separate variables, both merged together at the end, where light shades represent lower and dark shades—higher counts. Looks gorgeous and less blocky than the matrix-like heatmaps used here so far.
- If a "products" dropdown takes ≈40% of the available screen space and only 50% of it is filled with content (2 out of 4 columns), what does this say about space efficiency of the design?
- PCA on ultra-low-power microcontrollers by Texas Instruments bit.ly/2neastn. The source is the data table they provided. Not a clean diagram due to too much data. For instance, the 16-bit MSP430F5438A provides 256KB non-volatile memory, 16KB RAM, 14 ADC channels, 87 GPIO pins, 4x I2C, 8x SPI, 4x UART at $3.25 (min. order of 1000 units). These numbers look fine relative to other models, but the system clock of up to 25Mhz may not suit all applications. The 100 pins make this MCU fairly complex.
- Device nomenclature bit.ly/353KOZu. Wondering what we would do without good descriptive labels and visual design.
- "Part of learning how to cook (great) is judging doneness." The equivalent of testing the software; imagine the inconvenience caused when only insufficient time is spent on validating correctness. Only some customers may see the result and it may matter to them a lot. But the damage done is permanent and irreversible. To avoid this, proper testing requires its fair share of time and effort, not skipping. That said, have you ever tried the lemon-olive and avocado-egg combinations?
- Art galleries can be quite inspiring, yet their presence online is often limited. Collecting entrance fees is often seen as a better business model. And since some stores are located inside, the items they sell often remain unknown to the broader audience.
- ""The Burden of Formality" bit.ly/2oNhqG4 ↗
- getBouncingClientRect() bit.ly/2o8e9kT
- 12 pages * 24 + 1 (last page) * 16 = 304 Ravensburger puzzles for adults. If you look only at the first page and quickly conclude that since many appear to be 13.79€, one could estimate how much a collector would have to pay for all of them, you could be wrong. There are some rare variants with up to 9000, 18000 or 40320 pieces (instead of 1000), having a price up to 399€. Neglecting the rare cases and promoting impressions into false assumptions increases the margin of error.
- "Wing interactions" bit.ly/2nFTxAl. Each unit is made of exactly ten points.
- BBC came with a new article claiming my nation is the fastest shrinking in the world. Doesn't matter much. Not a patriot and will never be. One day we'll be all dust anyway. What I care about is what I can do here and today.
- Wasn't sure about the count, but search found 43 Ibis hotels in Berlin, 23 in Amsterdam, 23 in Vienna and 11 in Zürich.
- Can you find interesting correlations in the NASA exoplanet data archive? bit.ly/2oxKu4d ↗
- Noticed that JYSK had a single picture with an armchair, a pillow and two blanket types placed on its backrest (all prices included). Would you say that association rules might have been used to improve their brochure design?
- A robot making 30 pizzas/hour might be a serious threat to employment of many workers in the food sector. Only time will show how much loss of employment is socially acceptable. But there is no doubt that the limits of this acceptance will be tested and adjusted against.
- Heard about the tools enabling the creation of websites with no code or programming experience, with minimal effort. These were started by few companies several years ago. Not sure about their success rate, but you won't see me using any of these. Quality is too important to be left to a random generator.
- How much money have you spent for ads on popular websites/platforms this year? Did you find this a good return on your investment or are you already planning to have your own platform instead?
- "Knitting a sweater is like following an algorithm." Maybe even more so with hand-made ones, where each step involves some mental memory access before proceeding. Now go ask for the cheapest price.
- How fast is your decision making process? Would be able to decide within few months, few days, few hours or few minutes? If you were looking to rent a room in a popular, highly populated and competitive city, where offers quickly come and go and you were slow to decide, would you be able to see your turn come? Will the direct consequence be a discouragement to look further? In addition, are you currently exploring what others already exploit? Might be a sign that you are coming late to this opportunity and that upon arrival the rewards will be already gone.
- Regions in Europe known for their wine production bit.ly/2oZRjMr. Slightly sceptical about some coordinates, but this is what the machine says.
- Suppose someone wanted to make juice out of apples, carrots and beet, but they are given the constraint to use 80kg of all. Is there anything they could do to optimize the taste of the juice (not too acid, not too sweet) if they only knew the approximate nutrients a given mixture of quantities would contain?
- Funny to see Germans claiming that the quality of "made in Germany" had no equivalent worldwide. These people must be living in some bubble.
- George Polya's idea: If you can't solve a problem directly, try to solve an easier, related problem first.
- Setting up a self-reminder: Start with an interesting question uncovering a problem you are interested to solve, have the right skills for it, the willingness to stick to the end and a methodical way to approach its decomposed pieces. Gather and merge the right data from multiple sources, seek insights, learn any gaps in your existing solution and how you could do better next time.
- Possible that I can't help you much. But if you didn't ask, this was practically guaranteed. Didn't become a web designer for myself. Plenty of businesses exist, which complain that they need help, but don't actively seek it. Fortunately, deeds speak louder than words.
- Found a mini-map with some eco-cities in China bit.ly/2mmwd9W. Would be nice to look again after few years and see a much expanded list.
- Diving sign: "Warning! Drowning here." Liked rhyme and message.
- Another data source for your web works: TomTom traffic congestion index bit.ly/2n8barZ ↗ with an overview about 403 cities across the world. Enjoyed the idea of using navigation systems as tools to highlight slightly slower routes in order to reduce congestion (and their related emissions) for everyone, although (perhaps due to lack of sufficient understanding) it has me a bit sceptical. And that not all cars have navi-systems makes this is an obstacle to the realization. But it is clear that with ≈70 million kilometer roads worldwide and ≈100 million new cars coming on them each year, we are quickly moving towards the capacity limits.
- There could be an optimal route to do these 101 things in London bit.ly/2mTKXh3 ↗. Thought about extracting the names, getting the coordinates and plotting the path. But this is something anyone could do themselves if they were interested. Found the site via an excerpt mentioning that it takes only two lines of code (with the requests library in Python) to extract the events in New York City.
- Have you tried to find the same combination of services and type of work elsewhere?
- ICAO data+ for aviation professionals bit.ly/2nIRF9v ↗. Also merged two creative images seen in the ICAO's free publications—building lights inside the head of a person and a printed circuit board with outputs forming a pattern bit.ly/2mZJbe0. Additionally, the article on stratospheric aircrafts (the 75kg Airbus Zephyr) and balloons (Project Loon), which fly 60000 feet above ground for a long time (e.g. 26 days) was also interesting.
- "Get the look" (not the clothing piece) seems an interesting idea.
- "Supertankers can transport 2 million barrels of oil." (maybe even more ever since) Knowing the size of a single barrel, this is not easy to imagine.
- Expected that cruise ships have several quantifiable features (at minimum) and Wikipedia seems to confirm this bit.ly/2mZPwGl ↗. Symphony, harmony and oasis sound beautiful. You can also see photos of the "Royal Carribean Cruises" fleet bit.ly/2ovDULN ↗. A recent article on cruise ships (also mentioning "Symphony of the Seas") explains the scale and logistics involved to stock some of them with food to avoid having hungry passengers on board cnn.it/2nPL5hs ↗
- Thought that pesticides are exclusively used in agriculture, but learned that methyl bromide has been used to treat packing materials (like palettes or crates) utilized for maritime operations.
- This week is another opportunity to remind me what your business is about, the type of problems it has, the requirements you have and why they all matter.
- {writes code after 5PM, on Friday, in a hurry, uses the new framework} ⇒ {introduces bugs}. Easily verifiable? You still need lots of data and minimum assumptions.
- Could you use a dataset to derive a contigency table and apply the chi-squared statistic to investigate the validity of rules? Scipy seems to have a helper: bit.ly/2omyRgE ↗
- Few reasons for not pushing myself towards Germany: 1) it accepts random people without qualification or much questioning, 2) housing costs are too high relative to expected salary from work and/or opportunities, 3) taxes are (too) high, 4) high level of bureacracy, 5) companies with the right tech profile are missing (automotive sector is top priority) 5) many companies are unknown internationally, but with a sense of pride about their work, 6) foreigners are seen as third-class citizens who 7) are expected to work for free (relatively seen), 8) the economy is shrinking, 9) unfavorable demographics. Under these conditions it is a small miracle that many still seek to go there.
- Not watching TV in general, so the news of the type "first we watched the TVs, now they watch us" do not affect me much. Yet the findings show the work being done towards eliminating individual privacy. My assumption is that the goal is to create and expand the necessary addictions so as to have "returning customers" with a default behavior of mindless consumption without much thinking. If so, this is very convenient for many corporations.
- Had to type "display: none" to the comment section and "width: 100%" to the images overlay before I could see the entire photos on booking.com. The problem stubbornly persists.
- How do you like your Sunday doughnut? a) They don't pay me enough to have one. b) I don't like doughnuts at all. c) without drinks d) with coffee e) with tea f) with Cola. In case of low support, it would be pointless to compute confidence.
- Have you ever counted triangles in graphs and if so in what kind of context did you find this useful?
- Wikipedia's entry on association rule mining bit.ly/2obRunp ↗ in case you need a refresher on support, confidence and lift. What I didn't realize so far is that association rules may not simply be derived from the presence/absense of items in a databse of transactions, but from a combination of non-trivial logical expressions which evaluate to true or false. Completely changed my perspective reigniting further interest. For instance, one could be interested whether {individual is 40-60 years old, drives at midnight (22:00-01:00), has poor eyesight, is tired, road is wet} ⇒ {accident}. As you can see, this has very little to do with supermarkets.
- Do you think image classification can be used to detect the type of skin disease in a patient, supporting the diagnose of their dermatologist?
- Used a table from the same book excerpt ("The designer's guide to the Cortex-M processor family") to look at the Cortex models M0, M0+, M3, and M4, computing a combined index consisting of 90nm LP dynamic power (µW/Mhz), 90nm LP area (mm2), official Dhrystone (DMIPS/Mhz) and CoreMark/Mhz. Cortex M0+ came first, having a relatively good performance of 0.94 DMIPS/Mhz at only 9.8µW/Mhz, but it would have been nicer if M4F was also included and the data about M7 was feature-complete.
- Didn't know that something as simple as assigning the sum of two variables to a third could expand to a sequence of commands in Assembler. Hair-pull material.
- Some elementary operations and the number of cycles they take on a Cortex-M4 processor: add/subtract (1), divide (14), multiply (1), multiply-accumulate (3), fused multiply-accumulate (3), square root (14). You probably also wonder about trigonometric operations or things like min/max, modulo, floor/ceil/round etc.
- Also made a diagram of the performance of the biggest ports in Europe (2011-2017) bit.ly/2lOhqoc according to Wikipedia. It seems that since 2014 the port of Antwerp is already performing slightly better than the port of Hamburg, so there are some minor changes. The port of Barcelona is also visibly improving, but from a much lower position.
- In 2014, Rotterdam was 11th, Hamburg was 15th and Antwerp was 16th among the biggest container ports in the world. Unclear whether the situation has changed significantly since then. Among the first ten only Singapore, Busan and Dubai were not in China. Top 5 were Shanghai, Singapore, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Ningbo.
- Learned about some high-growth economies in 2017-2018: India, Uzbekistan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal. Perspectives about Ethiopia and Rwanda were also said to be good.
- Liked the select criteria listed to aid in finding a good place to work that isn't a coworking space: ambient noise level, number of seats, availability of outlets, bathroom availability, WiFi connection quality. Personally, it would be quite hard for me to concentrate at a public place, but you might like the flexibility of being able to work from anywhere. Clean air would also be a nice addition, since people sitting next to you might be smoking.
- Saw a photo with a newly hatched chicken posing next to a mini helicopter model. Already dreaming big.
- Would you prefer buying if both had the same price—a new low-class car or a second-hand, mid-class car, which reached the end of its useful life in an existing, well-maintained fleet? It depends, but existing fleets could be existing opportunities to get in contact in advance of the maintainer's future needs (in case the vehicles won't automatically enter an auction).
- The backpack can be $8, but the shipping cost $42.
- "Physics is the universe's operating system.' - Steven R. Garman
- Has your corporate software been made overly complex? Everyone bringing their own tools to the task and someone needing to write the interface for them to communicate? Must be quite a task.
- Again last day for client work this week. If not this one, you can try the next.
- When you see a photo with running tracks labled with sparse 1-8 digits, do you try to infer the font used? Possibly harder than looking at a long text where each letter, digit and special character are present. Remember "one(or even zero)-shot" learning?
- It is probably possible to write a CSSRuleShortener class, which contains shorter definitions of the CSS rules you use most often. Then you can type only this short code inside declarations, where the script takes care of the conversion. You no longer need to press the expand key combination on each rule in your editor (all expansions happen at once) and you also benefit from not having to stare at long, less readable code. Potential drawback: a problematic definition seen in DevTools will be harder to map back to its initial keyword (mental work required). Here is a short illustration of the idea bit.ly/2lvqluK
- The "Runners" probably didn't run you. Nothing is as effortless as someone wants to convince us.
- Realized that "capital" (metropolis) and "capitalist" have suspiciously short edit distance.
- Before you enter a university to study computer science, it makes sense to write a program which selects the best one according to the criteria of your choice (e.g. number of students, number of CS students, number of professors per 1000 students, number of subjects, reputation of the subject of interest, expected semesters needed to finish your studies, degree of integration with the industry, importance of university research output, library material size and opening hours, availability of good labor equipment, anytime access to a computer room (to code), semester price, room rent price, city living cost, avg. queue sizes and service times of the secretariat, aula temperature in the winter etc.). If you find this is too much, consider how much it would be if you find yourself at the wrong place a couple of semesters later.
- You can estimate the purchasing power of your salary against a basket of goods to determine whether working for that company still makes sense. Remember that you have a life to improve, not just qualifications.
- By the way, I may reject you by the same criteria, as a client. In that case you wouldn't seek to establish contact again.
- Demo idea: to finish an animation of an arrow on a speedometer and wonder about the own tendencies. Ignore it if you find it unprofitable.
- Distorted rectangle illusion bit.ly/2nlIknP
- Short summary of the sneaker prices at "Humanic" bit.ly/2mEsmFd
- Amenities of the "FitInn" fitness studios in Austria bit.ly/2mGzSPJ. With 42 studios, having a good overview could be somewhat difficult.
- Youth hostels, parkings and European institutions in Brussels, Belgium bit.ly/2lwc5SB. My assumption that the hostels must be close to the institutions, which must have nearby parkings turned out to be true. Practically no youth hostel is far from an important institution, which allows young people from other countries to more easily participate in the political life. The Economic and Social Committee has even two nearby youth hostels. For the European Commission one could stay at the "Centre Van Gogh" hostel and for the European Parliament one could stay at "Jeugdherberg Bruegel" if enough spaces are available at a given day. The work of the last institution is supported by the second-largest parking in the city, having almost thousand parking spaces. Could this be seen as an approximate indicator of institutional importance?
- Software built by any programmer = any software.
- Looked at minimum turning radiuses for trucks yesterday, thinking of a tangent line moved across a curve. Brain switched context today asking me: "If a plane took off at Schönefeld, could it realistically still land at Tegel given it had to reach median elevation and travel on a straight line?" Not exactly like a vertical turning radius (Gaussian), but the distance of ≈25km may still make this possible. Not a pilot to know this for sure.
- Math used to find parking spaces bit.ly/2lrDhSs ↗. Wished the actual details were also published as well. But that crowding problems are especially frequent was an undiscovered gap in my thinking.
- If you knew in advance that your flight will be delayed by 5 hours and 30 minutes, would you ask to receive your money back? Just a little bit more patience, just a bit... it will come.
- Information about the libraries in Kent County, UK bit.ly/2kYygAt ↗
- Someone made a simple application where you enter postal code in Germany and type of gasoline you seek to refuel. Then you get a list with the cheapest nearby petrol stations bit.ly/2kTeKp0 ↗
- Do you like Rührkuchen? Product nutrients of the "Bahlsen" sponge cakes bit.ly/2mspI4Z
- Would be nice to observe a "steep inclination" test at a car factory to ensure that rare cases are also covered well.
- Do you know what type of goods are received when at which terminal at the port of Hamburg (or any other) (map with real-time info)? Or would you rather say that this is better left intransparent (for competitive reasons)?
- "Designed for durability" bit.ly/2mjHXJY ↗. If the bridge was designed to last for 100 years, my assumption is that material emissivity (of precast concrete) was also designed to be minimal.
- Who would have thought? Self-similarity in a book about plants bit.ly/2mj4FlD. Has someone mapped the green polygons of all botanical gardens in Germany yet?
- Didn't occur to me, but it seems logical: people density ↑ → car density ↓ and people density ↓ → car density ↑.
- Wrote a mini script to look at data about "Briggs & Riley" carry-on luggage, after seeing the brand recommended at Consumer Reports. Scoring all 23 models and avoiding rolling cabin bags, two lightweight models like "Explore International Wide-body Spinner" ($349) and "Tall Carry-on Spinner" ($399) come into view. "Wide Carry-on Expandable Spinner" has only negligibly lower score, but looks more sturdy (sale, $375.20) bit.ly/2mBGYF7 ↗. Personally, I like the clean design of "Domestic Carry-on Expandable Spinner" bit.ly/2mw7NKO ↗, but it is also among the most expensive.
- "Automobiles also use supercapacitors for energy recovery during breaking." Now bus drivers will have the incentive to stamp passengers like me on the front glass. But liked this unconventional idea despite my belief that a driver does best when breaking as infrequently as possible. We need more such innovations, combinatorial thinking and playgrounds allowing the creation of such things like nanoscale parking garages out of sugar and salt.
- The German energy network is said to be 1.79 million kilometer long, which is equivalent to wrapping the Earth around the equator 45 times. 1.44 million are dedicated to underground cables.
- Remembered that long time ago, I got my hands on the book "Tatsachen über Deutschland" while at the Goethe library, where I was impressed with its structure, content and economy of expression. Turns out, they have the latest version freely accessible online bit.ly/2mpEcme ↗ and I still like the numerous beautiful diagrams and data as back then. At a young age you have no clue that such things could possibly define your daily work later.
- To me a "smart home" device is a component used to control one of the many useful functional aspects in the context of a home. But "home" sells much better than "component".
- How much power does a 4K/8K projector use to produce a vivid picture compared to a TV screen and at what cost? Which is more efficient? If a projector model costing $6000 works with a lamp rated at 265W with life expectancy of 4500 hours and replacement cost of $500, then each 90-min lesson/presentation will cost ≈22 cents, which appears to be 7.6x more expensive than a lesson played on a mid-range 70W TV bit.ly/2msm7nC. The question is whether the setup can easily be organized this way and whether text on the screen will be legible for a student sitting in the last row. I also look at this from the perspective of locality. A picture which appears "embedded" in the device has likely better locality than one which must appear several meters apart from the actual device producing it. Adjusting the focus seems to highlight this problem. Perhaps I'm wrong.
- Like the quote "It's a simple task to make a complex system. It's a complex task to make a simple system." dummerAugust has always been about simplicity, which is visible in the work done so far.
- Like the quality of the spirals in this "Mohnstrudel" bit.ly/30G5JOP ↗. Attention to detail.
- "Hidden designs in famous logos" cnn.it/30oX47c ↗. Somehow overlooked all this hidden semantics.
- Happy new week and new projects. In case your company needs help with them, you know how to find/approach me.
- Last idea this Sunday: percentage traveled distance of a public transport network relative to unit ticket price (for a single month and two cities in Germany) bit.ly/30i25yw. An imperfect one, because it reflects limited, perhaps even incorrect information and some choices/assumptions. Best seen as a model only. Would be nice if someone went to obtain the necessary information about every city to observe once again the broader perspective.
- A "limited edition" pizza was perhaps limited in the number of available slices (someone eliminated most).
- Servival—only through genuine service to humanity
- Median real estate purchase and rent prices in Berlin's neighborhoods according to "Guthmann Estate" bit.ly/30GSahW. You may still want to look at the historical view available at the source.
- My guess is that these classes were intentionally labeled so bit.ly/30jztoz. Notice the hyphens and underscores between the words and how long and repetitive each class name becomes. Whoever implemented this on the whole page had no clue about web development. Sadly, I was willing to do some numeric analysis, but now this has made it unnecessarily hard.
- Libraries in Hamburg, Germany bit.ly/30i9Rsb. Most seem to be on the north/north-east of the city. You might be used to "Bibliotheken", but for some reason these are called "Bücherhallen" here. Initial idea was to plot library accessibility with streets, bike paths and parks, but you could imagine what would happen if this all was included. Couldn't find how to convert the GML-provided coordinates of the bike paths and parks (e.g. 566662.5246000001, 5933845.1149) to common (lat, lon) values.
- Realized that I haven't seen good diagrams describing the sequence of steps used to dance, but then the search made me smile. Another non-obvious use of diagrams.
- Expensive furnished apartments with very high monthly rent aren't that interesting. Even when they have a couple of rooms, which can host several tenants. The landlord gets paid in bulk while whenever someone has to leave, all others share the risk. This is not sustainable at a rental price of ≈1600€/month. If there are two similar rooms, this makes 800€/month per tenant, but if someone has to leave, given noone else comes, the other tenant has to carry twice the cost. Suppose you seek to pay ≈20% of your monthly salary towards rent. This means that if you are one of the tenants, a 4000€ (net) salary would cover your needs in the no risk scenario (or lead you to reject the offer in case you find you are not meeting the requirements). But the other scanario would ask you for at least 4800€ (say 5000€ when you add administrativia and time lost in seeking another tenant). (And since this is still netto, you have to account that the brutto salary is much higher than this in a high-tax country like Germany). But only if you'd like to maintain the same living standard. Therefore, you have to ask yourself whether the city you reside in gives you such opportunities and whether you have the necessary skills to take advantage of them. (It could be no-yes or yes-no, but ideally it should be yes-yes.) Otherwise, you become a net donor upon agreement to sign the contract.
- "Bäckerei Wimmer" has a well-designed brochure, but it is slightly impractical to download a PDF about all products every time someone clicks on any of them. A product link which downloads a file (where this isn't necessarily obvious) is against my expectation. That said, I am convinced that the entire information present in the 4.1MB brochure could also be made available directly at the website with no concerns about quality or speed. Also liked the sense of tact in the brochure, where similar descriptions, ingredients, nutrient data and images are grouped together horizontally. Makes finding the right information much easier compared to an alternating pattern of details.
- Someone made a promotion of the Case Logic's "17" laptop backpack" and I wondered what the specifications about all models would tell me. The script ranked it at a very good fifth position out of the 30 different models (in terms of volume per price-weight (in3/($*lb)). Only "Commence", 'Ibira', "Jaunt" and "Prevailer" had higher scores. But "Founder" also deserves attention due to its high useful volume (26l) and low weight (0.75lb).
- Childish tendencies: wind, plant and magic wands bit.ly/30HbrAd
- Do you like classical music? Here is a diagram of some of the greatest composers and the times when they lived bit.ly/30joMSV
- 3056 pages * 20 offers/page ≈ 61120 available room rent offers only for Berlin (wg-gesucht). Is it possible to obtain useful information from that? Perhaps. Should it be done? Likely not a good use of computational time unless one wants to spend the extra energy to change their environment and this destination matches their goal.
- Liked the idea of three-image arrangements with text-around descriptions bit.ly/30fZJ39, which was extensively used in a brochure.
- "The Donut People" have a promotional flyer showing box packs with up to 96 units. Possible delivery work for a minivan, but apart from that the designs seem visually well-balanced. If you plan to order, take the longer tie.
- A diagram illustrating how to tie a tie bit.ly/308Tj61 ↗ in case you ever need it. Trying to stay away from official clothing as it does not suit my personality well.
- Almost caught me to believe it was 3D bit.ly/30npJda. But look carefully, the ends of each "layer" serve to start the next. It's a single line in disguise. Created by four nested loops (all short-distance runners).
- Sometimes you have to make a cube, but your only raw material are few circles bit.ly/307qJ4X (short video)
- Made another checkered pattern, perhaps with a small illusion bit.ly/31Pc9fK
- Last day this week in which you can propose your project. If you are not in a hurry, you could wait for the next week.
- Travel path and departure times of Deutsche Bahn's ICE 618 (19.09.2019) bit.ly/31DsunY. Not perfect; made with a good dose of trial and error.
- Do most hospitals have a data-sensitive process to evaluate when the right time has come to treat surfaces with bleach to reduce the spreading of germs? Or dedicated, non-shared patient screening areas?
- Reading about pill impurities and how 17µg of NDMA is equivalent to eating 48 pounds of bacon (dealing with the consequences). Which means that pesticides, tobacco smoke, tire odors and others are likely kept away from pill production factories. But I still wouldn't know what I'm gulping. Another question is whether the effects of spoiled fruits/vegetables are comparable to those of expired pills or one is significantly more harmful than the other.
- Do not greet my console with errors and warnings, performance tables, "REACT" label, job offers, long arrays, messages only you understand, hashes of unique items, requests made or anything else that shouldn't be there. By all means, use the console during testing, but leave it blank on every website reaching a wide audience. If you are not sure why, seek to hire a better web designer. Or at least better than your last.
- We have to be realistic. It bothers me to see few companies with extreme number of job applications (also high per available vacancy), while the broader economy is left starving for workers. Sooner or later this will spread the consequences to everyone.
- Better knowledge about the problem allows us to solve it better. The client can provide us with information and feedback on our progress, but they may not necessarily be able to provide us with the right insights. We have to find them by ourselves.
- Moscow metro map must have been quite a task bit.ly/31zYn0E ↗. Design and readability look nice, but can a viewer easily derive to what extent reality has been bent in favor of the grid and label positions? Perhaps not, but perhaps this is also a charming aspect of the map—the realization that whenever someone travels, whether the distance is slightly longer or shorter tends to matter to them less than the (right) name of the next station. And this is where this map does well. Also has a downloadable version if you are interested bit.ly/309wgrr ↗
- Never heard of "Breville" before, but like the uniform presentation of their appliances. Especially the photos are very well touched.
- Price distribution of the skin care products by "Sephora" bit.ly/30jlGyx. A good percentage of the 828 products seem to fall in the price range $24 - $30.
- What I think about all these "alike" sites seeking to sell me something from a grid of hundreds of items? Boring.
- Nice pattern in this pendant bit.ly/307lFgS ↗
- First time hearing about travelers requiring vegetarian food at the hotels where they plan to stay (and the corresponding websites offering the service). On the surface, this sounds reasonable—why pay for food twice when the right one could already be included in the price? Also this new consciousness is a positive development too. On the other side, it could sound pretentious—they are going to an unknown place, trying to impose rules on unknown people how they should be welcomed. To me this goes a bit far, especially when vegetarian food will likely be available at the nearby supermarket and when there is high probability that the meal won't fully match the traveler's taste anyway. Lazy by default is not an excuse to be rude. And we don't travel to consume.
- Made a simple diagram reflecting the height (in m) of some of the tallest buildings in New York City and the number of their floors (19.09.2019) bit.ly/31z2Lgf. Only "Empire State Building" seems to have over 100 floors, but it is not the tallest. I suppose that most of these offer a nice view of the city. Ground-level photos could easily mislead you to believe that these are much taller than in reality.
- Saw a new car model yesterday, where the tail lights were made of several red LEDs acting as vertices of distorted hexagons. Looked nice, so I borrowed the concept and transferred it (via simple computation) to a five-exhaust aggregate bit.ly/31u2tr0. But do not hope to see realistic smoke.
- Made a small, simple area puzzle bit.ly/30043U8 and combined it with another idea to bend two straight lines in several steps while making them shorter. Simple to solve.
- If you were wondering about the payments, be aware that I never involve myself in fixing a cheaply created mess when the expectation is to be even cheaper than that. Quite the opposite. It's more expensive—independent of the times and the economic conditions.
- Number of shops in some popular shopping centers in Germany bit.ly/2ZYMtQr. "Mall of Berlin" and "Alstertal Hamburg" stand out among this short list of 15 selected locations. "Vodafone" and "Douglas" were present in every shopping center without exception. "Deichmann", "Bijou Brigitte" and "O2" were not available only at a single location each. The first brand could be a useful addition to "Limbecker Platz Essen", while the other two—to "Börde Park Magdeburg". If you wonder about "Aldi", it came at a total of 6 stores if we count "Nord" and "Süd" branches together. This shows that a discounter brand may not necessarily thrive or seek presence at locations with potentially high rent (especially when it can have its own). On the other hand, we see that telecom companies are quite present, since they can sell relatively expensive devices (apart from the monthly subscriptions) without having to use as much floor space. This extra profitability supports their presence and enables them to more easily cover the rental costs.
- Thinking of a room as a 2D coordinate system (seen from above), where the individual items are part of a graph. Or part of several graphs (different edge colors), depending on their purpose.
- Estimation of the operating cost of a sample candle bit.ly/30alxwW. A disadvantage of the lightbulb is that it doesn't produce a nice scent (an overheated CFL anyway). What concerns me is whether a research study exists which has proven candle smoke to be much healthier than cigarette smoke, for instance. The inner sceptic.
- Assuming 1kcal = 4.1840kJ, the average energy content in Wendy's burgers comes at ≈3098kJ.
- Hard to see hospitals as credible when doctors refuse to share data with their patients while hackers extract whole databases in the background.
- The City of Mountain View, California claims that parks make life better bit.ly/304npat. Perhaps that's why there are so many.
- If you need special skills, you pay for them accordingly. And you carry the travel costs of the people you are willing to meet should the place be convenient for you (otherwise in the nearby park only). Unwilling to pay for out-of-pocket travel expenses when someone receives money back on their payments.
- Software quality is a reflection of the company quality. Not much to wonder if you work primarily with high number of cheap workers.
- Looked at the prices of 397 men's and 260 women's shoes at "New Balance". The medians computed to $95 and $90 accordingly.
- "Your value is not in the number of hours you’re willing to work, it’s in the quality of the work you create." adobe.ly/31rqAXv ↗. Good advice, although I don't consider myself a freelancer or work like one. Not having a default for client service and not seeking recommendations/followers. Yet, I would extend the last sentence with "...given the tools at your disposal."
- Have you tried "BelVita" biscuits? Here is a list of the nutrients found in most varieties (except "Protein Blueberry Almond" where no data was shown) bit.ly/31Eb9Lm. In many cases, the values appear almost identical. Since the website showed values in 50g product, they were multiplied by two.
- Having the kitchen "in full view" seems like a nice way to increase trustworthiness when every client can see how their food is being prepared at the moment and the progress being made. Still, not too many places attempt to be so transparent.
- Not sure of the average burger weight at KFC Australia, but the average energy content came at 2800kJ. Also "Double Tender Burger Combo" is the variant which is said to provide maximal energy per dollar spent (445.77kJ/$). Meanwhile, the average energy content of a sandwich at Subway, Australia came at 1504kJ (for a range of 220-260g products), yet the prices there have not been unknown.
- Neighborhoods and bike routes in Jena, Germany bit.ly/31vxQl2. Good to read that this Thüringen-based city has slightly improved economically and is now raising the German average.
- You could also make patterns for carpets for instance, but my intuition is that this requires a lot of computational power. Especially if the carpet is large (say 3 x 4m) while the pattern is of very fine detail. In this case, an actual finished model could become quite expensive, like this one bit.ly/31si2zB ↗. Imports of geometric inspiration have their price tag.
- Domino's facility location in Sydney, Australia bit.ly/31q6EUF ↗. If you wished, you could plot this chain's store locations at country level and look for interesting patterns.
- Code quality can't be declared an artefact of the language. What happened with the programmer skill? If you are concerned about it, you could pick a language with minimal code bumps.
- On the surface "click cattle" sounds quite interesting until one realizes that the online world is not only made to track and manipulate (corporations), but also to serve as a personal learning and advancement platform. You may still protect yourself from the one without necessarily giving up on the other. Yet, corporative interests are so designed as to interfere with yours on every step of your journey.
- "Many are against popups, but we use them because they work." - a marketer. Good, because in my presence, no unsolicited popups are sent even to a single user.
- tabindex="52" isn't as great as you think it is. All-images sites with minimal texts too. Horizontal scrollbars used as caroussel replacements, where the products can't be dragged at all are a usability issue. Sad that in 2019 we have to explain again why some elemenary concepts were abandoned before.
- This week open to your suggestions once again.
- Have you ever generated necklace designs computationally and if so, do they turn out to be beautiful and enter production? Must an item imagined truly become an item implemented? If one needs long hours to code and present a design for discussion, a simple sketch could have helped reduce this time significantly.
- Wrote a short code to visualize the relative distances between some cities in USA bit.ly/31pHC8j. No numbers are shown. It looks that among the chosen city pairs, the trips Chicago - Des Moines and Austin - Houston have the shortest distances, while Philadelphia - Los Angeles and Philadelphia - Seattle have the longest.
- If you are not careful, the plan to visit A could easily convert to visiting everything B to Z just because they are on the way to A. Which is no plan at all. When your time is limited, you can't waste it at the least interesting places.
- The "Resch & Frisch" catalog has so many baked products that you wonder how this is even possible. At the end, they finish with detailed two-page table of nutrients in each 100g product. But it leaves you wondering why this information is PDF-only and is not used to enhance the website.
- Didn't know about "The North Face". Turns out they make insulated thermojackets. Could have used one yesterday instead of opting to sleep through the effects.
- If the code doesn't give you headaches, it will be the sweat-inducing walk culminating with rest on the cold breeze.
- Pralines at "Confisserie Heindl", Vienna bit.ly/31mDEgM ↗. If you wish, you could find a good way to highlight how the nutrients of all variants differ.
- Made you a curved piano keyboard to practice your notes bit.ly/31muIYM. Note that the keys may not be equally easy to press. Some people went with this idea much further by taking more wild functions.
- According to the clock, your work can no longer start this week, but you might have more clarity what to do with the next one.
- What has been most frustratiing for you as a user of this website or as a client?
- A/B testing: A) the client actively seeks it and wants/needs it, B) they don't, but see this as an alternative to test/compare against. Can't serve in the latter case.
- When you offer video content on your website, do you have a fallback in case someone isn't willing to pull the video from a specific third-party domain where it is hosted? How many alternatives do you provide? Do you host the video yourself to reduce friction? Asking, because of the plenty of grey areas seen lately at places where this issue has not been considered at all.
- Can't pretend to do some work in need of reworking only to take some money for it.
- Bothered to see "teachers" giving private lessons in 15 different subjects and charging a lot for all of them. Digital platforms all enable this and as long as there are enough believer-followers, anything is possible. Needless to say, incapable people have a hard time penetrating my surroundings.
- Wanted to relate the prices of different item holders to see whether there is gradation in their median prices as one moves from a simple purse/wallet to a bag and finally to spacious luggage. Used the website of "Paul Smith" for this study, but the results cannot be representative unless one collects such informaton about hundreds of brands. In this case bit.ly/2ZYWcqH, luggage had the lowest median price overall, but we see clearly that purses and bags carry some addded importance for women, which is reflected in price premiums of ≈125€ relative to same-category items for men.
- Reused the data from the properties of the products on the "Burger King" menu to create a PCA decomposition, linking products in the same category to observe how much they differ relative to the rest bit.ly/2O0QgGq. Products in the "beef" and "chicken" categories were most concentrated and it was very difficult to label individual items. The drinks are also characterized by fairly similar properties. On the other hand, the properties of "sweet KINGS" and "dips & sauces" tend to vary a lot.
- Needed a file I previously worked on, but forgot how I named it. Search couldn't find it, because of looking for the wrong name. But remembered an artefact produced through this file (a diagram), which had a timestamp assigned. Modifying the search to only show me the files within a short time interval including this date, quickly brought it into view. A clear case for always putting timestamps on your work.
- Ineresting idea that photos of the same object taken from different angles/viewpoints tend to exhibit high correlation.
- Didn't have the eyes to identify what's going on in this page collection or what it was about, but a simple Laplacian filter plus post processing found some empty page regions bit.ly/2NZV7rw. Perhaps organizing the book overlaps slightly differently could have reduced these gaps. Another filter not shown here highlights the white space (and area lost) due to page margins.
- There might be some good furnishing algorithms available, but I haven't used one. Input: room type, room dimensions, percentage of desired free space, list of thousands of items with known dimensions, contexts of use, prices and colors (for design fit), rules for sensible placement (e.g. not having the shower closer to the bathroom door than the toilet or using curtains to limit the smole emitted from an open fireplace). Output: Selection of recommended items, based on geometry and design with recommended position and orientation for each. Perhaps I've missed something.
- You know which payment methods can be used to pay for this service, right?
- You could organize your montage nuts to prevent them from freely falling and rolling on the floor bit.ly/2NX6Err
- Should all chairs in a restaurant have the same design? Or should it include chairs from all kinds of places and times? By default we assume that total consistency is good design, but it depends on the goal. Saw a photo of a place where the different chairs were adding a lot of character/personality to the place. Every visitor could seek out the one they like most. Having the cutlery ready-placed on plates on the table is perhaps against convention too, but likely removes a minor detail a waiter would otherwise need to care about on each food serving.
- Above, under, above, un.. wait, was it above? Tried to practice manual coloration of this figure bit.ly/2NYkutA
- Approaching midnight with a playful pattern of moons with different visibility levels and contrasts bit.ly/2NS9C0t. What happens if you take moons (more beautiful than these) and stars and use them as a pattern in your bedroom, if you take a waterdrop and multiply it on the bathroom walls or if you take leaves and let them surround your plant-dedicated area? In fact, it is not hard to borrow such ideas from interior design.
- If you tell yourself that once your work starts to pay off, you will have more time to excercise, think again. Can be a very subtle chain.
- Could one use a croissant photo bit.ly/2Ltx3vn ↗ to design a simple SVG logo having five distinct bumps?
- Median prices in several AVON skin care subcategories bit.ly/2NXwDzc
- A pancake recipe bit.ly/2Ls40sf ↗ that looks simple enough.
- "Tetra" found that you can sell not only the aquarium bit.ly/2LprbTV ↗, but also the table on which it will be placed. Great thinking. The biggest variant I saw was 130l (260€), but alao a smaller one 60l (110€) was available at OBI.
- McDonald's Germany is also very rich on products which wait for someone to create a nutritional overview bit.ly/2NT7Cou ↗
- Distorted images are still a problem on the web today, but less so to the untrained eye. That said, some of the diagrams here are also not void of it.
- "How to reach us" instructions in addition to an address and opening times are a nice touch.
- Perspective with a hint about vanishing points bit.ly/2LphZ1U. Used a single square definition, applying only transforms on it as needed.
- A naive idea attempting to illustrate two careless esses spilling their heart over the world bit.ly/2NQI4IO. Low-fidelity, drawn with the usual degree of impaintience.
- Your company too can have all these skills and more. Or it can seek them elsewhere.
- Got some motivation for functional work today, which led to this triad strip bit.ly/2NTp8sL
- Two sample cakes at "Klein's Backstube" bit.ly/2Lqjsoy, where someone like me would actually think of the small variants first if their height was equal. If it wasn't, there wouldn't' be a simple way to relate the volumes. But assuming equal portions per individual and taking the averages, the bigger variant still appears slightly more expensive per individual piece. Ideally, one would feel motivated to spend more.
- Product nutrients at "Burger King", Germany bit.ly/2Lpkkdb. Happy about this and more specifically about the fact that their website was fast enough to enable this. Thank you.
- An article on SUVs had some curious details—that speed plays greater role than car mass in severe injuries involving pedestrians and that higher car mass is more dangerous for the smaller, more lightweight cars in case of a crash. This means that the desire for extra security on the road could be an additional driving force for the increased interest towards SUVs. And you could expect that a growing average mass could make more people seek even bigger models. Also liked the sentence that a SUV driving with 30km/h is likely less deadly to a pedestrian than a minicar driving with 50km/h.
- 32 out of the 365 perfumes at "Rossmann" had no indicated price, but the median of all others comes at 13.99€. The median of the 179 face cleaning products (17 prices not available) came at 3.79€, while the median of the 1426 lipcare products came at 4.95€. You could also see simplified normal distributions for each category bit.ly/2LqhDrR.
- The median price of the 34 "Garmin" smartwatches computes to $299, but you can't expect the cheapest models to come with GPS. The model "Approach® S10" ($150) has GPS, but is otherwise not rich in other sensors and functionality. And relating the 14 weeks watch mode vs. the 12 hours GPS mode tells us which one puts a lot more strain on the battery.
- Interesting to read about an asteroid linked with dinosaur disappearance on.wsj.com/2NVaXDE ↗
- Removing rare technology A to replace it with rare technology B is still a future maintenance issue, even when the new system might work well today. Perhaps there was a reason why both were rare, but internal politics, power struggle and keyword throwing took precedence over understanding it.
- What does it speak about a hotel to be present exclusively on booking.com and facebook.com? Where's the sense of self-worth?
- Could you optimize your hotel stay for price, stars received, distance from center, city dynamics on that day, travel path through the planned events and places to visit, availability of great people to meet, career advancement opportunities?
- Wondered whether it is possible to reprresent a room as a 3D tensor of values and then segment the individual items in it similarly to object segmentation in 2D images.
- Compared to my last site visit from a long time ago, Airbnb might have reduced the number of visible offers, giving preference to the more luxurious ones. Likely a step that has affected irreversibly many of their users. Also found the site a bit slow and intransparent. For instance, you can't easily see booking prices until you select dates. If someone is hesitating among different rooms to stay, they have no simple reference to support their decision, but need to slow-browse and obtain prices on a per case basis. Leaves me with a taste of competition—competition for the available rooms and shareability to promote it. This probably makes it closer to an auction site.
- A simple drawing of diagonal stripes over a cylinder surface bit.ly/2NOgk7H. Not meant to be perfect.
- Using a hexagonal net to catch more clients bit.ly/2HYd6L1. Had to compensate the lower density near the outer boundary with a slightly thicker thread.
- Mind can't comprehend how a round-trip flight like Seattle - Beijing (said to be ≈8700 km), can cost only $505 (Delta deal). In Europe you would travel ≈1500 km (round-trip) by paying ≈75% of that ptice.
- If you can't find teachers, it's time to start paying them. Same with all other professions.
- Oreo's website is using cookies and asks you to accept one bit.ly/2HUWeog
- Nutrients of the 70 cookie products made at "Pepperidge Farm" bit.ly/2HW7ktb. Hoping that the weight conversion from "oz" to "g" looks believable. Good to see the absence of trans fats.
- Small (semi-automated) progress: page 3 of 7. But spent more than two hours to sharpen the axe, so I can deal with the Omuluzu.
- Some codified thoughts on a sample case attempting to quantify whether a car upgrade is justifiable from an economic perspective bit.ly/2HVsqYC. Hoping that the environmental perspective looks quite different.
- Could your real estate company sell more in a downturn if it had a better website? (Not knowing the answer, depends on the case.)
- This week is also possible to propose a project in case you experience difficulties with its progress. In the right case, we might be able to work together.
- The median PM2.5 concentration at "H.C. Andersens Boulevard/1103: Gadestation" (12.3420, 55.4030) in Copenhagen, Denmark in the last month, measured at 30-min intervals by the TEOM method came out to be 9.3μg/m3. In two rare cases values reached 382.2 and 155.3μg/m3. (Source: Aarhus Universitet Institut for Miljøvidenskab, "Luftforurening", bit.ly/2HWwk3z ↗)
- Library accessibility in Washington, DC bit.ly/2HWHOEp. Uses a total of six datasets. Despite some libraries not seeing direct blue or brown lines (bike trail/bike lane), the overall picture looks slightly better than expected.
- Made a small diagram of the "Gaint" road bike prices bit.ly/2HR82rK. It seems that as the bike names become shorter, the prices fall too.
- What if the colors of the lines of a metro map were animated to indicate the arrival of the next vehicle? You might say, since there are plenty of vehicles on the same line that would be impossible. But what if a color gradient existed between the current and next vehicle positions—would this appear too colorful? Can we then paint only the borders of the line with uniform color and have thin, visible lines moving along? Trying to insert myself in the position of someone who is unsure whether their vehicle will arrive soon when they can't see/hear it and when the time tells them that this should have happened already. Directly seeing the current actual positions on a panel seems a step closer to improved transparency. In case such panels would cost too much, a cheaper alternative would be to release an app for moble phones.
- "We lose ourselves in work, but we find ourselves in life." Like this quote, although it comes with a slightly distracting flavor.
- A website which bothers me in my native language and has no option to switch to another version loses me quickly. And it is not hard to see that it is more about customer segmentation and binning rather than service which speaks for itself.
- The old Adidas logo is a good candidate for some SVG work. But if you insist, you could take their latest and try to reduce the amount of code as well.
- "Cooperative freelancing"? Enjoy the ability to meet and work with random people having a lot of time (seeing yours as "free" too). Without me.
- First break online relationships, then say you've developed a dating app. Disqualified.
- First time seeing a laptop with i9-9880H CPU having 16MB cache (Thinkpad P53). Could greatly accelerate one's work, but it costs more than some of these Chrisitie's items.
- Liked three patterns on Christie's auction house: bit.ly/2UHBV31, bit.ly/2UDQLri and bit.ly/2HTKd2p ↗, but tried not to look at the prices. Ideas for potential demos are everywhere.
- If we see the best uses for icons to be pictograms at airports, street sign symbols, tourist orientation, clothing maintenance etiquettes, package content indication (e.g. fragile, radioactive etc.), but also social icons, icon fonts and emoticons, this could be our limited view. Imagine it was possible to compose entire sentences in an icon language rather than words. Or using icons on a map to highlight objects of historical importance (e.g. Eiffel Tower, Colosseum etc.). Or plotting icon points to clarify the meaning of individual points on a diagram (or using icon vertices on a graph). Or using happiness icons instead of stars. Icons in mindmaps, usage instruction icons, icons representing materials or opening times, progress icons, icons indicating type of business, icons clarifying a multistep process (e.g. in front of an airport scanner, registration office, how something works, sequence of excercise movements etc.), icons for quotas, icons explaining room size and available capacity, icons describing degree of danger (e.g. too hot, strong waves etc.), icons indicating protected trees/species/areas, travel mode and travel duration icons, book genre icons, apparel category icons (e.g. t-shirts, socks, coats), cosmetics category icons (e.g. lipstick, creme etc.), computer performance icons, traffic flow and noise indication, topic-of-interest icons (individual), icons of available amenities (e.g in parks, hotels etc.), icons indicating a work pause, icons indicating the strength of lighting, icons indicating required programming language skills and so on.
- Initially, a bridge over a river may not be designed for very wide vessels and a bridge over a road may not be designed for very tall trucks. Is there something which can be done in advance of the anticipated need to reduce the chance of introducing traffic bottlenecks in the future? Another geometric consideration.
- Suppose you had the base radius and height of each chess figure type, where the base is assumed to be widest. Given all 32 pieces, can you estimate the dimensions of a compact wooden box to hold them all? Is it possible to use its bottom to show mini-instruction of the recommended order? Or would most people prefer the simple and fast pouring into a nylon bag?
- Thought that the diagrams on trees contained enough data to compute approximate number of trees per square meter and person bit.ly/2UFC9Ye in several cities, but this was not the case. Imagine how long it would take to specifically check for this again (in each dataset for each city). If you can, always touch things as rarely as possible (doing slightly more than you planned initially). Or stay lazy until someone validated the need.
- Trying to simulate the passing of one kilometer by three simple travel modes bit.ly/2ZVGA2b. Expecting that the tires of a scooter could wear off fester than those of a road bike. Also interesting to see how the number of steps relates to the turns of the scooter's tires especially when both can work together. The question is how often stepping outside the scooter (to accelerate it) is optimal to travel the distance in a short time with minimal energy loss.
- The first page of the Merkur's brochure on "cakes for every occasion" really speaks to me bit.ly/2HSZLU8. And I sometimes even feel so.
- Nutrients of some products at "Bäckerei Felber" bit.ly/2ZVGJCE. Liked the grid design of the "Powidl-Topfentasche" bit.ly/2ZVxl27 ↗
- Lidl placed a small red heart with a white stripe in the middle next to its logo. "Loves Austria" in a single symbol looks sympathic to me.
- Animated colors in squares bit.ly/2HRZst0. Looks like the runs take clockwise and counterclockwise direction depending on the rotation angle of the bigger square.
- Filling a cake with pork and salad sounds awful. Can't imagine to taste something like this.
- Giving the flat of your hand when they ask to scan your finger is giving away a bit too much.
- Menu plans of the canteens/cafeterias at the University of Zurich bit.ly/2ZUTihR ↗.Liked the use of icons (14 for allergens only) to assist choice and the transparency about the nutritional value of each meal,
- Another reportage claimed that even after VWs software update, emission control was functioning properly only between 15-33℃ (explanation being that this is done to protect the motor). The average temperatures in Germany were said to be below 15℃ on most of the year's months (except three), which raised concern that emission reduction remains mostly inactive. The current question is whether such automatic shutdowns are legal, but the way people mentioned that they have been offered money "to close the case" makes me a skeptic.
- Watched a reportage with an Indian patient, who was operated for the removal of an eye worm, which turned out to be 12cm. First cases were already reported on dogs in Germany as well.
- An article describing how long it can take to develop a game like "Diablo 3" bit.ly/2ZPMlOR ↗. In case you thought of overnight success, consider that it has been 11 years in the making. There are also examples of other games which took around 10 years. But we take things for granted and somehow mistakenly believe that the work of programmers must be easy.
- You probably remember the question I asked this week. Due to insufficient interest, I will not proceed to implement the initial intention. Perhaps most people already use a service they are happy with and do not see the need to have another one. In this case I cannot help you. But the reason I like to ask questions has become obvious—they guide me what to do next and where it is worth to invest some time. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
- Finished reading this article about "Etsy" bit.ly/2ZRyDeo ↗. Didn't know that 87% of the sellers are women and 77% businesses of one. As an infrequent visitor, there are a lot of reasons to like the platform (products, design). But you may not necessarily realize that some active sellers might be experiencing problems or feeling overworked. There seems to be a lot of competition on the platform, potentially leading to the appearance of cheap "me-too" products that may be "handmade", but far from unique. (Remember "the dominant aesthetic can be easily marketed"?) Additionally, buyers claiming that high shipping costs are their primary concern is pushing the company to demand free shipping from all sellers, but many may not be able to afford it (or not without increasing their prices). Interesting is the statement that "sellers try to move their Etsy businesses on a personal website." This makes sense to me, since one can own the website and fine-tune every possible detail about it. The whole screen is dedicated only to their products and no competitive product appears as a nearby distraction. So I expect more people to be willing to do this if they feel that the platform no longer supports their needs. However, a person coming from an Etsy plattfom to a personal website may do so with false expectations that their clients will be guaranteed without having them (and their designer) work hard for it. Etsy has a well-established brand, so the buyers come to it; on a personal website you have to fight for the respect about your brand and find your own customers. This is very different and can take a lot of time. Expecting a quick win from the website will likely lead to disappointment. Additionally, a website built by an individual will be less scalable than a platform, which has been built by many people and polished over long time. But if a seller is aware of these limitations, has a lot of finished work that customers have found valuable and still wants to proceed, such work is possible.
- Used an article to make a view of the median home prices in some US cities bit.ly/2HNiZe4. Hope you like it. I find that San Antonio, Chicago and Philadelphia stay well relative to the rest.
- Rleative and absolute positioning strike a parallel with sequential and parallel execution in me. With relative positioning, it is likely important what came before, since this is what influences the geometry on the page, while in absolute positioning this is not the case—elements can be placed independently of the flow and of one-another. Not aware whether this affects the multi-core GPU policy during rendering.
- You probably wished for free shipping and shopping, but that can't happen. Continue to dream.
- Can be styled with "div div section div a span div div". Not quite, but illustrative of the nesting levels seen on a popular apparel website. Hair-pulling material and inability to understand why design is a rare priority.
- A single image of "Kia" car models bit.ly/2HNOft6. Not all have been included. Additionally, I made all images smaller, shuffled some and removed the category labels. Can you still recognize which one is SUV, sedan, hatchback, hybrid/electric, minivan? Made primarily to illustrate a point, which is not brand-specific.
- "Don't win the battle, but lose the war" is a noteworthy reminder.
- Quick and rough wireframe idea about a waterfall page bit.ly/2ZUqFRM. Hints that the text describing the waterfall in the middle could follow the shape of the water boundaries on the left and right. Masked images, shape-outside for the text and water falling down from the top of the screen (not animated).
- Expect that some aspects in the functioning of a website behave similarly to CO2 release—they impact your audience in unseen ways, reduce people's ability to complete the task they came for, reduce willingness to proceed further (steps), reduce usability (popup windows), reduce findability and readability of information, drain device batteries, reduce communication and sales, affect the brand (tone of voice, typos), negatively impact subsequent visits. The unseens are very different from the numerics you use to describe the seens (width, height, margin, padding etc.). If you don't have a good sense for the former, the way an experienced designer has, you might think that the work has finished by receiving the code (the latter). This is far from the truth.
- Types of fit: project-market fit, project-designer fit, requirements-skill fit, client-designer fit, technological fit, process fit, compensation fit... Any of these can influence whether your project will be accepted or rejected.
- If the values of all product features (30+) were hidden behind individual accordions collapsed by default, how many times would a user need to click to reveal most of the information they need? Usability and accessibility are critical. If you can't understand it, hire a web designer.
- Removing the pain out of a project in trouble is the type of sale I am after. Can't possibly help everyone since my skills and time are fairly limited. But people who actively search these skills are much more likely to receive them.
- Try to explain someone that you are constantly selling yourself, your products and skills and you might be seen with disbelief. Many people still consider selling to be only the event when they hand money and receive something in return, but rarely think about how they reached that point or why they were motivated to do so.
- Looking at various fir cones and thinking about computational generation, at least in 2D. Perhaps doable, but since there are too many of them, that work won't appear unique.
- Concave spiral bit.ly/2NNBe6V, a star made by gradually reduced spiral lengths bit.ly/2O2vHtp and blue hurricane bit.ly/2NTByAU
- Zig-zag to square, variants in black and red: bit.ly/2MW81qE, bit.ly/2MVHOIQ. Hardly visible that they are made of two symmetric pieces along the diagonal.
- I have a theory that traffic grows along with the willingness of people to assert themselves. Can't prove it. But when traffic congestion exceeds the norm, we have to rethink whether we want to spend our time with a front-exhaust or a book stimulating our thoughts. This choice has always been obvious to me, except when the availability wasn't.
- I try to understand everyone independent of the language they speak. Perhaps this sounds stupid and perhaps it is. But I believe that we are alike in many different ways and that sometimes we are able to infer the meaning from the context and the words that appear similar to what we have learned or heard before. And we never stop learning and trying to understand. You also helped develop this conviction the first time when I visited your country as a 13-year old and spoke in my disturbing, native language in front you, simply because I didn't knew better. To my full surprise it took you a while, but you got me and we were able to clarify the details. Left the place totally fascinated and believing that language is perhaps some barrier of our own making. Soon thereafter I was to be seen at an "icecream street", delicately trying to balance an overstuffed icecream with a second cone attached on top of it (imagine how funny I must have looked with horns coming out of my ears). These days I may find open data in languages I cannot possibly comprehend. Wouldn't be able to proceed without Google's translator, enough curiosity, some time and an idea of what to make from it. I do not always succeed. Sometimes I waste my time, fail to make things sufficiently attractive or am simply disappointed by false expectations. But I found some words in some languages relateable and can sense their meaning without seeking translation anymore. Even more interesting is the sense you deveop to select potentially interesting data in a large collection of datasets, when they are all in a foreign language. Possibly valuable in itself, but not much. My idea here is that it is possible to open yourself for a world of information and let it influence your choices rather than staying only within the small boundaries of the tried, tested and known. Still can't deal with Chinese and Japanese symbols, although I came to realize that there is some logic behind some of the patterns as well. But in my nature I remain primarily a programmer, where the use of English, German and native language play a supportive role and also most heavily influence the kind of work I am able to accomplish. Yet, I try to leave the opportunity open to be influenced by individuals coming from other countries and cultures. Because this is how we grow and learn.
- At popular travel destinations, businesses might be seeing summer tourists as a source of their winter food. At the very least, because life is so much more than a full-time occupation with survival.
- With schools you rarely know which class is currently having which subject in which room. Walking around and asking questions to figure out in real-time could be incovenient to a parent. Perhaps solvable with sufficiently good planning, enough consistency and some programming skills. At least as long as you don't consider all schools/universities in the world.
- Same with technologies which I found not to be useful. Initially you required me to learn them, which didn't work. Then you regretted the time you had to spend learning them yourself. Which shows that ignoring my opinion is rarely consequence-free.
- Still designing websites exclusively for mobile? Never did that and never had to regret it.
- Liked the self-explanatory NOAA map of the projected trajectory, spread and arrival time of hurricane "Dorian" cnn.it/2MVQdfg ↗. Hoping that wind speeds will decline with a broader impact area.
- Hard to imagine how a city with 50000 people (article-claimed, although Google shows ≈262000) can welcome 20 million tourists annually. Orders of magnitude different. But makes me realize that people's complaints are not entirely unfounded. In case you wonder, this is said to be Venice, Italy.
- And if you don't like the article-cited sightseeings bit.ly/2NPRXXd, you can download yourself a screen-only map bit.ly/2MWSjf1 ↗ in case you have no intention to search by street name.
- If the average tourist in Vienna spends 266€/day, it is not too hard to sense how much attention one would receive there. But a seat reserved more than a month from now in a Flixbus traveling to this destination might still be affordable. At least if you had work there with a client available exactly on that day.
- Made a simple diagram of the approximate locations of the libraries in Cardiff, UK bit.ly/2MVhY7K. With its relatively uniform spacing the spread appears more beautiful than expected. Interesting that "Central Library" appears slightly to the south relative to all other branches. One would normally expect to find it somewhere near "Cathays Library", for instance. But it could be that "central" means the largest one, having the most items available to borrowers. Not necessarily central in geographical sense. But I could be wrong, of course.
- Waking up/successfully booting on 05.09.2019 bit.ly/2MWpC1A. Grateful for that.
- If you have traveled 10+ times around the globe, don't propose that "we" should be traveling less because of climate change. We will travel as much as needed (making you breathe this air too) and won't accept this cynical "after me, noone else" behavior so typical in individuals, corporations (see GDPR), countries (see European migrant crisis management), people with a sense of privilege (Brexit). No longer double standards which are valid for some, but not for the rest.
- A "convincing" software which lets users map their face in place of another one has been made. This means that it has become possible to impersonate almost anyone in a photo circulating online. No wonder the sales of digital camera units were said to be declining. People understood that the only real thing and connection they can expect to have is in front of them, here and now. What you
compute see is what you get.
- Is it possible to know in advance how hot the hot pepper will be? Until you taste it, you won't know. Can you say how good a product/service will be? Until you try them, you won't know. (Hearing all opinions and seeing all stars doesn't change anything.)
- The market price adjusts according to the demand. If millions of people believe that traveling is what gives them better opportunities and a chance to improve their lives, the tickets can't be cheap. You compete with these millions for the same resource where you should have been in a market of one.
- Liked the way Opel puts the physical dimensions of "Crossland X" (and many other models) in context bit.ly/2MTleR6
- Learning only "the bare minimum required (knowledge) to have conversations with the domain expert" could be a miscalculation. Once this person notices that you are after keyword usage and clever formulations with no real substance, you could be out before you know it. But it's fine if you see work as a strategic game.
- If I was looking for a room and received an invitation only to find out that 50 other people have been invited, I'd immediately retract my application upon arrival. No need to waste resouces on the lowest chance.
- A competition expecting each of the ≈500 participating teams to compute over 12 million images, offering the winner an end price of $25000 can't possibly have me. But at the start the ratios were perhaps looking good.
- If you buy a pack with 15 rolls "Mentos" for $9.53 on Amazon, each 2.7g piece will cost you ≈4.5 cent. Most nutrients in a piece are listed as 0g, except sugars valued at 2g. If my understanding is correct, 2g sugar on 2.7g content is ≈74% sugar. Might explain why this is the first listed ingredient. On the map showing "How the world stays fresh", I misread the button label as "Find your mentors".
- If your business is not about burgers, it probably doesn't make sense to periodically animate a "burger menu" icon into a burger icon and back. You may wish to appear playful, but this is the wrong place for a company in finance.
- Admiring the geometry in this triple socket bit.ly/2NPfCXS ↗. The "World plug & socket map" is slightly too small for me to be able to distinguish the fine details. And I find its colors less pleasing on the eye, Perhaps someone could create a more useful diagram using better images of the various socket types bit.ly/2MUJO49 ↗.
- The label "Hair, skin and nails" on a multiivitamin bottle looks strange. Does it work if it improves only one of the three?
- Interesting package design by TetraPak—pyramidal and colorful. Different from all the parallelepipeds I've seen. Still not as refined as some sharp-edged polyhedra, but at least the image does not "make me think" whether a falling orange on a surface could spill enough juice to cover my entire face (as suggested in some ads).
- Suppose there is a merino wool sweater priced of $90 at the local store (possible, see below). How much should a hand-knitted sweater from merino wool yarn cost, if it weighs ≈600g and is moderately hard to knit (pattern and colors)? 600g would assume at least 6 balls * 100g. If only the material is priced at $8/ball, independent of available colors, this leaves only $42 for all the hours of knitting effort if someone was to be competitive with that store. Hard to imagine how this could happen. Yet, automation often makes you believe that just because something has already been made cheaply, your effort isn't worth much. Not true at all. And you should be charging for it.
- If you are writing Javascript arrow functions on a single long line with multiple arrows, ternary statements and single-letter variables to complete a function on a single line, you need to rethink what you are doing. Especially if you believe that such shortening was the main reason to introduce arrow functions.
- If you list the technologies you require with dots at the end, this tells me that your company is about everything and anything. But I'm not. I am only about a small subset of technologies, for which I expect higher payment than the one you offer for all the dots. Zero chance to be my employer. It is for miniature details like this that I created the jobs page some time ago. Not interested whether you used it or not—the choice was yours. Whatever I wanted to achieve through it has already been done.
- End of Friday is the last day on which you can answer (or not) the question I asked here. Then follows my final decision.
- If you have a web-based or another type of project, feel free to contact dummerAugust about it, but allow some time to evaluate whether it will be a good fit. Also expect to ask and answer some questions.
- Idea: Draw a dynamic shortest path through points corresponding to numerous sightseeings in a city of your choice. Once the path reaches a given point, scale-animate (zero-to-one) a well-visible, but not too big photo above the point at that location. Always center the progress point of the line at the center of the screen as you go (so that only that already drawn line and the currently visible sightseeings move). Watched a similar demoscene which unfolded leaves on the screen a long time ago, but now I see that the same effect can be applied in other contexts (e.g. presenting a city in front of tourists). Hope you like it. Already thinking SVG?
- Chocolate bar nutrients at "Confisserie Sprüngli" bit.ly/2NN1hef.
- Strange to see a string representation of a JavaScript object as a value of an element's data attribute. The question is how complex this value could become (which has been partially answered in the code).
- Someone made a simple attempt to explain the <body> tag to beginners bit.ly/2NMLCM7. That knitters are also extensive users of the color wheel may come as a surprise. But like websites, the clothes must also look nice and sell successfully. Here is a sample rainbow of colors bit.ly/2NORpRs ↗.
- Would you be interested to a see a page where you could offer your used devices (e.g. smartphones/tablets, laptops/computers, servers) on sale and upload product descriptions, photos and contact details if the monthly cost of having an ad was $10 per smartphone/tablet, $15 per laptop/computer and $35 per server? Depending on how many people choose to respond and how, I might choose to create it or not.
- Using the right HTML elements matters in the smallest of details bit.ly/2MO8U4x. What would happen if you had a 2MB page full of inefficiencies?
- Dislike the delays introduced by showing grey templates prior to content loading (on several heavy websites). Are you trying to fix the problem which your solution exacerbated? Any UX designer would have noticed such development, but you do as if you don't care.
- On time for the "Eurobikes 2019" event, someone created this mini-app "Best Bike Guide" bit.ly/2NLR2XN. Unsure how good they are, but I still don't have one.
- Wished I could prevent hurricanes, but don't even know what causes them.
- And if I couldn't understand what it is you want to achieve or why your project is important to you and your clients, I would likely not involve myself to serve you either. Can't stand for something which would be hard to believe in.
- A group of kids wre throwing stones on an old, homeless man, one of them pretending that he stole his mobile phone. Took me some internal effort not to involve myself in a situation I didn't fully comprehend. If I was much closer, that would have been much more difficult. But yes, strange are some neighborhoods.
- Have you read "Bioland Richtlinien" bit.ly/2NM1w9n? Has some useful information about soil and plant care, fertilization, animal growing, highest allowed animal density (by animal type), available indoor (barn) and outdoor area, minimum age (by animal type) for slaughter, microelement composition of animal food etc.
- How many minutes are needed to bake and sell a pizza? How many minutes are needed to bake and sell software? Like the times, the prices are also totally incomparable.
- Understand that people are also writing software to cheat you. If a question gets downvoted on a well-known platform for no obvious reasons, it could be that it has been accessed by an automated system. May not have anything to do with the way you formulated it or the way readers perceived it. Just the impression is created to interfere with future communication.
- Would you ask someone for a free trip in exchange for "exposure" on your feed? Turns out there are so many people practicing this, that they are complaining about the epidemic level (of competition). When social media became a profession, it caused people like me to leave it (long time ago).
- Because of influencers and bots, we may stop communicating soon. Understandable, when you can't identify whether the other side is telling the truth or carries a mask to pretend so (while being paid in the background). Such communication is no longer needed or necessary since no basis for trust can exist. And I don't care whether an influencer has thirty thousand followers when they do things I'd never even consider. I wish them and all their followers all the best.
- This time no violinplot, but a simpler one in the case of the backpack prices by brand at "Ochsner Sport" bit.ly/2NMmTrc. If you were interested in concrete backpack models (which aren't duffels), offering good volume for the price, "Under Armour Hustle LDWR 29 L" bit.ly/2MRl4tg might appear interesting to you. "Puma Sole Smart 18 L" (25 CHF), "Realm 22 L"/"Old Skool III 22 L" by Vans (both at 40 CHF), "Eastpak Provider 33 L" (60 CHF) could be viable alternatives. A good gymbag could be "Dakine Cinch Pack 16 L Gymbag" (≈30 CHF) and a good long-trail, very high volume bag might be "Osprey Transporter 130 L" (245 CHF). But you might be able to see your favourite model at reduced price (which would improve this ratio).
- When you connect the centers of the hexagons in a hexagonal grid, you don't get only the left/right and top/bottom movements, which is nice.
- Interesting image where the details are made of alternating colors bit.ly/2MMd4tH ↗. Reminds of the minimum number of colors needed to have a planar map of distinct elements.
- She wants to visit the opera, he the baseball game bit.ly/2lSPW0t. With such payoffs, it might be better if each simply visits the other person's favorite each time.
- If a website is made of thousands of DOM elements, many style declarations, scripts, images and videos, content details and you have to think through each of them individually, that's complex. Don't explain me that the payment for the entire glue that holds everything together can be simple. It has to follow the same complexity rules.
- There are two options—working at a job where you are seen as a replaceable slave, letting other (very often unqualified) people run and ruin your life on purpose. This is the option that gives you enough reasons to hate yourself and your daily life, despite being paid, but mostly not enough. You conform to social, agreed-upon rules, which seek to sacrifice you for the common goal, good and cause. The second option is doing unpaid work, which you like and feel that matters, where you have the full freedom of expression without imposed restrictions and limitations (except budgetary). Where you are responsible for your thoughts and actions and where noone will come to do anything for you or ask you how is it going. Yet, when you perceive the first option as terrible (eventually coming from it), you try to work terribly efficiently towards protecting all the years of effort it took you to build upon layers of knowledge. Knowledge someone else might try to classify as "unimportant", "irrelevant" or "not good enough". And as unrealistic as it sounds, you continue dreaming about scaling your work further rather than drifting back into minutia. About finding your place. About finding your client. About finding you.
- Some good research time and work went into this diagram: "Median prices of shoes by Adidas, Nike, Puma and Reebok" bit.ly/2MNpC4b. Please, view the note. Most of these brands seem to expect clients to pay around $80-100 for new shoes. Interesting is that both Adidas and Nike have slightly lower median prices for women shoes, with the difference being around $10. That women shoes by Puma look more expensive could be due to the effect of not considering all models. We see that Adidas has a lot more shoes (especially for men) relative to other brands. Reebok is having the same median prices and is offering almost the same number of shoes to both genders. You can also see split violins describing the distributions of the shoe prices by brand and gender bit.ly/2lVBZin. Nike seems to offer shoes in a very wide price range, while Reebok mostly in a relatively narrow one.
- Haven't heard about "Specsaver" sunglasses before. They had 161 models with a median price of £89. "Polo Ralph Lauren" had 215 sweaters for men with a median price of $198 (as of 01.09.2019).
- Shopping is not necessarily how I like to spend my time. More interested in finding out what I can do for the businesses present at the shopping centers. Because there are many and even helping a very small fraction would already qualify as success. But this doesn't mean that I'd go personally to ask and impose myself. I like to verify for client fit first and use this site to seek it.
- Circle to ellipses animation bit.ly/2NIvqLP
- Rushing to end this month on a positive note with a flower pot made of conics bit.ly/2NEhpyR. Sometimes you expect one thing, but get another. Perhaps the machine's goal was to nudge me to plant more.
- Suppose you ran five laps and observed a performance curve (reflecting five times), which approached the bottom more quickly in the last laps. Ideally, it should have been consistent, but wasn't. Would it then bring more to increase the number of laps or to work on improving the endurance on each, thus lifting the lowest lows to an acceptable level before running further? Being systematic and thoughtful about the system may bring better results than pushing yourself more towards full exhaustion. Alternatively, you could think of reducing the curvature of the curve as the number of control points increases.
- The broom, the cordless stick vacuum, the upright vacuum, the canister vacuum and the flat, round vacuum robot all clean. The question is how well. And with digital services, a similar question arises.
- Making Saturday graphics bit.ly/2NERmay obeying the lightbulbian rules.
- Interesting perception bit.ly/2NGOcTJ, but I don't think that selfishness has to dehumanize other people. Understanding it this way is potentially harmful. If they find reasons to accuse you of this, that's another story. But attempting to let in random people in your life, who constantly make you feel bad, is very far from living a happy and fulfilled life.
- Not sure why, but I can't simply take a fruit, press it flat between two surfaces and fry it subsequently until it looks like rubber. Preferring everything in its natural form, as fresh und unprocessed as possible,
- "2för1" as one word having bold numbers, symmetric around the umlaut looks strangely beautiful. Hopefully not two halves.
- How easy is it to find bikes at the follwing stations in Paris: "Cambronne - Mademoiselle", "Charenton - Place du Col Bourgoin", "Pyrénées - Charles Renouvier", "Saint-Vincent - Verdun", "Gare de Lyon - Place Louis Armand", "Taitbout - Châteaudun", "Square d'Anvers", "Victor Hugo - Ecoles", "Marne - Charles de Gaulle, Paris"? Have never visited these, asking only after seeing a dataset by "Autolib Velib Métropole".
- If you want to secure these skills for your next project, you can connect, present it and see whether I'm interested. If you simply like the work and want to see more of it and faster, without necessarily being a client, you could connect and ask how you could make a financial contribution. Anything that makes me faster is also likely to increase your asking speed.
- Liked the design, variety and information about "Rimowa" luggage and decided to inspect the 266 variants present on their website to find potentially useful models bit.ly/2MTEu11. "Essential Lite Check-In L" gets the highest score and offers plenty of space for its price. This is relative to the other models only.
- Getting perspectives and faceted reflections from a script. Tells me that "NEMO Science Museum at Schiphol Airport" in Amsterdam is not too far from "Aalsmeer Historical Gardens", that the "Van Gogh Museum" is somewhere close to "Amsterdam Diamond Museum" and that "d'Admiraal Windmill" is close to "De Buiktuin petting zoo".
- City regions in Amsterdam, The Netherlands bit.ly/2MK04Vp. The initial idea was to bring the attractions as points on the same map. However they were in the expected WGS84 format, while the regions were in some country-specific format. For instance, (x, y) = (125000, 485000) was a valid point on the regions map. The online converter I used previously, which saved me once, has stopped working, which meant it wasn't possible to scale between the coordinates.
- Gem encyclopedia bit.ly/2MKSjP5 ↗ if you look for the today's dose of color.
- Quick diagram on Enercon wind turbines bit.ly/2NQqODF to see how three of their parameters relate.
- Also undocumented are the number of cases in whch an app gets approval to be included to an app store, but then is either sold or changes its owner for whatever reason. This means that the goal of the software can change with the click of a finger without the user even knowing.
- Does not surprise me bit.ly/2MHP0bz. Learned about a small trick yesterday. Start with a "clean" software, get it installed millions of times (on user's mobile phones) and then start spreading malware with the updates. Very convenient and somewhat hard to notice. Hard to believe too when you see the number likes. How could it be the app you trusted a while ago?
- You probably heard about L'Tur last minute travel before. Not living in Germany, but looked at the businesses in Olympiazentrum Munich and it was present there. The prices seem acceptable, although I have no experience with the quality of service.
- What could be the median €/ml price for the 753 fragrances at Мüller? Unfortunately, can't easily answer this question since they organize the page so that this is difficult to find. First, they use different styles for regular and promotional prices, but the promotional price overwrites the regular style. This means that if you select by regular price only, you also obtain the strike-through prices intermixed with them, without the ability to distinguish between them, which is not nice. Second, the selection retrieves additional information not shown on the page, again mixing regular data with one of unknown origin (this time). And third, the prices are often provided with plenty of spaces and optionally the label "ab", so it is often needed to decide on a by-case basis aout the most suitable cleaning. The combination of all these factors made me stop trying after a while.
- If a gallery with paintings in many different styles causes you to think about your classification toolbox, you might miss the beauty.
- SQL is great if you have plenty of users and need a highly available and scalable solution. If I have to wait long hours for user input, that's slow and then all advantages of SQL evaporate on the spot. I'd be much faster by other means, which are then easily transferrable to SQL, should the need arise. Working with client data I didn't have to ask for makes things so much easier. But if it is seen as sacred, I won't handle it for internal reasons.
- The "blackest black" implies there is also the "whitest white". If only CSS knew.
- Algorithms (people, companies) that discriminate are a serious problem in this society. Especially when discrimination is backed by hypocricy.
- Being paid in person doesn't scale, they say. Unfortunately, it has become my preferred way, because everyone else is trying to share my data with third parties I don't trust. Additionally, I prefer to know and see how much the client respects me and my work before I decide whether to continue working with them. Not inclined to allow a payment processor to take this away from me. In most cases we won't work together and that's fine. There won't be a fit or you won't meet the requirements. Whatever the reason, a "no" with me is final and life-long. Everyone who used to know me can confirm this. Refrain starting your conversation explaining which corporation you represent—won't feel the awe and may interpret it as an attempt to control. Could be your next life-long choice.
- Did this website achieve the gial I was after? If not, where did it fail and why?
- When you look for a room or a second-hand car and see plenty of offers, do you seek computational help/advice?
- Median price by category for "Trek" bikes bit.ly/2MK6p3g. Tested my assumption that road bikes have to be the most expensive. Didn't match reality.
- Suppose you were tracking the profitability of your store from a long time and discovered that when the average customer spent an amount over x, this led to an average profit of y. With this knowledge, you could offer special vouchers, which cost slightly less than the amount they provide in an attempt to attract more customers. For instance, you could sell $20 vouchers for $19. To fully take advantage of this extra dollar, one must be spending at least x (x = $20), when you know that y >> 1. You also suppose that in some rare cases people might choose to pay with the voucher when their bill is lower than its value, effectively increasing your profit. And bringing z more such customers could increase your profit with z*(y-1).
- If you were looking to change to a new neighborhood, would you place higher weight on having more grocery stores near your would be place? Perhaps they are many and the advantage of having an additional one could be progressively diminishing. But it could be that the kindergartens, high-quality schools or hospitals are not that widespread, if at all. Hence, a better approach when computing sums of pairwise distances would be to assign higher weights to rare building types and lower weights to common building types. You could also incorporate additional logic to support your decision based on your current goals.
- Another type of sun we frequently forget about bit.ly/2NBUKTB ↗. The question is whether computer vision can identify when the disk is ready to be cropped and whether it can count the number of pores in it. Or whether a relationship exists between the size of the happy leaves and the median seed size. Or when the number, size and coloration of the drupelets (juicy pulp + single central seed) of raspberries/blackberries have become favorable for their collection?
- If you had images of the most common letters, numbers and symbols of several fonts, you could compute font similarities and then select a second font based on the desired distance relative to the first, in addition to some aesthetic criteria. Perhaps math could help you identify interesting font combinations without having to look through all of them.
- Haven't seen triple donuts so far. Three of the same tori joined in line so as to minimize the total surface area while preserving all holes. The seller could ask for the triple price, while silently saving the cost of of the intersection volumes of the the middle with the left and right one. Any idea how many dobuts that could be if R = 2*r?
- Work expands to fit the available time. Weather adjusts to the available air conditioner cooling capacity. "Good that we have one" might be good today, but not tomorrow (given a large number of simultaneously emitting devices).
- bed + bath + beyond = 103; bath - bed = 50; bed - beyond = 1.
bath / beyond = ?
- Sometimes pages filled with beautiful images and interactive applications with no clear sense of purpose or end goal say less than a couple of self-explanatory sentences. If you find that you lose yourself in images and applications (perhaps your machine is fast and can keep million images in-memory), remember to explain clearly why this work is needed and try to list other people who believe so at the end. After the 50-100 artefacts you've created that would be the most natural thing you could do.
- Spare me your tirade of words designed to convince me. Whatever you say or do will not influence my decision even a tiny bit. Not understanding how you are wasting everyone's time makes me unwilling to speak with you again.
- You can complain that websites don't have RSS feeds and then read your Facebook feed all day long.
- Click to acknowledge the confirmation.
- In the same way someone plots the libraries or parks in a city, they could plot the locations of the trees and benches in the park or even the locations of the roses (and their color) or sprayers in the park's gardens. We don't have to limit ourselves only to the highest level or only to the most easily observed features.
- Not here to teach you about the advantages of having great website(s) and great designer(s). You already have both, since you would have complained otherwise.
- Double- and triple-decker cars are the latest mode designed to impress other people. If with nothing else, then at least with metal.
- Library accessibility in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2NFmHtN. Looks nice, but the framing omits some bike lanes which appear outside the city boundaries. There are many libraries (which makes it harder to show the branch names), but their density on the east seems higher than that on the north. The article whose link I shared contained the statement that Los Angeles was "the most dangerous city for cyclists", which is hard to verify from such a diagram. (If so, it is hard to accept that someone might be willing to risk their life to reach the local library.) We also notice that only a single bikelane seems to connect the east and north regions, which could be restrictive for cyclists (while there is a mesh of roads, albeit less dense). Road density sems higher on the east, where there are also more frequent bikelanes; it becomes slightly lower on the north, where visibly bigger regions between individual bikelanes exist. But these are only observations. Infusing the diagram with more detail could allow the finding of more interesting relationships.
- Better service is available only after better payments.
- Interesting perspective on parking spaces and mobility in the case of Los Angeles bit.ly/2Htp67c ↗. It did not occur to me that too many parking spaces could be eating away valuable area that could have been made available for affordable housing (the equivalent of how many housing units is estimated at the end). Also, parking spaces in new buildings were said to make them more expensive. But it seems reasonable to assume that providing space where noone is the majority of the time does not come free. Also liked the insights that vehicle miles driven increase proportionately to roadway created and that pushing more people through the road in unit time is a problem of geometric nature.
- Idea: Is it possible to design a website theme, which responds with a "feeling" according to user actions? How should this look like in the specific context of use?
- Helsinki Central Library Oodi is recognized as the best public library of the year bit.ly/2ZvN47V ↗. But I think that each library is a winner and enabler in one way or another. Especially important is to have a balanced presence all over the world.
- The today's median price among the 375 men sweaters at "Banana Republic" is $69.50. (Good that I didn't have to try all of them to say this.) Here are the medians by sweater category bit.ly/2Zrw1DL. Cashmere sweaters seem most expensive (as expected), but I've heard good things about merino wool and the prices of these sweaters appear relatively interesting.
- If you couldn't communicate during the summer, do not expect to be able to in the winter, when the travel costs are traditionally higher. Online communication can't replace the physical one and if you relied on it, you can expect to be disappointed.
- Short list of the most common destinations of the departing frlights from "Vancouver International Airport" as seen today bit.ly/2HHgh9Z. Disappointed that I had to manually collect and edit this information since the single open tab showing the departures took 100% of the available CPU time. Not only that, but this remained consistent long after the page has been fully loaded, making extra work on the machine extremely difficult. (Hence the previous bit.) Possibly one of the worst airport flight information pages I've seen so far, even when its visual design doesn't suggest it.
- When you seek it cheap, you get it cheap. Not here, but elsewhere.
- Noticed the omission that I haven't looked into library accessibility in Calgary, Canada bit.ly/2ZrbE9X and tried to do something about it. The diagram took some time and if I had more, I'd make the library dots a bit bigger and more visible. Currently, one could possibly mistake an intersection where a lot is going on for a library, which is not ideal. All library branches are accessible by either a road or a bikeway, but isolated cases seem inaccessible by a bikeway only (although they might be close to one).
- Nice application showng the stores (among other things) at the Edmonton International Airport bit.ly/2ZybzS0 ↗. The highlights are context-aware and clicks on a store zoom to the right spot. A closer look shows that the airports in Calgary and Vancouver also have interactive terminal maps.
- "Booster Juice" nutrients bit.ly/2Zrl991. As expected, none of these contain cholesterol and all are extremely low on saturated fats. Orange juice is said to deliver a good amount of vitamin C.
- Made a simple diagram about library accessibility by bike in Wuppertal, Germany bit.ly/2HspZN2. Found that four of the libraries on the north-east are relatively close. The central library is in "Elberfeld", which is indicated by a slightly bigger red circle. The "Uellendahl" branch north of it does not seem to be accessible by bike. The "Wichlinghausen" branch in "Oberbarmen" seems close to a bike path, but appears otherwise inaccessible. Most other libraries are accessibly via bike routes to varying degree. Sometimes people have to come from a particular direction to make use of an existing route, which limits its usefulness in lower density network areas as seen in the south. Someone tried to explain the difference between bike path and bike route bit.ly/2HnGTMQ ↗ in case you need it.
- Someone created this application showing the bike paths in Dortmund, Germany bit.ly/2ZvJBWF
- No such film exists starring a laptop cost of $1500 and software cost of $100. Everything exists in a context.
- A video doorbell integrated in the door could be less revealing than an obvious, bumpy one glued on it. In a poor neighborhood it won't take long until someone comes and tries to detach it. Why design so as to invite this?
- Given enough cosmetics products, can you vectorize the key ingredients and determine which of them are contributing most to the observed prices?
- Suppose you could draw companies as parcels. How big would be each one, what shape would it have and which would be its closest neighbors? The label of each parcel is allowed to occur only once (abstracting away international companies operating at several markets).
- An interesting idea at "Popular Mechanics"—laptop disassembly with the goal to see what area all its parts could cover when equally spaced and packed on the ground. Would this appear as a long pedestrian crossing? How many times would this "unfolded" area be larger than the one of the same, fully-functional device with a closed lid?
- Suppose you have four buttons on the page and they all take valuable space. Is it possible to replace them with a single button having a small triangle pointing to the right (the one on <select>s points downwards), allowing users to switch the button labels on the left before they see and click on the right one?
- Looking at a design detail of Samsung Galaxy S10 bit.ly/2HmQ7ZK. I admit, the front looks nicely curved and beautiful with the thin bezels. The two subtle cameras do not alter this impression too much. The back is another story. There are 3 cameras, a yellow dot and a vertical strip next to it, likely used as flash. To sum up, there are 7 different "eyes" on both sides dedicated to photo capturing. Is this good design? Why is is so hard to drill a single small hole passing through the case, insert a single unit and say: "Here, a double-facing camera. Now we only need to get the modes right!"
- First time seeing direct ternary statement comparison bit.ly/2Zvx9Xj. Won't comment on the feelings.
- Have a happy and imaginative new week!
- Not an expert on tennis rackets, so I had to make some simplified assumptions in the search for valuable Wilson tennis rackets bit.ly/2Hq2zbg. The "Federer Tennis Racket" seems to have well-balanced features for a price of only $40. Cross section is 24.5FB, head size is 110in2, racket length is 69.3cm at unstrung weight of 309g (slightly heavy, closer to the upper side of the range of 205-340g). Yet, my assumptions could be wrong.
- "Avocado Green" mattresses volume to weight-price bit.ly/2Hpjz1j. It seems that the tree largest sizes get a relative boost in the score by the ability to add a pillow-top, despite the price increase (to $1800-2200). Of the models without one, the "Queen" score appears highest. This is strange since Consumer Reports uses two long sentences to recommend it bit.ly/2Znbss3 ↗. They also give you a code (expiring 09.09.2019) for a $175 discount, but be wary that this consitutes only 12.5% of the regular "Queen" price.
- Savannah Bee Company's product label "Honey for your tea" made me smile bit.ly/2Hota8H. They also have honey gift sets in case you want to deliver deserts to someone.
- Casual and travel backpacks from Patagonia with laptop compartment and water resistance bit.ly/2Zl1ffW. The 28l "Refugio Pack" is currently listed at $89, but this tells nothing about its durability. "The Strategist" saw the 18l "Atom Pack" discounted to $59 (0.3050l/$), which is what they recommended. It looks nice and could be great for people not having much to carry or in case they have a more compact 13" laptop.
- A multitude of desserts in the plate—desert in the mind.
- Looking at a code defining the graph edges between some cities in the UK bit.ly/2Hm9WAf and learning about how close Bristol and Bath are. Is it possible to arrive from Bath on a bike?
- Saw teams of eight starting at "La Vuelta" yesterday. Perhaps a side question, but "Welke cassette kies jij?" bit.ly/2ZtRegF.and based on which technological criteria (before testing it in practice)?
- Polygonal image composition in a freely accessible magazine bit.ly/2HpUHGR. Do you think the same effect is achievable on the web?
- Do seahorse images remind you of recursion in nature? What about cauliflower and broccoli?
- Saw a nice photo with a kid experimenting at an event in an art museum. Weared a nice colorful sweater. Of course, you can't go to such event unprepared. Gotta live it.
- I tend to be concerned about stability. Buttons on clothes might fall after washing. Beautiful architectures of woven surfaces at height covering a wide open area supported on tiny, unaesthetic columns might be taken away by a stronger wind. Umbrellas might turn backwards if rain and wind collaborate. A bird's flight might be disturbed by the transparent window. Nothing appears less aesthetic to me than seeing something fail at its core function/purpose or initiating this elsewhere.
- "Draw inspiration from industries outside your own." Weekends are a good time for this. Makes me think of a high stack of recent magazines representing these industries, me popping from it quickly and murmuring about a length of zero at the end.
- Background elimination has become common among car makers presenting their models bit.ly/2ZnbK2l ↗. Peugeot is no different in creating a clean and simple view. They also orient the car fronts consistently to the right—not one model to the left and another to the right,—which is nice. However, in the case of "Peugeot 108" we can clearly notice another photo shooting angle relative to the car, which differs significantly from the orientation in the other photos. (The angle of "Traveller Business" also seems slightly off compareted to "Traveller".) The result is that subconsciously we find that something isn't fine, but we might be unable to formulate clearly what gives us this impression. A great designer can identify such minor details (not only in site layouts, but also in communication, processes, operation etc.) and make other people aware of them. Also liked the variety of numbers provided with the technical specifications, but not the absence of consistency (e.g. some missing engine details or info on brakes, suspension, tires). Another minor detail often observed on car maker websites is that they don't follow the "don't repeat yourself' in images criteria. If a model traveling on a wide road has been captured in a great photo, perhaps it doesn't add much to have four other similar high-resolution photos on the page, even when their shooting angles might differ slightly. Instead, it is better to actively look for or compose photos with higher perceptual variance and eventually some small new, surprising or unexpected detail. This is also necessitated by the constraints of the web as a medium—we can't accomodate for every single photo or expect users to download sameness. Each photo has to be visibly different, expressive and supportive of the message we'd like to convey (not delay it). Few thougts, which might help someone.
- Thinking of something in particular under the shower may lead you to mistakingly apply body lotion over your hair. The tubes look similar and picking the wrong one is easy until reality brings you back to realize it. This is how a new design requirement arises: make body lotion hair-neutral.
- Student hostels in Berlin bit.ly/2HnNsix. Tried to make a compact view showing the hostel name, its coordinates, average room area, average rent and available rooms. This is what I came up with. Finding an affordable room as a new student is always hard; the waiting times for many of these was said to be 2-3 semesters. But I hope that you still find this useful.
- Wondering whether the amount of ink used to print an image with 30 thousand colors is up to 3x higher than to print an image with 10 thousand colors (and about the pattern of "blacK" depletion) or the printable area has higher weight. If the first is true, then applying k-means to non-critical images prior to printing could potentially reduce the cost.
- Decomposing a square into animated strips bit.ly/2Zn2RFS
- Spent several hours extracting the technical data of Liebherr's fridge freezers, selecting some criteria and ranking 87 models according to it bit.ly/2ZowsPp. Two models ("CBef 4815 Comfort BioFresh" and "CNPes 4868 Premium NoFrost") appear relatively interesting, so their characteristics were shown. The first is slightly more energy-consuming, but has a large freezer and exceptional storage time in case electricity is not available. The second is possibly the most energy-efficient and is said to generate even more ice every day. The scores don't matter much here; the actual positions do. Hoping that you find this result useful.
- Magnum icecream (tubs and bars) nutrients bit.ly/2ZnIxUK. Seen per portion, tubes tend to have more calories and higher amount of saturated fats compared to bars. I have consistent trouble converting to grams. If a serving size is 2/3 cup and servings per container are given as 3, how many gram is the portion amount?
- If you see a "Dilbert" comic strip as a number of boxes which have to to be drawn, it might be tempting to try calculating how many you receive per unit price in a similar publication. But this will completely discount the creative effort that went into crafting them. Math can be a poor descriptor in the creative century.
- Tried to gain some understanding of the scale of metal and mineral sales of Glencore for 2018 bit.ly/2HlMGmi. This is on an sqrt x-scale to make all product bars visible. Iron ore has the biggest total weight by far, while cobalt seems to have the lowest among he products included.
- Recorded a short video of a small problem encountered during a Wöhrl website visit bit.ly/2HgyD1d. I've seen the same on other websites too, so it was time to document it and try to make more people aware of it. What I noticed is that the last menu entry often appears on a separate line, leaving enough space between the top row and the dropdown, causing the last to hide prematurely.
- Sometimes a new online shop could disappear as fast as it has appeared, so you have to account for the possible risk of doing business with it. Also learned to be wary of businesses whose names change. Tells me that they would do whatever it takes to avoid responsibility. "A is now B" could mean that A wants to hide something.
- Tried to gauge the travel cost for the route Los Angeles - Seattle - Vancouver, using the latest data on gasoline prices, available at the Energy Information Administration and an article claiming that an average of ≈25mpg has been reached. The result appears slightly lower than expected bit.ly/2HokGOC if I haven't made a mistake. Could you confirm/deny this empirically?
- To have each guest feel comfortable, often extreme care and attention to detail is needed. Once one sees the personnel friendliness at the reception, the careful arrangements (interior & exterior, food on the plate etc.), room cleanliness and thinks of the time and effort this all took, it would be simply disrespectful not to acknowledge them.
- Suppose you find a hotel room in a certain condition. Do you leave it as it was or adjust the location of each furniture piece to suit your taste instead?
- Number of cyclist deaths in Madrid, Spain (2010 - 2018) bit.ly/2ZlXaIv. Tried to put things in perspective, merging data from several sources. Possibly not perfect, but might still offer some orientation.
- You probably remember that I am not interested in your data in general. Why should I be when companies with a a lot more resources (see Mastercard) can't protect it? Not interested in disappearing for legal reasons. Also not excited about data coming from random sources and automated systems. Only from people who personally came to me with a problem to solve, who had a good amount of face time, good attitude and understanding why their data was needed in their specific case and sufficient appreciation for the end product. And if you wanted to mass-collect other people's data on my behalf, that conversation would be especially hard for you. It has to be, since I'll be the one having to stand for the case anything at scale goes wrong.
- The entertainment category tends to be long: Netflix/Hulu/YouTube, Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest, cinema, games, music, concerts, blogs, podcasts, shopping, jewelry, obsession with beauty, gadgets (smartphones, tablets, wearable loudspeakers), restaurants and expensive food, dance clubs, meetups, tourism. The temptations are many and danger lurks everywhere. These eat at your time and learning budget, meaning you are worse off than before you started.
- If I gave you two products—original and fake,—how would you recognize which is which? If you have no answer inside the context in which you are making a purchase decision, then perhaps you can't recognize quality yet and have no good understanding about its intrinsic value. Why should I then be willing to work with you?
- That said, I never do work for free and I like to connect the right level of quality with the right price. Might scare some clients in advance, but saves me a lot of headaches later.
- A median of 1.20€/ml for a Douglas fragrance as of today. Not exactly interested in scents, considering the chemical nature of the particles one might be breathing in, but the fact that a brand has to close physical stores due to online competition with products of unknown origin shows that an increasing number of consumers are either indifferent to quality or expect to receive it for free. Bad only that the same could happen with any company, anywhere.
- Spent some time thinking of the data provided by Leipziger Messe GmbH bit.ly/2HjngFR ↗. And more specifically how I would define a good year based on the variables number of fairs and exhibitions, number of congresses, number of exhibitors and total number of visitors. First tried to find the correlations, but it was discouraging that many of them appeared negative (e.g. number of exhibitions and visitors). Then tried dimensionality reduction, which showed a well-separated years 2005, 2007 and 2016. But then realized that I have a reason to doubt my intuition of treating a higher number of visitors and a higher number of exhibitions equivalently. Ideally a good year would achieve the highest number of exhibitors and visitors from the lowest separate numbers of exhibitions and congresses (the assumption being that they aren't free to organize). Accounting for this change, used a simple formula, which led me to see years 2002 and 2005-2008 (esp. 2006 & 2007) as good ones and 2001 (first recorded) and 2016 as especially weak ones. The last recorded year (2017) comes at almost the same value as 2009 if this isn't already an oversimplification. You probably know about "Leipziger Buchmesse", which served as additional stimulus (given how often libraries get mentioned here).
- Rental prices are gradually increasing in Leipzig as well bit.ly/2HkNojx. Slightly over 28% over an 18-year period. At a microlevel, the increase is starting to pick up in more recent years.
- Discouraging to see that increasing the number of animals in a zoo doesn't necessarily bring more visitors. You can see this clearly in the case of the zoo in Leipzig, Germany bit.ly/2HkKv2b. According to the data, between 2012 and 2017 they almost tripled the number of animals, while the number of visitors has steadily fallen since 2012. Data about the years 2018 and 2019 was not available.
- Saw a computer on which Skype started with an error message in a window showing "A JavaScrupt error found in the main process" giving a long stack trace mentioning something of Electron and cjs loader. Account inaccessible. Didn't know that JS is used in an application appearing as native or the reason why the company behind Skype has chosen to design it this way. Update: re-install fixed the error, at least for now.
- It's okay if people are forced to move away from the centers. In the future these centers will no longer have to experience the component that enabled them to grow. Complacency kills innovation.
- You have to be aware of the junk you place on your page and also take full responsibility for it. If you have 2-3 animated ads and without asking, you autoplay a video in the bottom right corner of the screen, your page might be added to my domain blocker. Because designing without the CPU in mind is no design at all.
- Nice effect seen on the Fjallraven's website: when you scroll down enough products so that the vertical menu goes out of view, they expand to take its column space. The process is reversed when you move towards the top again. Didn't know that their backpacks were highly sought after. But even if I somehow skipped the sentence, their design still appears simple and beautiful to me.
- Some services ask for your full address before they show you any service you may like/dislike. Quite convenient.
- Milka chocolate nutrients bit.ly/2ZiXqYv. Another hint of white chocolate being rich in sugar. Also the top 4 types with highest saturated fat all contain "dark milk" in their label. A bit sceptical about the values of the "Caramel" flavor.
- Cities by number of libraries in Finland bit.ly/2HfdaWb. Trying to understand the library landscape with the help of libraries.fi. The cities with the most libraries are Helsinki (39), Oulu (28), Tampere (20), Jyväskylä (19), Espoo (19) and Turku (16). Note that this includes the mobile libraries, as indicated. There aren't many large territories left without a library, which hints about the desire to provide equal access to books to everyone in a decentralized way. The number of libraries in Helsinki comes only at 4.5% of the total number. We also notice the high number of mobile libraries, where entire busses have been repurposed. Looking at the map, we see that north of Oulu it becomes much harder to find libraries and their density is significantly reduced. South Finland on the other side, has high concentration of libraries in the cities around or close to Helsinki (Espoo, Vantaa, Lohja, Salo, Turku). Plotting the exact library coordinates (as opposed to accumulating a number at a city level) would have been too time-consuming here and was avoided. I'd like to thank you for providing this information and making it very fast to access, which was the only reason this work was possible.
- Another piece generated from functions bit.ly/2Zi6Of3. If you look long enough, you might encounter a smiling mouth, nose, two eyes and a forehead.
- Simple experiment: projectors bit.ly/2Ziwxnu
- ≈4000 discovered exoplanets so far. Perception was about a much smaller number and intuition was none. Hard to blame them.
- So used of titles made of same-sized letters that I forgot that one could start with a small letter and gradually increase size every n-th letters to end with a big one. A bold font and the title rotated at 90° (reading top-to-bottom), placed on the left of the actual article serves to complelement the header photo nicely.
- If it is already food and sushi, would you care whether it is hosomaki, chumaki or nigiri? Only 3-4 hours later you'd face the same dilemma (what to eat) and the stomach probably won't remember. I see food as life support, not an indulgence.
- Lots of dark chocolate pralines at "Neuhaus chocolates" bit.ly/2Zgz4yK ↗. Liked the idea with the illustration of their cross sectional area.
- Sandwich nutrients at "Greggs" bit.ly/2ZeY2OX. If the data is accurate, then "Cheese roll" seems to have the highest energy content, partially due to high fat. In general, we see that "Greggs" is keeping the saturated fat at very low levels, which is nice. Perhaps the salt content could have been slightly reduced (maximums reaching at most 1g instead of 1.3g). Another great detail is that the protein column tends to reds, which means that they strive to provide high levels of protein with most of their sandwiches.
- Think about it: If driving a motorcycle at very high speeds, generating enough noise to be heard in the entire neighborhood, was positively correlated with high-speed creative thinking, we would have only well-advanced economies now.
- "Hackers are trying to be your friends on Facebook" n.pr/2HhHHCV ↗. Another reason not to be present there (the first being disrespect). The notion of the "cool kids" is so out of tune with this article. If someone wants to connect for becoming more connected and "cool", they can safely avoid speaking with me.
- Sweat is the price you pay for wearing a nice scarf in the summer with the goal to appear sophisticated.
- Suppose you are planning to look for clothing or shoes at several stores. Do you have an optimized path through them or walk in all possible directions instead?
- Is there any numeric reason you prefer one type of bottled mineral water over another? Or one brand over another? Do you look at total mineralization or is something else of highest importance to you? Had the idea to actively seek out information on mineral water contents, but it turns out that the number of offers on the market is prohibitively high.
- Watched someone who was asked to cut a tall tree threatening to fall over a house. He said that cutting the tree is the easy part, the hard one being pointing it to fall in the right direction.
- With cosmetic drugs, the illness is said to return once you stop taking them. Such a drug could make a lot more money to its inventor than one which is curative, which is unfortunate. You can imagine what would happen if all software was written to work only temporarily, until a hard-codified date triggered a rare popup informing the user about the expiration of their useful time (bad luck if in the sky). We should be aware of not designing software to satisfice, but to solve a problem completely, to the best of our knowledge and skills, before it has found a way to finish us.
- Martin Seligman writes that the goal of wealth is flourishing. So true. But there are people who believe that pursuing wealth for yourself makes you selfish.
- Like the way New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) tracks enterococci at 40 beaches bit.ly/2HhhCEa, although you may not necessarily find this a sufficient descriptor of water quality.
- Dangerous buildings in Kansas City, Missouri (19.08.2019) bit.ly/2Hc9tko
- Terminal dwell times of various companies at various rail stations in Canada (24.11.2018 - 27.07.2019) bit.ly/2ZajK6x
- In case you like this work and have a project, which could be of interest and a good fit, consider communicating its parameters.
- Considering the websites of the rail companies in Norway, Sweden and Finland (vy.no, sj.se and vr.fi), it seems that my intuition about the train speeds in Norway was somewhat correct bit.ly/2HfcwrO. Sweden and Finland show much higher average speeds, which are approximately equal (67.94km/h and 69.23km/h). And if you are interested in the medians, these are 40.39km/h, 65.92km/h and 70.00km/h accordingly.
- vy.no had information about travel times and ticket prices for various rail routes in Norway. I checked only Oslo-Bergen, Oslo-Trondheim, Oslo-Stavanger, Trondheim-Stavanger and Bergen-Trondheim. If we consider the routes where Oslo appears and find the distances between the cities (straight lines), the approximate average speed comes at 46.38km/h, but if we consider all routes, it falls to 40.71km/h. Could this mean that the rail infrastruture around Oslo is beter developed? To be fair, I expected to see much higher average speeds.
- Was looking for pages with well-designed train schedules, but came to a title "save 50% on September travel" on the Amtrak website and clicked on the link below it instead. On the following page bit.ly/2Z7oD0g ↗ tried to enter sample data to obtain sample pricing, but the date picker did not open properly bit.ly/2HrTiQ7. Not sure of the source for the actual problem, but if the last step is impossible to complete, the form also becomes impossible to submit.
- Simple functionality: Single smartphone tap uploading information to social network: "Status: Being beaten violently". Could potentially help even in cases where no direct witnesses exist or when people at hot spots are mistreated (as long as it is not speculated with). To this day, the smartphone is still a lacking safety device.
- Have an inspiring new week! Starting it with "Libraries, parks and bike lanes in Indianapolis, Indiana" bit.ly/2Zd7Jxd. Great to see so many library branches, but not all of them are reachable from bike lanes. The "Haughville" branch seems to be closest to what appears to be the biggest park in the city.
- Getting ideas from Delaware's "Restaurant inspection violations" bit.ly/2H7TAvd ↗. The top five most common complaints were about time/temperature requirements for proper food storage, operation and maintenance of handwashing sinks, contact surfaces with equipment/food/utensils, hand drying provision, food separation and packaging.
- A website had a sequence of big icons at the bottom of the screen, probably with the idea to make the desktop version look consistent with the mobile one. Now that's consistently problematic.
- Rectangular arrangement, animated bit.ly/2H9Suij. Starts with a bug, which I am no longer interested in fixing.
- 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.